The White House has a handy website to mislead you about your tax dollars. It claims that only 26.3 perent goes to “National Defense”. This is similar to the claim in the 1040EZ US income tax form booklet (see pages 36-37). Here are those two pages in a PDF. There the claim is that the [...]
Since May 2009, when President Obama first bowed to Republican pressure on national security issues, and abandoned a plan by White House Counsel Greg Craig to rehouse on the US mainland a couple of cleared prisoners at Guantánamo who were at risk of torture if repatriated, it has been apparent that no principles are sufficiently [...]
This report was written by Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye and originally published on Truthout. The White House has categorically denied that it set up a task force to address the psychological well being of military families and had First Lady Michelle Obama appoint as one of its members the former chief psychologist at Guantanamo, [...]
The failures of the General Electric nuclear reactors in Japan to safely shut down during the 9.0 Tahoku earthquake, following in the wake of the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the deadly methane gas explosion in Massey’s West Virginia coal mine, conclusively demonstrate the grave dangers to human society [...]
Those of us who have been studying Guantánamo closely were not surprised when, on March 7, President Obama announced that he was lifting a ban on trials by Military Commission at Guantánamo, which he imposed on his first day in office in January 2009, and also issued an executive order establishing a periodic review of [...]
Most people only see the public faces of the Tea Party Patriots: those doing television interviews, appearing on the covers of magazines, waving from the steps of private jets at political rallies, and who spend the millions of dollars in tax-free donations they have raised; but who are the 15 million “patriots” who actually attend [...]
If you’re dreaming that American Muslims might benefit even a tad from the images flowing out of the Middle East of young people putting their lives on the line to establish self-rule – dream on. The American people, if they’re paying any attention at all to the wider significance of the shockingly unexpected campaign for [...]
Rep. Pete King, the impresario of Capitol Kabuki, is very busy these days getting ready for his debut as the new chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. And for his opening act, some time next month, the congressman is planning a hearing on the radicalization of young Muslims by local religious leaders. The [...]
The report in Wednesday’s New York Times stating that the Obama Administration is preparing to resurrect Military Commissions to try Guantanamo detainees probably sounds the death knell for the kind of justice meted out by Federal civilian courts in the U.S. for more than two centuries. Instead, according to some of the nation’s most respected [...]
Barring some totally unforeseen development, key provisions of the USA Patriot Act will be renewed for yet another year – and almost no one will have noticed. Earlier this month, the newly-minted chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, a conservative Republican from Michigan, introduced a bill to extend the law until February [...]
