After a brief flurry of aggressive journalism in the 1970s, the mainstream U.S. press has grown steadily more tame, transforming itself into what might be called the government’s “semi-official” news agencies another “secret” brought out by the case of Edward…
Category: Human Rights
Supreme Court’s War on Democracy
Exclusive: The U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing majority is a serial killer of American democracy first Bush v. Gore, then Citizens United, now gutting the Voting Rights Act but another part of this crime story is the Right’s grotesque last stand for white…
Snowden’s Case for Asylum
Despite U.S. government pressure, Russian President Vladimir Putin is balking at demands that he extradite Edward Snowden from Moscow to face espionage charges for leaking secrets about America’s global surveillance operations. Still, Snowden’s status remains dicey, as Marjorie Cohn explains…
Gunning for Anti-Gun Laws
Right-wing propaganda has duped millions of Americans into believing that the Framers devised the Second Amendment so individuals could possess personal arsenals to shoot police, soldiers and other government representatives. This false narrative has made sane gun laws hard to…
America’s Informant Society
During World War II, the U.S. military and public were told “loose lips sink ships,” perhaps a worthy wartime reminder. But the seemingly endless “war on terror” has made government hostility to openness part of America’s permanent wartime mentality, a…
Israel’s Quiet Strategy of Conquest
While paying lip service to a two-state solution, some Israeli officials bluntly acknowledge that their goal is to repress the Palestinians and eventually absorb most of the West Bank into a Greater Israel. This strategy anticipates the continued acquiescence of…
The Right’s Dubious Claim to Madison
Special Report: James Madison, so-called “father of the Constitution” and fourth U.S. president, is at the center of a historical debate over what the original intent of the Framers was and whether a strong federal government fits with those principles. The…
Bush/Cheney Pulled Torture Strings
From the Archive: James Comey, President Obama’s nominee to be FBI director, was a conservative Republican lawyer when he went to work for George W. Bush’s administration and witnessed how the White House pulled the Justice Department’s strings to get…
Parallel Protests in Turkey and Brazil
Turkey and Brazil are two fast-developing regional powers that have begun to take their places on the global stage. But both are now dealing with popular unrest directed against government actions that have struck some protesters as arrogant and insensitive,…
Bush’s Foiled NSA Blackmail Scheme
More than a decade ago, President George W. Bush enlisted the National Security Agency in a blackmail scheme to dig up dirt to coerce UN Security Council members to approve his aggressive war against Iraq. But the plot was foiled by…