All News Items

Following his inclusion on an IPA news release Tuesday, Shahid Buttar appeared on Fox and Friends Wednesday morning to discuss new FBI guidelines expanding agents’ search authority to go through databases and trash. Watch the interview here.

Bob Kincaid of Coal River Mountain Watch gave an interview to Pacifica Radio yesterday after appearing on an IPA news release. He spoke on Flashpoints, a broadcast newsmagazine hosted by Dennis Bernstein, to discuss the mountaintop removal mining protests in West Virginia.

He said: “The coal companies also have their sights fixed on Blair Mountain and they want to blow it up. And in the course of blowing it up they’ll do what they do with all our mountains and all our mountain communities: they’ll destroy our heritage, they’ll destroy our Appalachian present, and they’ll destroy our Appalachian future.”

Listen to Kincaid here, starting at the 13:00 mark.

Robert Alvarez and Aileen Mioko Smith appeared on Democracy Now! this morning following their inclusion on an IPA news release earlier this week. Smith and Alvarez discussed the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, including the growing worry over possible contamination among Japanese citizens. “There’s incredible concern, especially among parents in Fukushima prefecture. But now spreading is concern among parents in Tokyo, which is quite a far way from Fukushima,” Smith said. “Mainly, what’s been happening is that citizens have been monitoring. And after they find high levels, they demand that the local authorities and the government look at those contaminated areas, and then the government looks, and it is contaminated. So it’s very much citizen-oriented. There are people going in all the time. There are radiation monitors all over. Parents are measuring. Mothers are measuring. University professors on weekends are measuring.”

Following his inclusion on an IPA news release Tuesday Harvey Wasserman appeared on CNN International last night to discuss Germany’s decision to abandon nuclear energy over the next 11 years. On the network he explained why he thinks the movement away from nuclear power will be a boon for the German economy, expressing his desire for the United States to follow suit and rely more heavily on renewable energy.

After appearing on an IPA news release last week University of California history professor Dana Frank went on Al Jazeera English to discuss the Honduran coup and Zaleya’s return. She discussed the implications of the former president’s return, emphasizing it was not a panacea for the nation’s problems.

Frank said: “Hilary Clinton, Secretary of State, has already said ‘Great, everything is wonderful now. Democracy has been restored and of course we can readmit Honduras to the OAS and make this problem go away.’ And of course it’s a huge ongoing problem for the Honduran people. You know I talk to people all the time who are terrified of the situation. There are not civil liberties. People on the opposition radio stations are still being threatened. There’s actually absolutely no functioning judicial system. Over 300 people have been killed in suspicious assassinations for opposition activities since the coup. Not a single person has been charged or prosecuted for those deaths, including four people that were killed in the last two or three weeks. So it’s really terrifying if you’re a Honduran.”

Following his appearance on an IPA news release commenting on media coverage of climate change Mark Hertsgaard, a veteran climate reporter for NPR, Vanity Fair, The Nation and the New Yorker, spoke with Ian Masters of Pacifica Radio Sunday to discuss the issue. Hertsgaard  stressed the need to recognize climate change as a pressing threat and offered corporate censorship of scientific proof as one explanation for what he perceives to be a lack of recognition of that threat. The full interview is available at KPFK.org (Hertsgaard comes on at the 36:00 point).

IPA Communications Director Sam Husseini appeared on the Ed Hancock show Wednesday to discuss political transparency in the wake of Netanyahu’s congressional address.

Following IPA’s news release, Nick Turse, who wrote “Obama’s Reset: Arab Spring or Same Old Thing?” appeared on Russia Today to discuss Obama’s recent speech. He said that despite the President’s promise to support self-determination in the region, the administration provided Mubarak’s regime with around $3.2 billion in aid his first year in office.

Reuters reports this morning: “President Barack Obama will nominate CIA director Leon Panetta as defense secretary and Army General David Petraeus as head of the American spy agency, officials said on Wednesday.”

MELVIN A. GOODMAN, goody789 at verizon.net, mel-goodman.dailykos.com
Goodman is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. His most recent book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA. From 1966 to 1990, he was senior Soviet analyst at the CIA and the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

He said today: “Obama has had a very weak national security team from the start. He kept Gates and put in Hillary Clinton in large part because of domestic politics. Jim Jones [who was National Security Adviser] and [former Director of National Intelligence Dennis] Blair were not up to their tasks. Panetta did not do anything to shake up the CIA, he gets captured by a bureaucracy pretty fast, which is what I’d worry about if he went to the Pentagon. I don’t think he has the energy, especially for a bureaucracy as big and complex as the Pentagon.”

Politico reports that “Goodman said known backers of significant Pentagon reforms, such as former assistant secretary of defense Larry Korb or former Navy secretary Richard Danzig, would be better secretaries.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

From USA Today: He’s as unacceptable to the protesters as Mubarak. He has fully sided with Mubarak and has used threats to dissuade protesters,” says Fawaz Gerges, professor of Middle Eastern politics and international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

“The long-quiescent population has had far more than enough of quasi-dictatorial rule,” says Edward Peck, a former diplomat who served in Egypt and Iraq and as U.S. ambassador to Mauritania. “To offer as his replacement, however temporarily, one of his most reprehensible subordinates is certainly not going to satisfy the demonstrators.”
…

Until he was appointed vice president last month, Suleiman was not well known outside of political and international circles. “The longer the limelight is on him, the less people like him. Part of the story is understanding his personal role in suppressing opposition and engaging in torture,” says Lisa Hajjar, an editor for the online Arab journal Jadaliyya. She recently wrote an article titled “Omar Suleiman, the CIA’s Man in Cairo and Egypt’s Torturer-in-Chief.”

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern notes Suleiman’s reputation dates back to 1993, when he first became head of Egypt’s intelligence agency and began assisting the CIA in interrogating terrorism suspects during the Clinton and Bush administrations.

One person detained under the CIA’s “rendition” program — Egyptian-born U.S. citizen Mamdouh Habib — claimed he was tortured by Suleiman himself. In October 2001, Habib was turned over to the CIA by Pakistani security forces, then shipped to Egypt. In his memoirs, My Story: The Tale of a Terrorist Who Wasn’t, Habib says he was systematically tortured. At one point, his blindfold fell off and he saw Suleiman, the book says. Habib was never charged and ultimately released in 2005.

“Suleiman’s a thug wearing a silk tie; a really nasty, mean guy,” McGovern says. “He makes Mubarak look like a fuzzy puppy. A guy like that who gets into power is unlikely to let it go.” See full piece by Garry Strauss.