News Items

  • Affidavit by Daniel Ellsberg for Plowshare Activists Being Allowed a Defense of Necessity

    In 1971 I gave the U.S. Senate, the New York Times and the Washington Post copies of what have come to be known as The Pentagon Papers. I was arrested on twelve felony counts. My trial was dismissed because of government misconduct which figured in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon…These considerations bear on two other elements of the necessity defense, the “lack of legal alternatives” and the “imminence” of the harms to be averted. Again, I speak from my own experience, but not only mine, in saying that it is the perceived insufficiency of other means, by themselves not…

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  • A Long List of Democratic Candidates Requires a Large Catalog of Their Funders

    By Sam Haut: As the first debates for the Democratic primary begin, and the list of candidates has grown to 24, it can be difficult to contextualize where each candidate has received funding from over the course of their time in office. What follows is a list of the Democratic candidates and the top sources for how much money they’ve made and where those top sources come from.

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  • NATO and US Foreign Policy: Dangers Ahead

    RootsAction.org held a news conference Thursday on “NATO and U.S. Foreign Policy: Dangers Ahead” hosted by the Institute for Public Accuracy. Speakers include former State Department officials Matthew Hoh, Ann Wright, as well as Martin Fleck. The event was moderated by Norman Solomon.

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  • Media Advisory: “NATO and U.S. Foreign Policy: Dangers Ahead”

    At 10 a.m. Tuesday, April 2, 2019 at the National Press Club: On the same day that President Trump is scheduled to meet with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at the White House, this news conference will focus on the U.S.-NATO relationship. Speakers include former State Department officials Matthew Hoh and Ann Wright.

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  • Statement by Floyd Abrams in response to Attorney General nominee William Barr’s remarks on the First Amendment

    “It’s one thing to say that there could be circumstances in which a journalist’s need to protect her sources could lead to a potential finding of contempt of court if she refused to obey a court order requiring such disclosure. But the notion that a journalist could properly be jailed for publishing material that the government thinks could ‘hurt the country’ is something else entirely and would be deeply threatening to First Amendment norms in general and journalistic freedom in particular.”

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  • Statement on NAFTA’s “Kafkaesque” Turn

    The supposedly concluded renegotiation of NAFTA has reached a Kafkaesque stage. As the United States Trade Representative has stated: “The United States and Mexico have reached a preliminary agreement in principle, subject to finalization and implementation.” Not only the negotiations have not been finalized, and without Canada, but the texts remain hidden from the public.

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  • What’s the Cost of Medicare for All?

    Even a Koch-backed think tank finds Medicare for all would cut health care spending. In a report released by the Mercatus Center, a single-payer health care system would offset costs with even greater savings. The Intercept and other media reporting on this are citing the work of Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler. They are distinguished professors of health policy at the City University of New York at Hunter College and lecturers in medicine at Harvard Medical School. They have written an analysis of the work of the Koch-backed think tank, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which is…

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  • Trump Team Hired Israeli Spy Firm Used by Harvey Weinstein to Attack Obama Officials on Iran Deal

    “Aides to Donald Trump, the U.S. president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a ‘dirty ops’ campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observer can reveal. People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to ‘get dirt’ on Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal.”

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  • From the desk of Noam Chomsky

    From the desk of Noam Chomsky

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  • 15 Years Later: The Whistleblower Who Almost Blocked the Iraq War

    Media Advisory: Press Conference to Mark 15th Anniversary Of Leak by GCHQ Translator Katharine Gun Revealing US “Dirty Tricks” at UN for Iraq War When:  Thursday, 1 March 2018 at 11:00 a.m. Where:  Head office, National Union of Journalists Headland House, 72 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NB Who:  Katharine Gun, Thomas Drake, Matthew Hoh, Jesselyn Radack This press conference will take place the day before the 15th anniversary of the Observer’s publication of the explosive March 2, 2003 story “US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war” — based on a leak by GCHQ translator Katharine Gun — revealing the US National Security Agency’s UN surveillance memo that aimed to grease the way for the…

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  • Last Year Teachers, Now GM Strike

    “A successful strike at General Motors could persuade UAW members that the union is willing to take significant risks to fight on behalf of its members, potentially opening the door to more organizing in the anti-union South, where many auto plants have migrated…’We are the architects of showing a better way, showing the light and…

  • Israel: “Apartheid Vote”

    “…this was an apartheid vote with an apartheid outcome. Any conversation about the election needs to include the context of millions of Palestinians who have no vote over who rules them…While Netanyahu not being around is a pleasant prospect, Cahol Lavan [Blue and White] must be understood as a rightwing party with less corruption issues.…

  • New Advisor is “Bolton Lite”

    “Will O’Brien work to get the U.S. out of Afghanistan? Or will he expand/facilitate war with Iran? Track record suggests latter…This is still a triumph for Pompeo, who gets a State guy in there and a weaker NSA than [with] Bolton. Pompeo is achieving Kissingerian levels of power in national security…”

  • Medicine for All

    “Forcing pharmaceutical companies to compete with a public alternative that does not answer to Wall Street and its demands for profit extraction would transform the market in ways that empowering the federal government to negotiate prices for a subset of drugs would not. It would also mean that patients with chronic diseases like diabetes would…

  • Why Would Saudi Arabia Get Attacked?

    “Easy to think of a rationale, with the U.S. (along with the Saudis) working to destroy not only [Iran’s] petroleum system but their whole economy, a consideration that seems to be left out of commentary that reflexively accepts that what the U.S. is doing, however shocking, cannot really be that bad, perhaps an error in…

  • Trump Threatens War With Iran: Why is Congress AWOL? 

    “It’s certainly true that Congress is charged with deciding whether or not to declare war. But the Congress has failed to live up to its responsibility as the U.S. is waging war in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Niger and elsewhere without a constitutionally mandated declaration of war. The U.S. government is also providing…

  • Beyond the Wall “Debate”: The “Bipartisan Border Industrial Complex”

    “Joe Biden was not telling the truth when at the debate on Thursday he said that the Obama administration did not ‘lock people in cages’ or ‘separate families.’ The statement is an impossible one given the nearly 3 million deportations during the eight years of Obama, the most ever by a sitting president, among other…

  • Biden: New Level of Iraq War Lies

    Presidential candidate Joe Biden is now claiming about the 2003 Iraq invasion: “Yes, I did oppose the war before it began.”…Tracey also writes: “When I reminded Biden that if he opposed the war all along, he could have joined 23 of his Senate colleagues in voting against authorizing it, he replied: ‘No, no, because they…

  • Bolton Out: A Step Away from More War?

    “Of course, Bolton’s departure will naturally increase the influence of Pompeo, a Christian Zionist whose views on Middle East policy, in particular, are very close to hard-line neoconservatives, but hopefully the Pentagon can act as an effective counterweight.”

  • Iraq War Lies Exposed by “Official Secrets” Heroine Influenced by Author

    The film is a remarkably accurate Hollywood account of how British spy Katharine Gun (played by Keira Knightley) attempted to stop the invasion of Iraq by exposing a top secret NSA document proving the U.S. and British governments were spying on other UN members to bully and blackmail their way to a UN authorization for…

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