The rigidity of Official Washington – more than intransigence from Iran – is threatening negotiations beginning in Istanbul this weekend. President Obama’s flexibility to ease sanctions on Iran in exchange for Iranian safeguards against building a nuclear weapon is limited by political pressures, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
Exclusive: Iran is resuming talks over its nuclear program with leading international powers – the United States, Britain, Russia, China, France and Germany – with the prospect of an agreement to swap some enriched uranium for research isotopes. But a similar plan was torpedoed by U.S. neocons in 2010, recalls Robert Parry.
Exclusive: German poet Gunter Grass is under withering attack for writing a poem that urges Germany to stop supplying nuclear submarines to Israel, objects to Israel’s threat of war against Iran and suggests both countries accept nuclear inspectors. That last idea has opened Grass to charges of “moral equivalence,” notes Robert Parry.
From Editor Robert Parry: Many people who read the original journalism from Consortiumnews – by Ray McGovern, Mark Ames, Lisa Pease, James diEugenio, me and other of our featured writers – see our articles at “aggregator sites,” i.e. Web sites that cull stories from the Internet and reassemble them at their own.
Famed TV news interviewer Mike Wallace died Saturday at the age of 93, the last giant of a pioneering era that revealed both the power of television to do good and its many failings. Danny Schechter recalls Wallace as a hard-nosed interrogator with the skills of a showman.
Exclusive: Both the mainstream U.S. press and some on the Left underestimate the danger to the Republic from having a Republican majority on the Supreme Court rendering decisions based on partisan needs not constitutional principles, a threat that surfaced in December 2000 and continues today, writes Robert Parry.
It’s difficult to know what’s happening in Syria not only because of the confusing violence but because the Western news media has lost nearly all credibility when it comes to reporting on Muslim countries, at least those on America’s and Israel’s enemies lists. William Blum explained the dilemma at the Anti-Empire Report.
Exclusive: Many in the Washington Establishment – including key parts of the press – fancy themselves doing what’s “good for the country” by shielding Americans from painful realities, like the emerging crisis over a partisan-driven Supreme Court. But the hard truth, not easy lies, is what’s best for the nation, says Robert Parry.
Exclusive: President George W. Bush not only botched the Afghan and Iraq wars but he bungled his “dead or alive” pursuit of Osama bin Laden, assuring al-Qaeda’s leader nine more years of life and the opportunity to father four more children with his 20-something third wife, Robert Parry writes.
Exclusive: The negative tone of the Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court suggests that the Affordable Care Act, with its individual mandate to buy health insurance, may be overturned as “unconstitutional” by a partisan 5-4 vote. But key Founders had a less hostile view toward mandates in 1792, as Robert Parry reports.
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