FIGHTING TRUTH DECAY IN THE NAME OF PEACE

                    

                                                                  

                           

                                    “Truth is the first casualty of war.”
                                   -Aeschylus

                                   “After that, it’s mostly civilians.”
                                  -Source unknown.

As Chomsky and Herman wrote, starting a war requires manufacturing the consent of the public. Fortunately, though opposition to war has become barely audible in the last 50 years amidst the clamor of warmongers’ alarms about imagined threats to the Empire, it persists. There is an urgent need to use the limited strength of the peace movement to rally public support to the cause of ending war. Whatever tactics we might use, our first goal must be to awaken Americans to the fact that nearly everything they are told by the mainstream media about US foreign policy is false.  

Only when Americans recognize that the corporate media is captive to war profiteers will they understand that war is not inevitable, that it threatens human survival because it enslaves us to fossil fuels, that silence is consent to continue on the path to self-destruction and that without that consent, the Empire cannot continue to wage endless war against the mass of humanity.

Awakening the public to these truths requires a strategy to enable them to see beyond the blinders of their belief in American exceptionalism. This idea is so deeply ingrained that even many antiwar activists do not recognize it in themselves. It is the belief that the United States is essentially good and that our tendency to war is due to our desire to do the right thing regardless of how consistently we do not accomplish our stated objectives. The idea that the Vietnam War was a mistake, that the lies that led us into invading Iraq were an aberration, or that humanitarian intervention is a noble endeavor are all examples of how the insidious belief in American Exceptionalism can blind us to the fact that excuses for war are always (or almost always) based on propaganda.

I don’t know what students are learning in high school these days, but when I was a sophomore I learned how the Hearst newspaper chain created support for war with Spain by calling for a “humanitarian intervention” to help Cuba liberate itself from imperial rule. The result of course was that Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam essentially became colonies of the US. In more recent times, the Vietnam was justified as “self-defense” based on lies about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Iraq was invaded for a second time on manufactured evidence for the false claim that it was building WMDs and Libya was destroyed based on an unverified claim that Gaddafi was preparing to massacre US-backed “rebels” in Benghazi. There are similar stories to tell about essentially every American intervention since WWII (not to mention WWI itself), for those who want to take the time to explore the history of modern wars.

Given these well-known examples of the US government lying to its people, you might think it would be easy to make the case that they are being lied to about Syria, Ukraine, Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Russia and other nations whose governments have been targeted for imperial expansion. If so, you do not appreciate the degree to which Americans have been induced to unconsciously accept the premises of American Exceptionalism through education, media, and politicians. The only way to break through this wall of denial is to educate the public about exactly how this is accomplished. How else will they learn to critically examine the lies they are being told by virtually everyone in the Western media, politicians, and the Wall Street war profiteers whose interests they serve?

It is hard for most people to accept the idea that the corporate media lies about nearly every aspect of foreign policy. It sounds to the uninitiated like a conspiracy theory, which they have been taught to disregard (unless it comes from the government). In order to understand how it is possible to get all of the mainstream media to repeat the same false story, you have to understand the ways in which it can be manipulated through both economic pressure (as detailed in the introduction to Manufacturing Consent) and the influence of propagandists in the CIA, their assets in the media and private think tanks. It is the extensive influence of the CIA on corporate media that is the hardest to accept for people who have not done the research, but for those willing to read a little further, I wrote this short essay to make it easy to understand the main points.

Since 1983, the CIA’s propaganda function has been largely replaced by corporate think tanks, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and its spinoff, the self-proclaimed “private nonprofit” National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which is in fact almost entirely funded by Congress. They use the same techniques of using government funding to influence both US and foreign media to tell the same stories whose scripts the US foreign policy establishment has written. Their function is to weaken governments targeted for regime change, whether through war, insurrection, US-backed terrorist invasions or crippling sanctions.

This is of course only a bare-bones summary of the way that the media is manipulated and why it is important to challenge the official narrative. I hope that I have made the case that it is critical to get people to understand the extent to which they are deceived by their government. Interested readers are encouraged to read the linked articles and to do their own research. The importance to the peace movement of freeing Americans trapped in the prison of their false belief systems cannot be overemphasized. Please join the effort by learning more and joining the fight to free America from the Matrix of lies in which most of us exist.

UKRAINE IN PERSPECTIVE

This is an editorial published on March 24 by the Eugene (Oregon) Register Guard. Regular readers of this blog will note that given the constraints of writing for the corporate media, I have been a bit less blunt and more terse in making my points. It is an example of how we can challenge the mainstream media by making ourselves heard in guest columns and letters to the editor.
As if to emphasize that point, it appeared directly over a column by noted psychopath Charles Kruthammer arguing that President Obama is weak because he refuses to illegally supply arms to the illegitimate American puppet government in Kiev. This is hardly surprising, because neocons do not believe that international law applies to the US, if they are aware of its existence.



US claims that the referendum on Crimean independence violates international law represent the height of hypocrisy. They cannot be taken seriously by anyone who understands US foreign policy since WWII. It is one unbroken string of violations of national sovereignty, from overthrowing elected governments in Guatemala and Iran in the early 50s to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and support for jihadists in Libya and Syria. Such violations of sovereignty trample basic principles of international law meantto prevent wars.

There is no basis to claim that peaceful secession is illegal. The International Court of Justice ruled in the case of Kosovo that “international law contains no prohibitions on declarations of independence.” Americans should recall that the US conducted a deadly bombing campaign to enforce that right. US recognition of Israel’s declaration of independence was another example of US acceptance of the right to create a new nation out of an existing geopolitical entity originally created by imperial design in the early 20^th century, as is US recognition of all the former Soviet Republics that declared their independence from the former USSR in the 90s.

The mainstream media unanimously declares Putin “aggressive, imperialist, a bully” or as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it, taking actions similar to Hitler. We have heard that line every time the international corporations who profit from war decide a nation’s leader is uncooperative with their plans for world domination. America’s national interests in the post-WWII era have been equated to those of the oil, gas, banking and “defense” industries.  The implicit assumption is that any challenge to NATO hegemony is a threat to national security. A moment’s reflection on Russia’s real security interests show how self-serving such claims are.

Ukraine is a major market for Russian products and an important source of agricultural products. Russia’s economy is heavily dependent on revenues from natural gas, 70% of which flows to Europe in pipelines that pass through Ukraine. The Black Sea port in Crimea is a critical part of Russia’s military defense. Under a 2010 treaty, Russia retains the right to use its military bases through 2042. By installing a compliant government in Kiev, the US is trying to disrupt Russian gas supplies, destroy its mutually beneficial trade arrangements with Ukraine and ultimately place yet more “defensive” missiles near Russia’s borders as it has in other former Soviet nations surrounding Russia.

Who is the imperial power here?

The EU offer to Ukraine for a trade agreement was likely never meant seriously. It was less than half the $30 million Russia was originally offering. That would have nearly paid off its debts to the international bankers now salivating at the prospect of making Ukraine its latest debt slave, as it has with Greece, Italy, Spain and other European nations now suffering under imposed austerity. The EU offer seems to have been a ruse to justify fomenting dissent in Ukraine that the US could use to overthrow the elected government.  Groundwork for this had been laid since at least the time of the last color revolution in Ukraine that put an anti-Russian, pro-West puppet in office.

US-funded NGOs like USAID and NED (National Endowment for Democracy) operate by funding opposition groups in nations who do not play ball with NATO powers. The first President of NED stated in a Washington Post interview “A lot of what we do today was done covertly by the CIA 25 years ago.” It does not matter if the targeted nation is democratically elected like the Ukraine or Venezuela. The agenda of these largely unknown agencies has little to do with democracy and everything to do with expanding the power of transnational corporations with undue influence over US foreign policy.

JFK’s murder coincided with his efforts to end the Cold War before it got out of hand. He announced his intention in a major speech at American University five months before his death. In his speech, he pointed out that those who suffer most from war are not the leaders of nations but their people, with whom we share a common humanity. If Americans learn to regard the Peoples of other nations as worthy of the same rights as our own, Kennedy will not have died in vain.


Rick Staggenborg of Coos Bay is the founder of Soldiers For Peace International.

OBAMA'S FOREIGN POLICY IN PERSPECTIVE-ROBERT PARRY

The following essay appeared in Common Dreams and is used with permission (see below).

Published on Monday, March 3, 2014 by Consortium News

What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis

by Robert Parry

President Barack Obama has been trying, mostly in secret, to craft a new foreign policy that relies heavily on cooperation with Russian President Vladimir Putin to tamp down confrontations in hotspots such as Iran and Syria. But Obama’s timidity about publicly explaining this strategy has left it open to attack from powerful elements of Official Washington, including well-placed neocons and people in his own administration.

The gravest threat to this Obama-Putin collaboration has now emerged in Ukraine, where a coalition of U.S. neocon operatives and neocon holdovers within the State Department fanned the flames of unrest in Ukraine, contributing to the violent overthrow of democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych and now to a military intervention by Russian troops in the Crimea, a region in southern Ukraine that historically was part of Russia.resident Barack Obama discusses the crisis in Ukraine for 90 minutes on March 1, 2014, with Russian President Vladimir Putin. (White House photo/Pete Souza)

Though I’m told the Ukraine crisis caught Obama and Putin by surprise, the neocon determination to drive a wedge between the two leaders has been apparent for months, especially after Putin brokered a deal to head off U.S. military strikes against Syria last summer and helped get Iran to negotiate concessions on its nuclear program, both moves upsetting the neocons who had favored heightened confrontations.

Putin also is reported to have verbally dressed down Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Saudi intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan over what Putin considered their provocative actions regarding the Syrian civil war. So, by disrupting neocon plans and offending Netanyahu and Bandar, the Russian president found himself squarely in the crosshairs of some very powerful people.

If not for Putin, the neocons – along with Israel and Saudi Arabia – had hoped that Obama would launch military strikes on Syria and Iran that could open the door to more “regime change” across the Middle East, a dream at the center of neocon geopolitical strategy since the 1990s. This neocon strategy took shape after the display of U.S. high-tech warfare against Iraq in 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union later that year. U.S. neocons began believing in a new paradigm of a uni-polar world where U.S. edicts were law.

The neocons felt this paradigm shift also meant that Israel would no longer need to put up with frustrating negotiations with the Palestinians. Rather than haggling over a two-state solution, U.S. neocons simply pressed for “regime change” in hostile Muslim countries that were assisting the Palestinians or Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Iraq was first on the neocon hit list, but next came Syria and Iran. The overriding idea was that once the regimes assisting the Palestinians and Hezbollah were removed or neutralized, then Israel could dictate peace terms to the Palestinians who would have no choice but to accept what was on the table.

U.S. neocons working on Netanyahu’s campaign team in 1996, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, even formalized their bold new plan, which they outlined in a strategy paper, called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” The paper argued that only “regime change” in hostile Muslim countries could achieve the necessary “clean break” from the diplomatic standoffs that had followed inconclusive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

In 1998, the neocon Project for the New American Century called for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, but President Bill Clinton refused to go along. The situation changed, however, when President George W. Bush took office and after the 9/11 attacks. Suddenly, the neocons had a Commander in Chief who agreed with the need to eliminate Iraq’s Saddam Hussein — and a stunned and angry U.S. public could be easily persuaded. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War.”]

So, Bush invaded Iraq, ousting Hussein but failing to subdue the country. The U.S. death toll of nearly 4,500 soldiers and the staggering costs, estimated to exceed $1 trillion, made the American people and even Bush unwilling to fulfill the full-scale neocon vision, which was expressed in one of their favorite jokes of 2003 about where to attack next, Iran or Syria, with the punch line: “Real men go to Tehran!”

Though hawks like Vice President Dick Cheney pushed the neocon/Israeli case for having the U.S. military bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities – with the hope that the attacks also might spark a “regime change” in Tehran – Bush decided that he couldn’t risk the move, especially after the U.S. intelligence community assessed in 2007 that Iran had stopped work on a bomb four years earlier.

The Rise of Obama

The neocons were dealt another setback in 2008 when Barack Obama defeated a neocon favorite, Sen. John McCain. But Obama then made one of the fateful decisions of his presidency, deciding to staff key foreign-policy positions with “a team of rivals,” i.e. keeping Republican operative Robert Gates at the Defense Department and recruiting Hillary Clinton, a neocon-lite, to head the State Department.

Obama also retained Bush’s high command, most significantly the media-darling Gen. David Petraeus. That meant that Obama didn’t take control over his own foreign policy.

Gates and Petraeus were themselves deeply influenced by the neocons, particularly Frederick Kagan, who had been a major advocate for the 2007 “surge” escalation in Iraq, which was hailed by the U.S. mainstream media as a great “success” but never achieved its principal goal of a unified Iraq. At the cost of nearly 1,000 U.S. dead, it only bought time for an orderly withdrawal that spared Bush and the neocons the embarrassment of an obvious defeat.

So, instead of a major personnel shakeup in the wake of the catastrophic Iraq War, Obama presided over what looked more like continuity with the Bush war policies, albeit with a firmer commitment to draw down troops in Iraq and eventually in Afghanistan.

From the start, however, Obama was opposed by key elements of his own administration, especially at State and Defense, and by the still-influential neocons of Official Washington. According to various accounts, including Gates’s new memoir Duty, Obama was maneuvered into supporting a troop “surge” in Afghanistan, as advocated by neocon Frederick Kagan and pushed by Gates, Petraeus and Clinton.

Gates wrote that Kagan persuaded him to recommend the Afghan “surge” and that Obama grudgingly went along although Gates concluded that Obama didn’t believe in the “mission” and wanted to reverse course more quickly than Gates, Petraeus and their side wanted.

Faced with this resistance from his own bureaucracy, Obama began to rely on a small inner circle built around Vice President Joe Biden and a few White House advisers with the analytical support of some CIA officials, including CIA Director Leon Panetta.

Obama also found a surprising ally in Putin after he regained the Russian presidency in 2012. A Putin adviser told me that the Russian president personally liked Obama and genuinely wanted to help him resolve dangerous disputes, especially crises with Iran and Syria.

In other words, what evolved out of Obama’s early “team of rivals” misjudgment was an extraordinary presidential foreign policy style, in which Obama developed and implemented much of his approach to the world outside the view of his secretaries of State and Defense (except when Panetta moved briefly to the Pentagon).

Even after the eventual departures of Gates in 2011, Petraeus as CIA director after a sex scandal in late 2012, and Clinton in early 2013, Obama’s peculiar approach didn’t particularly change. I’m told that he has a distant relationship with Secretary of State John Kerry, who never joined Obama’s inner foreign policy circle.

Though Obama’s taciturn protectiveness of his “real” foreign policy may be understandable given the continued neocon “tough-guy-ism” that dominates Official Washington, Obama’s freelancing approach gave space to hawkish elements of his own administration.

For instance, Secretary of State Kerry came close to announcing a U.S. war against Syria in a bellicose speech on Aug. 30, 2013, only to see Obama pull the rug out from under him as the President worked with Putin to defuse the crisis sparked by a disputed chemical weapons attack outside Damascus. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “How War on Syria Lost Its Way.”]

Similarly, Obama and Putin hammered out the structure for an interim deal with Iran on how to constrain its nuclear program. But when Kerry was sent to seal that agreement in Geneva, he instead inserted new demands from the French (who were carrying water for the Saudis) and nearly screwed it all up. After getting called on the carpet by the White House, Kerry returned to Geneva and finalized the arrangements.[See Consortiumnews.com’s “A Saudi-Israel Defeat on Iran Deal.”]

Unorthodox Foreign Policy

Obama’s unorthodox foreign policy – essentially working in tandem with the Russian president and sometimes at odds with his own foreign policy bureaucracy – has forced Obama into faux outrage when he’s faced with some perceived affront from Russia, such as its agreement to give temporary asylum to National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

For the record, Obama had to express strong disapproval of Snowden’s asylum, though in many ways Putin was doing Obama a favor by sparing Obama from having to prosecute Snowden with the attendant complications for U.S. national security and the damaging political repercussions from Obama’s liberal base.

Putin’s unforced errors also complicated the relationship, such as when he defended Russian hostility toward gays and cracked down on dissent before the Sochi Olympics. Putin became an easy target for U.S. commentators and comedians.

But Obama’s hesitancy to explain the degree of his strategic cooperation with Putin has enabled Official Washington’s still influential neocons, including holdovers within the State Department bureaucracy, to drive more substantive wedges between Obama and Putin. The neocons came to recognize that the Obama-Putin tandem had become a major impediment to their strategic vision.

Without doubt, the neocons’ most dramatic – and potentially most dangerous – counter-move has been Ukraine, where they have lent their political and financial support to opposition forces who sought to break Ukraine away from its Russian neighbor.

Though this crisis also stems from the historical division of Ukraine – between its more European-oriented west and the Russian-ethnic east and south – neocon operatives, with financing from the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy and other U.S. sources, played key roles in destabilizing and overthrowing the democratically elected president.

NED, a $100 million-a-year agency created by the Reagan administration in 1983 to promote political action and psychological warfare against targeted states, lists 65 projects that it supports financially inside Ukraine, including training activists, supporting “journalists” and promoting business groups, effectively creating a full-service structure primed and ready to destabilize a government in the name of promoting “democracy.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “A Shadow US Foreign Policy.”]

State Department neocons also put their shoulders into shoving Ukraine away from Russia. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, the wife of prominent neocon Robert Kagan and the sister-in-law of the Gates-Petraeus adviser Frederick Kagan, advocated strenuously for Ukraine’s reorientation toward Europe.

Last December, Nuland reminded Ukrainian business leaders that, to help Ukraine achieve “its European aspirations, we have invested more than $5 billion.” She said the U.S. goal was to take “Ukraine into the future that it deserves,” by which she meant into the West’s orbit and away from Russia’s.

But President Yanukovych rejected a European Union plan that would have imposed harsh austerity on the already impoverished Ukraine. He accepted a more generous $15 billion loan from Russia, which also has propped up Ukraine’s economy with discounted natural gas. Yanukovych’s decision sparked anti-Russian street protests in Kiev, located in the country’s western and more pro-European region.

Nuland was soon at work planning for “regime change,” encouraging disruptive street protests by personally passing out cookies to the anti-government demonstrators. She didn’t seem to notice or mind that the protesters in Kiev’s Maidan square had hoisted a large banner honoring Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist who collaborated with the German Nazis during World War II and whose militias participated in atrocities against Jews and Poles.

By late January, Nuland was discussing with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt who should be allowed in the new government.

“Yats is the guy,” Nuland said in a phone call to Pyatt that was intercepted and posted online. “He’s got the economic experience, the governing experience. He’s the guy you know.” By “Yats,” Nuland was referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who had served as head of the central bank, foreign minister and economic minister — and who was committed to harsh austerity.

As Assistant Secretary Nuland and Sen. McCain cheered the demonstrators on, the street protests turned violent. Police clashed with neo-Nazi bands, the ideological descendants of Bandera’s anti-Russian Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazi SS during World War II.

With the crisis escalating and scores of people killed in the street fighting, Yanukovych agreed to a E.U.-brokered deal that called for moving up scheduled elections and having the police stand down. The neo-Nazi storm troopers then seized the opening to occupy government buildings and force Yanukovych and many of his aides to flee for their lives.

With these neo-Nazis providing “security,” the remaining parliamentarians agreed in a series of unanimous or near unanimous votes to establish a new government and seek Yanukovych’s arrest for mass murder. Nuland’s choice, Yatsenyuk, emerged as interim prime minister.

Yet, the violent ouster of Yanukovych provoked popular resistance to the coup from the Russian-ethnic south and east. After seeking refuge in Russia, Yanukovych appealed to Putin for help. Putin then dispatched Russian troops to secure control of the Crimea. [For more on this history, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Cheering a ‘Democratic’ Coup in Ukraine.”]

Separating Obama from Putin

The Ukraine crisis has given Official Washington’s neocons another wedge to drive between Obama and Putin. For instance, the neocon flagship Washington Post editorialized on Saturday that Obama was responding “with phone calls” when something much more threatening than “condemnation” was needed.

It’s always stunning when the Post, which so energetically lobbied for the U.S. invasion of Iraq under the false pretense of eliminating its (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction, gets its ire up about another country acting in response to a genuine security threat on its own borders, not half a world away.

But the Post’s editors have never been deterred by their own hypocrisy. They wrote, “Mr. Putin’s likely objective was not difficult to figure. He appears to be responding to Ukraine’s overthrow of a pro-Kremlin government last week with an old and ugly Russian tactic: provoking a separatist rebellion in a neighboring state, using its own troops when necessary.”

The reality, however, appears to have been that neocon elements from within the U.S. government encouraged the overthrow of the elected president of Ukraine via a coup spearheaded by neo-Nazi storm troopers who then terrorized lawmakers as the parliament passed draconian laws, including some intended to punish the Russian-oriented regions which favor Yanukovych.

Yet, besides baiting Obama over his tempered words about the crisis, the Post declared that “Mr. Obama and European leaders must act quickly to prevent Ukraine’s dismemberment. Missing from the president’s statement was a necessary first step: a demand that all Russian forces – regular and irregular – be withdrawn … and that Moscow recognize the authority of the new Kiev government. … If Mr. Putin does not comply, Western leaders should make clear that Russia will pay a heavy price.”

The Post editors are fond of calling for ultimatums against various countries, especially Syria and Iran, with the implication that if they don’t comply with some U.S. demand that harsh actions, including military reprisals, will follow.

But now the neocons, in their single-minded pursuit of endless “regime change” in countries that get in their way, have taken their ambitions to a dangerous new level, confronting nuclear-armed Russia with ultimatums.

By Sunday, the Post’s neocon editors were “spelling out the consequences” for Putin and Russia, essentially proposing a new Cold War. The Post mocked Obama for alleged softness toward Russia and suggested that the next “regime change” must come in Moscow.

“Many in the West did not believe Mr. Putin would dare attempt a military intervention in Ukraine because of the steep potential consequences,” the Post wrote. “That the Russian ruler plunged ahead shows that he doubts Western leaders will respond forcefully. If he does not quickly retreat, the United States must prove him wrong.”

The madness of the neocons has long been indicated by their extraordinary arrogance and their contempt for other nations’ interests. They assume that U.S. military might and other coercive means must be brought to bear on any nation that doesn’t bow before U.S. ultimatums or that resists U.S.-orchestrated coups.

Whenever the neocons meet resistance, they don’t rethink their strategy; they simply take it to the next level. Angered by Russia’s role in heading off U.S. military attacks against Syria and Iran, the neocons escalated their geopolitical conflict by taking it to Russia’s own border, by egging on the violent ouster of Ukraine’s elected president.

The idea was to give Putin an embarrassing black eye as punishment for his interference in the neocons’ dream of “regime change” across the Middle East. Now, with Putin’s countermove, his dispatch of Russian troops to secure control of the Crimea, the neocons want Obama to further escalate the crisis by going after Putin.

Some leading neocons even see ousting Putin as a crucial step toward reestablishing the preeminence of their agenda. NED president Carl Gershman wrote in the Washington Post, “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents.  … Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

At minimum, the neocons hope that they can neutralize Putin as Obama’s ally in trying to tamp down tensions with Syria and Iran – and thus put American military strikes against those two countries back under active consideration.

As events spin out of control, it appears way past time for President Obama to explain to the American people why he has collaborated with President Putin in trying to resolve some of the world’s thorniest problems.

That, however, would require him to belatedly take control of his own administration, to purge the neocon holdovers who have worked to sabotage his actual foreign policy, and to put an end to neocon-controlled organizations, like the National Endowment for Democracy, that use U.S. taxpayers’ money to stir up trouble abroad. That would require real political courage.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat. His two previous books are Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'.