“Last night, NBC News’ Michael Isikoff released a 16-page ‘white paper’ prepared by the Obama DOJ that purports to justify Obama’s power to target even Americans for assassination without due process. This is not the primary OLC memo justifying Obama’s kill list — that is still concealed — but it appears to track the reasoning…

“When Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke to the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003, countless journalists in the United States extolled him for a masterful performance — making the case that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The fact that the speech later became notorious should not obscure how easily truth…

“Last night’s power outage at the Super Bowl gave the world a glimpse of the daily challenges many New Orleans residents still face in the wake of rebuilding post-Katrina. Thanks to misplaced priorities that place war and partisan politics over our nation’s infrastructure needs, cities like New Orleans suffer. From New Jersey to New Orleans…

Stephen Zunes said today in assessing Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy: “It is not unusual for a president to want to be his own secretary of state, but rarely has a secretary so badly wanted to be her own president. Unlike most administrations — in which the State Department would sometimes challenge the hawks in the…

“But the most revealing part of the spectacle was watching Hagel stand up to John McCain when McCain said he had been wrong to oppose the Iraq surge in 2007 and the Afghanistan surge in 2009 — and then watching Hagel fold pathetically when Lindsey Graham asked him to condemn Israeli settlements.”

“The best thing about the Hagel controversy, is that nuclear abolition is finally being discussed. Numerous Commissions and studies have found that the longer we hang on to our nuclear bombs, in violation of our treaty obligations in the Non-Proliferation Treaty to get rid of them, the more countries will acquire them, creating ever greater…

“There is so much hype about what comprehensive immigration reform could be that the rhetoric about what may happen is really an industry on it’s own. …Some are anxious for a real sign that President Obama is serious about reform. His tenure in office has brought increased funding for enforcement and record deportation numbers.”

“‘There is a legal definition of whistleblower and I meet that legal definition,’ Kiriakou declared. ‘I was the first person to acknowledge that the CIA was using waterboarding against al Qaeda prisoners. I said in 2007 that I regarded waterboarding as torture and I also said that it was not the result of rogue CIA…

“President of Veterans for Peace, Leah Bolger said today: “It’s kind of a civil rights issue, certainly anyone who is capable of doing any job should be able to do it. However, I don’t see this as cause for a big celebration. We should be trying to abolish war. The U.S. shouldn’t be sending ANY…

“John Kerry’s attacks on the International Court of Justice, his defense of Israeli occupation policies and human rights violations, and his support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq raise serious questions about his commitment to international law and treaty obligations.”