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By Mark Heisler
$23.96
Saul Landau
$13.46
$22
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Flickr / Chuck Coker
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Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano is expected to announce the retirement of George W. Bush’s color-coded terror alert system that always seemed like an easy way to terrify the public. In its day, the color-coded threat indicator only hit red (severe) once, and never dropped below yellow (elevated).
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Juan Cole examines the psychological torture of accused whistle-blower Bradley Manning in light of the collapse of Tunisia’s brutal regime. The “monarchical national security state” created by George W. Bush and his cohort can abuse, torment and punish the unconvicted with the best of them.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Bill Boyarsky — The selfish negativity expressed by Republicans in the House health care debate last week showed why we should fight hard for President Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012.
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AP / Ramon Espinosa
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By Barry Lando — There’s a certain irony in the fact that as one bloody, corrupt dictator headed off to ignominious exile, thousands of miles away another returned.
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AP / Thibault Camus
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By Juan Cole — Every state and movement in the Middle East is reading into the events in Tunisia its own anxieties and aspirations.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Eugene Robinson — Listening to Obama’s speech brought back memories of Obama the candidate, a mesmerizing orator with the power to summon visions of a better America.
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AP / Fareed Khan
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By Fred Branfman — There are few scenarios more frightening for America than a domestic nuclear terrorist attack. We now know that U.S. policy is actually increasing the danger of a nuclear incident.
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By William Pfaff — The U.S. can pursue one of two courses in East Asia: Either negotiate an understanding with regional powers and redeploy American troops, or continue the dangerous drift that provokes China’s insecurities.
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Flickr / Max Braun (CC-BY-SA)
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The people who keep track of these things report that global spam traffic dropped from 200 billion messages in August to just 50 billion in December. Unfortunately it appears that the spammers may have decided to pause their activity before a relaunch. Which is just as well because we’re running low on Canadian Viagra.
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U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Michael B. Keller
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The Pentagon’s budget is only about half of what the U.S. spends on war and defense. If you add costs like nuclear weapons and the medical care of wounded soldiers, the figure tops $1 trillion. Robert Higgs has the math to prove it.
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Flickr / Nick Bygon (CC-BY)
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By Chris Hedges — “The more outrageous the Republicans become, the weaker the left becomes,” Ralph Nader said when I reached him at his home in Connecticut on Sunday.
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AP / Guillermo Arias
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By Deanne Stillman — In light of a recent murder, and considering that we are about to ring in a new year, I think the time has come to reframe the border discussion.
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USMC / Cpl. Brandon Rodriguez
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By William Pfaff — The paradox that is seldom discussed in politics or the press is that the United States, with total military resources equal to those of all the rest of the world combined, wages wars that consistently turn out badly, leaving American enemies in power.
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Flickr / Ludovic Bertron (CC-BY)
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By Chris Hedges — The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” It turns out they were both right.
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Flickr / nolifebeforecoffee (CC-BY)
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The Washington Post’s Dana Priest has another phone book’s worth of terrifying revelations about our national security/police/prison state. One that really chills given the FBI’s track record is the “vast repository” the Bureau is building that ... (more)
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cia.gov
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What will those clever minds at the CIA think of next? The agency has assembled a task force to gauge the effects of WikiLeaks’ recent intelligence exposés on its operations, dubbed the WikiLeaks Task Force—or W.T.F. for short.
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By William Pfaff — The great campaign to create a new Middle East and Central Asia, slay Islam’s violent extremists and build a radiant new world of democracy and capitalism is moving backward.
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AP / Susan Walsh
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By Chris Hedges — One hundred and thirty-one men and women, many of them military veterans wearing old fatigues, formed a single, silent line. Under a heavy snowfall and to the slow beat of a drum, they walked to the White House fence. They stood there until they were arrested.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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Attacks on two Afghan military bases killed at least 13 members of the country’s security forces. One of the attacks, blamed on the Taliban, was against a training center on the outskirts of the capital, Kabul.
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By Amy Goodman — Despite being granted bail, WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange remains imprisoned in London. Politicians and commentators, meanwhile, have been repeatedly calling for Assange to be killed.
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By Eugene Robinson — Do we want the people who run Amazon, PayPal, Facebook, Twitter or perhaps even—shudder—Microsoft, Apple or Google making political decisions on our behalf?
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Flickr / dkwonsh (CC-BY-ND)
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As India’s top U.N. diplomat, Hardeep Puri is not supposed to have a hard time getting through the airport, but a trip through Houston found the Sikh in a polite showdown with security officials who wanted to search his turban. Puri is the third ... (more)
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U.S. Army / Staff Sgt. Michael Bracken
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New statistics show that the Afghan police force, upon whose shoulders eventual U.S. and British military withdrawal is based, is experiencing an unsustainable rate of attrition that sees one in five recruits bailing every year.
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By William Pfaff — The WikiLeaks documents reveal the irrelevance in much of what was being reported by American diplomats. There was no recognizable pattern or purpose.
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AP / Vahid Salemi
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By Juan Cole — Iran is winning and Israel is losing. That is the startling conclusion we reach if we consider how things have changed in the Middle East in the two years since most of the WikiLeaks State Department cables about Iran’s regional difficulties were written.
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AP / Jacob Silberberg
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By Chris Hedges — What is frightening in collapsing societies is not only the killers, sadists, murderers and psychopaths who rise up out of the moral swamp to take power, but the huge numbers of ordinary people who become complicit in state crimes.
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Fake news by Andy Borowitz —
In the first major policy fallout from the WikiLeaks disclosures, the State Department has ordered all U.S. diplomats to “cease and desist telling the truth until further notice.”
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wikileaks.org
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Acting as if we live in some sort of fantasy world, the Obama administration and the Pentagon have both forbid their hundreds of thousands of federal workers to view the WikiLeaks secret cables—unless those employees have the requisite security clearance.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Is President Obama’s strategy of offering pre-emptive concessions destined to make enemies of his potential friends in the electorate without winning over any of his adversaries?
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Flickr / David Shankbone (CC-BY)
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It’s a sad day when working journalists condemn those who would pry loose a few secrets from the national security state. Glenn Greenwald has done an excellent job tracking the hypocrites, hacks and access addicts. His latest target is Joe Klein (above), who describes WikiLeaks’ work as a “human disaster.” ... (more)
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AP / Evan Vucci
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Being the U.S. secretary of state must have its perks, what with the power and guaranteed attention of various world leaders and all, but Monday, Hillary Clinton’s was not a job to envy.
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U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Andy M. Kin
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“If the Pentagon wants something, the logic goes, then it must be necessary,” writes Gregg Easterbrook in a recent examination of military waste. As a result, military spending has jumped 119 percent since 2001, 68 percent if you exclude the two wars fought in that time.
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AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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By Chris Hedges — Many of us will, after our rally in Lafayette Park, attempt to chain ourselves to the fence outside the White House. It is a pretty good bet we will all spend a night in jail. Hope, from now on, will look like this.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — We are about to enter a two-year period in which the Beltway Republicans will always blame Obama’s America first—you know, the America that happens to disagree with much of the conservative agenda, the America from which they want to “take back” the country, as if the rest of us represent an alien force.
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By Joe Conason — By stalling or killing President Obama’s new START treaty, Republicans would provide moral support to Iran, North Korea and any other rogue regime seeking to arm itself with nukes.
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Flickr / Chris Davis (CC-BY-SA)
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It’s D-Day for pat-down protests and so far it looks like most people just want to get where they’re going. AP reports that waits at major airports Wednesday morning were surprisingly short—the TSA estimates 20 minutes or less. ...
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By Ruth Marcus — Some of the loudest howls of outrage over the new airport security rules emanate from those who would be quickest to blame the Obama administration for not doing enough to protect us if a bomber did slip through.
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By Eugene Robinson — It’s hard to love the Transportation Security Administration, especially now that airport personnel seem so intent on touching people’s junk. But the TSA’s job isn’t to be adorable, it’s to be infallible—and also, apparently, to suffer being unfairly maligned.
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Flickr / Michael Eyal Sharon (CC-BY-NC-SA)
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Seriously, people, it’s not like John Q. TSA Worker woke up this morning jonesing to goose you. The union that represents the unfortunate patters-down says its members have been subjected to verbal abuse and even acts of physical violence since the new travel rules took effect.
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AP / Jeff Widener
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By Chris Hedges — There is no hope left for achieving significant reform or restoring our democracy through established mechanisms of power. We must take to the streets, armed with the tiny acts of truth and kindness that throughout history have exposed the oppressor’s cruelty.
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Mike Lester, Cagle Cartoons, The Rome News-Tribune —
Posted on Nov 19, 2010
READ MORE 
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Bob Englehart, Cagle Cartoons, The Hartford Courant —
Posted on Nov 19, 2010
READ MORE
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TSA
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The backlash against the new mandatory screening regime at airports continues. At least one New York City Council member is trying to have body scanners banned from local airports. But does the city have the authority? Says Councilman David Greenfield, “... If the TSA disagrees with us, they can sue us.”
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By William Pfaff — To adapt to secular use a phrase from medieval mysticism, “the cloud of unknowing” deepens as the war-waging countries of North America and Western Europe approach their NATO “summit.”
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AP / Rodrigo Abd
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By Juan Cole — The military’s major campaign in Kandahar has been largely ignored. The American public cannot have a debate on the war if it is not even mentioned in public.
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U.S. Air Force / Tech. Sgt. Francisco V. Govea II
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By Richard Reeves — I had to pull over to the side of La Cienega Boulevard last Tuesday evening as I drove home from work. I was crying.
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Flickr / webtreats (CC-BY)
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By G.W. Schulz, CIR —
Everyone from employers to the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, raising questions about how standards enforcing privacy online can withstand the rush of data about you and everyone else that courses through the Internet.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By William Pfaff — Like his royal British forerunners, the president, through his advisers and their policies, brings imperial ambitions to the largest and most populous continent.
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AP / Matt York
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By Chris Hedges — American politics, as the midterm elections demonstrated, have descended into the irrational.
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U.S. Army / Spc. Brandon Bolick
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Baghdad was shaken by at least 15 explosions Tuesday, with an estimated death toll ranging from 76 to more than 100. The bombers appeared to favor Shiite targets and were unhindered by Iraqi security.
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Marching in Chicago: Resisting Rahm Emanuel’s Neoliberal Savagery
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