Category: Obama Administration

US-Israel Ties at a Crossroads

Cracks are forming in the old U.S. political paradigm of support for Israel whatever it does. Israeli leaders may compare mowing down each new generation of Palestinian militants to a chore like trimming the grass, but the moral depravity and…

Obama’s Challenge at Treasury

With Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner planning to step down, President Obama is faced with an important appointment. Much of Official Washington wants a “deficit hawk,” but Obama and the country would be better served by someone who cares more about…

Playing Games with Narratives

In an age of spin and propaganda, one trick is to falsify the chronological order of events to turn reactions into instigations and vice versa, like when George W. Bush says he went to war in Iraq in response to…

Muzzling an Anti-Nuke Trial Defense

Federal prosecutors, who are seeking long prison terms for three anti-nuclear-bomb activists as punishment for entering the government’s Oak Ridge bomb-making complex, want all moral and legal questions about nuclear weapons excluded from the trial, reports John LaForge.

Hyping Iran’s Nuke Capabilities

As Iran and the Obama administration maneuver toward a deal on Iran’s nuclear program, the Western news media continues to stoke the crisis by hyping Iran’s capabilities, including misreporting the significance of a new report on Iran’s supply of 20-percent…

FBI Snooping on the CIA’s Petraeus

The U.S. news media pretends to shy away from sex scandals but actually looks for any excuse to cover them. A case in point has been the ouster of CIA Director David Petraeus, but the press may have missed the…

Corrupting US Democracy

The United States tends to view itself as the gold standard for democracy and bristles at international criticism of its electoral flaws. But recent corrosion of democratic principles, caused mostly by Republicans, has lowered the quality of U.S. democracy, writes ex-CIA…

How Israel Out-Foxed US Presidents

From the Archive: Just days after President Obama’s reelection, Israel launched a punishing bombing campaign against Palestinians in Gaza much as Israel did shortly after his election in 2008. Obama again is put in a tight spot, but other U.S.…

Israeli Scholar Disputes Founding Myth

From the Archive: As Israel again “mows the grass” in Gaza taking revenge on Palestinians for firing crude missiles into Israeli territory the myth upon which the Jewish government stakes its claim to the land is front and center. But the myth…

Challenging Israel’s Myths

A carefully cultivated mythology sustains Israel’s territorial claims to Palestine and rationalizes Israel’s ethnic cleansing of millions of Palestinians from the land. Challenges to those myths are typically met with fierce counterattacks, as Lawrence Davidson discovered.