TV News LIES

Bob Woodward is “flat-out disgusted” with Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir.

“Rumsfeld's memoir is one big clean-up job, a brazen effort to shift blame to others -- including President Bush -- distort history, ignore the record or simply avoid discussing matters that cannot be airbrushed away,” Woodward writes on Tom Ricks’s Best Defense blog. “It is a travesty, and I think the rewrite job won't wash.”

The Washington Post reporter outlines contradictions in Rumsfeld’s version of events, including when the administration began focusing on Iraq, when the decision to go to war with the country was made, and on whom the responsibility of post-war planning ultimately fell.

Sometimes disgrace can actually lead to honor. Don't say this in Los Angeles, but between us, in Tel Aviv, we can tell the truth: If the fate of Mohammed and Johannes and Esther had depended on the government and the interior minister, they wouldn't be here anymore. Their little school experience would have ended a long time ago.

They are still here, but only because various aid organizations refused to hold their peace for the children's sake. Because the Tel Aviv municipality accepted them with open arms. Because some cabinet ministers managed to wake up in time and object. And above all, because the Bialik-Rogozin school itself took the children into its embrace and refused to let them be taken away.

A case filed before an African judicial body could open a new front in efforts by human rights groups to hold the CIA and its partners accountable for what they allege was the torture of innocent victims in secret "black site" prisons around the world.

The case involves Mohammed al-Asad, who said he was arrested in late 2003 at his home in Tanzania, blindfolded and flown to a secret prison in Djibouti. He said he was subjected to two weeks of torture and inhuman treatment in a clandestine CIA rendition and detentions program designed to nab suspected terrorists.

Upwards of 100,000 claims arising from the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico may never be paid, the beleaguered administrator of the oil company's compensation fund has acknowledged.

A defensive Ken Feinberg, under fire from the Obama administration, Gulf leaders and local business for the slow pace of payouts for losses due to the BP spill, said the vast majority of the 130,000 unsettled claims did not have adequate documentation.

Fascism is a difficult word, because it comes with an iconography that touches the Nazi nerve and is abused as propaganda against America’s official enemies and to promote the West’s foreign adventures with a moral vocabulary written in the struggle against Hitler. And yet fascism and imperialism are twins.

As the Washington historian William Blum has documented, since 1945, the US has destroyed or subverted more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and used mass murderers like Suharto, Mobutu, and Pinochet to dominate by proxy. In the Middle East, every dictatorship and pseudo-monarchy has been sustained by America. In “Operation Cyclone,” the CIA and MI6 secretly fostered and bank-rolled Islamic extremism. The object was to smash or deter nationalism and democracy. The victims of this Western state terrorism have been mostly Muslims. The courageous people gunned down last week in Bahrain and Libya, the latter a “priority UK market,” according to Britain’s official arms “procurers,” join those children blown to bits in Gaza by the latest American F-16 aircraft.

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African mercenaries hired by the Gaddafi regime to kill Libyan protesters would be immune from prosecution for war crimes due to a clause in this weekend's UN resolution that was demanded by the United States.

This means that mercenaries from countries such as Algeria, Ethiopia and Tunisia – which have all been named by rebel Libyan diplomats to the UN as being among the countries involved – would escape prosecution even if they were captured, because their nations are not members of the court.

The Army views complaints Oregon National Guard soldiers raised about the care they received at Madigan Army Medical Center last year as signs of systemic problems with how infantrymen are treated when they return from combat. But Army officials refuse to detail how they are responding to those concerns.

The Army finished three reviews of the Oregon Guard’s complaints more than four months ago. It won’t release the full reports for at least another month, pending a final review of one of the documents, a spokeswoman for the Army Western Regional Medical Command said Friday.

If I were in a position to deliver a message to the people of the Middle East, including Israelis, I would proudly declare myself an Arab Jew and remind everyone that Jews have been an integral part of the Middle East mosaic for millennia.

We are not the enemy, and often we speak the same languages - Arabic, Farsi, Turkish etc. Our ancestors have lived in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Iran, Turkey and even Afghanistan for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years.