Imagine being beaten to a pulp by a mafia hit-man. Your nose is broken and dribbling blood, your left eye is swollen shut, you may have broken ribs. Somehow, you manage to stand up. Just then, the hit-man produces an invoice for his services to the tune of $574. The...
Amnesty Int’l: Obama’s Partial Halt of Egypt Military Aid Not Good Enough
President Obama's October 9th decision to suspend millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Egypt came after two years of intense public pressure following Mubarak's ouster. In all likelihood, however, it is probably a temporary scheme to avoid further public...
Don’t Believe the NSA: What They’re Doing Is Illegal
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander made their umpteenth appearance in front of Congress yesterday to do damage control in the aftermath of Edward Snowden's leaks. As always, they insisted NSA surveillance programs are...
Lindsey Graham’s Approval Rating Drops Among Conservative Voters
POLITICO gives us a good news bad news report (at least from my perspective) on Lindsey Graham. The article cites two new polls that show support for Graham in his home state of South Carolina is dropping overall. That's the good news. The bad news is that his...
Despite Iranian Concessions, War Hawks Spread Fear of Deceptive Quest for Nukes
It's been really hard for Iran hawks these days. With a reformist Iranian president initiating unprecedented diplomacy with the U.S. and offering major concessions on its nuclear program, the best they've been able to come up with is that it's all a sham. Rouhani is...
Glenn Greenwald on Dick Cheney’s Edward Snowden Hate
Glenn Greenwald went on CNN last night to respond to Dick Cheney's accusation of Edward Snowden as a traitor and to yesterday's testimony from Clapper and Keith Alexander on NSA spying.
The Surveillance State Is ‘A Gigantic Beast’ That Values Self-Preservation, Not National Security
Jay Stanley over at the ACLU blog posts an illustrative table that gets to the heart of the NSA controversies these days. As he makes note, when defenders of the NSA's surveillance state are confronted with allegations of unlawfulness, overreach, or scandal as a...
One Area the NSA And I Can Agree: Obama Is A Cowardly, If Shrewd, Politician
The actual details of the NSA's expansive surveillance programs are infuriating enough on their own. Civil libertarians and ordinary Americans are and should be angry at the NSA's disrespect for the law, the Fourth Amendment, and privacy rights in general. It's...
Cheney’s Delusional Answer to ‘What Did We Get Out of Iraq?’
The U.S. benefit from the war in Iraq was that we eliminated the potential for al-Qaeda to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein, according to Dick Cheney...weapons he did not have to begin with. "...That was the threat after 9/11 and when...
Congressional Briefing on Drones: Watch the Video
Rafiq ur Rahman - a teacher at a primary school in North Waziristan, Pakistan - appeared at a briefing called by Representative Alan Grayson (FL-09), along with his children Nabila and Zubair, who were both injured in a drone attack in October 2012, Robert Greenwald,...
