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Posts published by “Saul Landau”

When J. Edgar Hoover Tapped My Phone

As a kid I listened on the radio to “The FBI in Peace and War.” My parents had listened during the mid 1930s to “G-Men.” FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover helped produce those programs and,…

Bolivian Democracy and the US

The prospect of socialist peasant leader Evo Morales as Bolivia's next president disturbed Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Charles Shapiro. “It would not be welcome news in Washington to see the…

Elegy to the Salton Sea

In 19th Century England, William Wordsworth strolled through his garden. “I am at one with Nature,” he declared. Hemingway’s 20th Century hero Nick paddled with his father in the canoe in the unspoiled Minnesota lakes.…

Vietnam and Iraq: Fog of War

American leaders don’t easily learn lessons from the past. Before choosing war in Iraq, the Bush leadership might profitably have consulted former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s 1995 memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons…

Rush to Judgment

Was Rush Limbaugh high when he said, “There's nothing good about drug use. It destroys individuals’ families, societies, some might say this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing…

Techno-Burger, Hold the Fries

I fell asleep reading an article in a magazine I grabbed in the hotel lobby. The author crowed about how successful we Americans have become in exporting our ways of life, our basic cultural values.…

The President and Corporate Fraud

I felt like blaming someone when, like millions of other Americans, I took a WorldCom bath. How, I asked my wife, could the company that owns MCI, one of the world’s telecommunication giants, declare bankruptcy?…

Watergate and the War Against Terrorism

As I tried to explain to my class about the tradition of individual rights and the various attempts of the Executive Branch to usurp various and sundry of those rights over the years, a student’s…

The Questions Not Asked as the Empire Strikes Back

Five days after the assault, Americans have ingested a TV, radio and print diet of bombast, hyperbole and sheer nonsense. The messages from our elected leaders, so-called experts and actors posing as TV anchors have…

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