by Brendan Lalor In a new column for FindLaw, John Dean, former counsel to President Nixon, assesses why George W. Bush is considering hiring private criminal defense lawyer James E. Sharp in connection with “the current grand jury investigation of the leak revealing the identity of Valerie Plame as a CIA covert operative.” Dean calls this a “stunning and extraordinary development” because it suggests Bush “knows much more about this leak than he has stated publicly.” Due to Ken Starr’s “decimat[ion of] the attorney-client privilege for government lawyers and their clients” as part of his war on Clinton, Bush “has […]
Daily Archives: June 5, 2004
5 posts
[ This important article uncovers the biases of the major U.S. (puppet) media, whose sources on Venezuela are often no more credible than Ahmed Chalabi. Incidentally, there’s a great corrective commentary in the Venezuelan press, “US intervention in Venezuela … no more blood, rape and other torture for oil.” –BL ] Media Falls Short on Iraq, Venezuela June 04, 2004 | Knight-Ridder/Tribune Information Services by Mark Weisbrot Last week the New York Times published an 1100-word note “From the Editors” criticizing its own reporting on the build-up to the Iraq war and the early stages of the occupation. On Sunday the […]
by Brendan Lalor (on a Boston Phoenix report) Last month, “the Supreme Court heard three cases concerning the rights of ‘enemy combatants’ being held at Guant?namo Bay, Cuba, and in US Naval brigs off the American coast. One issue at stake in these cases is whether the government — specifically President Bush — should be trusted to handle prisoners in an appropriate manner,” Harvey Silverglate reminds us in the Boston Phoenix. Should the Bush Administration be trusted with the power to lock up “terror suspects” without charges or trial indefinitely? Yet, “government lawyers from the Justice Department?s Office of the […]
[ These accounts of Israeli dehumanization of Palestinians suggest why most of the Arab world rightly consider the U.S. its enemy: the U.S. continues to provide anually more than $3 billion in military aid to Israel. According to a June 3 Associated Press report, “In the view of many American Muslims, the United States and Israel are so tight that Israel is practically the ’51st state’…. more Muslims [] see the United States and Israel the same way. They are equating American treatment of Iraqis with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.” –BL ] ‘They have no humanity. They didn’t even give us […]
1 June 2004 | CommonCause.org by Chellie Pingree, Common Cause President It is deeply troubling to learn that public broadcasting has been subject to intense ideological pressure, as reported this week by The New Yorker. Public broadcasting should not find itself in the crosshairs of a partisan firing squad. At a time when Americans are finding it more and more difficult to get past the clutter and partisanship on commercial TV and radio to find truthful sources of information about their government, this ideological pressure may gag one of the few sources of independent, substantive news and commentary that Americans […]