CounterPunch

In one of the most egregious uses of the pardon power since Bill Clinton freed billionaire tax cheat, Israeli agent and international fugitive Marc Rich as the clock struck midnight on his lamentable administration, last week Texas Gov. Greg Abbott freed an avowed racist who ran a red light, before plunging his car into a crowd of protesters and fatally shooting a man who was trying to protect people from being run over. Abbott granted the killer a pardon, even though the gunman had been obsessed... Читать дальше...

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius has always been an apologist for the Central Intelligence Agency; then he added the Pentagon to his list for institutional apologies.  But now Ignatius is going much further; he has become the mouthpiece for both the administrations of President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  His most recent editorial (“The U.S. is assembling the pieces of a Gaza war endgame”) foresees the “contours of a possible exit ramp” in Gaza that is constructed out of sheer fantasy. Читать дальше...

Tina Cordova is intimately familiar with the legacy of the atomic bomb. Her hometown, Tularosa, New Mexico, is just thirty-four miles downwind from the Trinity Test Site, where Manhattan Project scientists first detonated what they called “the Gadget.” When both of her great-grandfathers, who were in Tularosa during the blast, succumbed to stomach cancer ten years later, it was just the beginning of her family’s troubles. More

“Over the years, Boeing and its employees have played a vital role in the advancement of Cal State Long Beach.” Jane Close Conoley, President, California State University, Long Beach Pro-Palestinian student protests and encampments have bloomed this spring across U.S. universities. Unsurprisingly, campus administrators have responded with calls for civility and peace — that is, More

A bit of recent history seems worth recalling as the nation careens towards an election that seems somewhat likely to put a man Noam Chomsky once rightly called “the most dangerous criminal in human history” back in the world’s most powerful office. It’s quite possible that the fascist monster Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump would More

So many trips back and forth from the US to Pakistan ever since I "left" Lahore on Sep 12th, 1979. My 21st birthday. I was off to conquer the world, become the free and independent woman I had always dreamt of being, away from the strictures of desi patriarchy- or so I imagined. So many tearful and joyful reunions, departures, and arrivals over four and a half decades that now appear to have passed in the blink of an eye. More

There has to be some irony that as Donald Trump sits in the dock in lower Manhattan, on charges of cooking his corporate books for $130,000 after paying off a porn star (only the flag-waving Supreme Court would let him walk), while slightly to the west, on Wall Street, the same grifter (here as the More

Well-deserved indictments keep hitting Congress. The latest indicted legislator is Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar, the politician backed by former House speaker Nancy Pelosi in his last election, against a more progressive opponent, of course. On May 3, the justice department charged Cuellar with accepting roughly $600,000 from Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil company and a Mexican bank. More

While statements that “No one is above the law,” are repeated in the U.S. over the trials of former President Donald Trump, can the same be said internationally? By analogy, Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan of the International Criminal Court (ICC) said yes when he announced he was seeking arrest warrants for Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. More

There are constants in this world — occurrences you can count on. Sunrises and sunsets. The tides. That, day by day, people will be born and others will die. Some of them will die in peace, but others, of course, in violence and agony. For hundreds of years, the U.S. military has been killing people. More