Day: November 16, 2011

No Room for Smugness on Iran

There’s a “Lucy-yanks-the-football-away-from-Charlie-Brown” quality to how Americans are handled each time a new war with a foreign “enemy” is being sold. There’s a slightly varied pitch and the public belatedly learns it’s been conned, as is now happening with Iran, notes ex-U.S. intelligence analyst Elizabeth…

Seattle Police Pepper-Spray Pastor

U.S. authorities and major news media are quick to condemn leaders of foreign nations when they unleash police to rough up and intimidate protesting citizens, but a different standard applies inside the United States, as Rev. Rich Lang discovered when…

Whistleblowers Honored on Nov. 21

In recent decades, information — the lifeblood of democracy — has often been cut off from the American body politic on “national security” grounds or because insiders feel it wouldn’t be “good for the country.” To counter that benighted view, a group of ex-U.S. intelligence…

J. Edgar Hoover’s Long Shadow

A new movie about the life and times of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reminds America how the Republic veered so far off course in the last century, as claims of “national security” enabled a corrupt political establishment to take…

After the Zuccotti Park Raid

Driven from its iconic encampment in Lower Manhattan, the Occupy Wall Street movement struggled to recover its political footing and find a new geographical center but its success in changing America’s economic discussion can’t be doubted, says Danny Schechter.