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Editor’s Picks for 1/25

PICKS are stories from many sources, selected by our editors or recommended by our readers because they are important, surprising, troubling, enlightening, inspiring, or amusing. They appear on our site and in our daily newsletter. Please send suggested articles, videos, podcasts, etc. to picks@whowhatwhy.org.

Trump Effect in The Netherlands (Dan)

Center-right PM Mark Rutte has taken a hard turn against multiculturalism in an effort to prevent a takeover by the far-right Geert Wilders. The effect mirrors the way Trump caused the entire rhetoric in the US political system to accommodate far-right opinion.

Obama Bombs Libya One Last Time View article …

cyber security

Saudis Visit Trump

PICKS are stories from many sources, selected by our editors or recommended by our readers because they are important, surprising, troubling, enlightening, inspiring, or amusing. They appear on our site and in our daily newsletter. Please send suggested articles, videos, podcasts, etc. to picks@whowhatwhy.org.

 

Trump & Saudi Arabia: Oil Boycott or Bromance? (Trevin)

Juan Cole lists some disputes in honor of this week’s meeting between US President Donald Trump and Saudi’s minister of defense, Muhammad bin Salman.

Cambodia Furious Over US Debt Repayment Request (Jimmy)

The US dropped over 500,000 tons of bombs on the country during View article …

Senator Joseph McCarthy, Edward R Murrow

Mar 09

 

PICKS are stories from many sources, selected by our editors or recommended by our readers because they are important, surprising, troubling, enlightening, inspiring, or amusing. They appear on our site and in our daily newsletter. Please send suggested articles, videos, podcasts, etc. to picks@whowhatwhy.org.

 

Intel Whistleblowers Fear Government Won’t Protect Them (Trevin)

Despite President Obama’s 2012 executive order promising additional protections, there doesn’t seem to have been much noticeable improvement in the confidence of national security whistleblowers to be able to come forward without retaliation.

 

Libya Intervention Part 2 Based on Faulty Intelligence (Reader Pat)

The UK Sunday Telegraph View article …

Leaders sign the Declaration of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization

June 15

PICKS are stories from many sources, selected by our editors or recommended by our readers because they are important, surprising, troubling, enlightening, inspiring, or amusing. They appear on our site and in our daily newsletter. Please send suggested articles, videos, podcasts, etc. to picks@whowhatwhy.org.

 

 

North Dakota Vote to Stay Local with Farming (Dan)

Voters stop a bill that would overturn Depression-era rules against pork and dairy farming, making way for larger corporate entities in the state.

 

MI6 Gets Off Scot-Free Over Rendition of Suspected Islamists to Libya (Reader Pat)

Colluding with the CIA in kidnapping and deportation of victims View article …

Family of Secrets, Bush

Only Lone Nuts Need Apply: The Media’s Antipathy to Deeper Digs

Hello, friends. Here’s the sixth installment of my new Substack newsletter. I hope you like it. You can subscribe here.

As a subscriber, you’ll enjoy early access to my work before it’s posted at WhoWhatWhy. You’ll also enjoy exclusive Substack-only content.

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Last week I told you about my surprising and confounding experience with Alex Jones. Before Jones made himself radioactive and loathed for his outrageous claims that the Sandy Hook school massacre was staged and no one died, he View article …

Editors’ Picks for Oct 16

We’re pleased to introduce PICKS — stories selected by our editors because they are important, surprising, troubling, enlightening, inspiring, or amusing. They will appear on our site and in our daily newsletter. And we invite you to recommend articles, videos, podcasts, etc. Please send them to picks@whowhatwhy.org.

 

Stunning New Levels of Savagery From ISIS (Russ)

So disgusting we will leave it to you to click and read if you dare. What role might a kind of mental illness play is such brutality?

 

Fox News Analyst Indicted As Fraudster (Klaus)

A man who has often appeared on Fox News as View article …

Syria: We Can Learn a Lot From the “Small Stuff”

Every now and then, Syria jumps into the headlines, and our consciousness. Even then, it’s easy to forget the big picture: that the United States government and its allies are waging, through surrogates, a war designed to overthrow an existing government.

One of the reasons we forget is that the news media does such a terrible job of providing context. Here are a few contextual aspects we’ve collected over the past few weeks:

Who Caused the Crime?

The New York Times View article …

The Hijacking of Arab Spring, and the Media’s Complicity

For those versed in the black arts of propaganda, the hijacking of Arab Spring must be a beauteous thing to behold.

First came evidently spontaneous uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. Then some up-and-comer in Washington or London or Paris had a brainstorm, a new twist on a very old idea: if you can’t beat em, join em. Or even better, co-opt them, and use them for your own purposes.

The old way of getting rid of “inconvenient” leaders was so 20th-century—in the case of Saddam Hussein, a monstrous lie followed by View article …

Qaddafi, Bush And The Iraq Big Lie

While the US government expresses outrage over the brutality of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi toward his own people, we’re missing a complex but significant wrinkle that ties Qaddafi to America’s cover-up of the true path to war in Iraq.

In May, 2009, a man named Ibn Shaikh al-Libi supposedly committed suicide while being held in a Libyan jail. Al-Libi is a deeply, deeply interesting fellow. Back in 2002, he was tortured by Egypt under US direction. It appears that the reason the US government had View article …

Donald Trump, Hassan Rouhani

The Iran Nuclear Deal and the View From Tehran

Seyed Hossein Mousavian is a Middle East security and nuclear policy specialist at the Woodrow Wilson Center at Princeton. A former Iranian ambassador to Germany, he was the chief spokesman for Iran during its nuclear negotiations with the international community. Several years ago, he parted ways with the Iranian government. This week he joins Jeff Schechtman for our WhoWhatWhy podcast.

 

Mousavian sets the stage with a look at Iran’s reaction to the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement (JCPOA). He talks about the debate that took place inside View article …

Guantanamo, Prisoners

Suicide by Torture — a Guantanamo Cover-Up

What is it like to bear witness to victims of torture? Psychotherapist Dr. Jeffrey Kaye, whose work for Survivors International took him inside the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, talks with WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman about the experience of sitting with torture victims, how the numbing happens, and how the closer you get, the more you want to look away.

 

Torture that was never intended to get information, Kaye says, but instead to create dependency, weakness and dread. Antimalarial drugs have been used on detainees, though not for malaria, but because they have such awful and disorienting side effects.

 

Equally powerful is Kaye’s View article …

Child, Central African Republic

Hearts of Darkness, Part 2: Black Skin, Pseudoscience, and White Domination

In our second excerpt from Milton Allimadi’s Hearts of Darkness, we see how white people over the centuries “explained” black people, with a wide variety of pseudoscientific imbecilities, starting with Herodotus. Over 400 years before the birth of Christ, this Greek historian informed the world that both the seed and the semen of the African are black. Later, more and more explorers, mostly northern European — and Christian — went into Africa and came back with stories and maps showing the continent’s great potential for colonizing, plundering, and enslaving its people.

 

But how could good Christians enslave their fellow View article …