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By Mahmoud Darwish
$20.44
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
$18.45
$22
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commons.wikimedia.org
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Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, just a day after some tough talk, has caved on his promise to disarm militant Iraqis. The news that the Iraqi government would no longer pursue “people who carry weapons” comes on the heels of an Iran-backed truce with rival Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr.
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AP photo / Carol Phelps
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By Robert Scheer — A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, and soon you’re talking real money. But when it comes to reporting on what the Bush war legacy has cost American taxpayers, the media have been shockingly indifferent to the highest run-up in military spending since World War II.
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The New York Times / James Hill
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By Patrick Cockburn — All governments lie in wartime, but American and British propaganda in Iraq over the past five years has been more untruthful than in any other conflict since the First World War.
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AP photo
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By Chris Hedges — There’s an ugly secret behind the “success” of the surge: The United States is paying off Iraqi militants with weapons and cash. It’s a recipe for disaster, one that reminds Chris Hedges of “Yugoslavia before the storm.”
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poptower.com
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Director Steven Spielberg was an artistic adviser to the 2008 Beijing Olympics but has resigned because of China’s unwillingness to put more pressure on the Sudanese government to bring an end to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. As he put it, “I find that my conscience will not allow me to continue business as usual.”
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bfs-zh.ch
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Vladimir Putin isn’t taking the expansion of NATO and a planned missile shield lightly. The Russian president told his people: “It is already clear that a new phase in the arms race is unfolding in the world. ... It is not our fault, because we did not start it.” Flush with oil money, Russia is planning to beef up and flaunt its military capabilities in response.
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Confused by all the conflicting messages about Iran’s actual threat to the U.S. and, on a broader scale, to global security? It’s no wonder, given the sturm und drang coming from the Bush administration. Now, thankfully, former weapons inspector and Truthdig contributor Scott Ritter makes sense of the situation in this video of a still timely talk he gave in July.
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time.com
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Time magazine has decided to celebrate “order before freedom,” as the newsweekly put it, with its “person of the year” selection, because “if Russia succeeds as a nation-state in the family of nations, it will owe much of that success to one man, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.”
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By Eugene Robinson — Is the thought of him as president just vaguely scary? Or have we learned enough about the man that we should be hair-on-fire alarmed at the prospect, still pretty remote, that he could actually win?
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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.
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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.
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cbsnews.com
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Meet Rafid Ahmed Alwan, otherwise known as “Curve Ball” in intelligence circles. He’s an Iraqi defector who apparently won himself a green card with his fabricated claims about Saddam Hussein’s regime harboring biological weapons, which became the CIA’s (and Colin Powell’s) key justification for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
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AP photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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Let’s review these key ingredients from a White House news conference on Wednesday and see if they remind us of anything, shall we? We had: President G. W. Bush—check! Fear-mongering about weapons that a Middle Eastern nation is allegedly developing—check! Accusations from the Bush administration about said Middle Eastern nation lying about said weapons to the U.N.—check!
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AP photo / LM Otero
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James Harris and Josh Scheer —
Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Philip Coyle knows a thing or two about the “staggering” amounts of money the U.S. funnels into the military-industrial complex, and why it is so difficult to stanch the profiteering.
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AP photo / LM Otero
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Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Philip Coyle knows a thing or two about the “staggering” amounts of money the U.S. funnels into the military-industrial complex, and why it is so difficult to stanch the profiteering.
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Remember that B-52 that accidentally took some nukes on a joyride? The whole episode doesn’t make much sense to Larry Johnson, a former employee of the CIA and the State Department’s counterterrorism office, who wonders if it’s more than a coincidence that the plane landed at Barksdale Air Force Base, which a former B-52 pilot friend tells him is “a jumping off point for Middle East operations.”
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timeinc.net
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Is it just a coincidence that an unusually large number of American troops and Iraqi civilians are suffering from what appears to be a cancer epidemic? Iraq’s environment minister and a growing number of victims, scientists and even politicians say the widespread use of depleted uranium in U.S. munitions is to blame.
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By Marie Cocco — Tens of thousands of U.S. weapons have disappeared in Iraq. For years they are likely to be killing people across the globe, including Americans in Iraq and elsewhere.
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AP Photo / Ajit Kumar, File
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By Scott Ritter — Scott Ritter, a former U.N. weapons inspector and the author of “Waging Peace,” mourns the passing of the United Nations agency charged with monitoring Iraq’s WMD program. That agency suffered a political assassination recently to save the Bush administration any lingering embarrassment. With the closure of UNMOVIC, Ritter writes, the world has lost perhaps its last best hope for meaningful arms control and inspection.
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As more details emerge from the massacre at Virginia Tech, it has become tragically clear that the least remarkable aspect of the crime was the purchase of the weapons that killed 33 people. An investigation has found that Cho Seung-Hui bought two pistols quickly, affordably and, for the most part, legally.
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One of the weapons used with devastating effect against U.S. forces in Iraq is the so-called explosively formed penetrator, which the administration has accused Iran of producing. Astonishingly, the Discovery Channel recently aired a puff piece that delightedly showed off such a bomb, complete with a demonstration of how effective the compact device was against armored military targets.
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ucar.edu
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For the first time in two decades, the United States will produce a new design of the hydrogen bomb. The weapon is meant to ease insecurities caused by the aging of America’s nuclear arsenal but probably will be a mortal blow to the administration’s credibility as it attempts to deter other countries from building nuclear weapons.
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globalsecurity.org
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Although the United States and Iran have a testy relationship at best, weaknesses in security protocol currently allow buyers for Tehran to procure valuable aircraft parts from the U.S. military. At least two Democrats in the Senate want to cut off the supply, which would make the Iranian air force effectively irreparable.
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hrw.org
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A preliminary investigation by the State Department has found that Israel’s cluster bombing of civilian areas of Lebanon violated terms of an arms agreement with the United States. Israel receives roughly $2 billion annually in military assistance from the U.S., but Washington places classified conditions on how American munitions can be used.
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hhill.org
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China has successfully completed a test of an anti-satellite weapon, alarming the United States and other nations, the White House said. Although the Bush administration is weary of a possible militarized space race, it has steadfastly opposed a ban on such tests in order to preserve U.S. “freedom of action in space.”
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The U.S. and North Korea may meet for a second and possibly even a third round of talks following a surprise meeting. The White House had steadfastly refused to give in to Pyongyang’s desire for direct discussions outside of the six-party talks, but the recent rendezvous between the two countries suggests there may be more flexibility in Washington these days.
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politics.co.uk
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Tony Blair intends to modernize Britain’s nuclear arsenal, including the U.S.-made missiles and nuclear-powered submarines that deliver them. But the prime minister will have to survive the misgivings of his own party, with critics questioning the utility of nuclear weapons against suicide bombers.
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The CIA has found no hard evidence of a secret drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons, The New Yorker’s Sy Hersh reports.
Also, Hersh reports that Cheney has vowed to circumvent Congress and pursue military options against Tehran.
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The Israeli army, frustrated over the ineffectiveness of sending “a plane worth $100 million against a suicidal terrorist,” is developing futuristic weapons, including a “bionic hornet” capable of photographing and assassinating a target. (h/t: Engadget)
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Mohamed El Baradei cautioned on Monday that as many as 30 nations could rapidly develop nuclear weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency chief warned that countries are “hedging their bets” by developing peaceful nuclear programs that could provide the necessary technology and material for weaponization.
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The U.S. and three European allies may seek a range of sanctions against Iran including travel restrictions on Iranian leaders and limitations on access to global financial markets. However, according to the NYT, a recent report by the IAEA might hamper the sanctions effort. The report says Iran is making slow progress and has not increased its rate of production of enriched uranium, and that the purity of the uranium would only be useful for power plants, not weapons.
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A congressional report warned that there are “significant gaps” in America’s understanding of Iran’s WMDs capabilities—and even questioned if we are able to engage in meaningful talks with Tehran on ways to diffuse tensions.
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If you need more proof that right-wing lawmakers care a helluva lot more about their ties to industry than about safeguarding the country, read this post.
Posted on Apr 27, 2006
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The man who helped found the environmental aid organization argues that nuclear power—once his sworn enemy—is now the planet’s only hope for slowing global warming.
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The New York Times editorial page writes that “even a president cannot wave a wand and announce that an intelligence report is declassified.” Also, check out how Editor & Publisher handily took down the Washington Post editorial board’s defense of the leak.
Posted on Apr 16, 2006
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The presidential spokesman won’t say at what point the president learned of a Pentagon report which concluded that Iraqi weapons trailers discovered after the invasion were not—as Bush later claimed—WMD factories.
No wonder McClellan won’t answer. This could amount to proof positive that Bush outright lied about WMD.
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The White House spokesman said news networks should apologize for reporting on the Washington Post’s story about the phony Iraqi weapons trailers. But when reporters quizzed him on what Bush knew and when he knew it, McClellan ducked the question.
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From stopanimaltesting.com
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The animal rights organization has obtained video footage of pigs being stunned with Taser guns as part of a Pentagon nonlethal weapons testing program. (This video is not for the queasy.)
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Bush claimed that two small trailers found after the invasion of Iraq vindicated his claim of banned WMDs—but intelligence officials had already concluded that the trailers were bogus.
The Washington Post has the scoop.
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Remember the uranium ore that Hussein supposedly purchased from Niger? A contract documenting the sale was used as evidence of the need to invade Iraq and was included in a 2002 U.S. State Department fact sheet on Iraq’s weapons program. Remember how the IAEA denounced the documents as fakes shortly before the invasion of Iraq? Well, according to the Times Online, the forgers have finally been named.
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Karl Rove kept the public from knowing before the 2004 election that Bush had been apprised “directly and repeatedly” that Saddam’s infamous aluminum tubes might have been for conventional—not nuclear—weapons.
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Now that 48,000 boxes of Arabic-language Iraqi documents captured in Iraq have hit the web, armchair analysts have their work cut out for them.
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Shiite officials say that American-led forces killed many civilians in a raid on a mosque complex on Sunday. The U.S. has promised a full investigation.
Posted on Mar 27, 2006
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The New York Times gets a closer look at a UK official’s memo that indicates Bush was set on an invasion of Iraq regardless of a U.N. resolution or the outcome of the WMD issue.
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From elconfidencial.com
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This excellent article from the Boston Review opens with a brutal killing and goes on to stitch together the disparate threads of the sectarian violence now wracking the country.
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From lowculture.com
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AP reports that Hussein and his inner circle were exasperated in their attempts during the 1990s to prove to the world that they’d given up banned weapons, according to transcripts of meetings found among documents seized after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “We don’t have anything hidden!” Saddam once interjected, documents show.
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