Many Washington pundits understand that the conclusion of a tale very much depends on where one starts. The starting point is how the argument is framed, and if the reader accepts the initial premises, then the rest of the case being made falls into place. Many of the all-too-familiar voices in the foreign policy community …
Continue reading “The Washington Post Gets Tough With Iran”
Watching top U.S. intelligence officials present the annual “Worldwide Threat Assessment” before the Senate Intelligence Committee, I found myself wondering if they would depart from the key (if politically delicate) consensus judgment that Iran is NOT working on a nuclear weapon. In last year’s briefing, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had stood firm on …
Continue reading “Divining the Truth About Iran”
Excerpted from With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful by Glenn Greenwald, published October 25th by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright © 2011 by Glenn Greenwald. All rights reserved. Given the clarity of this law [Article 2 of …
Continue reading “America’s Elites Look Out for Each Other”
Ron Paul is getting more publicity out of not getting publicity in the wake of his virtual tie with Bachmann in the Ames poll than he’s gotten to date. Suddenly everyone’s noticing the “mainstream” media is trying very hard not to notice the twelve-term Texas congressman and libertarian icon, despite his success in quadrupling his …
Continue reading “The Media Is the Enemy”
You might think that 20 percent of the American Congress going on all-expenses-paid, weeklong junkets to a foreign country — paid for by a lobby for that country — would be newsworthy, especially when the top congressional leaders of both parties are leading the trips. You would be wrong. Eighty-one congressional representatives from all over …
Continue reading “Israel Lobby Dominates Congress, Media Covers it Up”
On Friday night and Saturday morning I scanned the newspapers and watched the usual after-the-fact nonsense on television in the wake of the horrific terror attack in Norway. The late edition of Friday’s Wall Street Journal featured a lead editorial blaming “jihadis” for the slaughter, an attack that was, per the editorial writer, launched because …
Continue reading “Terrorism Experts on Parade”
As Department of Defense officials prepared for an invasion of Iraq in early 2003, they were intent on giving good war at home and abroad all at once—and on creating images that, like the coming Pax Americana in the Middle East, would be forever. They planned, as they then liked to say, on “dominating the …
Continue reading “Warrior Pundits and War Pornographers”
Kelley Vlahos on the Afghanistan everyone’s missing
Freedom of the press could be seriously impacted across the world in the wake of the ongoing political revelations brought about by whistle-blowing websites such as WikiLeaks, one of foremost constitutional law experts in the U.S. said Tuesday. Speaking at a Personal Democracy Forum event, "WikiLeaks and Internet Freedom II", at New York University, veteran …
Continue reading “Press Freedom Under Threat in Age of WikiLeaks”
The toppling of Saddam’s statue as metaphor
