Here’s the question no one is asking as 2012 ends, especially given the effusive public support the Obama administration offered Israel in its recent conflict with Hamas in Gaza: Will 2013 be a year of confrontation between Washington and Jerusalem? It’s on no one’s agenda for the New Year. But it could happen anyway. It’s …
Continue reading “Are the US and Israel Heading for a Showdown?”
There has been a lot of pushback against the neoconservatives‘ preemptive smear campaign against Chuck Hagel, much of it illuminating, but none as clear-headed as that by Paul Pillar in The National Interest, who starts out his piece this way: "The effort to slander Chuck Hagel and to torpedo his potential nomination to be secretary …
Continue reading “Why This Fight”
Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) gave the following speech on the floor of the House of Representatives on December 20, 2012. Mr. Speaker I rise to oppose what will be the final National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) I will face as a Member of the US House of Representatives. As many of my colleagues are aware, …
Continue reading “NDAA Fuels Militarization, Enriches Defense Corporations, Expands Empire”
HEBRON, Occupied West Bank — A new Palestinian group called the National Union Battalions (NUB), comprising Palestinians from across the political spectrum, has called for a third Palestinian uprising, or Intifada. Simultaneously, Israeli intelligence is warning that conditions on the ground in the West Bank are ripe for another Palestinian revolt. These warnings come as …
Continue reading “A Third Intifada on the Horizon?”
The slaughter of 20 elementary school children in Connecticut has shaken me to the core. As an American who has been horrified by Washington’s foreign policy over the past 11 years, I must admit to having imbibed a steady diet of death and destruction, but there is nevertheless something special about a tragedy that strikes …
Continue reading “Christmas in Connecticut”
Violence claimed six lives today. Another three people were
wounded.
On New Year’s Eve 2003, Khaled el-Masri, an unemployed car salesman from Germany on vacation in Macedonia, was removed from a bus and kidnapped by the CIA due to a confusion of names. His evidently bore some similarity to an al-Qaeda suspect the Agency wanted to get its hands on. Five months later, after spending …
Continue reading “Torture Superpower”
The campaign to demonize Chuck Hagel in the run up to his possible confirmation hearings as Secretary of Defense is going full swing. As I told my readers the other day, “get ready for a mudslide of smears and innuendo as the [Israel] Lobby homes in for the kill.” Twenty-four hours later, there are so …
Continue reading “The Paranoid Style of the Israel Lobby”
Soon after President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, hundreds of leaders of the global medical community wrote an open letter to him, and to newly elected Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, urging them to make the abolition of nuclear weapons their highest priority: “You face many urgent crises at this difficult moment, but they all …
Continue reading “The Frightening Scenario of Nuclear War”
Although the United States and Russia have massively reduced their collective number of nuclear weapons since the heyday of the Cold War, the rate of that reduction is slowing, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) warned Monday. Further, these two countries alone continue to account for more than 90 percent of the world’s total nuclear …
Continue reading “Rate of US, Russian Nuclear Disarmament ‘Slowing’” 
