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By Jack Gilbert $35.00
By Richard Shelton $13.04
$35
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 AP / Sergey Ponomarev
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By Chris Hedges — I know enough of Libya, a country I covered for many years as the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, to assure you that the chaos and bloodletting have only begun.
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 AP / Hameed Rasheed
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In March 2006, a number of Iraqi civilians were killed under dubious circumstances in a home in the town of Ishaqi. Last week, WikiLeaks released a cable containing notes from U.N. investigators suggesting that the victims may have been executed ... (more)
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 AP / John Bazemore
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By Bill Boyarsky — Republican spending knows no limits when it comes to going into debt for failed and useless wars. But it’s another story when it comes to providing federal assistance for victims of Hurricane Irene or other catastrophes we may face in the months ahead.
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 Bush White House / Paul Morse
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By Eugene Robinson — Thank you, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, for emerging from your secure, undisclosed locations to remind us how we got into this mess: It didn’t happen by accident.
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 U.S. Army / Staff Sgt. Bronco Suzuki
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A three-year study by a nonpartisan panel reported Wednesday that the U.S. wasted between $31 billion and $60 billion, or about $12 million every day, on wartime contracts for services in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade. (more)
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 AP / Ed Zurga
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By Robert Scheer — Behold this unctuous knave, a disgrace to his nation as few before him, yet boasting unvarnished virtue.
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 Gage Skidmore (CC-BY-SA)
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By Amy Goodman — “When one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it,” wrote Joseph Goebbels, Germany’s Reich minister of propaganda, in 1941. Former Vice President Dick Cheney seems to have taken the famous Nazi’s advice in his new book, “In My Time.”
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 james.gordon6108 (CC-BY)
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By an estimate its co-chairs call conservative, the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting has found that the government wasted $30 billion on the use of private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. The co-chairs, writing in The Washington Post, say that number could double. (more)
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 AP / Hussein Malla
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By Robert Fisk — It all depends, I think, on whether criminals are our friends (Stalin at the time) or our enemies (Hitler and his fellow Nazis), whether they have their future uses (the Japanese emperor) or whether we’ll get their wealth more easily if they are out of the way (Saddam and Gadhafi).
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 White House / Pete Souza
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — It’s remarkable how reluctant Obama’s opponents are to acknowledge that despite all the predictions that his policy of limited engagement in Libya could never work, it actually did.
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 Flickr / stevendamron
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Essayist, Yale English professor and TomDispatch contributor David Bromwich takes a careful accounting of the “sacked” and “saved” members of the Obama administration in an attempt to reveal the similarities between his presidency and George W. Bush’s. (more)
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 AP
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Iranian authorities have sentenced two American hikers to eight years in prison for espionage, according to an unnamed source on Iran state television. (more)
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By Eugene Robinson — It’s hard to argue with President Obama’s call for Bashar al-Assad, the bloodthirsty Syrian dictator, to step down. But it’s also hard to discern any logic or consistency in the administration’s handling of the ongoing tumult in the Arab world.
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 Flickr / jimforest
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How much are American taxpayers paying for the nation’s imperial wars? No one seems to know. But the following article contains a few key figures we would expect to find on the manifest aboard America’s sinking ship of war.
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 how will i ever (CC-BY-SA)
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Britain’s riots were not political, we are assured, and looting is simply un-British, but “Shock Doctrine” author Naomi Klein takes a different view: From Iraq to Argentina, when corrupt elites pass the bill to the struggling masses, civil unrest is to be expected.
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 AP / Charlie Neibergall
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By Juan Cole — A review of Michele Bachmann’s messianic and irrational foreign policy statements reveals a potential president looking for other conflicts, especially with Iran.
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 Adam Campbell (CC-BY-ND)
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By William Pfaff — Barack Obama seems unwilling to be president. What a contrast he makes to George W. Bush, in his boots and with his swagger—the Decider.
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 Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey
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Is the president a bad negotiator, or did he get the deal he wanted all along, as Rep. Dennis Kucinich suggests? Also on this week’s Truthdig Radio in collaboration with KPFK: the phony Social Security scare, teaching Shakespeare in Iraq and more.
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Is the president a bad negotiator, or did he get the deal he wanted all along, as Rep. Dennis Kucinich suggests? Also on this week’s Truthdig Radio in collaboration with KPFK: the phony Social Security scare, teaching Shakespeare in Iraq and more. Update: Full transcript.
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 U.S. Army / Staff Sgt. Brendan Stephens
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By Amy Goodman — The history of the U.S. national debt is inexorably tied to its many wars. The resolution this week of the so-called debt ceiling crisis is no different.
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 U.S. Marine Corps / Lance Cpl. Adam J. Root
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By Amy Goodman — “War is a racket,” wrote retired U.S. Marine Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, in 1935. That statement, which is also the title of his short book on war profiteering, rings true today.
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 Illustration by Mr. Fish
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By Chris Hedges — Torture, prolonged detention without trial, sexual humiliation, rape, disappearance, extortion, looting, random murder and abuse have become, as in Argentina during the Dirty War, part of our own subterranean world of detention sites and torture centers.
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 Flickr / DVIDSHUB
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Fred Branfman was in Laos when the U.S. began covertly dropping bombs on the country’s civilian population in 1969 as part of its military operations in neighboring Vietnam. Today, he writes about the Obama administration’s international counterterrorism plan, which involves 60,000 Special Operations forces worldwide. (more)
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By Amy Goodman — President Barack Obama just announced a reversal of a long-standing policy that denied presidential condolence letters to the family members of soldiers who commit suicide.
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By William Pfaff — The internal American debate may be said to center around how much to rob the poor, and how much to enrich the rich.
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 Pablo Manriquez (CC-BY-ND)
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Every progressive’s favorite loudmouth is running to reclaim his seat in the House of Representatives, where he wants to fight Democratic “appeasement” of Republicans. Alan Grayson told Talking Points Memo, “It’s exactly like I said, the Republican health care plan: Don’t get sick. ... The Republican unemployment plan ... (more)
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 Flickr / Marion Doss
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A U.S.-based human rights group published a report Tuesday calling on foreign governments to prosecute George W. Bush and some of his chief officials in light of a growing body of evidence of war crimes. (more)
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 U.S. Air Force / Tech. Sgt. Jacob N. Bailey
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Leon Panetta seems to be confused about what administration he works for. On a world tour of America’s endless wars, the new defense secretary said to a gathering of troops in Iraq, “The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked.” (more)
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 U.S. Navy / MC2 Mark Logico
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By Richard Reeves — It occurred to me that it’s never going to be over, over there. We’re never coming back. We have more than 250,000 volunteer soldiers, sailors and airmen scattered (too thin) all over the globe.
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 Eddy (CC-BY-ND)
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By Amy Goodman — Last Saturday, Julian Assange joined me and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek for a public conversation about WikiLeaks, the power of information and the importance of transparency in democracies.
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By William Pfaff — I heard a brilliant young Harvard scholar, influential in the Obama administration, explain that the future of successful American action in Central Asia lies in a “surge” of civilian political and developmental action to rescue the people of the region from their present backwardness.
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 Illustration by Mr. Fish
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By Chris Hedges — “You have millions of people who say run, run, run,” Nader said. “Then you put yourself out there and find they are voting for Obama.”
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 Flickr / loop_oh
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Tom Engelhardt, a fellow at The Nation Institute and creator and editor of TomDispatch.com, takes a close accounting of President Obama’s Afghanistan speech delivered in late June, in which Americans were told that this year the U.S. would begin winding down its war in that country. (more)
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By Joe Conason — Anyone paying attention to the costs of U.S. military action in Iraq and Afghanistan must have known that the president badly underestimated those numbers on June 22, when he told the nation that we have spent “a trillion dollars.”
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 U.S. Air Force / Tech. Sgt. James Harper
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By Eugene Robinson — The skies over at least six countries are patrolled by robotic aircraft, operated by the U.S. military or the CIA, that fire missiles to carry out targeted assassinations. I am convinced that this method of waging war is cost-effective but not that it is moral.
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 AP / Drew Angerer
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Despite the reduced number of U.S. troops in Iraq, the monthly death toll among Americans there has risen to a two-year high, reached when three soldiers were killed Wednesday in a rocket attack.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Among Dana Carvey’s most brilliant sketches on “Saturday Night Live” were his dead-perfect impersonations of President George H.W. Bush, which made a permanent contribution to America’s political language. “Not gonna do it!” Carvey-as-Bush would say. “Wouldn’t be prudent!”
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Daryl Cagle, Cagle Cartoons, MSNBC.com —
Posted on Jun 26, 2011
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 Flickr / Rev. Xanatos Satanicos Bombasticos (ClintJCL)
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Independent experts suggest that more than 400,000 American service members will return from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with traumatic brain injuries that could lead to severe personality disorders, and little is being done to help them. (more)
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Jess Goodell volunteered when she was a Marine to work in the corps’ mortuary affairs unit in Iraq. Her job was to collect the bodies and body parts of fallen fellow Marines. She wrote a book about the experience called “Shade It Black: Death and After in Iraq.” Here are excerpts from Goodell’s book and Chris Hedges’ interview with the author, read by classically trained actor and Truthdig contributor Eunice Wong.
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 Wikimedia Commons / Rafy
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On Thursday, 23 people were reported killed and at least 82 wounded in a series of three bombs that detonated in a crowded market in south Baghdad, according to the BBC.
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 U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Larry E. Reid Jr.
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By Bill Boyarsky — Barack Obama’s plan for a limited withdrawal from Afghanistan means tens of thousands of American troops will remain there, many of them fighting, for several years to come.
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Jon Stewart recently went on Fox News and said, “Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers? ... Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.” The St. Petersburg Times evaluated the claim and deemed it “false,” but its investigation reveals a lot more about the sorry state of news and the problems with trying to identify informed Americans. (more)
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By David Sirota — In a breathless story somehow presented as a groundbreaking revelation, The New York Times recently reported that the Pentagon is—shocker!—using all sorts of media channels to market itself to the nation’s children.
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 CIA
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In a story that harks back to the bad old days of intelligence abuses, a former CIA spook says he and another agency staffer were asked by Bush administration officials to dig up dirt on Mideast scholar, Iraq war critic and Truthdig columnist Juan Cole. (more)
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Perhaps I should thank the current crop of Republican presidential candidates for providing me with an experience I never, ever expected to have: During this week’s debate in New Hampshire, I had a moment of nostalgia for George W. Bush.
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 Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey
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On this week’s episode of Truthdig radio in collaboration with KPFK: Unconstitutionally crowded prisons, battlefield medicine, a very special segment on the Marines who collect their dead in Iraq, and just a little bit of Jesus. Plus: Reese Erlich reports from Egypt.
Posted on Jun 15, 2011
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On this week’s episode of Truthdig Radio in collaboration with KPFK: Unconstitutionally crowded prisons, battlefield medicine, a very special segment on the Marines who collect their dead in Iraq, and just a little bit of Jesus. Plus: Reese Erlich reports from Egypt. Update: Full transcript.
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 Flickr / rbbaird
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Benjamin Franklin may be one of the most wanted men in Iraq right now, as the country’s officials threaten to take the Pentagon to court to recoup some $6.6 billion in cash airlifted from the U.S. in 2004 for the purpose of Iraqi reconstruction. (more)
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