Articles by Truthdig
We found 228 results.
From Tuskegee to Guatemala via Nuremberg
Amy Goodman - Truthdig,
11 Oct 2010
The U.S. government has frequently conducted experiments without the informed consent of the subjects. Women in Puerto Rico were given estrogen, at dangerous levels, when testing birth control pills. Researchers injected unwitting hospital patients with plutonium to study its effects on the human body. Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson and Pennsylvania prison authorities exposed inmates to chemicals, including dioxin, to test their effects. Subjects of a number of these experiments and others have died or had their lives indelibly harmed, all in the name of progress or profit.
→ read full articleMore Mao Than Thou: What the Hell Is Happening in Nepal?
Reese Erlich – Truthdig,
6 Sep 2010
Nepal’s parliament will attempt to elect a prime minister, the sixth try in almost three months. The impasse reflects the deep antagonism between the Maoists, Leninists, Marxists and socialists who are all fighting for control.
→ read full articleOur Enabling Media Is Worse Than Ever
Stanley Kutler - Truthdig,
6 Sep 2010
Once he tasted the realities of political life, Thomas Jefferson had harsh words for the free press. What would he have made of the irresponsible, shoddy, pernicious zeal that passes for news today?
→ read full articleInching Away From Bullfighting and Its Macho B.S.
T.L. Caswell – Truthdig,
30 Aug 2010
Catalonia has imposed a 2012 ban on the tradition, which is losing support throughout Spain. Could this toxic mix of blood lust and male preening finally be on its way out?
→ read full articleThank God for the Whistle-Blowers
Robert Scheer - Truthdig,
9 Aug 2010
Our government recruited terrorists from the Arab world to go to Afghanistan and fight in that holy war against godless communism with even greater enthusiasm during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who proclaimed the Muslim fanatics “freedom fighters.” As the 9/11 Commission report stated, those freedom fighters included Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks…. They never learn. It was Holbrooke who helped design the Vietnam-era assassination programs exposed in the Pentagon Papers and now replicated in the Afghanistan document. Thanks to Daniel Ellsberg, who risked much to make the record of the Vietnam War public, we learned about the madness that Holbrooke and others were creating. We should be grateful to the whistle-blowers who gave us the Afghanistan war documents for once again letting us in on the sick joke that passes for U.S foreign policy.
→ read full articleMarried to the Clinton Mob
Robert Scheer – Truthdig,
9 Aug 2010
Out of respect for privacy, even concerning famous people, I wasn’t going to write about the marriage of Chelsea Clinton to a Goldman Sachs alum and budding hedge-fund hustler with the resources to buy a $4 million loft so soon after graduating from Stanford. Hopefully Marc Mezvinsky won’t follow in the footsteps of his financier father, “Fast-Talkin’ Eddie,” as they called him back in Iowa, a former Democratic House member who just completed a five-year federal sentence for dozens of fraud felonies.
→ read full articleWikiLeaks’ Afghan War Diary
Amy Goodman – Democracy NOW! - Truthdig,
2 Aug 2010
Homeland security agents descended on a recent hacker conference in New York where he was scheduled to speak. He had canceled. He said the Obama administration also tried to get the Australian government to arrest him. Speaking to me from London, Assange said: “We are not pacifists. We are transparency activists who understand that transparent government tends to produce just government. That is our modus operandi behind our whole organization: to get out suppressed information into the public where the press and the public and our nations’ politics can work on it to produce better outcomes.”
→ read full articleCalling All Future-Eaters
Chris Hedges - Truthdig,
26 Jul 2010
The human species during its brief time on Earth has exhibited a remarkable capacity to kill itself off. The Cro-Magnons dispatched the gentler Neanderthals. The conquistadors, with the help of smallpox, decimated the native populations in the Americas. Modern industrial warfare in the 20th century took at least 100 million lives, most of them civilians. And now we sit passive and dumb as corporations and the leaders of industrialized nations ensure that climate change will accelerate to levels that could mean the extinction of our species. Homo sapiens, as the biologist Tim Flannery points out, are the “future-eaters.”
→ read full articleIf Only Information Flowed as Freely as Oil
Amy Goodman – Truthdig,
19 Jul 2010
On BP Shutting Out Scientists, Media: “Deep Spill 2” sounds like a sequel to a Hollywood thriller. Unfortunately, it is more of a reality show. “Deep Spill 2” is the name of an ambitious series of proposed scientific experiments that should be happening right now. Scientists from around the globe are ready, literally, to dive in to understand what is happening with the oil and gas that are spewing into the Gulf of Mexico with the force of a volcano. There is one problem, though: BP won’t let them.
→ read full articleThe Gaza Freedom Flotilla: Framing the Narrative
Amy Goodman – Truthdig,
14 Jun 2010
I caught up with two veteran journalists who were covering the Gaza Freedom Flotilla for Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald, chief correspondent Paul McGeough and his photographer, Kate Geraghty. They were in Istanbul, where they had been deported from Israel. They had spent time on most of the ships of the flotilla, but were aboard the smaller, U.S.-flagged Challenger 1 when the raid occurred.
→ read full articleAfter Religion Fizzles, We’re Stuck with Nietzsche
Chris Hedges - Truthdig,
17 May 2010
We are rapidly losing the capacity for the moral life. We reject the anxiety of individual responsibility that laid the foundations for the open society. We are enjoined, after all, to love our neighbor, not our tribe. This empowerment of individual conscience was the starting point of the great ethical systems of all civilizations. Those who championed this radical individualism, from Confucius to Socrates to Jesus, fostered not obedience and conformity, but dissent and self-criticism. They initiated the separation of individual responsibility from the demands of the state.
→ read full articleBP: Billionaire Polluter
Amy Goodman - Truthdig,
10 May 2010
Less than a week after British Petroleum unleashed what could be the worst industrial environmental disaster in U.S. history, the company announced more than $6 billion in profits.
→ read full articleThe NATO Nuisance
William Pfaff - Truthdig,
3 May 2010
Large and firmly implanted bureaucratic organizations are almost impossible to kill, even when they have no reason to continue to exist, as NATO has not since the Soviet Union, communism and the Warsaw Pact all collapsed.
→ read full articleWhat Obama’s Nuclear Weapons Conference Missed
William Pfaff - Truthdig,
19 Apr 2010
The specific inspiration for weapons proliferation among vulnerable Third World states is the desire to have a nuclear deterrent against invasion or attack by the United States (or in the Iran case, Israel), or by some other nation in the future.
→ read full articleAMARTYA SEN’S ‘THE IDEA OF JUSTICE’
Glen Newey - Truthdig,
5 Apr 2010
This review originally appeared in the London Review of Books, whose website is www.lrb.co.uk, and is reposted with permission.At some time in the past the idea took hold that social justice was all about the state’s hoovering up resources and then blowing them at needy or deserving recipients. Some of these resources, money for example, […]
→ read full articlePENANCE DEMANDS ACTION
Eugene Robinson - Truthdig,
2 Apr 2010
At its holiest time of the year, the Roman Catholic Church is being forced to confront not only the central mystery of the faith—life after death—but also a more worldly riddle: What did the Holy Father know, and when did he know it? Questions about whether Pope Benedict XVI was personally involved, as he rose […]
→ read full articleOBAMA’S BAD PRESCRIPTION FOR INDONESIA
Amy Goodman – Truthdig,
24 Mar 2010
President Barack Obama dedicated the signing of health care legislation to a number of people, including his mother, S. Ann Dunham Soetoro, who, he said, “argued with insurance companies even as she battled cancer in her final days.” The health care legislative process and its frenetic endgame prompted the president to postpone a trip to […]
→ read full articleCOMPETITION IN IGNOMINY
William Pfaff - Truthdig,
4 Mar 2010
There is a lot of money to be made by big international banks in impoverished small, and even medium-size, countries in times of world crisis.On my flight to Doha, where money doesn’t seem to be a problem, I read in London’s Guardian about the vultures making serious money out of the poorest national economies in […]
→ read full articleU.S. ALLIES IN EUROPE BEGIN TO PULL BACK
William Pfaff - Truthdig,
24 Feb 2010
Last Friday [Feb 19 2010] five NATO governments made it known that they want American nuclear weapons removed from their territories. They include the Benelux three, together with Germany and Norway. The five reportedly will ask that all the European NATO governments endorse their position before a meeting in New York in May. The Dutch […]
→ read full articleIT’S GREEK TO GOLDMAN SACHS
Robert Scheer - Truthdig,
20 Feb 2010
“What is this Goldman Sachs and why has it caused us so much grief?” is a question they must be asking in even the most remote of Greek villages, as they are throughout much of this economically troubled world. The Greek financial scandal in which Goldman Sachs stands accused of selling dubious derivatives that concealed […]
→ read full articleHAITI, FORGIVE US
Amy Goodman - Truthdig,
10 Feb 2010
The tragedy of the Haitian earthquake continues to unfold, with slow delivery of aid, the horrific number of amputations performed out of desperate medical necessity, more than a million homeless, perhaps 240,000 dead, hunger, dehydration, the emergence of infections and waterborne diseases, and the approach of the rainy season, which will be followed by the […]
→ read full articleTHE CREED OF OBJECTIVITY KILLED THE NEWS
Chris Hedges – Truthdig,
5 Feb 2010
The symbiotic relationship between the press and the power elite worked for nearly a century. It worked as long as our power elite, no matter how ruthless or insensitive, was competent. But once our power elite became incompetent and morally bankrupt, the press, along with the power elite, lost its final vestige of credibility. The […]
→ read full articleA MEMORY OF HOWARD
Daniel Ellsberg – Truthdig,
28 Jan 2010
I just learned that my friend Howard Zinn died today. Earlier this morning, I was being interviewed by the Boston Phoenix, in connection with the February release of a documentary in which he is featured prominently. The interviewer asked me who my own heroes were, and I had no hesitation in answering, first, “Howard Zinn.” […]
→ read full articleFROM COUP-LITE TO TRUTH-LITE: 10 WAYS THE U.S. FOUGHT DEMOCRACY IN HONDURAS
Andrés Thomas Conteris – Truthdig,
16 Jan 2010
Andrés Thomas Conteris, reporting from within the besieged embassy where ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya has taken shelter, outlines 10 ways the United States has supported the coup and undermined democracy in Honduras.In his essay “Top Ten Ways You Can Tell Which Side the United States Government Is On With Regard to the Military Coup […]
→ read full articleTHE QUESTION NO U.S. OFFICIAL DARE ASK
William Pfaff - Truthdig,
9 Jan 2010
It could be, as they say in the bureaucracies, “a career destroyer” to ask whether it has been a terrible error for the United States to have built a system of more than 700 military bases and stations girdling the world.It is time to ask a question that virtually no one in an official or […]
→ read full articleONE DAY WE’LL ALL BE TERRORISTS
Chris Hedges, Truthdig,
2 Jan 2010
Our descent is the familiar disease of decaying empires. Dissent is starting to become defined as an act of terrorism.Syed Fahad Hashmi can tell you about the dark heart of America. He knows that our First Amendment rights have become a joke, that habeas corpus no longer exists and that we torture, not only in […]
→ read full articleTHE 20 BEST SOCIALLY CONSCIOUS MOVIES OF THE DECADE
Peter Z. Scheer - Truthdig,
1 Jan 2010
2009 was a record year at the box office, but there are those who worry that Hollywood has gone into decline over the last decade. Moviegoers are reportedly much more interested in gimmicks than substance, and people supposedly would rather watch talking robots than talking humans, let alone stories about the human condition. But the […]
→ read full articleGORBACHEV’S SERMON ON THE MOUNT
Robert Scheer, Truthdig,
13 Nov 2009
On the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it’s worthwhile to remember that ending a stupid, harmful war is the most admirable thing a great leader can do.“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” That biblical quotation certainly applies to Mikhail Gorbachev, a man not honored enough […]
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