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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  • Rand Paul to Filibuster Pro-Drone Lawyer’s Judgeship

    “Barron co-authored the infamous Justice department opinion authorizing Obama’s murder of U.S. citizens. This is a total disgrace. If approved, we will have a murderer and a war criminal sitting on the U.S. First Circuit. … So here Barron and [his coauthor in the legal opinion Martin] Lederman deliberately and maliciously write a get-out-of-jail-free card…

  • Banks Still Too Big to Jail While Occupy Wall St. Activist Imprisoned

    “In this case we have the second largest Swiss bank, a bank with … 1.26 trillion Swiss francs of client assets under management getting away with essentially a fine that amounts to three months of their net earnings. Contrary to Holder’s claim about it being an end to ‘too big to jail,’ no senior executives…

  • House Considering Record Spending on Nuclear Weapons

    “As in previous years, the House Armed Services Committee version of the annual Defense Authorization Act tries to force the administration to design and build new nuclear weapons, components, and high-dollar factories sooner rather than later, and without further ado. The Committee wants to start design of a new cruise missile warhead three years sooner…

  • Military Budget: Good News for Contractors

  • 60 Years After Brown vs. Board of Ed.: “Segregation Now”?

    “Brown v. Board of Education … understood that resources follow white students in this country, that schools that have a significant percentage of white students get better teachers. They get better textbooks. They get better, really, curriculum. And so, today, that’s still the case. We have not eliminated that kind of connection between resources and…

  • FCC Holds Meeting on Net Neutrality Rules: Chairman Meets Protesters

    “It is great that Wheeler came to the encampment to talk with us but he is still in favor of a solution that will not work. Section 706 does not give the FCC the authority it needs to ensure real Net Neutrality protections. This approach has lost in court twice. The only reason he will…

  • Turkey Protests ‘Avoidable’ Mine Deaths

    “Belonging to a private company, the mine is organized by IndustriALL’s affiliate Maden-İş, Mineworkers’ Union of Turkey. Around 800 miners were in and around the mine when an electrical fault triggered a transformer to explode causing a large fire around noon time on Tuesday 13 May. The fire caused a power cut in the mine…

  • Did U.S. War in Libya Boost Boko Haram in Nigeria?

    “Seemingly out of nowhere, Boko Haram burst into the awareness of people around the world as a shadowy group of Islamists with the ability to carry out audacious attacks that paralyzed the army of the most populous country in Africa. People now want to know the group’s origins, where they came from, why they are…

  • Obama and Holder’s ‘Assault on Freedom of the Press’

    “History demonstrates that the CIA’s interventions in Iran have sown additional seeds of enmity between that nation and our own. The revelations of James Risen about the CIA’s recent activities in that country are the price of honoring the freedom of the press, a freedom the U.S. rightly condemns Iran for suppressing. Rather than prosecute…

  • Human Rights Watch’s U.S. Double Standard

    “In his capacity as an HRW advocacy director, Malinowski contended in 2009 that ‘under limited circumstances’ there was ‘a legitimate place’ for CIA renditions—the illegal practice of kidnapping and transferring terrorism suspects around the planet. Malinowski was quoted paraphrasing the U.S. government’s argument that designing an alternative to sending suspects to ‘foreign dungeons to be…

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