Category: Human Rights

UN Investigator Undercuts NYT on Syria

Exclusive: Amid last summer’s rush to judgment on the Aug. 21 Sarin attack in Syria, the New York Times joined the stampede blaming the Assad regime by pushing a “vector analysis” showing where the rockets supposedly were launched, but now that certainty…

A History of False Fear

It’s always hard to get someone to speak honestly when his or her livelihood depends on not telling the truth. With the military-industrial-surveillance complex, that reality is multiplied by the billions of dollars and the many careers at stake, Joe…

Truman’s True Warning on the CIA

Exclusive: National security secrecy and a benighted sense of “what’s good for the country” can be a dangerous mix for democracy, empowering self-interested or misguided officials to supplant the people’s will, as President Truman warned and ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern…

Mandela, MLK and Jesus

The death of Nelson Mandela offers Christians a chance to reflect on the great protest leader at the center of their religion, the historical Jesus, with his anger at ostentatious wealth and his disdain for social inequality, as Rev. Howard Bess reflects.

Snowden’s Leaks Doom NSA’s Snooping

After long claiming to welcome a robust debate on NSA surveillance, President Obama found the debate more robust and more substantive than he expected, especially after the leaks by Edward Snowden, as Danny Schechter explains.

NYT Replays Its Iraq Fiasco in Syria

Exclusive: Much like the Iraq WMD fiasco in 2002-03, the New York Times has taken sides in the conflict in Syria and is ignoring evidence that undercuts its indictment of the Assad regime as the guilty party in the Aug. 21 Sarin attack outside Damascus,…

Lost in an Anthropocene Wonderland

The Anthropocene Epoch  dating from when human activity began to have a significant impact on the global ecosystem is crashing toward a disastrous end amid melting icecaps, rising sea levels and dying species, but the human race can’t stop its…

How Boycotts Can Help Israel

When South Africa was ruled by white supremacists and faced boycotts, Pretoria’s defense was that many black-ruled African states were worse and apartheid shouldn’t be singled out. Now, Israel is advancing a similar argument, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar…

Unjust Aftermath: Post-Noriega Panama

Special Report: Twenty-four years ago, the United States invaded Panama to capture Gen. Manuel Noriega on drug charges. Operation Just Cause promised the country a new day free of dictatorship and drug-tainted corruption, but it didn’t work out that way,…

Behind Colin Powell’s Legend: Panama War

From the Archive: Though largely forgotten, the brief U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 established key precedents that would reappear in later conflicts from the Persian Gulf and Kosovo to Afghanistan and Iraq policies shaped, in part, by Gen. Colin Powell,…