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Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.



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The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement



SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris




SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018



SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018




SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018




SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017






SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven



2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.


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THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.


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Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

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"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.





Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.


JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

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Subscribe to Counterpoint bulletins via our subscriptions page.

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Election Recounts in Key Battleground States Will Reveal Deep Flaws in U.S. Electoral Machinery

Posted Nov. 30, 2016

MP3 Interview with Steven Rosenfeld, journalist with AlterNet.org and author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting," conducted by Scott Harris

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Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has captured national attention in this anxious post-election period by calling for recounts in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Despite Stein’s own view that the recounts won’t likely change the election outcome, the two-time Green Party standard bearer says she’s launched the recount drive to draw attention to serious questions that have emerged about the integrity of the nation’s voting system after allegations that Russia had hacked Democratic Party emails, and concern about the security of older electronic voting machines. While Donald Trump won the election based on the archaic Electoral College vote allocation, he lost the popular vote by more than 2 million ballots. Although Hillary Clinton had not requested a recount, her campaign decided to take part in the effort to "ensure that it is fair to all sides."

Thus far, the Green Party has raised more than $6 million that will help pay for recounts in the three states. The Wisconsin Elections Commission agreed to begin a recount of the presidential election on Dec. 1, but was sued by Stein after the agency declined to require county officials to recount the votes by hand. Stein has also filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania to force a recount there and plans to formally request a recount in Michigan on Nov. 30. If a state begins the process of an official recount and doesn’t complete it by the federal deadline of Dec. 13, they run the risk of not having their electoral votes count.

Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Steven Rosenfeld, who covers national political issues for AlterNet. Here, he assesses the rationale behind the election recounts, and the question of legitimacy looming over the 2016 presidential election results. [Rush transcript.]

STEVEN ROSENFELD: The Greens are really committed to this notion of verifying the vote and they believe that by casting the spotlight on the different voting systems and the procedures. They're not the same and they get sort of stuck in the different "silos and in the weeds" a little bit in these three different states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan – that they're really going to show people how rickety the voting system is, how unreliable the counting is, how imprecise it is, how hard it is to actually walk away with confidence. Now, some states will be better than others and this is the way it is across the country, some states are better than others.

So, they're doing it for that reason, and you know, nobody knows what's going to happen. It may very well be that they will – it's only 11,000 votes in Michigan – that they might change results there. But you know this is like changing or winning three Floridas. You have to win all three to reverse a presidential election. So that's what's so very unlikely.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Steve, in doing these vote recounts, what is going to be the focus? Looking for electronic voting machine flaws in the vote count – accidental or deliberate – and/or hacking of the vote by political operatives inside the the U.S.? Or, as has been suggested by some, the vote being skewed by outside operatives like the nation of Russia?

STEVEN ROSENFELD: The purpose the recount is to verify the vote. Now you have different ways that people vote in different states, and it's not just voting by mail. Or voting in polling places. There's different kinds of machinery in polling places. In some places, you take a pen and you mark a paper ballot and the paper ballot gets scanned. In Michigan, for example, there was something like 80,000 to 90,000 ballots that were scanned that didn't register a presidential vote. There were only 11,000 votes separating Clinton and Trump. The Michigan state election officials were very defensive about that. They say nothing is wrong, but you know, this becomes an example of many examples of well, let's take a look. Why does it hurt? You know, verify it, don't take anybody's word.

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Then in other states, you have other aspects of the voting systems that raise different questions. So, in Wisconsin, for example, people noticed that in the counties that primarily used the paperless machines, Donald Trump's margin of victory was between 10 and 15 percent, the largest in the state, and in the counties that relied mostly on paper ballots, Hillary Clinton won. They also see in some of these counties where there was supposedly this great rural resurgence of non-college graduate white voters, that the turnout was 85, 90 percent. You know they want to go into these towns where there are several hundred people, and if they can find a dozen or two people who said, I'm not going to vote, I'm not going vote, I don't care, those people do nothing for me, then all of a sudden it looks like the turnout numbers are not right. And you move to the next set of questions, which is, "Well, what happened? Did an electronic machine not run right? Did somebody tinker with the results?" And that's when you get this whole arc of conspiracy theories.

What you have here is a series of dots that is going to be very hard to connect.

BETWEEN THE LINES: You've written a book about counting the votes. From your perspective, what do we have to do to clean up the mess of both the machinery of elections in the United States, as well as the hodgepodge of different laws state by state, many of which since the demise of the Voting Rights Act – courtesy of the Supreme Court – we've seen a lot of voter suppression laws go into place in Republican-controlled states. What's the essential job here from this date forward where we have to repair our electoral system?

STEVEN ROSENFELD: Well, the essential job is to simplify the process of making voter registration easier and almost universal. Some states are actually doing that. The barriers to entry – whether it's registration or getting a ballot at a polling place – they should just be lowered. And in many places, they're not lowered. And that's when all the voter registration, voter suppression, all that sort of partisan tinkering with the rules comes from. And on the vote counting side, as old-fashioned as it sounds, you really need to use paper ballots so that there can be recounts. Anything else leaves you with the guessing game that we're going to be reading about in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Find all of Steven Rosenfeld's recent AlterNet articles on election 2016 at alternet.org/authors/steven-rosenfeld.

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