As wretched as the Iraq War was, the absence of any meaningful accountability for the U.S. policymakers and pundits who made the catastrophe happen is nearly as stomach-turning. Every day the same faces show up on the TV talk shows and…
WPost Pushes for Syrian War
The neoconservative Washington Post wants people to forget about how it and other Iraq War boosters got pretty much everything wrong about that disaster. Amnesia is especially important now as the Post and the neocons begin a new push for…
America’s Matrix
From the Archive: A decade ago, as U.S. troops gained control of Iraq, there were many false alarms about finding WMD, leading to President Bush declaring the discovery of mobile biological weapons labs. Robert Parry led the way in challenging…
Obama Opts for Syrian ‘Regime Change’
The most realistic route for peace in Syria is a power-sharing arrangement that protects the interests of the Sunni majority and the Alawites and other religious minorities backing President Bashar al-Assad. But President Obama has thrown in his lot with…
Getting Confused Answer on Iran Nukes
Official Washington’s conventional wisdom on Iran that it is building a nuclear weapon though the U.S. intelligence community says it isn’t is spilling into the results of public opinion polls. The false assumption about Iran’s nuke program affects both the…
Crazy Gun-Toting Insurrectionists
Exclusive: Just a few months after 20 first-graders were mowed down by a deranged killer wielding an assault rifle, the prospects of restraining this gun madness are fading. A major factor is the Right’s success in promulgating a bogus history of…
The Fallacy of ‘Tough-Guy-ism’
A basic tenet of “tough-guy-ism” is that throwing around U.S. military and economic muscle is the way to advance American global power. A corollary is that sensitivity toward world opinion is for sissies. But the reality is that the U.S.…
DiEugenio on Parry’s New Book
Exclusive: America’s political dysfunction stems, in large part, from the Right’s success in distorting U.S. history and the mainstream news media’s failure to counter those false narratives. That has left the nation adrift in a faux reality, a crisis described by…
Watergate’s Washed-Away Lessons
The Republican Party that emerged from Vietnam and Watergate was determined to obliterate the lessons learned, and the Democrats veered between timidity and complicity as those lessons were unlearned. Now, the key lessons are more reminiscence than real, as Michael…
The Two Views of Jesus’s Murder
Christianity has two conflicting views of Jesus’s Crucifixion, that God sacrificed his Son to atone for mankind’s sins, or that Jesus demanded economic and political justice for the poor and was killed by Jerusalem’s power structure. The two interpretations lead in…
George W. Bush’s Lie-bury
As minor African despots are dragged before the International Criminal Court, ex-President George W. Bush remains free, despite having committed major war crimes like torture and aggressive war. With the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands, he will…
Obama’s Retreat to Neocon Strategies
After signaling a willingness last year to undertake serious negotiations on Iran and Syria, President Obama appears to have slid back into the default U.S. position of “tough-guy-ism.” Obama’s retreat to that neocon-favored posture could bring chaos to the Mideast, warns Adil E.…
Obsessing Too Much on ‘Terror’
After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. intelligence community threw extraordinary resources into the hunt for al-Qaeda terrorists, so much so that some experts fear a possible new blindness to other threats, a dilemma addressed by ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
Reaping the Seeds of Nuke Tests
The warnings about fallout from nuclear tests six decades ago often noted that cancers from the radiation would probably not begin appearing in large numbers for many years. But that time is now and medical experts are wondering whether the…
Obama’s Nuke Double Standards
President Obama warns that “all options are on the table” regarding a possible attack against Iran, though there’s no credible evidence that it’s building a nuclear bomb. By contrast, Israel maintains an undeclared nuclear arsenal and the U.S. has thousands…
The Tragic Saga of Gary Webb
Starring Jeremy Renner as the late Gary Webb, the movie of Webb’s investigation of the CIA’s Contra-cocaine scandal and of Webb’s destruction by mainstream news outlets is set to begin filming this summer. If Hollywood gets the story right, it will…
Applying the Golden Rule to Peace
Rather than making serious efforts at peace settlements, President Obama is skating toward possible U.S. involvement in two more Middle Eastern wars, with Syria and Iran. And ex-Vice President Cheney has no regrets about the Iraq War. Such attitudes ignore a core…
Ronald Reagan’s Hollow Conservatism
In the early 1990s, Republicans turned Ronald Reagan into an icon; they hailed him for “winning the Cold War;” they used his name to put conservatism beyond challenge. But this deification was hollow, a reality that today’s thoughtful conservatives, like the Independent…
Buy Consortiumnews More Time
From Editor Robert Parry: Sometimes I view the survival of our 18-year-old Consortiumnews Web site like the Justin Timberlake movie, “In Time,” in which time is the new currency and the non-rich are always at risk of “timing out.” Thus,…
In Case You Missed…
Some of our special stories in February that focused on the neocons’ bid to reassert influence, the drone debate, reflections on Iraq War lies, and dark historical chapters of the Reagan administration.