This is the 49th anniversary of Congress’s passage of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, by which the Lyndon Johnson administration lied the nation into the Vietnam War. The resolution was spurred by false assertions of multiple North Vietnamese attacks on U.S. ships. At a National Security Council meeting on the evening that the first report came […]
Tag Archives | Lying
Me? Nihilist? Another NSA Slander
Former National Security Agency boss Michael Hayden denounced defenders of Edward Snowden as “nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twentysomethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years.” Hey, I’m no nihilist! And, though I am still a shy country boy, it’s been a long time since I was accused of being […]
New Terrorist Suspect Definition: “Someone searching the web for suspicious stuff”
The Guardian’s scoop today on the National Security Agency’s XKeyscore included documents that showed the “standards” that NSA employees can use to target Americans and others to vacuum up their email and all their Internet-related information. Page 14 of the documents reveals one of the new definitions of terrorist suspect: “someone searching the web for […]
Bradley Manning Verdict & WikiLeaks Movie
Bradley Manning got nailed today by a military judge for exposing the truth. The folks who committed war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq have almost all walked scot-free. The folks who made the policies that led to the abuses have never faced federal charges. Dreamworks has a movie on Wikileaks that will be coming out […]
IMF Guilty of “Aggravated Pimping” of Third World?
Former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been charged with “aggravated pimping” by the French government. I thought “aggravated pimping” was the job description for the IMF – at least in its function as a bill collector for the banks. Or maybe it is simply screwing the Third World after invoking the proper econometric formulas (with […]
Three Cheers for Justin Amash and the Anti-Spying Coalition
Three cheers for Rep. Justin Amash and colleagues who came within a whisker of reining in the NSA’s illegal surveillance tonight in Congress! (Final vote on his amendment was 217 to 205). This is a huge moral victory – and the sign of civil liberty victories to come. And the floor debate helped reveal […]
Wash. Times: AmeriCorps’ National Service Charade
Washington Times, July 18, 2013 BOVARD: AmeriCorps’ national service charade Paying youths to push big government makes a mockery of volunteerism by James Bovard At a White House ceremony Monday, President Obama announced a Task Force on Expanding National Service. He is jumping onto a popular bandwagon: Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson recently promised that […]
Ron Redrift
It's ironic: the nation which sternly lecture