Exclusive: The defeat of a modest gun-safety bill in the Senate is further vindication of Orwell’s cynical observation that “who controls the past controls the future” since the American Right has persuaded millions of Americans that a false narrative about the Second Amendment is true, says Robert Parry.
Just when it seemed the U.S. news media had learned some lessons from earlier “terrorism” misreporting, CNN rushed out – and then retracted – a report about the arrest of a “dark-skinned” suspect. But a related problem is the compulsion to draw broad conclusions about a rare event, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
Exclusive: Three people died and scores were injured when two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, part of the annual celebration of the Patriots who drove the British back from Lexington and Concord in 1775. For once, the U.S. news media didn’t rush to judgment about who did it, Robert Parry says.
Exclusive: Washington and Moscow exchanged lists imposing sanctions on each other’s officials accused of human rights crimes. But America’s benefit of the doubt no longer applies, as the Russians named John Yoo and David Addington, Bush-era legal advisers who twisted the law on torture, Robert Parry reports.
While the U.S. media has some spirited debate over politics and social issues – i.e. Fox News vs. MSNBC – there remains a broad consensus about foreign adversaries whose behavior is almost always cast in the harshest light, a reality that colors how America reacts to the world, as Jeff Cohen writes.
U.S. propagandists and the mainstream media present foreign crises, like the current one with North Korea, as black-and-white morality plays with Official Washington behaving wisely and the adversaries as crazy. But the reality is always more complex, as Christine Hong told Dennis J. Bernstein.
The most realistic route for peace in Syria is a power-sharing arrangement that protects the interests of the Sunni majority and the Alawites and other religious minorities backing President Bashar al-Assad. But President Obama has thrown in his lot with the forces pressing for Assad’s violent removal, as Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett explain.
As minor African despots are dragged before the International Criminal Court, ex-President George W. Bush remains free, despite having committed major war crimes like torture and aggressive war. With the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands, he will now celebrate his presidential library, Coleen Rowley notes.
After signaling a willingness last year to undertake serious negotiations on Iran and Syria, President Obama appears to have slid back into the default U.S. position of “tough-guy-ism.” Obama’s retreat to that neocon-favored posture could bring chaos to the Mideast, warns Adil E. Shamoo.
President Obama warns that “all options are on the table” regarding a possible attack against Iran, though there’s no credible evidence that it’s building a nuclear bomb. By contrast, Israel maintains an undeclared nuclear arsenal and the U.S. has thousands of nukes with no specific plans to get rid of them, Nat Parry notes.
Towards an Investigative 'War Chest' -- To expand our coverage of issues of war and peace, we are trying to build a $100,000 "war chest," believing honest information is the best way to avoid war.
