PRESS ROOM

Laura Carlsen of the Center for International Policy says that Oaxacan teachers are protesting not only teacher evaluations, but also the entirety of neoliberal reform under Pena Nieto... READ MORE »

In a disgusting moment of ‘straight talk’ from Senator John McCain (R-AZ) this week, the former Republican Presidential nominee claimed that President Obama was “directly responsible” for the violent and deadly carnage at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. The senior Senator from Arizona quickly backtracked, offering a Washington-style apology in which he clarified that he “misspoke” and didn’t mean to imply that President Obama was “personally” responsible, simply that it was his policies that led to the death of 49 people and the wounding of another 53... READ MORE »

Sebastian Junger’s book is doing tremendous damage to the public perception of veterans, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicide... READ MORE »

Two weeks ago the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) released a report entitled “Extending American Power: Strategies to Expand U.S. Engagement in a Competitive World Order.” It could just as easily have been entitled “What Hillary Should Do When She Gets Elected, and Why She Should Hire Us to Do It.” The report’s authors run the gamut from interventionist Republican neocons like Robert Kagan to Democratic hawks like Michele Fluornoy, the co-founder of CNAS and a possible candidate for Secretary of Defense in a Hillary Clinton administration. There is not a fresh or independent voice in the lot. As Stephen Walt rightly points out in his take-down of the report in Foreign Policy, this is at best a status quo document, and at worst a doubling down on the failed policies of the past two decades. And why should we expect otherwise? After all, as Walt notes, “the report’s signatories helped create many of the problems they now seek to fix, so you’d hardly expect them to cast a critical eye on their own handiwork.”... READ MORE »

Last week, as part of Ralph Nader’s four-day conference in Washington, DC, Breaking Through Power, my friend Raed Jarrar, a Palestinian-Iraqi-American, and I gave a talk on the horrors of war. My perspectives of combat, occupation, colonial administration and war time politics, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Washington, were set besides Raed’s experiences of living in Baghdad following the Gulf War, through the years of sanctions, into the American invasion, yes, the glory of Shock and Awe, and for the first year of occupation. Raed left Baghdad in 2004, but returned to Iraq to help rebuild, before becoming a full-time peace and anti-war activist.... READ MORE »

TomDispatch regular Bill Hartung reveals another kind of Pentagon effort to obscure and obfuscate involving another kind of highly creative accounting: think slush funds, secret programs, dodgy bookkeeping, and the type of financial malfeasance that could only be carried out by an institution that is, by its very nature, too big to fail (inside the Beltway if not on the battlefield)... READ MORE »

For more about what U.S. could do to stop the flow of guns into Mexico and the crisis of Mexico’s missing guns, CCTV America’s Mike Walter spoke to Laura Carlsen, director of the Americas Program at the Center for International Policy. She’s also a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus... READ MORE »

Defending the United States and its allies is serious business. That’s all the more reason Congress should stop playing games with Pentagon spending. A good place to start would be to put aside proposals to add billions to the department’s already ample budget. The Senate took a step in the right direction earlier this month when it beat back an amendment by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) that would have added $18 billion in Pentagon spending beyond the amount agreed to in last year’s bipartisan budget deal... READ MORE »

Today’s foreign policy speech by Hillary Clinton was designed to demonstrate that Donald Trump has neither the knowledge nor the temperament to serve as commander-in-chief. She succeeded. And as Clinton indicated at numerous points during her remarks, nowhere is this more obvious than on the question of who should have the power to decide whether to use nuclear weapons... READ MORE »

President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima this morning was a piece of history. He rose to the occasion in his remarks, speaking eloquently not only of the need to eliminate nuclear weapons but also questioning the institution of war itself, all with a clear focus on the devastating human consequences of armed conflict. Now the President must use the visit as a starting point for taking concrete steps that will hasten the creation of a world free of nuclear weapons. He has eight months left to make a difference... READ MORE »

William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, shines a bright light into the darkest corners of the Pentagon’s shady spending and accounting practices... READ MORE »

In an attempt to understand the different sources and dynamics of violence, the Center for International Policy and the Latin America Working Group Education Fund traveled to El Salvador late last year. We interviewed journalists, analysts, government officials, judges, police officers, citizens, activists, humanitarian workers, diplomats, and academics. Our report, coming in a series of posts over the next week, will lay out El Salvador’s current security situation and provide recommendations for U.S. policy... READ MORE »