NewsTrust - Bush Administration - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

TALIBAN = 9/11?? Afghanistan by Hypnosis

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Greg Palast - By Greg Palast - Nov. 15 (Opinion) - On September 11, 2001, my office building, the World Trade Center, was attacked by al Qaeda, a murder cult of Saudi Arabians, funded by Saudi Arabians. And so, in response to the Saudis' attack, America invaded ... Afghanistan. Like, HUH? And here we go again. New York Times headline last Friday: "Pakistani Army, In Its Campaign In Taliban Stronghold, Finds A Hint Of 9/11."

NewsTrust Rating: 3.3 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Why Gay Marriage Is Such A Big Deal

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

American Chronicle - By Sean Prophet - Nov. 09 (Opinion) - In the grand scheme of American politics, the gay marriage issue seems like it should really be a footnote. It affects so few people, how could it be so important? The question is simple enough, right? Either you think same-sex marriage is a symbol of plummeting morality and the decline of Western Civilization, or you see it as a fundamental human right. Like abortion or gun control, it's not a subject that lends itself to much middle ground.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.2 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

22 Things Dick Cheney Can't Recall About the Plame Case

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Nick Baumann - Oct. 31 (Opinion) - Notes from former Vice President Dick Cheney's interview with the FBI about the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's covert CIA identity were finally released on Friday afternoon after a lengthy legal battle. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued the Justice Department last year to obtain the interview notes; a judge finally ordered their release on October 1. In the interview, Cheney demonstrated a behavior common among Bush administration officials under investigation: he couldn't remember much of anything. Here's a non-comprehensive list of 22 things Dick Cheney claimed he couldn't recall about the Plame case, in the order they appear in the FBI's notes:

NewsTrust Rating: 3.5 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Obama's Choice: Failed War President or the Prince of Peace?

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Nick Turse - Oct. 22 (Opinion) - More than 100 years after their early counterinsurgency efforts on two tiny islands in the Philippines, U.S. troops are still dying there at the hands of Muslim guerillas. More than 50 years later, the U.S. still garrisons the southern part of the Korean peninsula as a result of a stalemate war and a peace as yet unmade. More recently, the American experience has included outright defeat in Vietnam, failures in Laos and Cambodia; debacles in Lebanon and Somalia; a never-ending four-president-long war in Iraq; and almost a decade of wheel-spinning in Afghanistan without any sign of success, no less victory.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.9 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

David Cole on "The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable"

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Amy Goodman, David Cole - Sep. 15 (Opinion) - Legal scholar and attorney David Cole looks at the story behind the infamous Bush administration torture memos. Cole argues the memos show that the United States government’s top attorneys were instrumental in rationalizing acts of torture and cruelty, employing chillingly twisted logic and Orwellian reasoning to authorize what the law absolutely forbids.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.5 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Karzai, Election Fraud and the Wages of Empire

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By John Nichols - Sep. 10 (Opinion) - So we get the "news" -- not from the satirical Onion but from the nation's newspaper of record -- that U.S. officials are trying to prevent Karzai from declaring "victory" in the exercise in fraud that naive commentators still insist on referring to as an election.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.4 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Liz Cheney can't handle the truth

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Vincent Rossmeier - Aug. 31 (Opinion) - Liz Cheney, the easily exasperated eldest daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, has become a one-woman TV juggernaut in 2009, racking up more airtime than a cloud as she defends her daddy's administration records. And boy, is she wrong. Unlike so many TV pundits who spin and slide around the facts, Cheney makes no fuss about completely ignoring them, and sticking to talking points that have little relation to the truth.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.7 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Nadler: Obama Violating Law By Not Investigating Bush

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Sam Stein - Aug. 21 (Opinion) - New York Congressman Jerry Nadler, a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, told the Huffington Post that he believed that President Obama would be breaking the law if he decided to oppose launching investigation into the authorization of torture. "If they follow the law they have no choice," Nadler said in an interview this past weekend.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.3 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Cheney's New Gambit

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Ray McGovern - Aug. 16 (Opinion) - The stenographers of the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) are missing the most obvious explanation for former Vice President Dick Cheney’s widely reported “disappointment” with former President George W. Bush on the issue of pardons -- self-interest.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.1 average - 7 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

McGovern on 'Downing Street Minutes'

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Ray McGovern - Aug. 10 (Opinion) - Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern recalls the remarkable case of the Downing Street Minutes, the documentary proof of President George W. Bush’s willful misuse of intelligence to justify an aggressive war in Iraq -- and the unwillingness of the major U.S. news media to do much with the evidence.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.2 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Free Inquiry - By James A. Haught - Aug. 05 (Opinion) - Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse. Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 6 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Cheney's Fondness for the Dark Side

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Sherwood Ross - Aug. 05 (Opinion) - In (Bush lawyer) John Yoo’s version of events, writes Jane Mayer in her book The Dark Side that “the impetus to break out of Geneva’s strictures…came from the CIA. Many at the Agency, however, saw this differently, suggesting it was Cheney and his lawyer, (David) Addington, who pushed the Agency to take the path toward torture.” A few days after 9/11 Cheney observed the CIA had gone over “to the dark side,” but whether he starred in the role of Darth Vader needs to be established or denied.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.8 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Torturing Children: Bush's Legacy and Democracy's Failure

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Henry Gireaux - Aug. 03 (Opinion) - The best kept secret of the Bush's war crimes is that thousands of children have been imprisoned, tortured, and otherwise denied rights under the Geneva Conventions and related international agreements. Yet both Congress and the media have strangely failed to identify the very existence of child prisoners as a war crime.(3)

NewsTrust Rating: 4.8 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Torturing Children: Bush's Legacy and Democracy's Failure

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Henry A. Giroux - Aug. 03 (Opinion) - Nowhere is there a more disturbing, if not horrifying, example of the relationship between a culture of cruelty and the politics of irresponsibility than in the resounding silence that surrounds the torture of children under the presidency of George W. Bush - and the equal moral and political failure of the Obama administration to address and rectify the conditions that made it possible.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.7 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

John Walker Lindh's Parents Discuss Their Son's Story, from Joining the US-Backed Taliban Army to Surviving a Northern Alliance Massacre, to His Abuse at the Hands of US Forces

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez, Frank Lindh, Marilyn Walker - Jul. 31 (Interview) - We turn now to a Democracy Now! exclusive. For the first time in over seven years, the parents of John Walker Lindh have agreed to sit down together for an extended interview to discuss their son, who is known by many as the American Taliban.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.4 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

The latent seeds of Auschwitz

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

granma.cu - By Inés Míriam Alemán - Jul. 25 (Opinion) - AFTER Nuremberg, where those centrally responsible were tried for crimes against humanity and peace, it seemed as though the world had seen the end of an era, the end of barbarism, and the beginning of a new era based on an international order that would not allow a repetition of the events of World War II

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Obama's View of Education Is Stuck in Reverse

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Henry A. Giroux - Jul. 24 (Opinion) - While President Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, have focused on public education, they have done so by largely embracing the Bush administration's view of educational reform, which includes more testing, more empirically based accountability measures, more charter schools, more military academies, defining the purpose of education in largely economic terms, and punishing public schools that don't measure up to high-stakes testing measures.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.3 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Bloody July in Afghanistan: Comedy of Errors

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Serge Truffaut - Jul. 23 (Opinion) - In short, Washington settled for the absolute minimum in every aspect.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.3 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

John McCain: Accountability For Torture is That People's Reputations Have Been Harmed Very Badly

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Crooks and Liars - Jul. 13 (Opinion) - GREGORY: But where's the accountability? McCAIN: Well, the accountability, obviously, is that people's reputations have been harmed very badly. The question is, is do we want America's image harmed more by dragging this out further and further? You've got to

NewsTrust Rating: 2.6 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

House Democrats on Intelligence Committee Say They Were Misled by CIA

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Crooks and Liars - Jul. 09 (Opinion) - On June 26, six seven Democrats on the committee — Anna Eshoo (Calif.), John Tierney (Mass.), Rush Holt (N.J.), Mike Thompson (Calif.), Alcee Hastings (Fla.) and Jan Schakowsky (Ill.) [Update: I received an early version of the letter. Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.) also signed it) — wrote to Panetta, “Recently you testified that you have determined that top CIA officials have concealed significant actions from all Members of Congress, and misled Members for a number of years from 2001 to this week.” T

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Obama's Torture Hypocrisy

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Jason Leopold - Jun. 30 (Opinion) - President Barack Obama just announced that the U.S. government "must stand against torture wherever it takes place," but it’s clear that his pledge does not apply to torture committed by officials from the Bush administration.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.2 average (not enough reviews) - See Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Free speech vs. surveillance in the digital age

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

dailytidings.com - By Amy Goodman - Jun. 27 (Opinion) - The Chinese government now requires any computer sold there after July 1, 2009, to include software called "Green Dam," which critics say will further empower the government to monitor Internet use. Josh Silver, executive director of media policy group Free Press, says Iran and China should alert us to domestic surveillance issues in the U.S.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.6 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Iran: Who's Diddling Democracy?

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Steve Weissman - Jun. 18 (Opinion) - .......I know firsthand the danger the protesters face from government thugs on motorcycles, provocateurs and the secret police. But none of this should blind us to the likelihood that our own government is dangerously meddling in Iran's internal affairs and playing with the lives of those protesters.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.4 average (not enough reviews) - See Review » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

Defeat of Graham-Lieberman and the ongoing war on transparency

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - Jun. 09 (Opinion) - the Graham-Lieberman amendment -- which Obama supports -- is nothing but a pure manifestation of the Bush mentality, as its core premise is that we can't remain Safe unless we abandon our decades-old legal framework governing transparency. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is more than 40 years old. It vests the Government with extremely broad secrecy powers, especially in the national security realm. Still, two federal courts -- one district court and a unanimous 3-judge Court of Appeals panel -- have ruled that FOIA compels disclosure of these photographs because none of the FOIA exceptions apply. Most critically -- as the courts noted -- the fact that information will reflect poorly on the Government is not a legitimate ground for suppressing it. That is the crux of FOIA, and it is that critical principle which Graham-Lieberman is designed to gut.

NewsTrust Rating: 3.9 average - 4 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer

When Will Dick Cheney's Tower of Lies Finally Come Tumbling Down on Him?

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Arianna Huffington - Jun. 03 (Opinion) - So, he gets all the media value and spin by originally making the claim that the intel documents would prove the value of torture - if only Obama would let the truth come out. Then he backs away from the claim, using weasel-words to give him sufficient wiggle room to say that what he really meant was that the overall interrogation program provided useful information -- not that waterboarding or other enhanced interrogation techniques did.

NewsTrust Rating: 4.3 average - 3 Reviews » - Review It Visit NewsTrust | About | Sign Up | Disclaimer