The secret of President Obama’s strategic agreement with Afghan President Karzai is that U.S. Special Forces will continue raids to kill Taliban leaders who won’t make peace — even as the new accord is sold to the American public as an end game to the long war, Gareth Porter reports for Inter Press Service.
Exclusive: President Obama signed a U.S.-Afghan strategic agreement on May 1, committing U.S. combat forces to withdraw by the end of 2014 while leaving behind U.S. counter-terrorism teams for another decade. But Obama and his aides still duck a full debate over the causes of terrorism, writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
Military technology continues to spill over into domestic law enforcement as unmanned drones – used to hunt down and kill suspected “militants” abroad – are now touted as the latest tool for monitoring Americans, a development that has drawn scant attention, writes Danny Schechter.
As SuperPACs dominate U.S. elections with unlimited spending on attack ads, the broadcasting industry is resisting a proposed federal rule requiring real-time posting online about those expenditures. The vote of one FCC commissioner could decide the outcome, says Michael Winship.
As President George W. Bush rushed the nation to war in early 2003, some Americans took personal risks to warn the country about the misleading evidence on Iraq, but most U.S. news outlets turned a deaf ear, sometimes leaving the whistleblowers out in the cold, as former FBI agent Coleen Rowley recalls.
Pvt. Bradley Manning faces possible life imprisonment for opening up windows into the unsavory actions of the U.S. government and many allies around the world. A valuable new book examines what turned the 24-year-old into one of history’s great whistleblowers, writes David Swanson at Warisacrime.org.
Even as the Obama administration continues to ignore the worst crimes of George W. Bush’s presidency– including torture and aggressive war – authorities in Poland are investigating its alleged hosting of a CIA “black site” prison. An inquiry that may be the best hope for some measure of truth, writes Nat Parry.
In a pre-Super Bowl interview, President Obama urged Iranian leaders to renounce nuclear weapons, which Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei did, labeling them a “grave sin.” But Khamenei’s fatwa against nukes was not new, just widely ignored by Official Washington, as Gareth Porter explains in this Inter Press Service analysis.
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: On Good Friday, Christians observe the brutal torture and crucifixion of Jesus at the hands of Roman occupiers, but many modern Christians don’t mind when it’s “their” side doing the extraordinary renditions of alleged subversives to be tortured and sometimes killed, ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern notes.
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