FEDS WANT MAJOR EXPANSION OF SECRET WIRETAP POWERS OVER WEB-BASED SERVICES. Facebook, Google, Skype and other brand names behind your favorite internet sites and programs are chafing at proposed new rules from the Obama administration that would force companies to comply with sweeping wiretaps and information requests from the FBI and Justice Department. While companies [...]
WATCH YOUR MOUTH, JOHN KERRY. The new U.S. Secretary of State commits the unpardonable sin of comparing the suffering visited on innocent people at the Boston Marathon with the 2010 Israeli raid and killing of numerous passengers on a “flotilla” of vessels bound with humanitarian aid to breach the Israeli blockage of Gaza. Israeli [...]
“INSUFFICIENTLY PRO-ISRAELI?” New U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had his appointment held up on such “insufficiency” charge but now, on a trip to Israel, he seems to be establishing his sufficiency bones. In presenting a large deal for U.S. arms shipments to Israel, he says that the deal is a “clear signal” to Iran [...]
BOMB AT BOSTON MARATHON KILLS 3 PEOPLE, INCLUDING 1 CHILD AND THERE IS AN OUTPOURING OF U.S. SYMPATHY FOR THE VICTIMS. A secret C.I.A. counter-terrorist raid in Afghanistan kills 17 people, including 12 children. Sympathy out-pouring?—not so much, at least in the U.S. Not so, however, in Afghanistan itself, where the PM Hamid Karzai [...]
THE WAY OF THE KNIFE: THE C.I.A., A SECRET ARMY, AND A WAR AT THE ENDS OF THE EARTH. A new book of this title by Mark Mazzetti is about to be released and is excerpted in the New York Times. It describes the “secret deal” in 2004 between the C.I.A. and the Pakistani state [...]
“ANTIQUE COLD WARRIORS IN THE SERVICE OF PIRATE CAPITALISTS.” This is Rob Urie’s tag-line for his scathing denunciation of the Iraqi war: the authorities who perpetrated it, and the 75% of Americans who “supported” it until the action came to be seen as too costly and futile. Bush administration officials come under major charges [...]
THE PIVOT TO ASIA AND THE RISE OF “SYMBOLIC” U.S.-CHINA CONFLICT. Various commentators on Asian affairs comment on the possibility that both the U.S. and Chinese governments are engaged in actions of belligerence toward one another to divert publics in both their countries from failures of domestic economic policies. Filipino Asian expert Walden [...]
Long predicted to emerge as the next theater of military operations and intelligence services, cyber warfare has finally come of age in a string of global attacks and retaliatory strikes stretching from China to the highest echelons of the U.S. government. But the steps the Obama administration say must be taken to protect the nation [...]
FIRST THE SENTENCE, THEN THE VERDICT: THE WAR ON TERRORISM IN WONDERLAND. Lewis Carroll’s classic depiction of a trial of Alice evokes the kind of “legal procedure” in which people are convicted and punished before or even instead of being found guilty after presentation of the evidence of their crimes. A legal memorandum from the Office [...]
AFRICAN-AMERICANS: LET THEM EAT SYMBOLS. The just-past inaugural festivities highlight the yawning discrepancy between the rhetoric and reality of the situation of black Americans. Black leaders at every level from the courthouse to the White House seem to think like some modern day Marie Antoinettes. Faced with the reality of African Americans stuck in [...]
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