By Saul Landau I sit on a gray plastic chair, facing a tiny, gray, plastic table and another empty, gray, plastic chair, waiting for Gerardo Hernandez in the visiting room of the maximum-security federal pen in Victorville, California. Next to me, in similar seating arrangements, a middle-aged black man speaks to a woman, presumably his wife; other black men talk to their spouses. Two kids run from the “chi ...

By Saul Landau You can disagree with violent anti-Castro dogma, but such dissent could also get you killed – or your business torched as happened on April 25 to Airline Brokers Co. Some Cuban exiles apparently take free speech so seriously that they punish those who use it in “inappropriate” ways. Miami has witnessed countless incidents for five plus decades where those who consider their own views on how t ...

By Saul Landau Fidel Castro scored one big political victory last week, without speaking or even leaving his house – and one sort of amusing little win. By a lopsided score at the Summit of the Americas meeting in Cartagena, Fidel beat President Obama 31-2. The USA and Canada still want to exclude Cuba from future meetings, but the rest of the Hemisphere rejected the US position. Excluding Cuba, most Presid ...

By Saul Landau The Syrian conflict continued to boil -- or boil over -- when Syrian troops fired across the Turkish border on April 9, apparently killing either fleeing refugees or armed combatants. Then the UN team entered and began monitoring a shaky ceasefire – shaky because the Syrian National Council in exile and their backers in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Washington and western capitals don’t want the fight ...

Danny Glover and Saul Landau   Highway 15 connects California’s Inland Empire with Las Vegas – accounting for the relative thickness of Saturday morning traffic. So we don’t stare too long at signs advertising Gentleman’s Clubs – showing no gentlemen, but rather attractive young women. Did you get it? If not you will. A few miles ahead the road ascends into the high desert. A billboard descends to Supe ...

By Saul Landau Western media has focused attention on Sgt. Robert Bales’ background. He allegedly murdered 16 Afghan civilians, 9 of them children, near Kandahar. After the bloodbath, Bales returned to his base and confessed. The media delved into Bales’ childhood, his marriage, and even his role on the high school football team. Reporters underlined his recent financial stress, war-related traumas, and pos ...

Saul Landau Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) want war with Iran and refuse to learn lessons from the futile wars this country has perpetrated since US troops landed in Korea in 1950. They begin with “facts not in evidence,” as lawyers say. “The prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran is a threat to the entire world, including particularly the U.S., and its destabilizing consequences are not ...

Saul Landau   “Romney now flaunting his wealth to impress voters!” (The Onion) I smiled weakly when Liberal Democrat friends guffawed last week over verbal foibles of Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. It was sort of funny when Romney said: “Michigan’s trees are just the right height,” and “I Have Some Friends Who Are NASCAR Team Owners.” And his wife “drives a couple of Cadillacs.” Both at the same time? ...

After 9/11, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a Yale graduate with a law degree from Columbia, and fellow neo cons plotted to twist and invent “intelligence” data to convince the public that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, so as to build a case for invading Iraq. From 2001 to 2005, Libby served as Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs, Chief of Staff to the Vice Preside ...

By Saul Landau The media’s ability to confuse celebrity “news” with war and economic disaster grows stronger. “As North Korea ramped up its threats to attack South Korea, CNN reassured its viewers that a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula would have “no effect whatsoever” on its Whitney Houston coverage.  (The Borowitz Report) Whitney even in death outranks fighting in Syria, wherever that is. Right wing p ...