Category: Obama Administration

Israel Clears the Bench in Iran Fight

Exclusive: Israel in its desperation to kill the Iran nuclear deal is exposing its often-denied influence over the U.S. political/media process. Israeli officials are even using football analogies to rally U.S. lawmakers while emptying the bench of friendly “experts” to mount…

NYT Enforces Ukraine ‘Group Think’

Exclusive: Determined to enforce the “group think” on Ukraine, the editors of The New York Times lashed out at Russia for urging an expanded inquiry into last year’s MH-17 shoot-down. But the Times won’t join calls for the U.S. government…

The Dangers of European Dis-Union

The “European Project” is under unprecedented stress from fissures both east-and-west (over the Ukraine crisis) and north-and-south (over the Greek and refugee crises) and it’s unclear whether the Continent’s bureaucrats can keep the European Union from splintering apart, as Nat Parry explains.

Philippines’ Terror-Inducing ‘War on Terror’

A largely forgotten front in George W. Bush’s “global war on terror” has been the Philippines where military campaigns to crush various rebel groups and political activists have led to charges of extrajudicial killings, torture and other war crimes, reports…

Hillary Clinton’s Leftward Flip-Flops

Faced with a populist surge in favor of Sen. Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton has tacked strongly to the left and in so doing is leaving in her wake many long-held positions on crime, trade, same-sex marriage, etc., to such a…

Trump, McCain and ‘Chicken-hawk-ism’

The fury over Donald Trump’s slur against Sen. McCain’s time as a Vietnam War POW has obscured a larger point about “chicken-hawk-ism,” how U.S. political/media insiders hail the soldiers for “heroism” but send them into harm’s way with little appreciation of their sacrifice, writes ex-CIA analyst…

Obama Should Release MH-17 Intel

A year ago, the U.S. government issued a sketchy report on the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shoot-down citing “social media” and other flimsy data implicating eastern Ukrainian rebels and Russia, but then as hard intelligence became available went silent. Now, U.S. intelligence veterans are…

Iran Deal Dooms ‘Full-Spectrum Dominance’

The international agreement to ensure that Iran’s nuclear energy program stays peaceful is not just a victory for non-proliferation but part of a more realistic realignment of U.S. policy toward the Mideast, finally recognizing the bloody futility of “full-spectrum dominance,” writes…

Learning from the Greek ‘Betrayal’

Europe’s defenders of neoliberal economics favoring the market interests of wealthy elites over the social needs of average people marshaled their forces to crush the Greek challenge to “austerity,” with Greek Prime Minister Tsipras betraying his supporters, John Pilger told Dennis J Bernstein.

Hidden Origins of Syria’s Civil War

Exclusive: In the early months of the Syrian civil war, the West’s mainstream media presented the conflict as a simple case of good-guy protesters vs. bad-guy government, but the conflict was more complicated than that and the one-sided version only made matters…