Israel has made its security the sin qua non of negotiations with the Palestinians, including insistence on military control of the Jordan River valley. But these escalating demands ignore questions of Palestinian security and the greater risk to Israel from worldwide opprobrium,…
In a memo to President Obama, former National Security Agency insiders explain how NSA leaders botched intelligence collection and analysis before 9/11, covered up the mistakes, and violated the constitutional rights of the American people, all while wasting billions of dollars and misleading the public.
A bitter irony of modern Israel is that the Jewish people have historically been at the forefront of tolerance, reason and egalitarianism but now have leaders who demand a Jewish religious state accompanied by the repression of Palestinian Muslims, a dilemma…
From the Archive: Central to the neocons’ narrative on the current Mideast crisis as Islamic terrorists seize territory in Iraq and Syria is that George W. Bush’s “successful surge” in Iraq in 2007 had achieved “victory at last,” but was squandered by President…
From the Archive: As al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists gain ground in Iraq and Syria, U.S. neocons are eager to focus attention on President Obama’s “failure” to militarily dominate the Mideast; otherwise, Americans might recall how this mess got started, as Robert Parry…
Exclusive: Al-Qaeda extremism is resurgent across the Middle East with its affiliates seizing territory in western Iraq and in neighboring Syria. But the neocons are whitewashing their role in spreading this extremism via George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, reports Robert…
The Saudi-Israeli tandem may superficially still be “unfriendly” but the two countries are peddling in the same direction when it comes to dragging the U.S. into Mideast conflicts against Iran and Syria. But is that in the U.S. interest, asks Independent…
As Iraq becomes a hotbed for al-Qaeda terrorism, President George W. Bush’s legacy grows even dimmer. But one could argue that he did succeed in stirring democratic impulses in the region, albeit mostly of an anti-American variety, as ex-CIA analyst Paul…
The Obama administration has grown more tolerant of the Egyptian military coup that ousted elected President Morsi and is now cracking down on his Muslim Brotherhood, repression favored by the Saudi-Israeli alliance, as Lawrence Davidson explains.
Official Washington’s neocons are still trying to derail a negotiated settlement with Iran over its nuclear program by imposing new sanctions and thus putting the U.S. on a course for war as favored by Israel’s Likud. But this reality is…
From the Archive: Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as “a Jewish state” and thus accept the Zionist narrative of the Diaspora may doom the latest peace talks. But the Diaspora narrative also represents bad history,…
The great tragedy of Nelson Mandela’s life was that his revolution only passed political power to South Africa’s black majority, not economic power, which remained in the hands of the old white ruling classes, both domestic and global. That is a…
If presenting reality is the goal of news, the U.S. mainstream media strayed farther off course in 2013, lost in a self-defeating spiral of maintaining “credibility” by not challenging the powers-that-be and thus losing the trust of the public, as Danny…
Exclusive: Last summer, Saudi intelligence chief Prince Bandar reportedly offered Russian President Putin a deal: if Russia abandons Syria, Saudi Arabia would protect the Sochi Olympics from Islamic terrorists. Putin is said to have angrily rebuffed the offer. Now, with two…
From Editor Robert Parry: How much money we can raise in our year-end fund drive goes a long way to determining how much investigative journalism we can do in the New Year. My hope is that we can expand on…
The year 2013 saw the United States bogged down in ideological conflicts and veering close to new wars in the Middle East, but reporting at Consortiumnews.com contributed to a fuller understanding of the facts domestically and internationally as the fever of…
The single-minded Republican drive to exploit the deaths of four U.S. diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 and use the tragedy to embarrass President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has obscured the more complex reality of what happened,…
Exclusive: For months, the “slam-dunk” evidence “proving” Syrian government guilt in the Aug. 21 Sarin attack near Damascus was a “vector analysis” pushed by the New York Times showing where the rockets supposedly were launched. But the Times now grudgingly…
Exclusive: Ex-NSA chief Michael Hayden, who once declared that “probable cause” is not part of the Fourth Amendment, is sure to hurl more stones at NSA leaker Edward Snowden, especially after a New York judge endorsed the NSA’s “metadata” as legal, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
Exclusive: Critics of “leakers” Manning and Snowden claim that unauthorized disclosures risk lives, but a stronger case can be made that many more lives have been lost due to government deceptions on issues of war or peace, lies that secrecy made possible, writes Robert Parry.