Israel claims its latest slaughter of Gazans is justified as self-defense because some militants are firing poorly aimed rockets into Israel. But that leaves out the moral context of Israel’s seizure of Palestinian land and its harsh blockade of the 1.7 million people locked in the tiny Gaza Strip, says theologian Daniel C. Maguire.
Traditional U.S. policies – backing Israel whatever it does and assuming the dollar will remain king – are facing new challenges as Israel shocks the global conscience with its war on Gaza and emerging economic powers consider a new reserve currency, notes Danny Schechter.
The Tea Party extremism boiling from beneath the Republican Party bubbled to the top in the GOP’s Texas state platform revealing ugly bigotries and a frantic know-nothing-ism, writes Michael Winship.
Exclusive: U.S. intelligence officials suggest that the person who fired the missile that downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 may have been “a defector” from the Ukrainian army, an apparent attempt to explain why some CIA analysts thought satellite images revealed men in Ukrainian army uniforms manning the missile battery, writes Robert Parry.
Exclusive: The sectarian conflict engulfing Iraq has created an historic opportunity for the Kurds, a people who have long dreamed of their own homeland. A new Kurdish state carved out of Iraq also could shift the region’s power relationships, says Andrés Cala.
America’s universities are turning more teaching over to low-paid “adjunct” professors and are leaving students with greater debt burdens, but one area were pay is high and the perks are lavish is in college administration, writes Lawrence S. Wittner.
Exclusive: Secretary of State Kerry has earned an unenviable reputation for bombastic exaggeration at times when diplomatic caution is needed, a pattern that he has demonstrated again in rushing to judgment over the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
![U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry delivers remarks on Syria at the Department of State in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 30, 2013. [State Department photo]](http://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/kerry-syria-remarks-300x199.jpg)
Exclusive: Though the investigation of the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 has barely begun, the Obama administration and the U.S. media have sold the world on the narrative blaming Russia’s President Putin, with Secretary of State Kerry sealing the deal, writes Robert Parry.
Exclusive: The U.S. media’s Ukraine bias has been obvious, siding with the Kiev regime and bashing ethnic Russian rebels and Russia’s President Putin. But now – with the scramble to blame Putin for the Malaysia Airlines shoot-down – the shoddy journalism has grown truly dangerous, says Robert Parry.
The U.S. mainstream media is again downplaying the horror of Israel’s latest invasion of Gaza. The Washington Post’s front-page headline said “Israel edges into Gaza.” But the carnage is more dramatic at Gaza’s overflowing hospitals, as Dr. Mads Gilbert explained to Dennis J Bernstein.
Exclusive: President Obama and the State Department’s “anti-diplomats” are fanning flames of anger against Russia after the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine. But some U.S. intelligence analysts doubt the popular “blame-the-Russians” scenario, reports Robert Parry.
U.S. hardliners still dream about “regime change” in Iran – and thus want more sanctions rather than a deal that would constrain Iran’s nuclear energy program – but the Obama administration has found that talks can work if Iran’s independence is respected, say Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett.
Exclusive: As usual, the mainstream U.S. media is rushing to judgment over the crash of a Malaysian airliner in war-torn eastern Ukraine, but the history of U.S. government’s deceptions might be reason to pause and let a careful investigation uncover the facts, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
The three big international crises – Ukraine/Russia, Israel/Gaza and Iran/nuclear – mark a choice for President Obama, stick with Israel and the old alignments or shift toward more cooperation with Russia and Iran. But the pieces on this global chessboard are fast moving, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
By invading Gaza, Israel claims to be addressing short-term security concerns but it is also damaging what remains of the peace process — and the offensive raises troubling questions about the future of the Palestinians trapped in Gaza, writes former Congressman Dennis Kucinich.
![U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry shakes hands with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif as he arrives at a hotel in Vienna, Austria, on July 14, 2014, for a second day of meetings about the future of his country's nuclear program. [State Department photo]](http://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/14650034984_be2e8824f7_z_432_1-260x146.jpg)
Though neocons and congressional war hawks are still hoping to sink an Iranian nuclear deal, the Obama administration and Iranian negotiators appear to have cleared some key hurdles toward a workable plan for keeping Iran’s program peaceful, writes Gareth Porter for Inter Press Service.
Exclusive: Neocons are the “masters of chaos” as they destabilize disfavored governments around the world. But real people pay the price as we’ve seen with Israel’s slaughter of four boys on a Gaza beach and an apparent shoot-down of a Malaysian airliner over war-torn Ukraine, writes Robert Parry.
A favorite line of Official Washington goes: “Perception is reality!” — a misguided notion that makes the U.S. mainstream media particularly vulnerable to “perception management.” And no one does that better than the Israelis when justifying the slaughter of Palestinians, as Danny Schechter notes.
The Israeli bombardment of Gaza is getting the usual sympathetic treatment from Official Washington, which even excuses Israel’s killing of civilians who are near Hamas militants by claiming that Hamas is using them as “human shields,” as Vijay Prashad explained to Dennis J Bernstein.
To the Israeli government, the periodic slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza is called “mowing the grass,” a chore that frequently needs repeating. But this violence is wearing on the world’s conscience, including moral objections from more and more Jews, observes Lawrence Davidson.
The passing of former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze has roused praise from the West – though opinions are mixed among the people he served – but one point missing in the obits was the U.S. promise made to him (and broken) not to exploit Moscow’s retreat, ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern writes.
Despite Barack Obama’s promises during the 2008 campaign to reform the U.S. intelligence community, he has continued to tolerate its abuses, enable its excessive secrecy and indulge its bone-headedness, as ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman explains.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu knows he has Official Washington so deeply in his pocket that he can get away with almost anything including the stealing of Palestinian land and the slaughtering of civilians in Gaza. Whatever his war crimes, Netanyahu will be excused, as Marjorie Cohn notes.
A danger from propaganda is that its disseminators can come to believe their own exaggerations and thus damage their own interests, a situation that now exists with U.S. hardliners seeking to sabotage an Iran nuclear deal that would make everyone safer, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar notes.
A decade ago, exposure of President George W. Bush’s Total Information Awareness scheme brought assurances that it had been shelved, but its Orwellian intent was only shifted to the NSA and it now gives the U.S. government nearly god-like powers, says Norman Solomon.
Exclusive: The documentary, “Citizen Koch,” was deemed unfit for PBS as the network sidles up to David Koch’s wealth, but the film’s weakness actually is that it doesn’t focus enough on how the Koch brothers have corrupted the U.S. political process, writes Jim DiEugenio.
Many Democrats seem set on Hillary Clinton getting a cakewalk to the party’s presidential nomination, but her neocon-style foreign policy and her cozy ties to Wall Street might give rank-and-file Democrats some pause, as Jeff Cohen suggests.
The City of London is the UK’s Wall Street, not only in the sense that both are financial centers but they also serve as an intersection for money and politics, especially with the Conservative Party putting access to prominent politicians up for sale to the highest bidder, as Michael Winship recounts.
For decades the “two-state solution” has been the U.S.-preferred panacea to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but its practicality has long been in doubt and the latest collapse of the U.S.-backed “peace process” leaves little doubt that the option is dead, as Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett explain.
Much of the world is horrified at Israel’s latest slaughter of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip but the continued power of the Israeli Lobby over Official Washington has silenced any protests against the imbalanced infliction of death, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar observes.
The flight of Central American children north to the U.S. border is another form of blowback from decades of U.S. refusal to permit reformist governments in the region, including the State Department’s support for a 2009 coup ousting Honduran President Zelaya, writes William Blum at Anti-Empire Report.