Howard Friel

When the New York Times finally apologized for its coverage of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in 2004, it was too late. The newspaper had already supported the invasion. The Bush administration was not only violating international law, it was lying to the public, using major media like the Times to spread its message.In this meticulously researched study—the first part of a two-volume work—Howard Friel and Richard Falk demonstrate how the newspaper of record in the United States has consistently, over the last 50 years, misreported the facts related to the wars waged by the United States. From Vietnam in the 1960s to Nicaragua in the 1980s and Iraq today, the authors accuse the New York Times of serial distortions. They claim that such coverage now threatens not only world legal order but constitutional democracy in the United States.Falk and Friel show, for example, that, despite numerous US threats to invade Iraq, and despite the fact that an invasion of one country by another implicates fundamental aspects of the UN Charter and international law, the New York Times editorial page never mentioned the words “UN Charter” or “international law” in any of its 70 editorials on Iraq from September 11, 2001, to March 20, 2003. The authors also show that the editorial page supported the Bush administration’s WMD claims against Iraq, and that its magazine, op-ed and news pages performed just as poorly.In conclusion the authors suggest an alternative editorial policy of “strict scrutiny” that incorporates the UN Charter and the US Constitution in the Times coverage of the use and threat of force by the United States and the protection of civil and human rights at home and abroad.

A compelling exposé of the highly problematic scholarship of Bjørn Lomborg, the world’s leading global warming skepticIn this major assessment of leading climate-change skeptic Bjørn Lomborg, Howard Friel meticulously deconstructs the Danish statistician’s claim that global warming is “no catastrophe” by exposing the systematic misrepresentations and partial accounting that are at the core of climate skepticism. His detailed analysis serves not only as a guide to reading the global warming skeptics, but also as a model for assessing the state of climate science. With attention to the complexities of climate-related phenomena across a range of areas—from Arctic sea ice to the Antarctic ice sheet— The Lomborg Deception also offers readers an enlightening review of some of today’s most urgent climate concerns. Friel’s book is the first to respond directly to Lomborg’s controversial research as published in The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001) and Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (2007). His close reading of Lomborg’s textual claims and supporting footnotes reveals a lengthy list of findings that will rock climate skeptics and their allies in the government and news media, demonstrating that the published peer-reviewed climate science, as assessed mainly by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has had it mostly right—even if somewhat conservatively right—all along. Friel’s able defense of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth against Lomborg’s repeated attacks is by itself worth an attentive reading.

In this scathing analysis of Israel-Palestine coverage in the US media, Howard Friel and Richard Falk reveal the persistent ways the New York Times has ignored principles of international law in order to shield its readers from Israel’s lawlessness. While the Times publishes dozens of front-page stories and extensive commentary on the killings of Israelis, it publishes very few such stories on the killings of Palestinians, and mostly ignores the extensive documentation of massive violations of Palestinian human rights by the government of Israel. Furthermore, the Times regularly ignores or under-reports a multitude of critical legal issues pertaining to Israel’s policies, including Israel’s expropriation and settlement of Palestinian land, the two-tier system of laws based on national origin evocative of South Africa’s apartheid regime, the demolition of Palestinian homes, and use of deadly force against Palestinians. These journalistic practices have not only shielded the extent of Israel’s transgressions from the American electorate, which is Israel’s main source of financial and military support, it has severely diminished our understanding of the Middle East and of US foreign policy in general.

Through the lens of a careful assessment of the political views of MIT’s Noam Chomsky and Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz—the two protagonists of a Cambridge-based feud over the past forty years—author Howard Friel chronicles an American intellectual history from the U.S. war in Vietnam in the 1960s to the contemporary debate about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Major findings reveal the consistency of Chomsky’s principled support of international law, human rights, and civil liberties, and a reversal by Dershowitz from support in the 1960s to opposition of those legal standards today. Friel’s volume argues that a Chomskyan adherence by the United States to international law and human rights would reduce the threat of terrorism and preserve civil liberties, that the Dershowitz-backed war on terrorism increases the threat of terrorism and undermines civil liberties, and that the incremental but steady transition toward a preventive state threatens the permanent suspension of civil liberties in the United States.

A Paradigm Shift to Prevent and Treat Alzheimer’s From Monotargeting Pharmaceuticals to Pleiotropic Plant Polyphenols is the first book to systematically exhibit the powerful pleiotropic pharmacological effects on Alzheimer’s disease of plant-based compounds from ancient foods that humans have been consuming safely with substantial health benefits for thousands of years. These plant-based compounds include curcuminoids from turmeric, resveratrol from red wine and grape seed extract from other grape products, epigallocatechin-gallate (EGCG) from green tea, and oleocanthal and oleuropein from olive oil, in addition to a special extract, EGb 761, from the leaves of Ginkgo biloba , the oldest living species of tree on earth. This book also presents a new analytical framework that convincingly favors a multi-targeting ("pleiotropic") approach to the prevention and treatment of complex chronic diseases, in contrast to the mono-targeting of the pharmaceutical model. A Paradigm Shift to Prevent and Treat Alzheimer’s Disease is a unique and exciting resource for pharmaceutical scientists, pharmacologists, neurologists, general practitioners, research scientists in various medical and life sciences, healthcare professionals in clinical and executive positions, conventional medical schools, schools of naturopathic medicine, healthcare and medical journalists, executives in both national public healthcare systems and private insurers, and informed general readers.

On May 26, 2004, the New York Times issued an apology for its coverage of Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction. The Times had failed to provide what most readers expect from the US newspaper of journalistic accuracy and integrity about important matters of US foreign policy.But the Times' coverage of Iraq was worse than they were willing to concede. In fact, for at least the past fifty years the editorial policy of the Times-from its coverage of the 1954 Geneva Accords on Vietnam to the issue of torture in Abu Ghraib-has failed to incorporate international law into its coverage of US foreign policy. This lapse, as the authors demonstrate, has profound implications for the quality of the Times' journalism and the function of the press in a country supposedly governed by the rule of law.In this meticulously researched study, Howard Friel and Richard Falk reveal how the Times has consistently misreported major US foreign policy issues, including the bombing of North Vietnam in response to the Tonkin Gulf and Pleiku incidents in 1964-65, the Reagan administration's policy toward the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the 1980s, the 2002 military coup that briefly overthrew Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's elected president, and the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq.