The neocons have lost ground within the Executive Branch, but continue to wield great influence in Congress and Washington opinion circles. That sway is revealed in the framing of debates on President George W. Bush’s power to torture and President Obama’s use…
Category: Human Rights
The Shortsighted History of ‘Argo’
Exclusive: The Oscar for Best Picture went to Ben Affleck’s Argo, an escape-thriller set in post-revolutionary Iran. It hyped the drama and edged into propaganda. But Americans would have learned a lot more if Affleck had chosen the CIA coup in 1953…
Mideast Photos: Compassion/Geopolitics
When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, the U.S. news media suppressed many images of dead and wounded Iraqis so as not undermine the feel-good patriotism, and a similar bias has held true for Palestinian victims of Israeli attacks. But…
Eyes Wide Shut on the Iraq War
Exclusive: As the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War approaches, it’s worth recalling one moment when the curtain was prematurely lifted on the lies justifying the invasion and how quickly government officials and the complicit mainstream press pulled it back…
The Depressing ‘Zero Dark Thirty’
From the Archive: Director Kathryn Bigelow won an Oscar for “The Hurt Locker” and is in the running again with “Zero Dark Thirty,” but both movies have a troubling undercurrent of racism, heroic Americans operating in a world of apathetic…
The Dark Side of ‘Zero Dark Thirty’
From the Archive: The hunt-for-bin-Laden film, “Zero Dark Thirty,” portrays torture as a key element in that search. But the filmmakers distorted the facts and ignored the reality that torture is illegal, immoral and dangerously ineffective, wrote Marjorie Cohn.
Honoring a Heroic Slavery-Fighter
The movie “Lincoln” was a dramatic depiction of the political fight to end American slavery with the 13th Amendment and presented a rare sympathetic portrayal of anti-slavery Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, played by Tommy Lee Jones. This offered a belated chance to…
How Reagan Promoted Genocide
Special Report: A newly discovered document reveals that President Reagan and his national security team in 1981 approved Guatemala’s extermination of both leftist guerrillas and their “civilian support mechanisms,” a green light that opened a path to genocide against hundreds…
A Long Pursuit of the Real Jesus
For Christians, the search for the real Jesus can be a challenging pursuit, given the two millennia of doctrine, dogma and distortion that have built up around his teachings. For some followers, the key has been to strip away those traditions…
Get Parry’s Bush Trilogy for Only $34
As the bright new Republican stars flame out the likes of Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul the presidential focus for 2016 will shift back to Jeb Bush as a choice broadly acceptable to the GOP, and you will…