Obama’s Slippery Slope. Ginning-Up the “Terror” Threat, Shredding the Constitution

by Tom Burghardt
Global Research, May 17, 2010
Antifascist Calling

When Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized American citizen and 30-year-old son of a retired senior Pakistani Air Force officer was arrested in the failed plot to detonate a car-bomb in Times Square May 1, U.S. counterterrorism officials and their stenographers in the corporate media proclaimed a “connection” between Shahzad and the far-right jihadi outfit, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

Never mind that such “evidence” relies on the thinnest of reeds: that Shahzad had recently traveled to Pakistan, was allegedly in “contact” with the TTP and had even received “training” from a sectarian, clan- and tribal-based organization wary of outsiders who nevertheless, allegedly “approved” of an ill-conceived plan to kill hundreds of New Yorkers.

Last week on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder claimed, “We know that they [TTP] helped facilitate it. We know that they helped direct it. And I suspect that we are going to come up with evidence which shows that they helped to finance it. They were intimately involved in this plot.”

Holder’s “evidence”? Why statements by former CIA torture-enabler and current Obama counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, “confirming” the administration’s threadbare assertions.

The New York Times reported that Brennan “appeared to say even more definitively than Mr. Holder did that the Taliban in Pakistan had provided money as well as training and direction.”

May 19th, 2010 | Posted in Web-Only Content | Read More »

It’s time to take Mother’s Day back!

by sherry mann

Although mothers are certainly the one tie that commonly binds all people throughout human history, it has been celebrated as an official occasion only in this past century.

The struggle toward what we now call “Mother’s Day” began in 1868, with the work of Ann Jarvis to establish a “Mother’s Friendship Day”. Jarvis wanted to encourage mothers to fulfill their unique role which could reconcile the division of so many families as another painful result of the Civil War. Jarvis wanted to expand the concept into an annual celebration for mothers, but she died in 1905 before the day became popular.

Ann Jarvis’ daughter, Anna Marie Reeves Jarvis is credited with establishing Mother’s Day in its current form, following the death of her mother on May 9, 1905. It is the date of Ann Jarvis’ death which was the motivation behind celebrating Mother’s Day on the second Sunday in May.

May 6th, 2010 | Posted in Web-Only Content | Read More »