A blog about a criminal enterprise
By Dave Lindorff
The incoming Biden administration is considering breaking with a long-standing tradition of new presidents sharing national secrets with prior presidents. Instead, in the case of his future predecessor Trump, Biden says he wants to hear the advice of key national security figures in the new government regarding whether or not to brief the impeached ex-chief executive once he’s out the White House door.
That is not the question Biden should
By Dave Lindorff
I have something in common with some of the brownshirt thugs who assaulted the Capitol, some reportedly intent on kidnapping and/or killing congressional leaders and members like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader and soon to be courseMajority leader Chuck Schumer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Vice President Mike Pence.
No, I’m not a brownshirt fascist. I’m a politically leftist professional journalist, a former Business
By Dave Lindorff
Little noticed during yesterday’s bizarre storming of the Capitol building by armed and violent Trump-incited American “brownshirts,” was the fact that National Guard troops, called for by Washington’s mayor, but not authorized by President Trump, were finally authorized by Vice President Pence.
The significance of this chain of authority cannot be understated.
The control of the US military is one of the, if not the greatest power of
Dave Lindorff
Mumia Abu-Jamal, the prison journalist long known as the “voice of the voiceless” for his compelling writings and short audio tapes about life behind bars, moved a step closer to getting a chance for a reconsideration of his earliest appeal of his conviction — an allegedly flawed Post-Conviction Relief Act hearing in 1995, as well as three other later PCRA appeals of aspects his case, all ignored and their findings rejected by Pennsylvania’s appellate
By Dave Lindorff
Texas Republican Party Chair Allen West has joined blow-hard right-wing radio whackjob Rush Limbaugh in suggesting that Republican-governed states (like Texas, Wyoming, Nebraska, Utah, Montana, Alabama, Mississippi and others) should “band together” and secede from the Union.
Some have expressed outrage at such a suggestion, but really, since it’s going to be next to impossible to get rid of the Electoral College that has enabled Republicans
By Dave Lindorff
The US War in —or on—Afghanistan has rightly been called the “Forever War.”
Launched on October 7, 2001, while the ruins of the World Trade Center were still smoldering from the 9/11 attacks five weeks earlier, the war is now in its 19th year, making it almost nine years longer than the Vietnam War.
And yet, over the years, almost any time a president has attempted to ratchet down the war, or to talk about ending it — while that may have been
By Dave Lindorff
As the US confronts both a political crisis of presidential succession and a worsening pandemic, it might be instructive, though perhaps not comforting, to learn that we’ve been here before.
In the period between the 1773 Boston Tea Party up through the start of the American Revolution with the battles of Lexington and Concord and on into late 1775, the citizens of Boston were under the thumb of a tyrannical autocrat, Gen. Thomas Gage, a leader
By Dave Lindorff
It’s often been noted that countries that go to war tend to adopt the behaviors of their enemies in fighting them, and then bring that war and the techniques they have appropriated home where they begin to apply them domestically.
For at least two decades, since the US in 2001 launched its so-called “War” on Terror following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, the US, under
By Dave Lindorff
Flash! Nuclear bombs and warheads have just joined landmines, germ and chemical bombs and fragmentation bombs as illegal weapons under international law, as on Oct. 24 a 50th nation, the Central American country of Honduras, ratified and signed a UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Of course, the reality is that despite this outlawing of landmines and fragmentation bombs by the UN, the US still uses them routinely and sells them to other
By Ron Ridenour
The second indictment of alleged violations of the Espionage Act belatedly filed by the US against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange actually should not include him since there is no contention that he spied for any warring enemy, nor is he a U.S. citizen or resident, which the 1917 law targeted.
The original indictment focused on allegations that Assange had criminally aided Chelsea Manning in “hacking” into and downloading secret documents that