Category: Obama Administration

Prospects for Iran Nuke Deal Brighten

Though neocons and congressional war hawks are still hoping to sink an Iranian nuclear deal, the Obama administration and Iranian negotiators appear to have cleared some key hurdles toward a workable plan for keeping Iran’s program peaceful, writes Gareth Porter…

The Human Price of Neocon Havoc

Exclusive: Neocons are the “masters of chaos” as they destabilize disfavored governments around the world. But real people pay the price as we’ve seen with Israel’s slaughter of four boys on a Gaza beach and an apparent shoot-down of a Malaysian airliner over war-torn Ukraine,…

How Israeli PR Sells Gaza Slaughter

A favorite line of Official Washington goes: “Perception is reality!” — a misguided notion that makes the U.S. mainstream media particularly vulnerable to “perception management.” And no one does that better than the Israelis when justifying the slaughter of Palestinians, as…

The Periodic Slaughter of Palestinians

To the Israeli government, the periodic slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza is called “mowing the grass,” a chore that frequently needs repeating. But this violence is wearing on the world’s conscience, including moral objections from more and more Jews, observes…

The Broken Promise to Shevardnadze

The passing of former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze has roused praise from the West  though opinions are mixed among the people he served but one point missing in the obits was the U.S. promise made to him (and broken) not to exploit Moscow’s retreat,…

Obama’s Failure to Rein in CIA and NSA

Despite Barack Obama’s promises during the 2008 campaign to reform the U.S. intelligence community, he has continued to tolerate its abuses, enable its excessive secrecy and indulge its bone-headedness, as ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman explains.

Hyping the Iranian ‘Breakout’ Threat

A danger from propaganda is that its disseminators can come to believe their own exaggerations and thus damage their own interests, a situation that now exists with U.S. hardliners seeking to sabotage an Iran nuclear deal that would make everyone safer, as ex-CIA analyst Paul…

An All-Seeing, All-Knowing Being

A decade ago, exposure of President George W. Bush’s Total Information Awareness scheme brought assurances that it had been shelved, but its Orwellian intent was only shifted to the NSA and it now gives the U.S. government nearly god-like powers,…

The Back Story of ‘Citizen Koch’

Exclusive: The documentary, “Citizen Koch,” was deemed unfit for PBS as the network sidles up to David Koch’s wealth, but the film’s weakness actually is that it doesn’t focus enough on how the Koch brothers have corrupted the U.S. political process,…

Hillary Clinton’s Corporatist Party

Many Democrats seem set on Hillary Clinton getting a cakewalk to the party’s presidential nomination, but her neocon-style foreign policy and her cozy ties to Wall Street might give rank-and-file Democrats some pause, as Jeff Cohen suggests.