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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  • 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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