The revelation that the family of the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings was from Chechnya prompted new speculation about the attack as Islamic terrorism. Less discussed was the history of U.S. neocons supporting Chechen terrorists as a strategy to weaken…
Category: Human Rights
The Power of False Narratives
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…
Over-Analyzing Terror Incidents
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…
A Civil Rights Battle over a Streetcar
Even after the Emancipation Proclamation freed African-American slaves in the Confederacy on Jan. 1, 1863, racial bias was common even far from the rebellious South. Later that year, blacks fought to get access to horse-drawn streetcars in San Francisco, writes…
Tales of Reagan’s Guatemala Genocide
Exclusive: Guatemala is finally putting ex-dictator Efrain Rios Montt on trial for genocide in the extermination of hundreds of Mayan villages in the 1980s, but Ronald Reagan remains an American icon despite new evidence of his complicity in this historic…
No Rush to Judgment in Boston
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…
US Still Dominates in Arms Spending
The U.S. government’s military spending excess — when compared with the rest of the world — is down somewhat due mostly to troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan but still accounts for 39 percent of the global total, according to a new international…
Russia Bars Bush-Era Torture Lawyers
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 ‘Stooge-Like’ Palestinian Authority
As Israel changes “the facts on the ground” through settlement of Palestinian land, the prospects of a two-state solution fade from unlikely to impossible. That has made the Palestinian Authority into a “stooge” organization and helps explain the resignation of Prime…
A Palestinian Right to Resist?
If journalistic objectivity is applied honestly, it means that all people must have equal standing whether they’re “on our side” or not; outrage over human rights crimes can’t be selective. But Israeli journalist Amira Hass faced fierce attack when she said Palestinians had…