Attorney Lynne Stewart aggressively defended alleged terrorists, making her a target of President George W. Bush’s “war on terror.” After 9/11, she was prosecuted for violating special security rules for dealing with a client and is now dying of cancer in…
Risky Business of Morsi’s Ouster
The military ouster of elected Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi was cheered by some anti-Islamists as a repudiation of Morsi’s autocratic rule and his Muslim Brotherhood. But the coup could further radicalize the region’s Islamists with dangerous implications for the U.S.…
Rethinking Thomas Jefferson
Exclusive: Americans are proud that their Declaration of Independence was also a declaration of universal rights. But the hard truth is that, in 1776, the words were mere propaganda cloaking the fact that a third of the signers were slaveholders,…
Human Rights, Intelligence, Lost History, Media, Obama Administration, Politics, Right Wing, The Bush-43 Administration
Flag-Waving to Death
In American politics and media, anyone who questions the concept of “American Exceptionalism” is banished to the margins of society. But this self-aggrandizing notion has always contained a large measure of self-deception, ignoring the suffering inflicted on other peoples and on…
Taking on Israeli-Palestinian Impasse
The Egyptian military has ousted President Morsi and Syria is in a civil war, but Secretary of State Kerry has invested much of his time on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some pundits question Kerry’s priorities but they ignore how corrosive the Israeli…
Gauging Sympathy for Snowden
As the U.S. media turns on NSA leaker Edward Snowden and as many Americans say they’re happy to trade some privacy for more security samples of public opinion abroad are more sympathetic. An online poll by a major German daily…
Why Snowden’s Fate Matters
Exclusive: There’s an old saying that a reporter is only as good as his sources, meaning that there’s a need for people inside government who see wrongdoing to speak up. It is also a test of a democratic Republic whether truth-tellers like…
Migrant Workers’ Bitter Fruit
The battle to overhaul U.S. immigration policy has now moved from the Senate to the House where its future is at best uncertain. The debate continues even as the Obama administration presses forward with the most stringent deportation policies in…
Climate-Denying Libertarianism
Exclusive: Libertarianism has gained new followers amid disclosures of excessive government surveillance. But this trendy ideology is filled with hypocrisy on principles and hostility to facts, having evolved from the South’s defense of slavery and now resistant to the science of…
Egypt’s Morsi Teeters
Turmoil is rocking Egypt again, threatening the country’s first elected leader Mohamed Morsi and drawing the military back into the political fray. This popular discontent seems to center on poor government performance despite the usual U.S. worries about Islamist influence, notes ex-CIA…
Sanitizing Nelson Mandela
When Nelson Mandela was a dedicated freedom-fighter against white-ruled South Africa, he was almost as much a “non-person” in the U.S. media as he was in South Africa’s press. Only after Mandela pulled back from demands about redistributing wealth was he…
Demonizing Iran, Again
Despite Iran’s election of relative moderate Hassan Rouhani to be the new president, the demonization of Iran continues, with dubious claims about Iranian-linked “terrorism” against the U.S. and its allies. This renewed propaganda campaign threatens the success of negotiations with…
Ignoring the Palestinian Plight
Holocaust expert Elie Wiesel has urged audiences around the world to reject apathy and to resist injustice. But Wiesel and many other Zionists fall silent when the victims of oppression are the Palestinians, as Lawrence Davidson writes.
Hiding the Numbers on Gun Madness
Between the Right’s false history of the Second Amendment and the NRA’s lobbying clout, the American scandal of uncontrolled firearms and their use in mass slayings continues unabated. The gun madness has even prevented law enforcement from quantifying the crisis,…
Fixing US Democracy with Facts
From Editor Robert Parry: In our 18 years, Consortiumnews.com has had one priority: to chart a truthful history of the United States and its role in the world. In doing so, we have examined key chapters of that history so…
How Israel Alienates Arab Citizens
A key founding principle of the United States was that a secular government would protect the religious freedoms of all groups. But Israel’s insistence on a Jewish state that systematically discriminates against Arabs has drawn America down a different path, as…
The Slippery Slope into Syrian War
The neocons and much of the mainstream U.S. news media are eager for another U.S.-sponsored “regime change” in the Middle East this time in Syria and President Obama has acquiesced to shipping guns to the rebels. But this slippery slope…
The Marriage of Libertarians and Racists
Exclusive: The modern Republican Party and its chic libertarians have dallied with white supremacists as a political necessity, because blacks and other minorities have rallied to the Democrats due to their better civil rights record. But the Right’s dancing with…
The Painful Truths Told by Phil Agee
Truly objective journalism would value facts and accuracy above all else, but the mainstream U.S. press while pretending to be “objective” treasures faux patriotism much more, as is evident with recent whistleblowers as it was with the hostility toward the…
Should Israel Be Boycotted?
When Apartheid South Africa faced boycotts in the 1980s, it often argued that some black African governments treated their black citizens worse. Now Israel is making the same case regarding its oppression of Palestinians, that Arabs are worse off in, say,…