It looks like the possible meeting between president Obama and Iranian president Rouhani on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meetings will not happen after all, apparently because it was “too complicated” for the Iranians.
But despite that setback, Stephen M. Walt makes the obvious point, that talking to foreign leaders whom one disagrees with should not be seen as so momentous. [Read more…]
Ever since the Edward Snowden NSA revelations exploded on the scene on June 6, we have been treated to one blockbuster story after another about how the US and UK governments in particular have been spying on practically the entire world and brazenly lying on a grand scale. As far as I know, even though a host of media outlets (The Guardian, Washington Post, Der Spiegel, TV Globo, New York Times, ProPublica) are co-operating in the publication of the 300 and more stories so far, only Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and Laura Poitras are in possession of the entire dossier and they are being very deliberate in what they release and how. [Read more…]
As a result of the revelations by Edward Snowden of abuse by the NSA, president Obama promised an ‘independent’ review of the agencies activities, a promise that was immediately belied by the fact that he said the panel would work under the supervision of James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, who still has his job despite getting caught blatantly lying under oath. [Read more…]
I have railed before at how the big banks have been able to escape serious consequences for their acts that threw the global economy into turmoil and caused hardships for so many. While they have had fines levied against them, the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission, the agencies entrusted with maintaining accountability, were satisfied to simply levy fines on the banks without threatening the senior executives with jail time, which would be the best way to deter future malfeasance. The fines themselves, even though large by normal standards, were usually just a few days’ profits for the banks that they could absorb as the cost of doing business. [Read more…]
The ghastly events unfolding in a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya unfortunately did not come as a complete surprise to me. Ever since I completed reading Jeremy Scahill’s book Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield (2013), where he traces to evolution of the global war on terror, I felt that it was only a matter of time before some atrocity occurred either in that country or Ethiopia or both. [Read more…]
The House of Representatives voted late last week to cut the budget for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (popularly referred to ‘food stamps’) by $40 billion over ten years. The vote was close (217-210) and the bill now goes to the senate. The Des Moines Register has come out with a scathing editorial against the cutting of SNAP benefits, comparing the meager allowance with how lavishly the state’s members of Congress spend on their own food on trips at taxpayer expense. [Read more…]
In a long profile in Foreign Policy, Shane Harris describes Keith Alexander, the head of NSA, as a cowboy who disdained the law and felt that he could do what he needed to do to get the results he wanted. [Read more…]
It was less that a year ago that General David Petraeus was the golden boy of US military strategy, the supposed genius who had turned around US fortunes in Iraq prior to the withdrawal. Members of Congress treated him as some kind of oracle whose words must be followed by even the president and competed to see who could praise him the most. Criticisms of him were treated as if they were blasphemy, as could be seen from the howls of outrage when the group MoveOn.org put out an ad in 2007 against the Iraq war that made a bad pun on his name. [Read more…]
It was little more than a week ago that the US seemed on the verge of bombing Syria, an action that threatened to spread to Iran and thus open yet another front in the perpetual war against Muslim countries. This was something that was hoped for by the neoconservatives, the liberal war hawks, Israel and its US lobby, and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups that thrive on instability and chaos. [Read more…]
We have been steadily observing over time the encroachment of the civil liberties and the violation of constitutional protections by the government, using fear-mongering about terrorism in order to get people to acquiesce. The government seizes any excuse to make inroads into our due process rights, often stampeding people at times of crisis, and terrorism is the best excuse they have. [Read more…]