Bush Administration

The American Surveillance State

by News Sources 12.21.2010

Glenn Greenwald writes: One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is its fixation on hiding everything it does behind a wall of secrecy while simultaneously monitoring, invading and collecting files on everything its citizenry does. Based on the Francis Bacon aphorism that “knowledge is power,” this is the extreme imbalance that renders the ruling [...]

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The killing spirit in America

by Paul Woodward 12.15.2010

“I don’t want to just end the war,” Barack Obama said in January 2008, “but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.” That was a line which seduced many a progressive across America during the presidential campaign and it’s one reason so many now feel betrayed. Either [...]

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America’s alliances with Central Asia’s despots

by News Sources 12.13.2010

The Guardian reports: The post-Soviet state of Uzbekistan is a nightmarish world of “rampant corruption”, organised crime, forced labour in the cotton fields, and torture, according to the leaked cables. But the secret dispatches released by WikiLeaks reveal that the US tries to keep President Islam Karimov sweet because he allows a crucial US military [...]

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How the US and China colluded to undermine Copenhagen climate summit

by News Sources 12.09.2010

Der Spiegel reports: Last year’s climate summit in Copenhagen was a political disaster. Leaked US diplomatic cables now show why the summit failed so spectacularly. The dispatches reveal that the US and China, the world’s top two polluters, joined forces to stymie every attempt by European nations to reach agreement. In May 2009 the Chinese [...]

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Secrecy and power

by Paul Woodward 12.04.2010

True believers in secrecy know that its most staunch defenders are secrecy’s worst enemies. They know that the inevitable consequence of the rampant proliferation of a secrecy culture, will be to feed doubt that secrecy itself has any legitimacy. The assumption will take hold that secrecy’s one and only function is the protection of power. [...]

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Obama and GOPers worked together to kill Bush torture probe

by News Sources 12.04.2010

David Corn reports: In its first months in office, the Obama administration sought to protect Bush administration officials facing criminal investigation overseas for their involvement in establishing policies the that governed interrogations of detained terrorist suspects. A “confidential” April 17, 2009, cable sent from the US embassy in Madrid to the State Department—one of the [...]

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Nigeria to charge Dick Cheney in pipeline bribery case

by Paul Woodward 12.03.2010

Bloomberg reports: Nigeria will file charges against former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and officials from five foreign companies including Halliburton Co. over a $180 million bribery scandal, a prosecutor at the anti-graft agency said. Indictments will be lodged in a Nigerian court “in the next three days,” Godwin Obla, prosecuting counsel at the Economic [...]

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George Bush gets some advice from the Conservative Mayor of London

by News Sources 11.22.2010

Borris Johnson writes: It is not yet clear whether George W Bush is planning to cross the Atlantic to flog us his memoirs, but if I were his PR people I would urge caution. As book tours go, this one would be an absolute corker. It is not just that every European capital would be [...]

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Bush’s Decision Points is a terrifying journey into the authoritarian mind

by News Sources 11.14.2010

Anis Shivani writes: This would be less grim to talk about if Bush weren’t still with us. But he is, in every way that matters. The Bush Doctrine lives. No leading American politician can disavow the two key aspects of the Bush Doctrine: that we cannot distinguish terrorists from the countries where they live, and [...]

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British deny George Bush’s claims that torture helped foil terror plots

by News Sources 11.10.2010

The Guardian reports: British officials said today there was no evidence to support claims by George Bush, the former US president, that information extracted by “waterboarding” saved British lives by foiling attacks on Heathrow airport and Canary Wharf. In his memoirs, Bush said the practice – condemned by Downing Street as torture – was used [...]

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Torture and terrorism

by Paul Woodward 10.23.2010

One of the strange aspects relating to conspiracy theories concerning 9/11 is that they unwittingly obscure something even worse: that the US government foments terrorism not by design but by neglect; that its policies have had a direct and instrumental role in creating terrorists not simply by providing individuals and groups with an ideological pretext [...]

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Obamanation by Lowkey

by News Sources 09.30.2010

Lowkey, a 24-year-old British musician, poet, playwright and political activist of English and Iraqi descent, in an interview on RT News, describes “Obamanation” by saying: It was an examination of America’s role in the world. The main purpose of the song was to draw the American people’s attention to the way in which they are [...]

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America and Iran: strikes, sanctions and scapegoats

by News Sources 08.12.2010

Gary Sick writes: For the pundits, there are only two questions about U.S.-Iran relations that are of any importance: (1) Will Israel and/or the United States attack Iran? and (2) will the new sanctions have enough bite to persuade Iran to change its nuclear policy? Despite all the printers ink spilled on these two issues, [...]

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Looking back at torture

by Paul Woodward 08.04.2010

President Obama has so far refused to look back at the previous administration’s use of torture, but David Cole says: “on this issue, we cannot move forward without looking back. Unless we acknowledge that what the United States did was not just a bad idea, but illegal, we risk treating torture as simply another policy [...]

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The American way of war; how Bush’s wars became Obama’s

by Paul Woodward 07.23.2010

On September 11, 2001, America froze in shock and the shock was followed by a mix of fear, anger and bewilderment. Yet for some, the first response was also the enduring response: a knowing dread that what followed would be far worse than what just happened; that America’s reaction would be wildly disproportionate and vastly [...]

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The terrorist-naming game

by Paul Woodward 06.28.2010

On September 11, 2001, George Bush changed the way Americans look at the world and the success with which he accomplished this feat is evident in the fact that his perspective largely remains unchallenged — even among many of his most outspoken critics. Bush’s simplistic for-us-or-against-us formula was transparently emotive yet utterly effective. For almost [...]

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Grave injustice: Maher Arar and unaccountable America

by Paul Woodward 06.27.2010

At Middle East Report Online, Lisa Hajjar writes: On June 14, the Supreme Court buried the prospect of justice for Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian origin who was “extraordinarily rendered” by the United States (via Jordan) to Syria in 2002. Arar was suing the US officials who authorized his secret transfer, without charge, [...]

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An empire decomposed: American foreign relations in the early 21st century

by Paul Woodward 04.16.2010

A must-read speech on the militarization of American diplomacy, by Chas Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and the first casualty in the Israel lobby’s efforts to rein in what in its early days might have looked like a dangerously independent Obama administration. Americans are accustomed to foreigners following us. After all, for forty [...]

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The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

by Paul Woodward 03.06.2010

In Harper’s, Scott Horton writes: When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great.” Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo Naval Base “shall be closed [...]

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The new McCarthyism

by Paul Woodward 03.05.2010

In The American Prospect, Adam Serwer writes: The “Gitmo Nine” aren’t terrorists. They weren’t captured fighting for the Taliban. They’ve made no attempts to kill Americans. They haven’t declared war on the United States, nor have they joined any group that has. The “Gitmo Nine” are lawyers working in the Department of Justice who fought [...]

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Are we living in the post-moral age?

by Paul Woodward 02.20.2010

Rafi Eitan, an Israeli elder statesman and former intelligence officer is perhaps best known for having led the Mossad operation that captured Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust, and brought him back to face trial and execution in Israel in 1962. In an interview with Haaretz this week, Eitan summed up the Zeitgeist in which [...]

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The crime of not “looking backward”

by Paul Woodward 01.20.2010

The crime of not “looking backward” By Glenn Greenwald, Salon, January 19, 2010 The single biggest lie in War on Terror revisionist history is that our torture was confined only to a handful of “high-value” prisoners. New credible reports of torture continuously emerge. That’s because America implemented and maintained a systematic torture regime spread throughout [...]

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What’s the difference between Obama’s anti-terrorism policies and Bush’s?

by Paul Woodward 01.08.2010

What’s the difference between Obama’s anti-terrorism policies and Bush’s? By Jacob Sullum, Reason, January 6, 2010 If Obama is pretending we are not at war, he is not doing a very good job of it. “Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred,” he declared in his inaugural address. “I [...]

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War in the Age of Terrorism

by Paul Woodward 01.04.2010

War in the Age of Terrorism By Paul Woodward, War in Context, January 4, 2010 This is change: we’ve gone from change we can believe in, to a change in the mood music. If Dick Cheney was the éminence grise behind George Bush, one could now be forgiven for thinking that George Bush himself has [...]

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