Truthout 6/9

William Rivers Pitt | I Come to Praise Helen Thomas, Not to Bury Her
William Rivers Pitt, Truthout: "I am not going to try and defend the comments Helen Thomas made about getting the Jews out of Palestine and sending them to Germany and Poland; that was an unbelievably stupid thing to say, not just to a rabbi, but to anyone. Helen is a Lebanese-American with very strong views on Israel, views to which she has every right, but in saying what she said, she abrogated two responsibilities: first, to treat others as she would want to be treated, and second, to avoid undercutting the legitimacy of her own views with incendiary, insulting and inappropriate vitriol. Helen blew it on both fronts, and her words became torpedoes that struck the ship of her career at the waterline."
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Dahr Jamail | Military Neglecting Fort Hood Soldiers' Medical Needs
Dahr Jamail, Truthout: "At least 50 soldiers from Fort Hood who have medical profiles that should prohibit them from military training have been sent to the National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, California, regardless of their conditions. Truthout spoke with some of these soldiers on June 7, before they were to fly back to Fort Hood the next day."
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News in Brief: Union Carbide Officials Sentenced to Prison in Bhupol and More ...
Mike Ludwig, Truthout: "A court in Bhupol, India sentenced seven Union Carbide officials to two years in prison; a natural gas pipeline in Texas explodes killing two people and injured three; scientists confirm massive underwater plumes of oil spreading at least 40 miles from the leaking Deepwater Horizon well; Chinese police beat protesters demonstrating against a local Communist Party chief; Italian police officers sent to prison for violent raid on anti-globalization activist center in Genoa, Italy; and more ..."
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Primary Results Show Battle Ahead for Incumbents
Yana Kunichoff, Truthout: "In the primary results Wednesday, three high-profile legislator bypassed the predicted anti-incumbent rage in what may mark a turning point in the midterm campaign season. On the Republican side, conservative candidates prevailed, highlighting the possible strength of the Tea Party in this electoral cycle."
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Caravan Risks Another Attack to Break Blockade in Oaxaca
Mike Ludwig, Truthout: "A caravan carrying food and supplies headed to the autonomous town of San Juan Copala in the Mexican state of Oaxaca yesterday determined to break a paramilitary blockade just 41 days after pro-state militants attacked a similar caravan and killed two activists."
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Erasing Arizona: Dark-Skinned Mural Faces "Lightened" to Appease Bigots; Public Outcry Ensues
Randall Amster J.D., Ph.D., Truthout: "It is difficult to fully explain the impacts of Arizona's burgeoning and overt anti-immigrant climate these days. To outsiders, it must seem like either the inmates have finally taken over the asylum or, alternatively, that someone is finally standing up to an inept federal government. To those of us living here, it further appears as either a formalized decree of misguided policies that have long been in place below the radar or a chance to finally push a brewing agenda to its logical and necessary extreme on a statewide scale. While all of these sentiments possess a kernel of truth, more to the point is that Arizona today has, in many ways, simply become a veritable theater of the absurd."
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Feds Knew of Gulf Spill Risks in 2000, Document Shows
Shashank Bengali, McClatchy Newspapers: "A decade ago, U.S. government regulators warned that a major deepwater oil spill could start with a fire on a drilling rig, prove hard to stop and cause extensive damage to fish eggs and wetlands because there were few good ways to capture oil underwater."
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Stephen Soldz | CYA for the CIA: The CIA's Torture Research Program
Stephen Soldz, Truthout: "Over the last year, there have been an increasing number of accounts suggesting that, along with the CIA's 'enhanced interrogation' torture program, there was a related program experimenting with and researching the application of the torture."
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Senate Weakens Bid to Tax Wall Street Like Rest of Us
Kevin G. Hall and David Lightman, McClatchy Newspapers: "Senate Democrats Tuesday weakened efforts to end a controversial Wall Street tax break, watering down a bid to raise taxes on managers of hedge funds, private-equity funds, venture capital firms and other business partnerships."
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Congress Calls BP's Hayward to Testify
Deb Weinstein, Truthout: "Fifty-one days after oil began gushing out of the ocean floor and into the Gulf of Mexico, Congress has extended a request that, in political parlance, is more of a demand: that Tony Hayward, the much maligned CEO of British Petroleum (BP), play question-and-answer before the Senate Energy and Commerce Committee June 17 on Capitol Hill."
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Oil Companies Dishonor Our Troops and Undermine Our Security
T.J. Buonomo, Truthout: "Since 2003, more than 4,300 American troops and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have become casualties of a war full of contradictions. One of the most fundamental of these is embodied in U.S. assurances to the Iraqi and American publics that Iraq will be a fully sovereign country upon the United States' military withdrawal at the end of 2011. The lobbying activities of U.S. oil executives and their political allies suggest efforts to perpetuate a more dependent relationship."
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What's Next for the Nuclear Disarmament Movement?
Lawrence S. Wittner, Foreign Policy in Focus: "Many advocates of nuclear disarmament felt considerable elation at the election of Barack Obama in 2008. In the previous years, the Bush administration had scrapped the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, refused to support ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, championed the development of new U.S. nuclear weapons, and abandoned arms control and disarmament negotiations. Obama, by contrast, not only promised to reverse these priorities, but - during and after his campaign - stated his commitment to building a nuclear weapons-free world."
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Tom Tomorrow | This Modern World
Tom Tomorrow, Truthout: "Obama the far-left radical and a few of the far-left radical things he has done."
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Jim Hightower | Airlines Battle Workplace Democracy
Jim Hightower, Truthout: "If you ever want to spook a smug, stuffed-shirt corporate CEO - I mean spook him so bad that he jumps clear out of his Guccis and screams louder than Little Richard - sneak up behind him and shout 'union!' They hate that."
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Retired General: "We Have to Accept the Fact That We Did Torture People" (Video)
Laura Flanders, GRITtv: "Torture is still happening, says Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez of black sites around the world that the Obama administration has yet to close down. Sanchez was the highest-ranking Latino in the U.S. Army when he retired in 2006, after having been commander of ground forces in Iraq during a critical period of the war - and during the period when abuses at Abu Ghraib occurred. Since his retirement, he has called for a truth commission to investigate torture, and, he says, 'Americans need to face up to' what happened there."
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