Stephen Lendman

On May 14, 2008, New York Times writer Lynnley Browning headlined, "Ex-Banker from UBS Is Indicted in Tax Case," saying:

"The one-count conspiracy indictment, unsealed in federal court, accuses the former banker, Bradley Birkenfeld, of helping (a wealthy American real estate developer) evade taxes on $200 million held in bank accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein."

According to the indictment, "fictitious trusts and bogus corporations (were created) to conceal the ownership and control of offshore assets. They also advised clients to destroy bank records and helped them file false tax returns...."

National Whistleblowers Center (NWC) covers his case on whistleblowers.org, saying:

"Bradley Birkenfeld commenced serving a three-year and four-month sentence in federal prison on January 8, 2010, a direct result of blowing the whistle on one of the largest tax fraud schemes in US history."

On April 15, he filed an appeal for clemency.

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Patrick Martin

Henry Kissinger (left) and Augusto Pinochet (center)

Documents released last week by the National Security Archive, which has played a valuable role in uncovering evidence of the crimes of American imperialism in Latin America, provide new details on the role of top US officials in facilitating the assassination of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier.

These documents add to the overwhelming case for the prosecution of then-secretary of state Henry Kissinger, then-CIA director George H. W. Bush and other top officials for their role in these and other murders perpetrated by military juntas allied with and backed by the US government.

The September 21, 1976 murder of Letelier and an American aide, Ronni Moffitt, was the most spectacular act of international terrorism on US soil up to that time. The two were killed, and Moffitt’s husband Michael wounded, when a bomb detonated underneath their car as they rounded Sheridan Circle in northwest Washington D.C., barely a mile from the White House.

Letelier, who had served as foreign minister and then defense minister in the reformist government of Salvador Allende, was arrested and tortured in the September 11, 1973 military coup lead by General Augusto Pinochet. He was eventually sent into exile, but became a thorn in the side of the Chilean junta because of his political activities abroad, exposing the savagery of the junta’s repression and campaigning for an international boycott.

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Jay Barr

This is the reality. This what the 76 senators are supporting.

The Boxer-Isakson "Israel Support Letter" [.pdf] addressed to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and currently signed by 76 senators [.pdf] answers a question no one needed to ask: Does the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) have the support of the United States Senate? However, unlike the proverbial napkin former AIPAC bigwig Steven Rosen boasted that he could have signed by 70 senators within 24 hours, this particular piece of paper contains a slew of Likud talking points, few of which are supported by reality. Some read an implicit rebuke of the Obama administration in the letter for the administration’s alleged spat with Israel, though despite the new conventional wisdom that there’s a major schism between the two, it would be hard to point to on-the-record words or actions taken by the Obama administration that translate into substantive criticism of Israeli policies.

The letter states, "Despite your [Clinton's] best efforts, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have been frozen for over a year." If Clinton were truly making her best efforts to restart the peace process, she would wield the considerable U.S. leverage of aid to tiny Israel in order to rein in their increasingly extreme activities that violate even their own lukewarm prior commitments. One commitment, the so-called settlement freeze, involves the seemingly self-evident notion that if you are serious about good-faith negotiations over borders you do not continue to expand your territory into the ever shrinking piece that is well-established as belonging to the other side. Instead, Clinton bragged at her recent speech to AIPAC about the increase in U.S. aid to Israel in 2010 and the planned increase for 2011.

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Marc W. Herold

A child killed in recent airstrikes, western Afghanistan

“The American public is conditionally tolerant of [military] casualties and consistently indifferent to collateral damage.” ~Dr. Karl P. Mueller, School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Maxwell Air Force Base

"General McChrystal’s data provided an opportunity to reveal Pentagon lying (or incompetence) to all, but only the libertarians rose to the occasion. The mainstream U.S media, Obama cultists, and much of the U.S antiwar movement persist in blithely quoting UNAMA and consuming Pentagon and embedded “patriotic” U.S reporters’ characterizations of America’s War in Afghanistan."

The Politics of Counting Dead Afghan Civilians: Responses by the Libertarian Right and Obama Liberals to McChrystal’s Numbers.

The ever-so-faithful stenographer of Pentagon truths, USA Today, printed numbers put forth by General McChrystal on Afghan civilians who perished at the hands of NATO.[1] The article headlined “NATO Strikes Killing More Afghan Civilians,” noted that such deaths rose from 29 during the first three months of 2009, to 72 during 2010.

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