|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
By Joe Conason
$9.35
By Miriam Pawel
$18.48
$23
|
|
|
|
|
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a self-described “Independent Democrat,” is expected to turn his back on the Democratic candidates to endorse John McCain for president. It’s a fitting move for the George Bush apologist, who was rejected by the primary voters of his own party for his unabashed support of the war.
|
arcent.army.mil
|
Despite touting increased stability in the outer provinces as proof of the success of the “surge,” the U.S. military is about to abandon those regions altogether. The Pentagon’s new strategy for dealing with a reduction of forces in Iraq is essentially to pull back to Baghdad and hope for the best.
|
news.bbc.co.uk
|
Turkey has dramatically ramped up its cross-border campaign against Kurds in Iraq with an airstrike involving as many as 50 warplanes. The Turkish military says the assault was aimed at Kurdish rebels seeking refuge in Iraq and not “people living in northern Iraq or local groups not engaged in enemy activity.”
|
AP photo / Francois Mori
|
By Barry Lando — For former “60 Minutes” producer Barry Lando, Moammar Gadhafi’s recent visit to France raised some important questions about the West’s attitudes toward tyrants. Just whom should we embrace and whom should we flatten with a bit of shock and awe?
|
|
By Will Durst — The list of folks who turn out not to have the ability to destroy the world is growing at a dangerous rate.
|
|
Three car bombs ripped through the southern Iraqi province of Amarah on Wednesday, killing at least 46 and wounding 149, according to The Washington Post, which reported Thursday that the death toll was likely to climb.
|
AP photo / Jose Luis Magana
|
Judging by the senator’s voting record and her position on matters of international law and human rights, political scholar Stephen Zunes believes Hillary Clinton is poised to carry on the legacy of a certain prior occupant of the White House if she’s elected next November—and it’s not the one you might think.
|
abcnews.com
|
Over two years ago, Jamie Leigh Jones was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad’s Green Zone when she was gang-raped, allegedly by several co-workers. According to Jones, instead of attending to her injuries and bringing her assailants to justice, KBR officials held her for 24 hours in a shipping container without food or water and then told her she would lose her job if she left Iraq. Now, it’s unclear whether the case will go to trial, and her attackers may escape punishment due to a legal loophole regarding U.S. contractors working abroad.
|
AP photo / Bela Szandelszky
|
By Chris Hedges — The refusal to pay my taxes if we go to war with Iran, and the portion of my taxes spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan if we do not cut off funding for these two conflicts, is not a means. It is an end. I do not know if my refusal, and the refusal of others, will be effective in halting these wars. All I know is that it is worth doing.
|
|
By Marie Cocco — The head of the Iraqi Red Crescent has a plan for Iraq, one that could test the theory that a few hundred million dollars spent on humanitarian aid would be more effective than a few hundred billion spent on bombs.
|
|
By Joe Conason — Even when George W. Bush tells the truth, he cannot quite bring himself to tell the whole truth.
|
AP photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
|
By Robert Scheer — Bush is such a liar. Or is he just out to lunch on the most important issue that he faces? In October, he charged that Iran’s nuclear weapons program was bringing the world to the precipice of World War III, even though the White House had been informed at least a month earlier that Iran had no such program and had stopped efforts to develop one back in 2003.
|
|
A day after the release of the National Intelligence Estimate assessment on Iran’s purportedly halted nuclear weapons program, President Bush once again demonstrated his well-practiced ability to repurpose facts or opinions to better serve his administration’s aims.
|
mcclatchydc.com
|
BBC: “The UK will hand over control of Basra to Iraqi forces despite failing in its goal to establish security there, an MPs’ [members of Parliament] report says. The city is dominated by militias and the police contains ‘murderous’ and ‘corrupt’ elements, the report added.”
|
|
By Joe Conason — The ascension of George W., according to many Bush loyalists, was a return of mature and wise foreign policy. Tell that to the ailing Middle East, whose future is now being pondered in a U.S. meeting that seems destined to fail.
|
orbitcast.com
|
While speaking at the University of Colorado on Tuesday night, former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft reaffirmed his belief in the Patriot Act and, when asked by an audience member if he’d submit to the controversial “interrogation” tactic of waterboarding, Ashcroft said he would.
|
|
By Amy Goodman — The Democrats have gotten in bed with torturers, those who support cruel treatment of military prisoners and some who may have authorized such abuse.
|
foxnews.com
|
Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani clearly shares a particular personality trait with President Bush: the kind of unassailable certainty that even evidence to the contrary can’t uproot. Take his position on the Iraq war, for example, which he still believes—even more so, now—was the right move for the U.S. to have made.
|
|
By Marie Cocco — Winter approaches, and as many as 400,000 Afghans face starvation. The trouble is not an insufficient supply of food. There is no way to get food to those who need it.
|
news.bbc.co.uk
|
While we Americans were gorging ourselves on turkey and dressing, Australians were busy voting out their Prime Minister John Howard, who has been one of President Bush’s closest allies. His successor, Kevin Rudd, has pledged to sign the Kyoto climate treaty, withdraw from Iraq and apologize to aborigines for Australia’s past abuses.
|
AP photo / Gerald Herbert
|
By Chris Hedges — All great empires and nations decay from within. By the time they hobble off the world stage, overrun by the hordes at the gates or vanishing quietly into the pages of history books, what made them successful and powerful no longer has relevance.
|
AP photo / Murad Sezer
|
By Scott Ritter — The former weapons inspector and military intelligence officer argues that Turkey, once dismissed as the “sick man of Europe,” will be ignored by the West at its own peril.
|
|
By Andy Borowitz — The satirist imagines what the president might be thankful for. A compliant Congress, perhaps? A lack of impeachment proceedings? Jena’s book deal?
|
defenseindustrydaily.com
|
Roughly 20,000 soldiers who aren’t on the military’s list of combat wounded have signs of brain injury, according to an analysis of Army, Navy and Veterans Affairs data conducted by USA Today. The Pentagon’s official tally of troops who’ve suffered brain trauma in combat is 4,471—one-fifth the total gleaned from military records.
|
|
Bilal Hussein, an AP photographer whom the U.S. military has accused of collaborating with insurgents, has been detained in Iraq for 19 months and may soon be tried by an Iraqi court. The Associated Press, apparently fed up with trying to reason with the military, has released the results of its own exhaustive investigation, which found the charges against Hussein to be “false” and “meaningless.”
|
vietnamveteransagainstjohnkerry.com
|
It may be a few years too late, but Sen. John Kerry is going after the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, taking SBVT sympathizer T. Boone Pickens’ offer to pay $1 million to anyone who could disprove the group’s claims.
|
|
By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The contours of the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination are set, and it is not a battle about “issues.” Advisers to the major contenders largely see things this way, and Democratic voters are in a quandary about what to do.
|
|
By Eugene Robinson — Finally, we’ve got a real presidential campaign on our hands. Wake up, those of you in the back row, because it looks as if the long-running seminar is finally over.
|
|
The New York Times reports that in certain areas of Baghdad, such as the Dora neighborhood in the south of the city, residents are cautiously returning to their homes and attempting to resume some semblance of normal life by taking advantage of a recent lull in violence. How long it will last, however, remains to be seen.
|
|
By Will Durst — The rule is simple: The good guys get the nukes, the bad guys don’t. And who decides who’s naughty and who’s nice? Not Santa—it’s the Decider.
|
|
Try not to mist up during this clip of two young boys being surprised at their Virginia elementary school by their father, Lt. Thomas Bourne. As Keith Olbermann opines, the best way to support our troops is to “make sure that that kind of homecoming is what each of them and their families have earned.”
|
AP photo / Nabil al-Jurani
|
Perhaps Basra can be seen as a test case for the rest of Iraq with regard to withdrawal and its effects: According to Maj. Gen. Graham Binns, the commander of British forces in Basra, there has been a “remarkable and dramatic drop in attacks” since the majority of his troops withdrew from the city.
|
|
By Nicholas von Hoffman — Why is it that so many voters continue to elect reactionaries who do their best to disenfranchise them? The answer, says Paul Krugman in his new book, is racism.
|
|
By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — It’s time that we subject the Iraq war to the same cost-benefit analysis that we are called upon to impose on other government endeavors. We are supposed to repeal or revise domestic programs that don’t work. Shouldn’t a troubled war policy be treated the same way?
|
|
By Joe Conason — The Pentagon has launched a preventive strike against a target that military chiefs presumably regard as one of the most active current threats to U.S. and world security—namely, the office of the vice president of the United States.
|
|
The horse-race coverage of the campaign mostly missed this absolute gem of a speech from Barack Obama, who has scratched and clawed his way to a virtual tie with Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in Iowa.
|
nytimes.com
|
The FBI, which is still investigating Blackwater’s Sept. 16 killing rampage in Baghdad, has determined that at least 14 of the 17 shootings were unjustified and in violation of deadly-force rules. The Justice Department is looking into whether to press charges, if it even has the authority, which means that Blackwater could very well get away with murder.
|
nytimes.com
|
The bridge world is in an absolute tizzy over a protest by the world champion U.S. women’s team, which held up a sign during its victory celebration in Shanghai last month that read: “We did not vote for Bush.” Some bridge fans have accused the group of treason, and the United States Bridge Federation—whatever the hell that is—has decided that its authority trumps free speech, a value some people vaguely remember associating with America.
|
AP photo / Gerald Herbert
|
By Robert Scheer — “The war on terror” made me do it. That’s the excuse that works for George W. Bush to rationalize his assaults on the rule of law, from arbitrary arrest to torture. So why not try some war-on-terror obfuscation to bail out his president-dictator buddy over in Pakistan?
|
|
By Amy Goodman — One of the 20th century’s greatest journalists, interviewers and storytellers is alive and working at age 95: Studs Terkel offers both the wisdom of age and keen insight into the issues of today.
|
|
According to the calculations of congressional Democrats, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost about $1.5 trillion. That’s nearly double the (already staggering) $804 billion that’s been appropriated or requested. Lawmakers arrived at the revised estimate by considering larger economic factors, including interest on debt and health care costs for wounded veterans.
|
|
By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Democrats in Congress are discovering what it’s like to live in the worst of all possible worlds. They are condemned for selling out to President Bush, and for failing to make compromises aimed at getting things done.
|
|
By Marie Cocco — Sometime before the average price of gas topped the $3-a-gallon mark, an inevitable moment arrived. The economy beat Iraq as the issue of most concern to Americans.
|
AP photo / Brennan Linsley
|
By Chris Hedges — The last, best hope for averting a war with Iran lies with the United States military. We will be saved or doomed by our generals.
|
news.bbc.co.uk
|
For the first time in George W. Bush’s political life, a Bush government is trying not to have someone executed, or so it seems. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has accused the U.S. of stalling the executions of three prominent prisoners, one of whom might have been in cahoots with the CIA during Saddam Hussein’s reign.
|
|
By Eugene Robinson — Bush Derangement Syndrome is now a full-blown epidemic. George W. apparently has reduced more of his fellow citizens to sputtering rage than any other president since opinion polling began, with the possible exception of Nixon.
|
|
This year’s winners of the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Courage in Journalism Awards are truly remarkable journalists who uphold the highest standards of the profession—and, as they reveal in their speeches, risk paying the highest price for their perseverance and dedication.
|
|
More than seven months before Blackwater’s September killing spree, one of the company’s snipers shot and killed three Iraqi guards, who, witnesses said, never opened fire. A brief “investigation” by the State Department, which included no Iraqi witnesses or visits to the scene of the crime, found that the incident “fell within approved rules governing the use of force.”
|
|
By Marie Cocco — Sheldon Whitehouse, new to the Senate, was searching for what he called a “moment of moral clarity.” Seated alongside the other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee in its crowded hearing room, the Rhode Island Democrat was looking in precisely the wrong place.
|
View the most popular tags overall?
|
|
The Lotto Symbolizes the False Promises of Barracuda Capitalism
Newsletter 
Like Us
Follow Us
Get Our Feed
