Month: June 2005

Atrocity Porn, Human Rights, and Empire Three weeks after it went public, the video of Serb militiamen shooting six Muslims in the mountains of Bosnia has turned into a media monster. The supposedly "irrefutable" evidence of Serbian involvement in the Bosnian war or the "genocide" in Srebrenica is nothing of the sort, but that has … Continue reading “The Mask of Power”

Despite a strong delivery, solemn demeanor, and a respectful military audience, U.S. President George W. Bush’s effort to rally the nation behind his Iraq strategy through a prime-time televised speech at Fort Bragg, N.C., offered nothing new to reassure a restive public that the situation was coming under control. Rejecting increasingly bold calls by Democrats … Continue reading “Bush’s Iraq Speech Falls Flat”

As a congressional committee heard testimony last week that billions of Iraqi dollars – held in trust by the U.S. government – still cannot be accounted for, the inspector general charged with tracking the funds said he has referred three contractors to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecutions for fraud. Stuart W. Bowen Jr., … Continue reading “Report: ‘Appalling Fraud and Greed’ in Iraq Contracts”

Oh, to be a gonzocon in denial! Has National Review online (NRO) become the National Backward Glance? Are all the rah-rah warmongers and Star Trek fans on "The Corner" beginning to feel the breath of history down the backs of their necks? Or, to paraphrase Tolkien, is Smeagol losing his nerve? Why, ragin’ Rich Lowry … Continue reading “Gonzocons Erase History”

The U.S. Air Force continued to carry out damage control Tuesday before a congressional committee looking into religious intolerance at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., which trains future officers. A military task force reported last week that there was no overt religious discrimination at the academy but that it found insensitivity by … Continue reading “Jesus Is Not Our Co-Pilot, Academy Insists”

The editors of the New York Times this morning feign shock that in his speech at Fort Bragg yesterday evening President George W. Bush would "raise the bloody flag of 9/11 over and over again to justify a war in a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorist attacks." Kudos for that … Continue reading “Stay the Crooked Course”

Despite the growing likelihood of confrontation between their two countries, U.S. President George W. Bush and Iranian President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad share a number of remarkable similarities. Juan Cole, a prominent blogger and Middle East historian at the University of Michigan, noted last week that the two men’s campaign tactics suggest that they are "soul mates," … Continue reading “Ahmadinejad and Bush: Separated at Birth?”

“At a breakfast meeting with reporters, Wolfowitz said he hasn’t read the [Downing Street] memos because he doesn’t want to be ‘distracted’ by ‘history’ from his new job as head of the world’s leading development bank. He returned this weekend from a tour of four African nations. “‘There’s a lot I could say about what … Continue reading “Immoral Relativism”

David Aaronovitch, formerly a Communist Party youth leader and now the freshest shoot in Britain’s bumper crop of Blairite neocons, tried to smear me once before, and I dealt with him here. The Stalinist school of falsification never sleeps, however: its practitioners just keep churning out lies, in the hope that sheer repetition will do … Continue reading “Comrade Aaronovitch
Strikes Again”

The George W. Bush administration’s policies on indefinite detention and "extraordinary rendition" are coming under heavy fire from a number of institutions and organizations, including the United Nations, Amnesty International, and members of the U.S. Congress itself. "The prohibition of torture is nonnegotiable," said UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the International Day in Support of … Continue reading “US Terror Policies Draw Outrage at Home and Abroad”