From The Gulf News
By Abbas Al Lawati

Dubai: Pulitzer prize-winning American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh recently said that former US vice-president Dick Cheney headed a secret assassination wing that targeted America’s enemies abroad.

GULF NEWS: You have spoken about an assassination unit that reported to Cheney called the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). There have been allegations that this unit was responsible for former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination.

SEYMOUR HERSH: I can’t verify [that]. What I said was, and what I have written more than once, is that there’s a special unit that does high-value targeting of men that we believe are known to be involved in anti-American activities, or are believed to be planning such activities.

In Cheney’s view this isn’t murder, but carrying out the “war on terror”. And in the view of me and my friends, including people in government, this is crazy. The vice president is committing a crime. You can’t authorise the murder of people. And it’s not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s in a lot of other countries, in the Middle East and in South Asia and North Africa and even central America.

In the early days, many of the names were cleared through Cheney’s office. One of his aides, John Hanna, went on TV and acknowledged that the programme exists, and said killing these people is not murder but an act of war that is justified legally.

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From AlterNet
By Bill Moyers

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal.

“When television history is written,” one critic says, “Little else will rival ‘The Wire.’”And when historians come to tell the story of America in our time, I’ll wager they will not be able to ignore this remarkable and compelling portrayal of life in our cities.

Take a look at this scene:

[...]

DETECTIVE JIMMY MCNULTY: Let me understand you, every Friday night you and your boys will shoot crap right? And every Friday night your pal Snot Boogie he’d wait ’till there was cash on the ground and then he’d grab the money and run away? You let him do that?

WITNESS: If we’d catch him we’d beat his ass but ain’t nobody let it go past that.

DETECTIVE JIMMY MCNULTY: I gotta ask you, if every time Snot Boogie would grab the money and run away why’d you even let him in the game?

WITNESS: What?

DETECTIVE JIMMY MCNULTY: Snot Boogie always stole the money, why’d you let him play?

WITNESS: Got to. This America, man.

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From The Washington Post
By Lois Romano

He may have tanked his tryout for the Boston Celtics, but as President Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan has hit the jackpot: an unprecedented $100 billion at his disposal to try to turn around the nation’s public schools. The 44-year-old career education administrator is juggling a lot of balls as he begins to parcel out stimulus money to the states, tackles the much-maligned No Child Left Behind reauthorization legislation, and figures out how to get rid of bad teachers — and pay the good ones more. The 6-foot-4-inch Duncan met Obama in Chicago, where the two were pickup basketball buddies, and where Duncan headed the 600-school district. He says his family has made a quicker transition to his exalted role in Washington than he expected, and yes, his own children attend public school, in Arlington. But he won’t say where he and the president play ball these days.

Romano: Did President Obama give you some specifics that he wanted you to tackle?

Duncan: He wanted the opportunity to drive up college graduation rates.

Romano: The education budget has been doubled, to $100 billion. Where do you start?

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From AlterNet
By Amy Goodman

The investigative journalist for The New Yorker explains his recent bombshell revelation about Dick Cheney’s “executive assassination” squads.

Amy Goodman: Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh created a stir last month when he said the Bush administration ran an executive assassination ring that reported directly to Vice President Dick Cheney. Hersh made the comment during a speech at the University of Minnesota on March 10th.

Seymour Hersh: Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination wing, essentially. And it’s been going on and on and on. And just today in the Times there was a story saying that its leader, a three-star admiral named McRaven, ordered a stop to certain activities because there were so many collateral deaths. It’s been going in — under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving.

Amy Goodman: Yesterday, CNN interviewed Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser, John Hannah. Wolf Blitzer asked Hannah about Sy Hersh’s claim.

Wolf Blitzer: Is there a list of terrorists, suspected terrorists out there who can be assassinated?

John Hannah: There is clearly a group of people that go through a very extremely well-vetted process, inter-agency process, as I think was explained in your piece, that have committed acts of war against the United States, who are at war with the United States, or are suspected of planning operations of war against the United States, who authority is given to the troops in the field and in certain war theaters to capture or kill those individuals. That is certainly true.

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From The Progressive
By Elizabeth Dinovella

Reporter Helen Thomas did not get a chance to ask President Bush a question at his last press conference. But luckily Amy Goodman of Democracy Now sat down with Thomas. (Click here to read.)

As a White House correspondent for the United Press International, Thomas began covering the Kennedy White House. She was not assigned to the beat—she just started showing up.

Next week she will start covering the Obama Administration as a columnist. She recently penned a column about Bush’s Presidency entitled, “History Cannot Save Him.”

“As he leaves office, President Bush is passing on to his successor two wars and a growing economic debacle. What a way to go!” she writes. “Because of Bush’s policies, the U.S. also is complicit in the Israeli attack on the Palestinians on the Gaza Strip by providing a ‘made-in-America’ high-tech arsenal for the assault and blocking a ceasefire for nearly two weeks, a move intended to help the Israelis consolidate their hold.”

What I most appreciate about Helen Thomas is her courage and her outrage. I interviewed her in 2004 and she was kind and gracious in person, but had a thick skin when it came to criticism. She was unapologetically a liberal, before it was cool again.

Here’s an excerpt of my August 2004 interview:

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From Thomas Paine’s Corner
Interview By Jason Miller

In the land of those who think they’re free and the home of savage capitalism, class is indeed a dirty word. Remember, we’re a nation of Joe the Plumbers. If we just work hard enough and fend off those socialist vampires who want to suck us dry by redistributing our hard-earned wealth, we can all be financial successes. And if you’re a faux-progressive presidential candidate—like Obama, you’re doomed to political perdition unless you sign a blood oath disavowing your ties to socialism.

Yet there are a few political analysts and academics who dare to blaspheme against capitalism, which is the “God” this benighted land truly worships—despite the disgustingly hypocritical veneer of faux Christianity. Remember that Michael Parenti has one of the filthiest mouths you’ll ever hear. He dares to repeatedly spew profane diatribes against capitalism, the sacrosanct basis for our precious American Way of Life. Parenti has the chutzpah to derisively attack our system, which we all know is the best that’s ever been (or will be), by asserting that there are divisions amongst US Americans based on socioeconomic standing. And worst of all? He uses the “C” word! Somebody needs to give his mouth a good cleansing with a bar of Dial!

Parenti recently answered a few questions Jason Miller threw his way. Let’s see how much further he traveled on the road to perdition…..

Jason Miller: You’re one of the best kept secrets of the “American Left” (ridiculously marginalized and small in number as we are). Why is it that despite your brilliant critiques, particularly of bourgeois revisionist history, you remain relatively obscure even amongst the more radical segment of the US population?

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From Thomas Paine’s Corner

Shortly before a public lecture presented at Champlain College, I sat down with Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Studies at New York University, to ask him a number of questions regarding stolen elections-a subject Miller has researched and written about extensively. Greg Palast, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Bev Harris, Steve Rosenfeld, Bob Fitrakis, and Lynne Landes, have provided monumental contributions to the subject of election fraud, each with their own unique styles and methods of targeting the issue. Mark Crispin Miller’s 2005 book Fooled Again, impeccably documents the stealing of the 2004 election, and Loser Take All, a 2008 collection of essays on stolen elections incorporates the research of other investigators of election fraud such as Robert Kennedy, Jr; Bob Fitrakis, and Steve Rosenfeld.

Generously, Professor Miller gave me both time and disturbing insights regarding the upcoming election of 2008.

CB: In progressive circles there are countless issues that attract people, and I’m curious about what drew you to fight for clean, legitimate, democratic elections in the United States as opposed to some other issue.

MCM: What immediately drew my interest was the overwhelmingly obvious fact that the 2004 election was stolen. We already know the 2000 election was stolen because the Supreme Court intervened so flagrantly, but I think the 2004 election was stolen on an even grander scale. What struck me was not just that fact, but no less, the general refusal to admit it which was evident not only throughout the corporate media but on the left as well. Even now I can’t quite get over how the left fell into line and dismissed the evidence as “conspiracy theory” on the basis of very sloppy reporting by very good reporters in progressive circles.

So the immediate reason why I got into it was because of this staggering miscarriage of proper civic procedure and a betrayal of democracy. The more I thought about it, the more I also came to believe that this is the most important issue, precisely because we can make no progress on any other front if we don’t have the right to pick our representatives, and more importantly, reject those who don’t represent our interests. That’s vital, so I often say in my talks that regardless of what your issue is, you’re kidding yourself if you think you can get anywhere when government is able to act with impunity.

Read more Stolen Elections

From Wired
By Noah Shachtman

No outsider has spent more time tracking the labyrinthine ways of the National Security Agency than James Bamford. But even he gets lost in the maze. Despite countless articles and three books on the U.S. government’s super-secret, signals-intelligence service — the latest of which, The Shadow Factory, is out today — Bamford tells Danger Room that he was caught off guard by revelations that the NSA was eavesdropping on Americans. He remains confused about how the country’s telecommunications firms were co-opted into the warrantless spying project. And he’s still only guessing, he admits, at the breadth and depth of those domestic surveillance efforts. In this exclusive interview, Bamford talks about how hard it is, after all these years, to fit together the pieces at the NSA’s “Puzzle Palace” headquarters.

DANGER ROOM: When did you learn that the NSA was listening in on American citizens?

JAMES BAMFORD: After 2001, when people would ask, I’d say, “I don’t think the NSA is breaking the law. As far as I’m concerned, the NSA doesn’t do that. They don’t eavesdrop illegally on Americans anymore.” So on December 16, 2005 [when The New York Times broke the story of the NSA's domestic surveillance], I was … shocked to learn the NSA for years had been doing warrantless eavesdropping — exactly contrary to what I insisted they were doing, what I thought [agency director Lt. Gen. Michael] Hayden wouldn’t do.

DR: The new book really centers around Hayden. You two were close, right?

JB: I never had a personal relationship with Hayden — I knew him well enough to interview him numerous times, had dinner at his house, all that kind of stuff. Looking back later on, I was disappointed in his lack of ability to stand up against powerful forces like Cheney and Bush. He should know the law better than anybody and he never said no, to anything.

Read more Shadow Factory

From The LA Times
By Davan Maharaj, Foreign Editor Bruce Wallace and Jerusalem Bureau Chief Richard Boudreaux

As you know, in New York we have a lot of news. The financial system is in shambles and the fallout is convulsing the world. What do you think is behind this financial mess, and is it good or bad for Iran?

The U.S. government has made a series of mistakes in the past few decades. First, the imposition on the U.S. economy of heavy military engagement and involvement around the world. There’s no one who can correctly pin at the moment exactly how much the war in Iraq, for example, has cost so far.

But clearly we’re not very happy to see what has happened. We’re never happy when people are pressured.

You have been reported as saying that the messiah is managing the daily affairs of the Iranian economy. In Iran, there are widespread reports of galloping inflation, massive unemployed, massive flight of capital and rampant corruption that you yourself have criticized. Do you deserve any responsibility for that?

I’m not aware where you found that quote from. The government is responsible for the economy.

Both on the east and western borders of our country, there are two big wars going on, and for years sanctions have been imposed on us. It’s quite natural that when world crises increase, Iran is also harmed.

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From AlterNet

Where is the United States heading in terms of world power and influence?

Zinn: America has been heading — for some time, and is heading right now — toward less and less world power, less and less influence. Obviously, since the war in Iraq, the rest of the world has fallen away from the United States, and if American foreign policy continues in the way it has been — that is aggressive and violent and uncaring about the feelings and thoughts of other people — then the influence of the United States is going to decline more and more.

This is an empire which is on the one hand the most powerful empire that ever existed; on the other hand an empire that is crumbling — an empire that has no future because the rest of the world is alienated and simply because this empire is top-heavy with military commitments, with bases around the world, with the exhaustion of its own resources at home.

[This is] leading to more and more discontent and home, so I think the American empire will go the way of other empires and I think it is on its way now.

Is there any hope the US will change its approach to the rest of the world?

Zinn: If there is any hope, the hope lies in the American people. [It] lies in American people becoming resentful enough and indignant enough over what has happened to their country, over the loss of dignity in the world, over the starving of human resources in the United States, the starving of education and health, the takeover of the political mechanism by corporate power and the result this has on the everyday lives of the American people.

[There is also] the higher and higher food prices, the more and more insecurity, the sending of the young people to war.

I think all of this may very well build up into a movement of rebellion.

Read more Zinn Interview