Since becoming Defense Secretary in December 2006, Robert Gates has wallowed in flattering press clippings, most recently hailed as the heroic Pentagon budget cutter eliminating wasteful weapons systems. However, the reality is quite different as Gates ends his tenure at…
Author: Consortiumnews.com
The Scandal of Secret Campaign Cash
Secret political donations threaten to inundate Campaign 2012 to flood levels that would make the Watergate slush funds look like kiddy pools. In this guest essay, Michael Winship explains how political scandals big and small trace back to money in politics.
Targeting Cuba’s Health-Care System
The U.S. government’s half-century campaign to discredit and destroy Cuba’s experiment with socialism has had many ruthless aspects, but perhaps none more so than efforts to disparage and damage the Caribbean island’s widely admired health-care system, as William Blum describes in this…
Making the US Economy ‘Scream’
Exclusive: Over the past several decades, Republican methods for winning national power have come to resemble CIA techniques for destabilizing an enemy country — through the use of black propaganda, political skullduggery and economic disruptions. Now, heading toward Election 2012, the Republicans appear poised to make the U.S. economy “scream,” observes…
Is Unity Still a Value?
As the United States commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Civil War fought over the South’s secession in defense of slavery today’s irony is that the U.S. government is experiencing a resurgence of the divisions that empowered secession in 1861,…
US Spying Detects No Iranian Nukes
Despite fresh alarms from U.S. and Israeli officials about Iran’s nuclear program, evidence remains elusive that Iran has resumed work on a bomb. That lack of proof continues even though U.S. intelligence has engaged in extensive monitoring of suspected research…
Obama’s Peace Talk Ploy
The killing of Osama bin Laden and reports of peace talks with the Afghan Taliban have raised U.S. hopes that the long war in Afghanistan might finally be heading toward a conclusion, but some sources suggest that there is less to these…
Why US Must Leave Iraq
Neoconservatives want the Obama administration to pressure Iraq into permitting American troops to stay in the country after 2011, all the better to avoid having to admit what a strategic disaster the Iraq invasion was. But the Independent Institute’s Ivan…
The Mysterious Robert Gates
Special Report: Defense Secretary Robert Gates is leaving the Pentagon as a Washington “wise man,” admired by both Republicans and Democrats for his supposed judgment and integrity. But does he deserve that reputation — or is he just an especially clever manipulator…
Behind the Netanyahu Spectacle
By bouncing up and down, again and again, Democrats and Republicans in Congress demonstrated their support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even as he criticized the Mideast policies of President Obama and essentially shut off prospects for serious peace…