by Anthony Lawson / February 8th, 2010 ()
by Tom Burghardt / February 8th, 2010 ()
Rightist demagogues, as they are wont to do, prattle-on how they, and they alone, can “keep America safe”–by shredding the Constitution.
Waging a decades-long psychological war against the American people, corporatist thugs embedded within the National Security State assure us that secrecy, deceit and imperial adventures that steal other peoples’ resources are the one true path to national prosperity and universal happiness.
But what happens when those charged with protecting us from attack, actually aid and abet those who would kill us, and then handsomely profit from our slaughter in the process?
During a January 27 hearing of the House Committee …
by Stephen Lendman / February 8th, 2010 ()
On February 3, a Department of Justice press release headlined “Aafia Siddiqui Found Guilty in Manhattan Federal Court of Attempting to Murder US Nationals in Afghanistan and Six Additional Charges.”
At her scheduled May 6 sentencing, she “faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison on each of the attempted murder and armed assault charges; life in prison on the firearms charge; and eight years in prison on each of the remaining assault charges. SIDDIQUI faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 30 years in prison on the firearms charge.”
On February 3, New York Times writer CJ Hughes was headlined …
by Gilad Atzmon / February 8th, 2010 ()
The more I read about the Chilcot inquiry the more disturbed I am. The fallacy imbued in the heart of British ‘democracy’ is staggering. While some commentators are concerned with questions to do with the legality of the war, the most crucial issue here is actually the disappearance of ethical judgment from our public and political life. Rather than being concerned with morality and ethics, British politicians are concerned with legalism. In other words, if someone would manage to prove that the war was ‘legal’ then the murdering of a million and a half Iraqis would be well justified. Let’s …
by Ellen Hodgson Brown / February 7th, 2010 ()
Rumor has it that Timothy Geithner is on his way out as Treasury Secretary, due to his involvement in the AIG scandal that is now unraveling in hearings before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Bob Chapman writes in The International Forecaster:
Each day brings more revelations of efforts of the NY Fed and Goldman Sachs to hide the details of the criminal conspiracy of the AIG bailout. … This is a real crisis on the scale of Watergate. Corruption at its finest.
But unlike the perpetrators of the Watergate scandal, who wound up looking at jail time, Geithner evidently …
The Anti-Empire Report
by William Blum / February 6th, 2010 ()
In America you can say anything you want — as long as it doesn’t have any effect.
– Paul Goodman
Progressive activists and writers continually bemoan the fact that the news they generate and the opinions they express are consistently ignored by the mainstream media, and thus kept from the masses of the American people. This disregard of progressive thought is tantamount to a definition of the mainstream media. It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy; it’s a matter of who owns the mainstream media and the type of journalists they hire — men and women who would like to keep their …
Questions Not Asked
by Kim Petersen / February 5th, 2010 ()
Israel defense minister Ehud Barak has spoken to apartheid in Israel.
As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.
Israeli media Haaretz responded:
His [Barack's] stark language and the South African analogy might have been unthinkable for a senior Israeli figure only a few years ago and is a rare admission of …
by Stephen Lendman / February 5th, 2010 ()
Founded in 1972, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) is its leading human and civil rights organization through activities involving litigation, legal advocacy, education, and public outreach. Each year it publishes an annual report covering flagrant violations, positive trends, if any, and “significant human rights-related processes” affecting Israelis and Palestinians.
Its latest December 2009 one is examined below, discussing “a disturbing (government-sponsored) trend that has (gained) currency in Israel over the past year — both in public discourse and sometimes in practice — to make human rights conditional: on fulfilling some obligation, having financial means, or belonging (or not …
by Maidhc Ó Cathail / February 5th, 2010 ()
Worried about the global economic crisis? It’s all in your head, says a leading financial expert.
And that’s the problem, according to Jeff Gates, author of the highly-regarded Democracy at Risk: Rescuing Main Street from Wall Street, a sequel to The Ownership Solution: Toward a Shared Capitalism for the 21st Century. The latter book was described by one reviewer as “the best book on economics for a generation,” and praised by Ralph Nader as “a Capitalist Manifesto, a blueprint for spreading the benefits of capitalism more …
A Personal Account
by Azita Ebrahimi / February 4th, 2010 ()
I went to Iran, the country of my birth, in November of 2009 and stayed there for two months after being away for 30 years. I had left Iran right before 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah. Before I left for my visit back to Iran, I was feeling very agitated and depressed about the way things are here in the USA, and I felt like I needed to get away for a while. My trip to Iran was a pleasant, interesting, and eye-opening trip, but at times I felt strongly the gloomy atmosphere that was overshadowing the country of …
