News Item Archive - 2011

Max Richtman, executive vice president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, was quoted in the New York Times on Friday following his inclusion on an IPA news release earlier that morning. “I think it’s tragic that AARP would, wittingly or unwittingly, play into the hands of people who have never really liked Social Security and want to decimate it,” Mr. Richtman told the Times. “AARP is the 800-pound gorilla, but they do not speak for seniors.”

Read the article here.

Following his inclusion on an IPA news release Tuesday, Shahid Buttar appeared on Fox and Friends Wednesday morning to discuss new FBI guidelines expanding agents’ search authority to go through databases and trash. Watch the interview here.

Bob Kincaid of Coal River Mountain Watch gave an interview to Pacifica Radio yesterday after appearing on an IPA news release. He spoke on Flashpoints, a broadcast newsmagazine hosted by Dennis Bernstein, to discuss the mountaintop removal mining protests in West Virginia.

He said: “The coal companies also have their sights fixed on Blair Mountain and they want to blow it up. And in the course of blowing it up they’ll do what they do with all our mountains and all our mountain communities: they’ll destroy our heritage, they’ll destroy our Appalachian present, and they’ll destroy our Appalachian future.”

Listen to Kincaid here, starting at the 13:00 mark.

Robert Alvarez and Aileen Mioko Smith appeared on Democracy Now! this morning following their inclusion on an IPA news release earlier this week. Smith and Alvarez discussed the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, including the growing worry over possible contamination among Japanese citizens. “There’s incredible concern, especially among parents in Fukushima prefecture. But now spreading is concern among parents in Tokyo, which is quite a far way from Fukushima,” Smith said. “Mainly, what’s been happening is that citizens have been monitoring. And after they find high levels, they demand that the local authorities and the government look at those contaminated areas, and then the government looks, and it is contaminated. So it’s very much citizen-oriented. There are people going in all the time. There are radiation monitors all over. Parents are measuring. Mothers are measuring. University professors on weekends are measuring.”

Following his inclusion on an IPA news release Tuesday Harvey Wasserman appeared on CNN International last night to discuss Germany’s decision to abandon nuclear energy over the next 11 years. On the network he explained why he thinks the movement away from nuclear power will be a boon for the German economy, expressing his desire for the United States to follow suit and rely more heavily on renewable energy.

After appearing on an IPA news release last week University of California history professor Dana Frank went on Al Jazeera English to discuss the Honduran coup and Zaleya’s return. She discussed the implications of the former president’s return, emphasizing it was not a panacea for the nation’s problems.

Frank said: “Hilary Clinton, Secretary of State, has already said ‘Great, everything is wonderful now. Democracy has been restored and of course we can readmit Honduras to the OAS and make this problem go away.’ And of course it’s a huge ongoing problem for the Honduran people. You know I talk to people all the time who are terrified of the situation. There are not civil liberties. People on the opposition radio stations are still being threatened. There’s actually absolutely no functioning judicial system. Over 300 people have been killed in suspicious assassinations for opposition activities since the coup. Not a single person has been charged or prosecuted for those deaths, including four people that were killed in the last two or three weeks. So it’s really terrifying if you’re a Honduran.”

Following his appearance on an IPA news release commenting on media coverage of climate change Mark Hertsgaard, a veteran climate reporter for NPR, Vanity Fair, The Nation and the New Yorker, spoke with Ian Masters of Pacifica Radio Sunday to discuss the issue. Hertsgaard  stressed the need to recognize climate change as a pressing threat and offered corporate censorship of scientific proof as one explanation for what he perceives to be a lack of recognition of that threat. The full interview is available at KPFK.org (Hertsgaard comes on at the 36:00 point).

IPA Communications Director Sam Husseini appeared on the Ed Hancock show Wednesday to discuss political transparency in the wake of Netanyahu’s congressional address.

Following IPA’s news release, Nick Turse, who wrote “Obama’s Reset: Arab Spring or Same Old Thing?” appeared on Russia Today to discuss Obama’s recent speech. He said that despite the President’s promise to support self-determination in the region, the administration provided Mubarak’s regime with around $3.2 billion in aid his first year in office.

Reuters reports this morning: “President Barack Obama will nominate CIA director Leon Panetta as defense secretary and Army General David Petraeus as head of the American spy agency, officials said on Wednesday.”

MELVIN A. GOODMAN, goody789 at verizon.net, mel-goodman.dailykos.com
Goodman is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. His most recent book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA. From 1966 to 1990, he was senior Soviet analyst at the CIA and the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

He said today: “Obama has had a very weak national security team from the start. He kept Gates and put in Hillary Clinton in large part because of domestic politics. Jim Jones [who was National Security Adviser] and [former Director of National Intelligence Dennis] Blair were not up to their tasks. Panetta did not do anything to shake up the CIA, he gets captured by a bureaucracy pretty fast, which is what I’d worry about if he went to the Pentagon. I don’t think he has the energy, especially for a bureaucracy as big and complex as the Pentagon.”

Politico reports that “Goodman said known backers of significant Pentagon reforms, such as former assistant secretary of defense Larry Korb or former Navy secretary Richard Danzig, would be better secretaries.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167