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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  • · Rove Walks? · Bush and Permanent Bases in Iraq

    ROBERT PARRY Parry is the founder and editor of ConsortiumNews.com. He wrote the piece “Letting the White House Walk?” last October. Parry said today: “This decision shows that Patrick Fitzgerald has taken a very narrow approach to prosecuting crimes in the course of this investigation.” Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s…

  • Guantanamo and Suicides

    In the aftermath of apparent suicides by three men detained at Guantanamo Bay, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., Commander of the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo, stated: “They are smart, they are creative, they are committed. They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act…

  • Zarqawi

    LORETTA NAPOLEONI Currently in Rome, Napoleoni is available for a limited number of interviews. She is the author of the book Insurgent Iraq: Al-Zarqawi and Al-Qaeda’s New Generation. She said today: “Al-Zarqawi is a man we created out of nothing, because, let’s not forget that Al-Zarqawi was presented to the world as the link between…

  • · Palestinian Authority · East Timor

    ALI ABUNIMAH Abunimah wrote the new article “Dangerous Dirty Tricks in Palestine,” in which he states: “Without consulting [Palestinian Authority] Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas leader, [Palestinian President] Abbas announced that Hamas would have 10 days to accept the prisoners’ document without any changes or he would call a referendum. Hamas made clear that…

  • · Congo · Sudan

    MAURICE CARNEY Time magazine’s cover story last week noted: “Simmering conflict in Congo has killed 4 million people since 1998, yet few choose to cover the story.” Executive director of Friends of the Congo, Carney said today: “The central issue of the Congo has long been its enormous wealth and the nexus that exists among…

  • Beyond Haditha

    DAVID MacMICHAEL A disabled veteran of 10 years active Marine Corps service in Korea, MacMichael was a Defense Department consultant from 1965 to 1969 in Southeast Asia. During most of that period he was attached to the office of the Special Assistant for Counter-Insurgency at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok. In that capacity he reviewed…

  • UN Declaration on AIDS Causes Outrage

    The group ActionAid International is criticizing the declaration coming from the UN AIDS conference taking place in New York City. ActionAid International states that “the declaration does not commit governments to urgently fill the $10 billion funding gap … every year to finance the scaling up towards the goal of universal access.” Among those AIDS…

  • Blix Report

    Today the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission chaired by Hans Blix presented its report “Weapons of Terror: Freeing the World of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms” to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The following nuclear disarmament specialists are available for interviews: JOHN BURROUGHS Burroughs, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, said today:…

  • Deal with Iran?

    SELIG HARRISON Available for a very limited number of interviews, Harrison is director of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy and author of five books on nonproliferation and Asian affairs. He said today: “What Iran’s going to say is that they agreed to suspend their uranium enrichment before because the European Union…

  • Iraq and Afghanistan: Turning Point or Going in Circles?

    KHALIL BENDIB Bendib is a cartoonist; his first collection of cartoons is titled “It Became Necessary to Destroy the Planet in Order to Save It!” His latest cartoon depicts Bush repeatedly claiming to be reaching a “turning point” in Iraq while in fact he is just going around in circles; see it here. Bendib said…

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