Month: August 2006

LONDON – The suspects in the bomb-plot case in Britain are a long way from being convicted, but Muslim leaders are blaming government policy for provoking youths to consider terrorist ways. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his ministers have flatly dismissed suggestions that British intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan was provocation for the July … Continue reading “UK Foreign Policy Hangs Above Terror Threat”

In Saddam Hussein’s war crimes trial for the 1988 Iraqi “Anfal” campaign that gassed Kurdish villages, his defense lawyers have argued that Iraqi forces were really attempting to strike Iranian forces and the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga militias that were in and supported by the hamlets. In other words, the lawyers are asserting that the innocent … Continue reading “Selective Prosecution of
War Crimes”

Four years ago, President Bush ordered Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet to prepare a National Intelligence Estimate to be used to "justify" to Congress the preemptive war against Iraq we now know he had already decided to launch. Two years later, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that "Most of the major key judgments in … Continue reading “Cooking Intelligence Again”

When I was a kid, John Wayne war movies gave us the message that America was the good guy, the white hat that fought the villain. Alas, today the U.S. and its last remaining non-coerced ally, Israel, are almost universally regarded as the bad guys over whom John Wayne would triumph. Today, the U.S. and … Continue reading “Bush Goes Retro to Avoid Prosecution”

According to President George W. Bush, America is at war with "Islamic fascists." Commentators who support Bush’s military interventions also argue that the West faces new religious enemies who do not play by the old rules of warfare. Hezbollah (which literally translates as "Party of God") says its wants to obliterate Israel, and Hamas (an … Continue reading “Today’s ‘Islamic Fascists’ Were Yesterday’s Friends”

President George Bush’s ignorance of the Middle East and its people is well-known. So also is his habit of parroting words and sentences given to him by other people. He hit a new low when he referred to “Islamic fascists.” No two more opposite concepts are to be found. Fascism glorifies the nation-state; Islam is … Continue reading “Bigotry and Ignorance of Islam”

You know the War Party is in trouble when a prominent Republican like Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska) starts criticizing their policies of endless war and repression on the home front, as in this Fox News interview. Notice how the Fox News war-bot, Chris Wallace, tries to trap him in a partisan vise: “Let’s go over … Continue reading “Right Hook”

In a recent interview with Raw Story, Former Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith recounted an anecdote from his new book The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created A War Without End. When three Iraqi-Americans met with the president prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and spent some time trying to tutor him on … Continue reading “Will the US Again Attack Iran – This Time Without Saddam?”

In a recent article, “Will the U.S. Defend Itself?”, economist Walter Williams seems to make a case for nuclear war on Syria and Iran. His case cries out for a response. Here’s mine. I preface by noting that Williams and I both earned our Ph.D.s in economics at UCLA and that he is one of … Continue reading “Should the US Nuke Iran and Syria?”

If the U.S.-backed aerial spraying of chemicals does not stop immediately, Colombia will pay a heavy price for environmental destruction and lost livelihoods in its indigenous communities, warns a new study by a U.S.-based environmental research group. The 23-page study documents numerous cases of damage to human health, destruction of food crops and contamination of … Continue reading “US-Backed Coca Spraying Mostly Hurts Legal Farmers”