Long-time peace activist Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK describes the terrible experience she had in Cairo while trying to get to Gaza to attend the International Women’s Day celebrations there as part of a 100-member international delegation that included “representatives from France, Belgium, Switzerland, Australia, the UK, Ireland, Canada and the United States” and “who ranged in age from 18 to 84, included Nobel Peace Prize winners, doctors, writers and students.”
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CIA director John Brennan may have seriously miscalculated when he publicly derided senator Dianne Feinstein for accusing the CIA of spying on her staff and clandestinely removing some of the documents that she says her staff had been given access to in their investigations of torture by the US government. Unnamed administration sources went even further and accused committee staffers of actually stealing documents from the CIA and triggering an investigation. If senate staffers, not previously known to be masters of internet espionage, could pull off such a feat against the CIA, that would be truly impressive.
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A new study finds that saying that you represent a group of active campaign donors is five times as likely to result in a meeting with a member of congress or their chief of staff than if you say you are representing a group of interested ‘local constituents’. While the researchers were not surprised by the difference, they did not expect it to be so large.
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Over at the New Yorker, Amy Davidson fills us in on the details of the fight between Senate Intelligence Committee chair Diane Feinstein and CIA director John Brennan. It shows how the CIA infiltrated the computers of the intelligence committee staffers and messed around with their documents.
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One of the recurrent themes of politics that would be amusing if it were not infuriating is how politicians are quite complacent about the rights of ordinary citizens being violated by the government but get enraged when they discover that they themselves are targets of those same abuses.
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This is a perennial question in US politics with many plausible explanations but no convincing ones.. Sean McElwee argues that this is because Republicans have been able to deflect attention from economic issues to social ones.
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