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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  • “Net Neutrality” Ruling Poised to Make Web into “Something that Looks Like Cable TV”

    “For those of us already pushed to the margins of public debate, today’s decision striking down net neutrality couldn’t be worse. Despite reports by telecom companies and their allies that keeping the Internet open would hinder jobs and hurt the economy, the opposite is true. Killing network neutrality will actually hinder our small businesses and…

  • West Virginia Chemical Spill

    “In West Virginia, both the Republicans and Democrats are bought and paid for and regularly mouth Wall Street’s deregulatory dogma. West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Protection is in the pocket of the coal and chemical industries. The state’s mainstream media — with the exception of the Charleston Gazette — is asleep at the wheel. (…)…

  • Robert Gates’s Narcissistic “Duty”

    Parry just wrote the piece “Robert Gates Double-Crosses Obama,” which states: “As Barack Obama is staggered by a back-stabbing memoir from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the president can’t say that some people didn’t warn him about the risk of bringing a political opportunist like Gates into his inner circle on national security. “Those warnings…

  • Debate on Disclosure as Petition Spotlights $600 Million Ties Binding Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the Washington Post and the CIA

    Today, RootsAction released the full text of email correspondence between the group’s co-founder Norman Solomon and the Washington Post’s executive editor, Martin Baron. To read the complete exchange, click here. Routinely, the Post’s coverage of the CIA does not include disclosure that the newspaper’s owner, Bezos, is Amazon’s CEO and largest stakeholder while the firm…

  • War on Poverty: How it Succeeded and How it Failed

    “LBJ’s policies did not end poverty. … But that shouldn’t keep us from drawing lessons from its shortcomings as well as its accomplishments in building a progressive campaign against inequality. One is the importance of fighting the battle at the level of economic policy and structural reform rather than relying on redistributive social welfare policies…

  • “How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty”

    “We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that key parts of the war on poverty – the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 — have been critical for reducing poverty. Until then, poor people and older people had no way of ensuring access to health care. We do see some continued racial dynamics around…

  • Drone Trial Friday in New York

    The 16 protesters and allied activists will hold news conferences Friday and Saturday and released a statement: “On October 25, 2012, the 16 served a War Crimes Indictment to Hancock Air Base, home of the 174th Attack Wing of the New York Air National Guard, and were arrested. The base is located on the backside…

  • NAFTA at 20: “Record of Damage” to Widen with “NAFTA-on-Steroids” TPP

    “NAFTA’s actual outcomes prove how damaging this type of agreement is for most people, that it should be renegotiated and why we cannot have any more such deals that include job-offshoring incentives, requirements that we import food that doesn’t meet our safety standards or new rights for firms to get taxpayer compensation before foreign tribunals…

  • CIA Cloud Over Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post

    “It’s all so basic. Readers of the Washington Post, which reports frequently on the CIA, are entitled to know — and to be reminded on a regular basis in stories and editorials in the newspaper and online — that the Post’s new owner Jeff Bezos stands to benefit substantially from Amazon’s $600-million contract with the CIA. Even…

  • First Commander: Guantánamo Should Never Have Opened

    “There is much that is remarkable in the recent op-ed by Guantánamo’s first commander, Michael Lehnert. It is not just a piece arguing we should close it already, but that it should never have been opened. Two passages are particularly striking. The first was the belief that the detainees would provide a ‘treasure trove of…

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