Andrew Cockburn has an interesting article (paywall) in the January 2015 issue of Harper’s Magazine where he talks about how the military industry, alarmed by the fact that the end of the Cold War led to a reduction in the need for things like fighter planes, tanks, and other highly profitable heavy armaments, set about creating a new cold war and succeeded.
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As time goes by, there is increasing skepticism over the US government’s claim that North Korea was behind the Sony hack. Fabius Maximus has compiled an extensive list of knowledgeable people who have poured cold water on that hypothesis. But it may be too late to overcome this narrative if it turns out to be false. As Mark Twain famously said, “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” The propaganda system depends upon this fact and that is why the US government quickly rushes out its version of events, knowing that the pliant US media will parrot it as fact and the public will accept it. The Bush administration’s WMD lie is the most recent example of this, though there are many others. Remember the Kuwait incubator story? Gulf of Tonkin?
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It is bad enough that almost the entire top echelon of the Bush administration authorized, condoned, and even encouraged the most disgusting forms of torture and that the Obama administration is protecting these criminals. What is even worse is that surveys show that a majority of Americans actually support the CIA’s acts of torture by a margin of 59-31% and similar majorities think that torture produced useful information, that the torture report should not have been released, and that the people who committed torture should not be prosecuted.
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You would think that by now, after all the lies that we have been told by the US government in its efforts to take the country into various wars, we would all have a healthy skepticism when officials blandly assert without providing the evidence that some country that they perceive as the enemy is responsible for some action. And yet here we are, with the media accepting at face value the assertions by US officials that North Korea is behind the Sony hack.
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The Daily Show talks about the absurd right wing and Fox News reaction to the protests against the killing of unarmed black people by the police who strain to find some way of discrediting the various forms it has taken.
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Religious groups are feeling their oats following their success in the Hobby Lobby case to carve out a religious exemption for themselves from following the law if it conflicts with their religious beliefs. Now comes word that legislators in some states are seeking to expand that practice and allow businesses to not serve gay people if they disapprove of homosexuality on religious grounds.
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I am not a psychiatrist but I am not being facetious when I pose this question. It is quite incredible to watch Dick Cheney defend the torture that he and George W. Bush authorized and encouraged and to see someone who is dead wrong and yet be dead certain that he is dead right. His defenses of the indefensible are so bizarre that I honestly think that he shows signs of being detached from reality because the things he says seem to go well beyond mere attempts at self-justification and well into delusional territory. There is a deranged quality to the way he calmly and matter-of-factly says the most appalling things.
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This story comes via Britain’s The Daily Mail, not the most reliable of news sources, but it is still shocking and more trustworthy news outlets like The Guardian and the The Telegraph have also covered it.
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Jonathan Cook has a good analysis of the upcoming Israeli elections to be held on March 17, 2015 and the role that US-Israeli relations are playing in it. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to be hoping to win by pandering even more than he does presently to the right wing, religious, settler, racist elements in the country. Meanwhile Cook says that European opinion is rapidly shifting towards the Palestinians.
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Many people may not have heard of Barrett Brown. He is a 33-year old journalist who has been hounded by the US government because he exposed its wrongdoings using documents that had been obtained by the hacktivist group Anonymous. He seemed to have informal links to Anonymous and was willing to publicly engage with reporters about what they were doing. As a result, he was sometimes referred to as their spokesperson though he and they denied it. In some ways, he was a precursor to Edward Snowden. Kevin M. Gallagher gives us the back story.
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