Exclusive: President Barack Obama’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq is a blow to the neocons who had long dreamt of permanent military bases. But the neocons are now trying to spin the Iraq disaster into another excuse to confront Iran, writes Ray McGovern.
Exclusive: In two months, the Iraq War – at least the eight-year U.S. phase – will be over. President Barack Obama promises the last troops will be home for the holidays. Then, Americans may finally reflect on this bloody imperial disaster. So the neocons are busy rewriting the war’s narrative, Robert Parry reports.
After discovering that the host of an opera program had joined pro-democracy protests in Washington, NPR decried the woman’s ethics and got her ousted from one job. But the opera show refused to buckle, so NPR dropped it from national distribution, as activist David Swanson reports.
Exclusive: One not-so-funny fact about Washington is that nearly all the news media stars who fell for neoconservative falsehoods about Iraq are still around to fall for new ones on Iran, even some like Richard Cohen who briefly regretted his earlier gullibility, notes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
Tea Party leaders have joined Fox News in ridiculing Occupy Wall Street – while calling for even less regulation of the banks and still lower taxes on the rich – but Irving Wesley Hall is one Tea Partier who is questioning these “leaders” and finding common ground with the anti-Wall Street protests.
Exclusive: Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told President Barack Obama that U.S. troops wouldn’t have immunity from Iraqi laws after December, forcing the last thousands of American soldiers to leave. That signals the end of the Iraq War – and the start of the U.S. battle over what the war’s lessons were, writes Robert Parry.
Perhaps unavoidably, history is filled with mysteries, both recent and in the distant past. A great example of this fact in the literary world has revolved around the actual authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, a topic that has been fictionalized into the new movie Anonymous, as Lisa Pease explains.
In a powerful place like Washington D.C., sloppy thinking can have horrendous consequences, a truism that Big Media pundits have proved over and over. Now, the target is Iran and the usual suspects, the likes of the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, are back at it, as former CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar notes.
From the Archive: As U.S. policymakers and pundits celebrate the brutal murder of Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi, his torture and execution are being justified by glib references to his purported role in the Pan Am 103 bombing in 1988. But William Blum found a different reality in the records.
From the Archive: U.S. officials are congratulating themselves after NATO aircraft bombed a convoy fleeing the Libyan town of Sirte, leading to the capture and murder of Muammar Gaddafi – the grisly affair justified by Gaddafi’s supposed role in the bombing of Pan Am 103. But the evidence goes in a different direction, Robert Parry wrote.
Exclusive: President Barack Obama may have thought appointing David Petraeus as CIA director was a political masterstroke, keeping the ambitious ex-general inside the tent. But Petraeus’s close ties to the neocons may now be undercutting Obama’s policy goals, reports Robert Parry.
For years now, U.S. “public broadcasting” has run scared from right-wing attacks and Republican funding cuts. So, NPR and PBS lard on more right-wing pundits, while purging any sign of liberal dissent as just happened with a producer of an opera show who joined “Occupy DC” protests, David Swanson reports.
Some of our special stories in September dealt with America’s deepening economic crisis, the political/media failures of the Establishment, solving a three-decade-old mystery about George H.W. Bush, the Founders’ actual views on government, and more.
From Editor Robert Parry: A while back, we approached a foundation with a request for a “matching grant,” a donation that would equal what we could raise from our readers. Last week, the foundation sent us a check for $20,000 with the hope — not a requirement — that our readers would come close to equaling the amount.
The New York Times’ lack of objectivity on the Middle East is one of the core violations of U.S. journalistic ethics, obvious yet rarely acknowledged. Ethics professor Daniel C. Maguire thought it worth noting in a letter to Times columnist (and former executive editor) Bill Keller.
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