Editorial

By Lawrence Davidson

Real Threats?

In mid February 2012 an array of top U.S. intelligence chiefs appeared before Senate Intelligence Committee to give their annual report on “currant and future worldwide threats” to national security. Those testifying included CIA Director David Petraeus, National Intelligence Director James Clapper, Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. General Ronald Burgess, and FBI Director Robert Mueller. Their presentations on what is and is not a real threat to the nation, as well as the reaction of the senators holding the hearings, turned out to be an exercise in one dimensional thinking. What is real? Well, what comports with your point of view.

Read more: Reality and the Senate Intelligence Committee

By Ben Tanosborn

Nothing appears as ugly as unmasked raw propaganda, or seems as fashionable as well-crafted deception. Yet, the catwalk for both forms of propaganda is one and the same, deception wearing the most titillating togs provided by the top fashion house, the House of Public Relations. And the deceptive PR isn’t limited to multinational firms or businesses in general; it is part and parcel of our daily existence, having infiltrated most if not all institutions, totally poisoning politics, and eroding away whatever little honesty might still be left in our elected officials.

Read more: Our Tolerance for Fashionable Deception

By Gideon Polya

One Million Americans annually die needlessly

The US is the richest country on earth but an estimated 1 million Americans die preventable deaths each year due to gross fiscal perversion whereby trillions of dollars are spent on the military, wars and killing people abroad rather than on keeping Americans alive at home. The Neocon and Zionist Establishment 1% responsible for this passive mass murder of 1 million Americans each year should be  exposed and sidelined  by the long-suffering 99% of ordinary Americans. For those who care about ordinary Americans and have been inspired by great American humanitarians, there are some truly shocking statistics.

Read more: The cost of Zionism & Neo-fascism

By Richard Falk

Twists and Turns Beneath the Cairo Skies

A confusing controversy between the United States and Egypt is unfolding. It has already raised tensions in the relationship between the two countries to a level that has not existed for decades. It results from moves by the military government in Cairo to go forward with the criminal prosecution of 43 foreigners, including 19 Americans, for unlawfully carrying on the work of unlicensed public interest organizations that improperly, according to Egyptian law, depend for their budget on foreign funding. Much has been made in American press coverage that one of the Americans charged happens to be Sam LaHood, son of the present American Secretary of Transportation, adopting a tone that seems to imply that at least one connected by blood to an important government official deserves immunity from prosecution.

Read more: When is an ‘NGO’ not an NGO?

By Richard Falk

After the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the colossal scale of devastation disclosed, there was a momentary embrace of sanity and rationality by world leaders and cultural commentators. There was a realization that living with such weaponry was at best a precarious journey into the future, and far more likely, an appointment with unprecedented human catastrophe if not apocalypse. This dark mood of foreboding did produce some gestures toward nuclear disarmament tabled initially by the U.S. Government, but in a form that reasonably struck others at the time, especially the Soviet Union, as a bad bargain—the U.S. was proposing getting rid of the weapons for the present, but retaining the materials, the technology, and the experience needed to win handily any nuclear rearmament race. In other words, the United States offered the world a Faustian Bargain that rested on bestowing trust upon the dominant geopolitical actor on the global stage, and depended crucially on Soviet willingness to go along on such a basis, an option that never seriously tempted the Stalinist approach to world order.

Read more: The Menace of Present & Future Drone Warfare