Month: July 2005

Moonie McCarthyism Why are you posting links from the World Peace Herald? Who are these folks anyway? A quick Google search reveals them to be a publication founded by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who also founded the Washington Times, a neocon organ. Their “news” seems to be mostly pro-Bush propaganda, such as the piece on … Continue reading “Backtalk, July 19, 2005”

On July 23, 2003, not quite four months after Baghdad had been occupied by American troops, TomDispatch published a piece by Jack Miles, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book God: A Biography, entitled “How Many Iraqis Have We Killed?” At that time, less than 100 Americans had died in the “postwar” era in Iraq, while … Continue reading “Iraq’s Dead Unnamed and Unnoticed”

When William Randolph Hearst – the newspaper publisher who put the yellow in “yellow journalism” – sent the artist Frederick Remington to Cuba in the 1890s to illustrate articles on an alleged revolt against Spanish rule, Remington and his fellow journalists ran up against a slight problem: “There is no war,” Remington wrote to his … Continue reading “Judith Miller: Hearsted on
Her Own Petard”

Last year, President Bush made a number of proposals to "strengthen" the existing weapons of mass destruction proliferation-prevention regime. He proposed expanding his Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) to interdict what he deems to be illicit transfers by "proliferation networks." He urged the adoption of a UN Security Council resolution criminalizing such illicit international transfers, thereby … Continue reading “US Proliferation Rhetoric and Reality”

If President Bush has competent advisers, he must know that his Iraqi war has become a liability for him and for the Republican Party and might easily become a catastrophe. The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that 45 percent of Americans doubt President Bush’s veracity, compared to 41 percent who regard him as … Continue reading “Can Congressional Republicans Save Bush?”

I was 20, and the so-called Vietnam War was just heating up. I did my homework on Vietnam because teachers challenged my opinions. I thought the early antiwar protesters were completely wrong; we had to stop those dirty commies, after all. The newspapers told us so. But this was America: the protesters had a perfect … Continue reading “Was Jane Right?”

Back in the 1950’s comedienne Carol Burnett made her name as a nightclub performer with a song called “I Made a Fool of Myself Over John Foster Dulles.” Americans had a big laugh over the spectacle of a celebrated entertainer singing a love song about U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower’s Cold War secretary of state and … Continue reading “The Unbearable Lightness of Being ‘Condi’”

I have to wonder what George Bush must be thinking as Iraq’s elected Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari readies for his trip next week to Iran. I wonder if he’s surprised that the two countries have recently inked a deal to have the Iranian government train the new Iraqi Army and to send grain to Iraq, … Continue reading “Iraq and Iran: Still the Axis of Evil?”

UNITED NATIONS – A group of U.S.-based human rights and trade union activists is urging the United Nations to investigate the alleged killings of innocent civilians by its peacekeeping troops in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince last week. The activists, who were dispatched to Haiti by the San Francisco Labour Council early this month to … Continue reading “Group Charges Massacre in UN Raid”

LONDON – An Iraqi connection was conspicuously missing from the first statements British Prime Minister Tony Blair made on the bomb blasts in London Thursday last week. But new developments suggest a powerful link between the British invasion and occupation of Iraq and the bomb attacks. A friend of the three suicide bombers of Pakistani … Continue reading “Iraqi Shadow Seen Over Train Attacks”