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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  • Prosecuting Manning for WikiLeaks: “Killing the Messenger”

    Glenn Greenwald writes today: “The U.S. Army yesterday announced that it has filed 22 additional charges against Bradley Manning, the Private accused of being the source for hundreds of thousands of documents (as well as [the video ‘Collateral Murder’]) published over the last year by WikiLeaks. Most of the charges add little to the ones…

  • Wrong Kind of Intelligence: U.S. Killing Children in Afghanistan

    Kelly and Brollier are with Voices for Creative Nonviolence. Kelly said today: “The drone intelligence and all of the other surveillance available to the U.S. military couldn’t help bomber pilots figure out, on March 1, 2011, that the nine people they believed to be insurgents, on a mountainside in the Pech Valley, were actually children.…

  • More Cuts — Or Make Rich, Corporations Pay Up

    RICHARD WOLFF Wolff just wrote the piece “How the rich soaked the rest of us,” which states: “The richest Americans have dramatically lowered their income tax burden since 1945, both absolutely and relative to the tax burdens of middle income groups and the poor.” Wolff is author of the book Capitalism Hits the Fan: The…

  • The Real “National Security” Budget: $1.2 Trillion a Year

    CHRISTOPHER HELLMAN Hellman just wrote the piece “The Real U.S. National Security Budget” (for TomDispatch.com), which gives a breakdown and states: “What if you went to a restaurant and found it rather pricey? Still, you ordered your meal and, when done, picked up the check only to discover that it was almost twice the menu…

  • “Deficit Fears Irrational, Cuts Will Impede Recovery”

    JAMES K. GALBRAITH, THEA HARVEY Chair of Economists for Peace and Security, Galbraith (available for a limited number of interviews) is Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. chair in government/business relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. His latest book is The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned…

  • U.S. “Hypocrisy” on Libya and International Criminal Court

    Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called for the ouster of Muammar Qaddafi, citing “universal principles.” MICHAEL RATNER President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Ratner said today: “While it appears that serious crimes against humanity are being committed by the Libyan government, the referral of those abuses to the International Criminal Court by the…

  • Wall Street Criminality: Origin of State Crises

    Last night Charles Ferguson, director of “Inside Job” (about Wall Street’s wrongdoing), upon receiving the Oscar for best documentary, said: “Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by financial fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.” See video at…

  • Palestinians, Israel and Freedom and Democracy

    AHMET DOGAN, via Ann Wright, Greta Berlin Professor Dogan, whose 18-year-old son Furkan was killed during the Israeli military raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla in May 2010, is in Washington, D.C. He hopes to convince U.S. officials to open an independent investigation into his son’s killing by Israeli commandos and to discuss with them what…

  • Libya

    Chair of the department of political science at the University of New England, Ahmida’s books include The Making of Modern Libya and Forgotten Voices: Power and Agency in Colonial and Postcolonial Libya — largely about the little-known Italian genocide in Libya of 100 years ago. He said today: “Despite the brutal backlash it is too…

  • CIA Spy Captured in Pakistan: Fallout

    Dave Lindorff said today: “When Raymond Davis, the American who killed two Pakistani intelligence operatives in Lahore and now sits in a Lahore prison, was arrested, he claimed to have worked for a security company in Orlando. I checked it out for Counterpunch magazine. The address proved to be a vacant storefront in an empty…

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