Public Policy News and Research

Brother of Afghan Leader Said to Be Paid by C.I.A.

2009-10-29T14:19:00.000-04:00

From NYTimes.comBy FILKINS, MAZZETTI and RISENThis article is by Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen.KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American

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Oil Tycoon: US “Entitled” to Iraqi Oil

2009-10-27T01:36:00.000-04:00

From Democracy Now!: In other congressional testimony, the oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens told lawmakers Wednesday the US is “entitled” to Iraqi oil because of the human and financial toll of occupying Iraq. Addressing the Congressional Natural Gas Caucus, Pickens criticized Iraqi plans to open up oil fields to international bidding. Pickens said, “They’re opening them up to other companies all over

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US Warns Japan on Revisiting Military Ties

2009-10-27T01:34:00.000-04:00

From Democracy Now!:The Obama administration is warning Japan over talk of scaling back military ties to the United States. In the past week, Japan has announced it would pull out of a refueling mission in the Indian Ocean in support of US-led military action in Afghanistan. Japan also wants to renegotiate a military agreement on relocating a US Marine base inside its borders. The ruling

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The Yes Men Pull Off Prank Claiming US Chamber of Commerce Had Changed Its Stance on Climate Change (news credulity)

2009-10-20T22:52:00.000-04:00

From DN:The business community got a shock on Monday when its leading advocacy group appeared to make a startling announcement. A statement purporting to come from the Chamber of Commerce said the group had dropped its opposition to congressional climate change legislation and would now even support taxing carbon emissions. The news wires quickly picked up the story, and within minutes it was

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October surprise: jet fuel doesn't ride elevators

2009-10-17T21:34:00.000-04:00

From World Trade Center Elevators:Before collapse, North Tower lobby was destroyed, all glass, revolving doors, plus huge slabs of marble (along with significant parts of subbasements). Amateur Official story defenders say it was destroyed by jet fuel fireball, on impact, traveling 90+ floors down elevator shafts, emerging from elevator shafts and doing the lobby damage, etc. For evidence, they

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t r u t h o u t | Judge Confirms Detainee Tortured to Make False Confessions

2009-10-16T23:21:00.000-04:00

FROM t r u t h o u t: A declassified ruling by a federal court judge reveals that Fouad al-Rabiah, an innocent Kuwaiti prisoner who was ordered released from Guantanamo three weeks ago, was brutally tortured into making false confessions by US interrogators and repeatedly threatened until he confessed to terrorist activities in which he was not involved. In the summer of 2002, a CIA analyst

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PNAC's new work | Foreign Policy Hawks Launch New Campaign Against Obama

2009-10-16T23:19:00.000-04:00

t r u t h o u t | Foreign Policy Hawks Launch New Campaign Against Obama:by: Jim Lobe | Inter Press ServiceWashington - Just days after the Nobel Committee in Oslo awarded Barack Obama its coveted peace prize, two of Washington's most prominent foreign policy hawks launched a new group and ad campaign designed to depict the president as weak and defend the more aggressive policies of his

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Opt-out public option

2009-10-09T21:26:00.000-04:00

From Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com: "So the new idea seems to be a public option offered at a national level, but with states having the right to opt out — that is, make it not available to their own residents.At first blush, that sounds good. It’s true that the states most likely to opt out will probably be small states that really need the competition. But many states, with probably a

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The Public Relations Machine for the Vaccine Complex

2009-10-08T20:51:00.000-04:00

from Global Research:Peter Doshi, while at Harvard in the mid-2000s, published a devastating study in the British Medical Journal that systematically unveils the flawed predictive science used to publicize our health agencies’ influenza statistics and mortality rates. His analysis shook up enough health authorities to warrant twelve scientists from the CDC and National Institutes of Health to

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Study: Torture damages brain, leading to misinformation - Science Fair

2009-10-01T22:34:00.000-04:00

From USATODAY.com: Torture of terrorism suspects likely leads to misinformation due to stress hormones damaging the brain, reports a neuroscientist this week.In the journal, Trends in Cognitive Science, Shane O’Mara of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience in Dublin, examined the legal memos released in April detailing U.S. "enhanced" interrogation techniques from 2002 to 2005. O'Mara

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O'Reilly, Others Back Away From 9/11 Debate With Sheen

2009-10-01T22:24:00.000-04:00

From Alex Jones: Charlie Sheen’s challenge to media pundits to debate him on the issues brought up in his “20 Minutes With The President” letter has not been met after several news outlets expressed interest in taking part but later backed off when it became clear that the discussion would have to be fairly moderated.Bill O’Reilly was the only pundit to express an interest in debating Sheen but

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And It’s Not Only Sibel Edmonds Who Says So [Investigation into top State Official Marc Grossman]

2009-10-01T22:18:00.000-04:00

From 911Blogger.com: "John M. Cole, a former FBI Counterintelligence and Counterespionage Manager, has publicly confirmed the FBI’s decade long investigation of the former State Department Official Marc Grossman. Cole worked for 18 years in the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. According to Cole, as in over one hundred cases involving Israeli espionage activities directed against the US

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The textbook economics of cap-and-trade

2009-09-30T12:51:00.000-04:00

Paul Krugman - NYTimes.com: I realized, after the last post, that it might be useful to write down just what the Econ 101 version of cap and trade looks like; as it happens, this also helps explain the intellectual sins of Glenn Beck and Martin Feldstein.So here we go. Bear in mind that something like what follows can be found in just about every intro textbook.Think of the benefits to the

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Moral decay? Or deregulation?

2009-09-30T12:02:00.000-04:00

From Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com: Moral decay? Or deregulation?Andrew Leonard is unhappy with my colleague David Brooks for suggesting that rising debt in America reflects moral decay. Surprisingly, however, Leonard doesn’t make what I thought was the most compelling critique.David points out, correctly, that something changed around 1980 — that consumers started spending a larger share of

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The Role of the US International Republican Institute (IRI) in the Honduran Coup

2009-09-28T20:41:00.000-04:00

from Postcards from the Revolution:"The International Republican Institute (IRI), considered the international branch of the U.S. Republican Party, and one of the four “core groups” of the congressionally created and funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), apparently knew of the coup d’etat in Honduras against President Zelaya well in advance. IRI is well known for its role in the April

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Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link

2009-09-26T00:07:00.000-04:00

From McClatchy: The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George

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WAR PROGRAMMING: The Propaganda Project and the Iraq War

2009-09-21T22:38:00.000-04:00

From Sociological Quarterly: The invasion of Iraq was justified to the American people by a sophisticated propaganda campaign that reflected a think tank's vision for a new foreign policy. One objective of this article is to set forth a theoretical argument for analyzing modern propaganda campaigns as a feature of mass-mediated discourse crafted by think tanks and highly organized claims makers.

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What the Mainstream Media Can Learn From Jon Stewart | American Journalism Review

2009-09-20T09:36:00.000-04:00

From American Journalism Review: "Brown, who had dismissed the faux news show as silly riffing, got hooked during the early days of the war in Iraq, when he felt most of the mainstream media were swallowing the administration's spin rather than challenging it. Not 'The Daily Show,' which had no qualms about second-guessing the nation's leaders. 'The stock-in-trade of 'The Daily Show' is hypocrisy

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Cultural forces in terrorism coverage

2009-09-20T01:54:00.000-04:00

From Global Media Journal Mediterranean Edition: "The second article is Amani Ismail and Dan Berkowitz’ comparative analysis of leading U.S. and Chinese daily newspapers where they consider the role played by different press systems in the coverage of terrorism. Using examples from the New York Times and China Daily, Ismail and Berkowitz convincingly argue that the mainstream news media tend to

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Preventing State Crimes Against Democracy

2009-09-19T23:47:00.000-04:00

From Administration & Society: "This article analyzes U.S. vulnerabilities to state crimes against democracy (SCADs). SCADs are actions or inactions by government insiders intended to manipulate democratic processes and undermine popular sovereignty. Watergate and Iran–Contra are well-known examples of SCADs involving top officials. SCADs in high office are difficult to detect and successfully

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CIA Documents Provide Little Cover for Cheney Claims

2009-09-19T18:59:00.000-04:00

From Washington Independent: Those revelations, as former Abu Zubaydah interrogator Ali Soufan has testified, came before Abu Zubaydah was tortured.

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Pentagon Hires Rendon Group to Profile and Rate Journalists Covering Afghanistan War (propaganda watch)

2009-09-07T19:09:00.000-04:00

democracy nowThe US Army in Afghanistan has admitted it pays a private company to produce background profiles on journalists covering the war. The Pentagon has been on the defensive ever since the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes revealed this week that journalists were being screened by the Washington-based public relations firm, the Rendon Group, under a $1.5 million contract with the military.

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Representative Of Largest 9/11 Families Group Says Government Complicit In Attack

2009-09-07T18:55:00.000-04:00

Paul Joseph WatsonThe representative of the largest group of 9/11 families says that the official version of events is a fallacy and that the NORAD stand down and evidence of incendiary devices used to bring down the towers amount to government complicity in the attacks - a conclusion shared by half of the 9/11 families he represents.

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1945 - crisis and debt

2009-09-07T18:33:00.000-04:00

Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com: I guess I should say something about claims that looking at debt at the end of World War II is irrelevant, because so much of the spending back then was on the war, and therefore fell rapidly once the war was over.Yes, it’s true that it was relatively easy to cut spending after World War II. However, during the war the United States ran massive deficits — more

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Predictors of educational success | Joachim De Posada Talks About Delayed Gratification

2009-09-07T15:15:00.000-04:00

Slashdot Idle Story | Joachim De Posada Talks About Delayed Gratification

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