It’s become trendy in some circles – mostly on the Right since the election of the first African-American president but also a bit on the Left – to talk breezily of armed revolution. But bloodshed is wrongheaded and reckless when political space remains for democratic change, say Bill Moyers and Michael Winship.
Exclusive: Official Washington is obsessing over the Benghazi “scandal,” proof that the Republicans and their right-wing media can make the smallest things big and the biggest things small. It is a disparity that has distorted how Americans understand their recent history, writes Robert Parry.
Slashing the U.S. nuclear stockpile – and still having plenty of bombs left over for “deterrence” – would represent a huge saving to the American taxpayers and could help leverage more cooperation on nuclear proliferation in other countries, writes ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman.
Over the past two years of Arab unrest, only in Bahrain did a neighboring country (Saudi Arabia) invade militarily to put down a popular uprising – and did so without U.S. outrage because Bahrain is home to the Fifth Fleet. But the political injustice of Bahrain remains a regional sore point, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul…
Official Washington’s “tough-guy-ism” – no one wanting to look “weak” on “terror” – has stopped sane and humane policies toward Guantanamo. Members of Congress have blocked President Obama’s efforts to close the prison and he has shied away from a political battle to do so, as Marjorie Cohn explains.
Some of our special stories from April focused on the Boston Marathon bombings, the defeat of gun-sanity legislation, the latest research on the historical Jesus, and the political rehabilitation of George W. Bush.
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Exclusive: A half-century ago, religious clashes in Vietnam — leading to a dramatic photo of a Buddhist priest burning himself alive — shocked the U.S. government and drove it deeper into the morass of the Vietnam War, a confluence of religion and politics that remains relevant today, as war correspondent Beverly Deepe Keever explains.
Official Washington’s “conventional wisdom” is a pernicious fact of life in the U.S. capital as various presumed realities reverberate through the echo chamber of policymakers and journalists. Conventional wisdom is especially dangerous when what-everybody-knows-is-true isn’t, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.
From the Archive: Former Vietnam War correspondent Beverly Deepe Keever has just published a memoir, Death Zones & Darling Spies, in which she addresses her almost scoop on Richard Nixon’s 1968 sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks, a story that could have changed history, as Robert Parry reported in 2012.
Exclusive: A new poll says 44 percent of Republicans believe “an armed revolution” may be needed in the next few years “to protect liberties,” proof of the Right’s success in re-branding itself with Revolutionary War symbols and fueling paranoia about the elected national government, Robert Parry reports.
Three decades ago, the Reagan administration followed Israel into the middle of the Lebanon civil war with disastrous results, including the deaths of 241 U.S. servicemen and a U.S. withdrawal. Now, the Obama administration faces a similar choice regarding the Syrian civil war, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar writes.
Exclusive: The dam holding back pressure for U.S. war in Syria is giving way with President Obama – like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike – seeming unable to stop the inevitable. Cheering on the impending flood are many of the same big-name pundits from the Iraq War, Robert Parry notes.
For years Americans have been warned that George W. Bush’s brutal “war on terror” and his invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan would spur more anti-U.S. terrorism. But when such events occur – as in Boston last month – anyone who observes that fact is shouted down, as happened to Richard Falk, notes Lawrence Davidson.
Though many of today’s domestic and international crises date back to George W. Bush’s presidency, Republicans see a political edge in frustrating President Obama’s efforts to solve them, reveling in a new narrative about Obama’s “weakness.” The Guantanamo mess is a case in point, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
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