TV News LIES

Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld has always answered his detractors by claiming that history will one day judge him kindly. But as he waits for that day, a new group of critics—his administration peers—are suddenly speaking out for the first time. What they’re saying? It isn’t pretty.

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DHS has become an albatross of surveillance choking American necks. Internal documents such as the lexicon and the rightwing extremism report, combined with previous examples of DHS helping state fusion centres watch over antiwar protesters under the Bush administration, show that DHS is not only actively undermining American civil liberties but is also politicised by whichever party is running the country. This isn't a left-right issue, it's an American issue.

Alan Keyes, who lost to Barack Obama in a U.S. Senate race, was arrested Friday protesting President Obama's invitation to speak at Notre Dame in Indiana.

Keyes and 20 others were charged with trespassing, Dennis Brown, a spokesman for the Catholic university, said. Brown said the university has a long-standing policy that only student-led demonstrations are allowed on campus with approval from the office of student affairs.

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For AIPAC, that message is ensuring that campus student organizations toe a pro-Israel line and that all campus initiatives to disinvest in Israel are defeated.

But it is not just America’s college students who are being subjected to AIPAC’s right-wing propaganda blitzkrieg. This editor overheard a conversation by another AIPAC attendee about continued non-profit funding for a network of summer camps to stress support for Israel and “Jewishness” among the generation following in the footsteps of college students and the generation following that. Clearly understood in the conversation was that the effort was planning for 30 years into the future.

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The New York Times story today on the dropping of the government case against the AIPAC lobbyists Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman comes in separate parts, not entirely signaled by paragraph breaks or outward format. The report by Neil A. Lewis and David Johnston sets out to answer three questions. What was this investigation about? Who is pleased and who displeased by the reversal? And why was the case dropped at just this moment?

Dick Cheney has called for declassifying memos he claims will vindicate the Bush administration’s torture policy. Now former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV urges the former vice president to extend his demand for transparency to his still-secret testimony in the Scooter Libby obstruction of justice case.

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