News & Views

By Robert Scheer, Truthdig

Keep an American soldier locked up naked in a cage and driven half mad while deprived of all basic rights, and you will be instantly condemned as a barbaric terrorist. Unless the jailer is an authorized agent of the U.S. government, in which case even treatment approaching torture will go largely unnoticed. Certainly if a likable constitutional law professor happens to be president, all such assaults on human dignity will easily pass muster.

By Harvey Wasserman

The Second Amendment does NOT guarantee the right of any and all citizens to own any and all kinds of guns.   

It DEMANDS, in the name of national security, that we regulate it.   

NEVER let assertions of the so-called "sanctity" of the 2d Amendment bully you into thinking it guarantees unregulated weapon ownership.   

It does NOT. 

By Koohan Paik and Jerry Mander , The Nation

On the small, spectacular island of Jeju, off the southern tip of Korea, indigenous villagers have been putting their bodies in the way of construction of a joint South Korean-US naval base that would be an environmental, cultural and political disaster. If completed, the base would hold more than 7,000 navy personnel, plus twenty warships including US aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and destroyers carrying the latest Aegis missiles--all aimed at China, only 300 miles away.

By David Swanson

The troubled souls (generally known in the media as "monsters" and "lunatics") who keep shooting up schools and shopping centers, believe they are solving deeper problems.  We all know, of course, that in reality they are making things dramatically worse.

By Bruce Gagnon

The Minneapolis, Minnesota city council passed a version of the Bring Our War $ Home resolution last week.

The Daily Beast

It’s a decade-long story that Josh Begley believes too few Americans know about. A story, he says, “that fundamentally shifts how we understand what war is.” It’s the story of unmanned drones redefining the front lines in the U.S. War on Terror. And a story of Apple—one of the most powerful and profitable corporations in the world—rejecting Begley’s iPhone application that maps strikes and alerts users to new attacks as they happen.

By Peter Hart, FAIR

The message could hardly be clearer: According to U.S. intelligence, Syrian government could very well be preparing to use chemical weapons to put down the long and bloody rebellion against ruler Bashar al-Assad. That was the signal from the TV networks and other major media. Should anyone believe they're right?

By Ray McGovern, ConsortiumNews

President Barack Obama should ditch the idea of nominating U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice to be the next Secretary of State on substantive grounds, not because she may have – knowingly or not – fudged the truth about the attack on the poorly guarded CIA installation in Benghazi, Libya.

Susan Rice, the candidate believed to be favored by President Obama to become the next Secretary of State, holds significant investments in more than a dozen Canadian oil companies and banks that would stand to benefit from expansion of the North American tar sands industry and construction of the proposed $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline. If confirmed by the Senate, one of Rice’s first duties likely would be consideration, and potentially approval, of the controversial mega-project.

By Jeff Faux