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by Gareth Porter
Obama had called McKiernan directly and asked how he planned to use the 30,000 troops, but got no coherent answer to the question. It was after that conversation that Obama withdrew his support for the full request. The unsatisfactory response from McKiernan had been preceded by another military non-answer to an Obama question. At his meeting with Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon Jan. 28, Obama asked the Joint Chiefs, 'What is the end game?' in Afghanistan, and was told, 'Frankly, we don't have one'
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If global warming ever causes the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to collapse, as many experts believe it could, the resulting sea level rise in much of the United States would be significantly higher than is currently projected, a new study concludes
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by Alexander Cockburn
The number of seemingly decent nominations has been pathetically small: Hilda Solis is a promising pick as labor secretary; Leon Panetta as CIA chief seems good. No doubt there are more among the hundreds of new officials. But the symbolism has been overwhelmingly negative. Obama has methodically surrounded himself with ranking members of the party of permanent war and with the economic strategists who have blazed the path to the nation's present ruinous state
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by Alexander Cockburn
Trailer-park management is a tough business, giving the veteran a skeptical posture toward protestations of good faith and square dealing
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by Alexander Cockburn
Today the Bayshore Mall molders, embodying the misfortunes of General Growth -- the second largest mall owner in the United States -- whose stock trades now for 55 cents, down from $44 last May. Some major retailers, like Lauren's Polo, have long since fled. Walk east along one of the arcades and you come to a wall of plywood, behind which lies the desolation that was Mervyn's, a clothing chain that has now filed for bankruptcy. The little stores nearby have a somber mien, like people compelled to live in the chill shadow of a funeral home. The food court, serviced by six or seven fast food businesses, is becoming a sanctuary for the poor
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by Alexander Cockburn
What was dismissed only a few months ago by leading Democrats in Washington as unthinkable now seems possible -- that senior officials in the Bush administration, even Bush and Cheney, will be the target of public war-crime hearings and even criminal prosecutions here in the United States
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by Alexander Cockburn
Back at the start of the 1990s, the drug companies were spending $55 million on DTC ads.
By 2003, the outlay had soared to $3 billion -- by 2006, the outlay on DTC ads went to $5.2 billion
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by Alexander Cockburn
So far as I can figure it at this early stage of the game, we elected at least three presidents last November, all of them identified by the name Barack Obama. Unfortunately, the one on duty in the Oval Office most of the time, the First Obama -- the one the elites picked as their man -- is sticking to utterly conventional and catastrophic policies
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by Steve Young
In a surprise warning, the State Department issued a travel alert cautioning college students and teens to be mindful of the deluge of video clips depicting near-naked, gyrating women cavorting on Mexican beaches and pool sides during Spring Break that are being aired 24/7 on Fox News
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by Steve Young
Even in the face of what Rush and Republicans wrought, the Right, lead by Rush's Lords of Loud brethren, is spinning the shoot-the-messenger card in an attempt to make their self anointment of Mount Rushmore a White House creation that they say is meant to distract from the three real issues of the day: The economy, the economy and the economy
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by Steve Young
Did you know that House Leader, Nancy Pelosi put $20 million into the stimulus package to keep the San Francisco areaŐs salt marsh mouse from perishing? And thanks to talk radio and Fox News, real Americans know that there is zillions in the bill to aid ACORN, those bastards who tried to register Mickey Mouse so he could vote for Democrats. These points were made over and over last week and every one of them are strong evidence that talk radioŐs presence as a forum for information youŐll never hear in the mainstream media -- if they were true
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by Steve Young
The right wonders why Katie Couric isn't being Fair Doctrine'd -- you know, because Katie's reporting is so liberal. See, that's one of the most successful effects from years of conservative talk. They have so successfully defined anything infinitesimally left of Rush, Sean or Bill as leftist. The center no longer exists. To talk radio, moderate Republicans are leftists
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by Steve Young
Seemingly fearful of getting anything wrong, Bush and his admirers have defended his presidency by saying history will prove he was right about most things, including Iraq. My guess is that history will prove that he never learned a thing from history
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by Robert Scheer
It is obscene that the Republicans who created this mess dare question the cost of a stimulus package directed at meeting a crisis that their radical deregulation of the financial markets created
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by Robert Scheer
So what we have here is socialism without even the pretense of a soul. Certainly that has been the case with the abject refusal of the banks that received government bailouts to be more aggressive in preventing home foreclosures. And the Obama administration has made it clear that it has no intention of taking over the operation of any of the mega-companies that are in trouble, even when, as in the case of AIG, the government already owns 80 percent of the shares. The reason? Because that would be viewed as nationalization
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by Robert Scheer
We are already into AIG for a total of $170 billion -- an amount that dwarfs the $75 billion allocated to helping those millions of homeowners facing foreclosures. And more will be thrown down the AIG rat hole because President Barack Obama is blindly following the misguided advice of his top economic advisers, who insist that AIG is too big to fail
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by Robert Scheer
At some point, if he is to make good on his promise to cut the deficit by half within four years, he will have to confront the military-industrial complex, which now obtains much larger annual budget allocations than when President Dwight Eisenhower issued his famous warning. Currently, military spending makes up 60 percent of the federal government's discretionary budget
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by Marwaan Macan-Markar
Under fire for failing to disclose the amount of money it allegedly paid to secure rights to drill for offshore oil in corruption-ridden Cambodia
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by Ashfaq Yusufzai
Since 2001, Pakistan has spent an estimated one billion dollars annually on polio eradication efforts. The campaign has failed to penetrate remote areas, particularly in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas adjoining the NWFP, in the wake of opposition from Islamist radicals that the vaccine is a U.S. ploy to make the population infertile
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by Joe Conason
Back in 1993, Dick Armey, a Republican representative from Texas and former economics professor, warned that Mr. Clinton's proposed increase in the top tax rate would lead to economic disaster. Those predictions were echoed by every right-wing politician and talking head and soon proved utterly wrong by the historic growth rates of the Clinton years. Now we hear Armey offering the same kind of predictions about the Obama stimulus plan -- and he is treated as a sage rather than a dolt who bet the ranch on his ideology and lost
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by Joe Conason
Disgruntled AIG employees may not just quit; they may sue us if we don't pay their bonuses. But let's see what happens in five years or so, as their lawsuit moves through the courts. Let's see how many of these executives really want to answer hard questions in a deposition about their dubious activities at AIG. And let's see how many of them suddenly realize that they may have criminal liability
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by Robert Scheer
The $165 million in taxpayer funds used to reward them is but a sideshow in a far larger drama of moral decay swirling around the banking bailout. It should not distract from the many billions, not paltry millions, of our dollars being diverted to reward the very folks who brought us such misery
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by Alexander Cockburn
NATO doesn't need a new mission. It needs to disappear into the trashcan of history along with the cold war that engendered it
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by Steve Young
Tucker Carlson is muy jealous. He has a problem with Stewart not only because Stewart called him for what he was four years ago on CNN's Crossfire, but because Stewart, while a comic, knows that when a bull takes dump it front of the whole world, it can only be called one thing
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by Steve Young
I will continue to shine a light on the inanity of broadcast snake oil hawkers through my own site (steveyoungonpolitics.com) as well as other websites and print venues, but the Albion Monitor will be missed
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by Joe Conason
Ever since Election Day 2008, the usual suspects have been hard at work, deflecting responsibility from the Bush administration (and the Republicans in Congress) for the catastrophic effects of conservative policy enacted during the past eight years
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by Robert Scheer
Gary Gensler helped create this financial crisis when he was in the Treasury Department back in the Clinton era, when bipartisan cooperation with Wall Street lobbyists was all the rage
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by Alexander Cockburn
Geithner gets pelted with moldy cabbages, while Obama -- entirely responsible for the basic economic strategy of bailing out the banks rather than taking them over -- charms the nation
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by Steve Young
Following their March 26 Fox & Friends segment where co-hosts Brian Kilmeade and Gretchen Carlson hosted Michael Franzese, former capo of the Colombo crime family, to discuss similarities between Democratic leaders and the Mafia, Kilmeade and Carlson brought on Walter Schreiber. Now 111 years young and missing since 1952, Schreiber, who was instrumental in Nazi medical experiments on concentration camp inmates, was asked to discuss the Obama's administration's parallels to the Third Reich
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by Steve Young
At 6'4" and both weighing in at well over 200 pounds, the heavyweights are imposing figures, but they're two completely different types of brawlers. O'Reilly is willing (unaware?) that he is taking a beating while Olbermann doesn't want to mess up his hair
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by Steve Young
Every time Bill OŐReilly uses the closing of newspapers as a rationale for liberalism as a loss revenue agent I wonder why he never uses the same generalization for the closing of any other business. 'The Folks just arenŐt buying from Circuit City anymore because of their pinhead liberal marketing tactics.' And it would just make as much sense
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by Steve Young
Sure, Glenn Beck is nuts, but not nuts enough for some. There's a real cry out there for a network that isn't afraid to say what the real patriot holed up in his axles-on-blocks, trailer shack is thinking, the guy who feels that Michael Savage is too wishy-washy. So it comes as no surprise that Fox President Roger Ailes has announced the development of a new News Corp network to fill the niche: Fox News Adrenalin Network
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by Steve Young
This president apparently uses a teleprompter even to remind him of facts and figures at news conferences. I want a president who isn't afraid to make up stuff if he can't remember the facts and figures - a president who boldly speaks off the top of his head rather than bothering with preparation and deliberation
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by Joe Conason
What makes someone like Boehner important and potentially dangerous is not that anyone takes his bonehead advice seriously, but that he and his caucus can block or stall policies that might rescue us from the worst consequences of the bust
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by Joe Conason
For Democrats, these clown shows are amusing and encouraging. As long as the Republicans kowtow to Limbaugh, they won't be able to muster substantive opposition to President Obama and the Congressional majority
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by Joe Conason
At the brink of global ruin, many Americans suddenly seem willing to consider sensible ideas that were always deemed unthinkable, and to reject foolish notions that were once deemed brilliant
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by Mel Frykberg
Israel is bracing for a wave of lawsuits charging substantial human rights violations during its 22-day military assault on Gaza which left more than 1,300 Palestinians dead and nearly 5,000 wounded, more than half of them civilian
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by Stephen Leahy
Earth's two ice-covered polar oceans may be the most inhospitable places on the planet, but more than 12,000 species of animals have been found there, according to new research
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by Dahr Jamail
70% percent of Iraq's doctors are reported to have fled the war-torn country in the face of death threats and kidnappings. Those who remain live in fear, often in conditions close to house arrest
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by Gareth Porter
Sunday's battle in Fadhil was a warning signal that the U.S. command has allowed itself to be drawn into a campaign by al-Maliki to pick off individual commanders of the Sunni neighborhood security groups made up of former insurgents
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Analysis by Beena Sarwar
The release of Pakistani rogue nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, underlines major issues confronting Pakistan -- and indeed the world -- ranging from nuclear proliferation to governance, corruption, hypocrisy, and how public opinion is shaped by falsehoods
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by Mirela Xanthaki
The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates 2 million as the yearly net addition to the total number of slaves worldwide. Subtracting the number of people rescued or who die annually, the total number is thought to be over 10 million. However, the actual number of known trafficking victims is only 22,500
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by Joe Conason
Nearly every poll now says that Obama's popularity and approval ratings remain at extraordinary levels. Just as important, he has displayed the capacity to persuade the public that his policies deserve support, as he did when he finally began to campaign on behalf of the stimulus last week. The latest Gallup survey shows that support for the stimulus rose markedly among Democrats and stabilized among both independents and Republicans as soon as he started speaking out forcefully
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by Joe Conason
For the White House, the strategic issue is whether he waited too long to confront the stimulus critics -- and how he will balance bipartisanship with toughness in dealing with the recalcitrant Republicans from now on
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by Marina Litvinsky
Financial sector invested more than $5 billion on purchasing political influence in Washington over the past decade, with as many as 3,000 lobbyists winning deregulation and other policy decisions that led directly to the current financial collapse
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by Al Jazeera
Authorities in Pakistan have vowed to deal sternly with Taliban militants who have this month mounted a series of deadly attacks apparently aimed at weakening this country that has close links with neighboring Afghanistan
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Analysis by Gareth Porter
A few influential strategists here have been doubting that al Qaeda would seek to move into Afghanistan as long as they are ensconced in Pakistan and argue that escalating U.S. drone airstrikes or Special Operations raids on Taliban targets in Pakistan will actually strengthen radical jihadi groups in the country and weaken the Pakistani government's ability to resist them
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by Dahr Jamail
Fishing is not just difficult now, but also unpleasant and hazardous. The smell of burning plastic, or at places of raw sewage, is overpowering. And, Majit says, he has been shot at by U.S. soldiers from the Green Zone, whose concrete walls line the banks along one stretch. Iraqi environmentalists report that the river is contaminated with war waste, oil derivatives, industrial waste, and toxins
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by Mirela Xanthaki
The United Nations is urgently appealing for $613 million to aid more than a million desperate civilians in the ruins of Gaza, where schools, hospitals, houses, factories and even farmland were obliterated during the three-week assault by Israeli air and ground forces
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by William Fisher
Since the iconic detention center in Cuba opened in 2002, some 22 juveniles have been imprisoned there. And contrary to the UN's Rights of the Child protocol, all but three have been housed with the general population
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by William Fisher
The latest DOD report, which was issued in mid-January, alleged that 61 detainees have returned to the battlefield. The Seton Hall report notes that in each of its 43 attempts to provide the numbers of the recidivist detainees, the Department of Defense has given different sets of numbers that are contradictory and internally inconsistent with the Department's own data
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by Dahr Jamail
The compound, which was the headquarters of former dictator Saddam Hussein's son Qusay Hussein, was heavily damaged by U.S. air strikes during the invasion in March 2003. Buildings like this became shelters for thousands displaced then and later
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Analysis by Daan Bauwens
46 percent of those surveyed thought that responsibility for the conflict is more or less evenly divided between Jews and Arabs, while 43 percent thought Palestinians are mainly to blame, and 4.3 percent that the Jews are mainly to blame
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by Robert Scheer
The leaks from Treasury promise that $50 billion will eventually be allocated directly to helping homeowners, which is a day late and a dollar short in chump change compared to the trillion dollars that Geithner on Tuesday committed to the purchase of more bad bank debt
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by Robert Scheer
What we need is an honest accounting of how we got into this mess, beginning with an investigation of the role of Goldman Sachs as the most insidious Wall Street player. But we are not likely to get that from an administration populated by Goldman's Washington allies
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by Jim Lobe
Despite a shrinking national economy and a record defense budget, U.S. neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks are mounting a spirited -- if misleading -- campaign to persuade Congress that the military should get a bigger slice
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by Zofeen Ebrahim
The ceasefire agreement reached by the provincial government in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Taliban on Feb.16, involving implementation of shariah (Islamic law), is being seen as a setback for women's rights in the area bordering Afghanistan. Going by what the Taliban have in mind for women in Swat, the worries are well placed
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by Pratap Chatterjee
Want a billion dollars in development aid? If you happen to live in Afghanistan, the two quickest ways to attract attention and so aid from the U.S. authorities are: Taliban attacks or a florishing opium trade. For those with neither, the future could be bleak
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by Michael Winship
"One of the ironies at play is that the maritime industry being victimized is itself a standard-bearer for the advantages that exist in a world beyond law and regulation"
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by Steve Young
Oh, to be a FoxNews fly on the wall at the O'Reilly Factor preproduction meeting putting together last Wednesday's show
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Analysis by Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani
Despite declarations of victory by Israel, the military assault on the Gaza Strip failed to achieve its stated aims, many analysts say. The assault, and even its exceptional brutality, may only have vindicated the notion of resistance among the Arab public
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by William Fisher
Before a federal appeals court in San Francisco Monday, lawyers from the Obama Department of Justice invoked the same 'state secrets privilege' used by the Bush administration to argue that a lawsuit brought on behalf of Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyan Mohamed and four other alleged victims of the CIA's 'extraordinary rendition' program should not go forward because revealing the evidence would harm national security
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Analysis by William Fisher
With growing public support for a public investigation of crimes that may have been committed by the Bush administration, policy makers and legal experts are deeply divided on how to proceed -- and President Barack Obama seems ambivalent about whether to proceed at all
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Analysis by Mohammed A. Salih
The U.S. is making sure Iraqi security forces can take over the task of protecting the country against rebellious forces once it leaves. To achieve that end, the U.S. is equipping and training Iraqi security forces. But this is hardly reassuring to Kurds, many of whom see a conflict with Baghdad forthcoming in some form in the future
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by Dahr Jamail
Latif produced the cemetery logbook. 'As of this hour, exactly, there are 5,500 bodies in this place. I log their names in my book, but we've never had anyone come from the government to ask how many people are here. Nobody in the media nor the Ministry of Health seems to be interested.' Such graveyards, and there are many, raise questions about the real death toll in Iraq
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Just two weeks before he leaves office, President George W. Bush set aside January 6 three new marine national monuments in the Pacific Ocean. Taken together, the three monuments cover nearly 200,000 square miles, and they will now receive America's highest level of environmental recognition and conservation, the president said
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by William Fisher
Newly released documents confirm the existence of 'black site' prisons at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and in Iraq; affirm the Defense Department (DOD's) cooperation with the CIA's 'ghost' detention program; and show one case where the DOD sought to delay the release of Guantanamo prisoners who were scheduled to be sent home in order to avoid bad press
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Analysis by Gareth Porter
The real story of the leak by Petraeus is that the most powerful figure in the U.S. military has tried to shape the media coverage of Obama and combat troop withdrawal from Iraq to advance his policy agenda -- and, very likely, his personal political interests as well
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by Bill Berkowitz
As the world awaits the formation of a new Israeli government -- likely to be headed by Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party and possibly in partnership with Kadima's Tzipi Livni -- Evans has honed in on another of his favorite targets: former U.S. President Jimmy Carter
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Albion Monitor Issue 178 (http://www.albionmonitor.com)
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