DOUG HENWOOD Editor of Left Business Observerth, Henwood said today: “While the government can’t run big deficits forever, there’s no great urgency to do anything in a hurry. Even on official projections (which assume decades of near-depression rates of economic growth), federal debt won’t become a problem until well into the 2020s. Alarmists are trying…

Reuters reports that UN Ambassador Susan Rice said Monday: “Let me be very clear — our diplomats are just that, they’re diplomats.” Reuters noted that “Rice declined to comment on the details of the cables.” KATHARINE GUN Available for a limited number of interviews, Gun is a former British government employee who faced two years…

PRATAP CHATTERJEE Chatterjee is a regular columnist for the Guardian and just wrote a piece titled “WikiLeaks v the imperial presidency’s poodle: Once, Harold Koh spoke truth to power. Now, as Hillary Clinton’s legal adviser, he obediently denounces the embassy cables leak.” Chatterjee is author of Iraq, Inc: A Profitable Occupation and Halliburton’s Army: How…

McClatchy reports: “Under a cloud of intimidation and suppression, Egyptians will vote Sunday in parliamentary elections that already have been denounced as a charade aimed at prolonging the three-decade rule of President Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party. “Egyptian authorities have jailed Mubarak’s opponents, blocked rallies, clamped down on independent news media and angrily rejected calls…

ALEX MAIN, [now in Haiti] Policy analyst with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Main said today: “These elections were already highly problematic before the cholera epidemic began to spread. Haiti’s electoral authority — the CEP [Provisional Electoral Council] — suffers from a lack of credibility; legitimate parties have been excluded from participating in…

GARETH PORTER The International Atomic Energy Agency released a report on Iran today. Last week, an article by Porter was published by Truthout.org titled “Exclusive Report: Evidence of Iran Nuclear Weapons Program May Be Fraudulent.” He said today: “The latest IAEA report asserts that Iran has only addressed issues of ‘form’ rather than of ‘substance’…

THOMAS P. KIM Kim is executive director of the Korea Policy Institute and professor of politics and international relations at Scripps College. JOHN FEFFER Co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus, Feffer is author of The Future of U.S.-Korean Relations. He said today: “Applying sanctions against North Korea and conducting military exercises near its border have…

DAVID SWANSON Swanson just wrote the piece “The New War Congress, An Obama-Republican War Alliance?” which states: “The [House] Armed Services Committee is likely to be a hotbed of military expansionism. Incoming Chairman McKeon wants Afghan War commander General David Petraeus to testify in December (even before he becomes chairman) on the Obama administration’s upcoming…

NIR ROSEN Rosen is author of the new book Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World. He said today: “Obama has set an arbitrary deadline of 2014, but his generals are doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. There is no evidence of progress on any front…

KAREN GREENBERG Greenberg is executive director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University Law School. She just wrote the piece “Guilty Until Proven Guilty: Threatening the Presumption of Innocence” about Wednesday’s acquittal of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani on all but one of more than 280 counts by a jury in a federal…