News Items

  • Media Advisory: Whistleblowers to Speak About Surveillance and Cyber Issues

    “President Barack Obama is set to sign an executive order on Friday aimed at encouraging companies to share more information about cybersecurity threats with the government and each other, a response to attacks like that on Sony Entertainment. … Obama will sign the order at a day-long conference on cybersecurity at Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley.”

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  • Delegation of U.S. and UK Whistleblowers in London: News Conference on “Special Surveillance Relationship” — News Advisory

    Whistleblowers from four American and British “national security” agencies will hold a news conference in London on November 21 in a direct challenge to surveillance policies of the U.S. and UK governments. The whistleblowers — from the NSA, FBI, State Department and GCHQ — will speak about the effects of their governments’ policies on freedom of the press and democracy. They are traveling as a delegation co-sponsored by the U.S.-based organizations RootsAction.org and ExposeFacts, a project of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The news conference is being hosted by the Foreign Press Association.

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  • In Response to the Government’s Lynching of James Risen

    It has been a sharp learning curve for Jim Risen, but by having numerous grand juries and two administrations relentlessly hounding him, he has learned how deeply the government’s malevolence descends. But there was always one steadfast assertion he wound not compromise, Jim Risen assured his sources, from the very start of their first encounter, that he would never divulge their identities nor what information they provided him with.

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  • Militarization of U.S. Police: Ferguson, Mo.

    Community policing reforms came about as a corrective to the 1950-60s professional police model which created a large gulf between police and citizens. Few noticed that underlying all the CP rhetoric was a little noticed yet foretelling trend of para-militarism as found in SWAT teams. What we’re witnessing today, though, with the influence of the Dept. of Homeland Security since 9/11 — along with growing emphasis on military hardware and tactics — is the expansion of police militarization throughout entire police departments — and indeed, the entire police institution.

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  • Unconstitutional acts of war in Iraq

    President Obama ignored the wise direction of President George Washington when he casually told the nation — and Congress — that U.S. military forces will engage in acts of war in Iraq for an extended period of weeks and maybe months. Bombing, he said in a brief statement last week, is needed here and there, but he promised there will be no U.S. boots on the ground. … The announcement seemed almost an afterthought as the president headed for vacation in Martha’s Vineyard. He neglected to seek approval of Congress before authorizing bombardment of the military forces of ISIS, the…

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  • News Conference: Edward Snowden’s Passport, Political Asylum and Related Issues

    Ray McGovern, Coleen Rowley and Norman Solomon spoke at this news conference, sponsored by RootsAction.org and hosted by the Institute for Public Accuracy.

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  • NSA Veterans and Whistleblowers Respond to Obama Speech

    Minutes after President Obama’s major address on NSA surveillance on Friday, Jan. 17, the Institute for Public Accuracy held a news conference with noted NSA veterans and whistleblowers.

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  • The War on Poverty at Fifty

    Fifty years after Lyndon B. Johnson made it the centerpiece of his first State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, the War on Poverty remains one of the most embattled—and least understood—of Great Society initiatives.

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  • Edward Snowden: Profile in Courage

    Edward Snowden may go down in history as one of this nation’s most important whistleblowers. He is certainly one of the bravest.

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  • Obama’s Economic Race Legacy

    From the start, President Barack Obama has shown little interest or loyalty in the issues that affect the poor, working class and people of color in the United States. For almost his entire first term he didn’t utter the words poor or poverty. Early on he reminded African Americans: ‘I’m not the president of black America. I’m the president of the United States of America…’

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  • * Gold Star Moms * Can Jimmy Carter Defuse North Korea Tensions?

    “Trump has proven himself to be a loose cannon who doesn’t seem to have very many social graces. But Bush was no better. I wish the conversation was about the barbarism of war and, in this instance, why are there special ops forces in Niger? Where is the movement to oppose U.S. wars, instead of…

  • CIA Expanding in Afghanistan: “Brutally Subjugate and Punish the People”

    “These CIA teams in Afghanistan are not just reminiscent of the Operation Phoenix program in Vietnam, the death squads of Central America and the Shia torture and murder militias of Baghdad, they are the direct descendants of them.”

  • Is Climate Change Affecting Western Fires?

    We have a really diverse set of ecosystems across the western United States, even within forest areas and they have different sensitivities to increasing temperatures and changes in the timing of spring. The places that have shown the largest increases linked to those changes in spring timing and warmer temperatures are places where the forests…

  • Bergdahl: “Traitor to American Exceptionalism and White Supremacy”

    “Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl’s guilty plea begins the end of this phase of an embarrassing, sad and morally absurd saga of American history.”

  • Somalia Bombing

    “This shows the failure of the international community to bring peace to Somalia. Drones and military forces with no real strategy for stability just produce more violence. The African Union force is a conventional army up against guerrilla fighters and I have little faith they will prevail. They have Mogadishu, but al-Shabab has much of…

  • Is “Fake News” Scare Being Used to Stifle Dissent?

    “As tech companies prepare to cooperate with intelligence agencies, and their owners inch closer to steering corporate media both indirectly and directly, it becomes ever more urgent to recognize the irony of it all: Centrist alarmism doesn’t destroy harmful propaganda — it creates it.”

  • Assessing Karzai’s Charge of U.S. Backing ISIS in Afghanistan

    “American allies, including Israel, still support these jihadist groups directly in Syria, as well as Yemen. It would be naive, based upon decades of American covert actions and wars, to imagine the U.S. is not involved and complicit at some level with that support in these multiple countries, even if it is just approval from…

  • Jailing a Grandma for Allegedly Protesting Drone Killings

    ‘Who is the real victim here? The commander of a military base whose drones kill innocent people halfway around the world, or those innocent people who are the real ones in need of protection from the terror of U.S. drone attacks?’

  • “Russiagate Is More Fiction Than Fact”

    “For privileged Americans to challenge Trump mainly over Russia is to do so in a way that avoids confronting their own relationship to the economic and political system that many of his voters rebelled against. ‘If the presidency is effectively a Russian op, if the American presidency right now is the product of collusion between…

  • Nuclear Ban Treaty Group Gets Nobel

    “Upon the adoption of the ban treaty, the United States, United Kingdom and France issued a statement that ‘We do not intend to sign, ratify or ever become party to it’ as it ‘does not address the security concerns that continue to make nuclear deterrence necessary’ and will create ‘even more divisions at a time…

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