Roundup: Media's Take

Source: counterpunch.com
January 25, 2006

Saul Landau: When J. Edgar Hoover Bugged My Phone Calls with My Father

[Saul Landau is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. He will be presenting his Emmy Award winning film, Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang, at the Fifth Avenue Cinema in Portland, Oregon on January 28 at 7 PM.] ... In addition [to the eavesdropping program], Homeland Security spooks open citizens' letters. In December 2005, retired University of Kansas history professor Grant Goodman told reporter Brock N. Meeks, that he "received a letter from his friend in the Philippi

Source: AlterNet
January 18, 2006

Sean Gonsalves: What Would James Madison Say About the Modern Presidency?

[Sean Gonsalves is a Cape Cod Times staff reporter and a syndicated columnist.] ...Assuming the confirmation of Alito, whose mild-mannered public persona is admirable, here's a phrase we all need to get educated on: ''unitary executive.'' In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Alito affirmed his support of the conservative doctrine, which is fancy legal talk for giving the president more power. A bit more technically speaking, they're talking

Source: CRS Report : Presidential Authority to Conduct Warrantless Electronic Surveillance to Gather Foreign Intelligence Information
January 5, 2006

Congressional Research Service: Presidential Authority to Conduct Warrantless Electronic Surveillance

... Foreign intelligence collection is not among Congress’s powers enumerated in Article I of the Constitution, nor is it expressly mentioned in Article II as a responsibility of the President. Yet it is difficult to imagine that the Framers intended to reserve foreign intelligence collection to the states or to deny the authority to the federal government altogether. It is more likely that the power to collect intelligence resides somewhere within the domain of foreign affairs and war pow

Source: American Conservative
January 30, 2006

Bill Kauffman: Liberals need another George McGovern-and perhaps conservatives do too

To the slanting wall above my desk is taped a large "Come Home America/ Vote McGovern Shriver '72" poster. Designed by artist Leonard R. Fuller, the collage fills an outline of the United States with iconographic images, historic statuary, and photos of unprepossessing but individuated Americans. The message is peace and brotherhood and a return to the ideals of the Founders. The mood is civics-class hippie, antiwar wife-of-a-Rotarian, liberal community-college-professor-who-cr

Source: TomDispatch.com
January 24, 2006

Dilip Hiro: The Palestinian Election and Democracy in the Middle East

[Dilip Hiro is the author of Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and After and The Iranian Labyrinth: Journeys Through Theocratic Iran and Its Furies, both published by Nation Books.] By now, the voting will have begun in today's Palestinian elections. It's not clear how well Hamas -- the Arabic acronym which stands for Movement of Islamic Resistance -- will do, but opinion polls in the Palestinian territories show the Islamic organization pulling neck and neck wit

Source: LAT
January 25, 2006

Max Boot: Iran's threat, Bush's dilemma

IRAN'S DECISION to remove the U.N. seals on its nuclear research facilities has made obvious the failure of European attempts to cajole the mullahs into giving up their atomic dreams. The only thing the Europeans did was buy time for the Iranians to better camouflage and defend their research and production sites. Some experts estimate that Iran will need only three more years to build its first nuclear bomb, and it will pass the point of no return much sooner. Within six to 12 mon

Source: TomDispatch.com
January 22, 2006

Wade Kane: Letter frm a Vietnam Vet

Wade Kane, once a helicopter door gunner and crew chief, wrote the following letter to Tom Engelhardt of the Nation: Dear Tom, Although I'm sure we occasionally execute some innocent person after years on Death Row, we as a nation go to great lengths not to execute any innocents. Only the worst of murderers seem to reach death row. So it seems quite ironic that we accept seeing some men apparently planting a bomb on the side of a road in Iraq via a video from a Predato

Source: New Yorker
January 16, 2006

Nicholas Lemann: Why the life and times of the broadcast pioneer Ed Murrow still matter

... “Good Night, and Good Luck” begins and ends with another famous Murrow moment, a speech to the broadcasters’ trade-association convention in 1958 in which he blasted television for being frivolous and too timid. It was probably a conscious parting shot: the president of CBS, Frank Stanton, fired back (by telling the Times’ television critic that the questions on “Person to Person” were shown to guests in advance), and Murrow took a year’s leave of absence, returning to CBS only briefly befor

Source: American Conservative
January 16, 2006

Robert Dreyfuss: The Neocons now have Syria in their sights

[Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. He covers national security for Rolling Stone and writes frequently for The American Prospect, The Nation, and Mother Jones.] It's happening again. It all sounds depressingly familiar, and it is. The Bush administration accuses the leader of a major Arab country of supporting terrorism and harboring weapons of mass destruction. The stable of neoconservative pundits begins beati

Source: Independent (London)
January 21, 2006

Paul Vallely: Brothels in England? Sure.

If prostitution is the oldest profession, then the brothel must be the oldest public institution. The Government's plan to make brothels legal - albeit only small ones, with a maximum of two prostitutes and a receptionist - may sound bold to those in Middle England who fear the woman next door may turn to a bit of home working. But the debate on whether prostitutes are best confined to brothels or allowed to walk the streets is hardly a new one. The "oldest profession&

Source: Commentary (January 2006)
January 21, 2006

Norman Podhoretz: The Panic Over Iraq

Like, I am sure, many other believers in what this country has been trying to do in the Middle East and particularly in Iraq, I have found my thoughts returning in the past year to something that Tom Paine, writing at an especially dark moment of the American Revolution, said about such times. They are, he memorably wrote, “the times that try men’s souls,” the times in which “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot” become so disheartened that they “shrink from the service of [their] country

Source: Newsweek
January 23, 2006

Howard Fineman: Baby Boomers' Last Hurrah

When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, his campaign-trail theme was the exuberant Fleetwood Mac anthem "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." Fourteen years later, that "tomorrow" has arrived for the first baby-boomer president: he turns 60 in August. If he had a song these days, it might be Bob Dylan's wistful hymn "Forever Young." Heart surgery has left Clinton pallid and gaunt, and deepened the hint of melancholy that always lay beneath the surface of his pr

Source: TomDispatch.com
January 20, 2006

John Brown: "Our Indian Wars Are Not Over Yet"

[John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who resigned from the State Department over the war in Iraq, compiles a near-daily"Public Diplomacy Press Review," available free upon request. The title for this paper comes from a 1692 quotation by Puritan preacher and witch-hunter Cotton Mather.] The Global War on Terror (GWOT) is, like all historical events, unique. But both its supporters and opponents compare it to past U.S. military conflicts. The Bush administration and the neocons have

Source: American Conservative
January 16, 2006

John Laughland: Radical globalist ideology has possessed the occupant of the Oval Office and is bringing about the revolution Communism never could

[John Laughland is a London-based writer and lecturer and a trustee of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group.] ...Revolution has now become a completely positive word in the Western political lexicon. Recent years have seen a spate of "people power" revolutions, especially in Eastern Europe. Perhaps authoritarian regimes, rather like the walls of Jericho, really are brought tumbling down by the chanting of a John Lennon song, but it often turns out that things were not a

Source: WSJ
January 19, 2006

Victoria Toensing: Why Bush had to override FISA

[Ms. Toensing, a Washington lawyer, was chief counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee and deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration.] In a speech this week, former vice president Al Gore took another swing at the National Security Agency's electronic surveillance program, which monitors international communications when one party is affiliated with terrorists. Specifically, Mr. Gore argued that George Bush "has been breaking the law repeatedly and per

Source: New Republic
January 19, 2006

New Republic: Hillary's Plantation Comment

On Martin Luther King Day, Senator Hillary Clinton, flanked by the Reverend Al Sharpton, told parishioners at the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem that the House of Representatives "has been run like a plantation, and you know what I'm talking about." Unfortunately, the church's parishioners, who have presumably never worked on a plantation, didn't quite know what she was talking about (the New York Daily News reports that the comment "got muted response&qu

Source: Boston Globe
January 19, 2006

Sanford Gottlieb: US Spying Isn't New

[Sanford Gottlieb was executive director of SANE and is author of "Defense Addiction: Can America Kick the Habit?" He was on President Richard Nixon's ''Enemies List."] Government Spying on Americans didn't start with President George W. Bush and the National Security Agency. I was spied on in the 1960s and 1970s. While working in 1961 for the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, or SANE, a citizens group organized to halt nuclear testing, I spo

Source: Salon
January 19, 2006

Sidney Blumenthal: Abramoff is an integral part of the GOP machine that revved up with the '94 "revolution"

Hardly anyone in the Republican Party, in Congress or at the White House, seems to recall ever having met Jack Abramoff. Collective amnesia has suddenly descended upon the capital. The super-lobbyist, whose plea bargain with prosecutors requires the extensive naming of names of members of Congress, staffers, ex-staffers, lobbyists, friends, colleagues and his own personal assistants, is spending his days racking his memory for details of their relationships that may become the basis for bills of

Source: Weekly Standard
January 16, 2006

Harvey Mansfield: The Law and the President ... In a national emergency, who you gonna call?

[Harvey Mansfield is the William R. Kenan Jr. professor of government at Harvard.] EMERGENCY POWER FOR SUCH UNDERHANDED activities as spying makes Americans uncomfortable and upset. Even those who do not suffer from squeamish distaste for self-defense, and do not mind getting tough when necessary, feel uneasy. A republic like ours is always more at ease in dealing with criminals than with enemies. Criminals violate the law, and the law can be vindicated with police, prosecutors, jur

Source: TomDispatch.com
January 17, 2006

Elizabeth de la Vega: Does the President Really Know Best?

[Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than 20 years of experience. During her tenure, she was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California. Her pieces have appeared in the Nation Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Salon. She writes regularly for Tomdispatch. She may be contacted at ElizabethdelaVega@Verizon.net.]