Exclusive: Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision not to prosecute CIA torturers in two high-profile homicides bows to the political difficulty of going after field agents while sparing superiors, including ex-President George W. Bush. But the all-clear on torture sends a dangerous message,…
Category: Obama Administration
Obama Impedes Israel’s Iran Attack
The ploy of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to use the November elections to push President Obama into supporting an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites appears to be failing in the face of Obama’s firm “no,” say Jim Lobe and…
Whitewashing Rachel Corrie’s Death
Two recent rulings, one in Israel blaming American Rachel Corrie for her own death while obstructing the demolition of Palestinian homes and another in America absolving torturers in the murder of detainees, suggest that national security trumps justice and international…
Trouble from the US ‘Terrorism List’
Over the years, the U.S. “terrorism list” has become less an objective assessment of groups that use violence against civilians than an ideological battlefield littered with blatant hypocrisies and outdated hatreds. The list has even complicated strategies for reducing political…
Clint Eastwood’s Jobless Exaggeration
Fact-checking Campaign 2012 has become more than a fulltime job, but one danger is to apply false equivalence as fact-checkers protect their “credibility” by blaming both sides equally. That ignores the fact that some people lie more than others and…
Romney’s New Global-Warming ‘Joke’
Exclusive: At the Republican National Convention and on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney has come up with a new laugh line, mocking President Obama’s policies to slow global warming. In doing so, Romney distorts a quote from an Obama speech…
An All-Clear for Bush’s Torturers
Even as Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu urges a war-crimes trial for George Bush and Tony Blair for invading Iraq, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder gives an all-clear to Bush’s subordinates for homicides that resulted from torture in Afghanistan and Iraq, a repudiation of…
How Rev. Moon’s ‘Snakes’ Infested US
From the Archive: The death of Rev. Sun Myung Moon at 92 ends the long personal saga of a Korean theocrat whose life intertwined his bizarre religion with threads into organized crime and right-wing politics. Moon also showed how a fortune spent…
Report Shows Iranian Nuke Restraint
A new inspections report about Iran’s nuclear program prompted the usual alarmist headlines in U.S. newspapers about the growing need to attack Iran. But details in the report suggest that Iran is holding back from any “breakout” capability to build…
GOP Defends Marianas’ Sweatshops
Scandal-stained Republican activist Ralph Reed is back in the GOP’s good graces with a new “grassroots” operation organizing right-wing Christians. Also back on the Republican agenda is protection for an old Reed cause, maintaining sweatshops in the Marianas, note Bill…