Month: September 2006

Addressing the use of torture Wednesday, President George W. Bush played to the baser instincts of Americans as he strained to turn his violation of national and international law into Exhibit A on how "tough" he is on terrorists. His tour de force brought to mind the charge the Athenians leveled at Socrates – making … Continue reading “The Torturer’s Apprentice”

[This article, which will appear in the Sept. 25 issue of The Nation (on the newsstands this week), is posted here with the kind permission of the editors of that magazine.] We knew it was coming. Not, as conspiracy theorists imagine, just a few top officials among us, but all of us – and not … Continue reading “9/11 in a Movie-Made World”

In a major victory for the State Department and career military lawyers, the Pentagon Wednesday released a new Army field manual that requires all detainees held by the U.S. military, including suspected terrorists, to be treated according to the Geneva Conventions. At the same time, President George W. Bush announced that 14 so-called "high-value detainees" … Continue reading “Bush Yields to Geneva Conventions on Detainees”

Last week, a 41-year-old U.S. Army sergeant from Hinesville, Ga., was released from prison after serving 13 months of a 15-month sentence for refusing to board a plane bound for Iraq. Born in Alabama and raised in rural Tennessee, Sgt. Kevin Benderman first joined the Army in 1987 out of a sense of purpose and … Continue reading “Soldier Who Chose Jail Over Iraq Goes Home”

President Bush says we must achieve victory in Iraq. What is "victory?" The dictionary defines it as defeating an enemy or an opponent. Under this definition, the problem becomes simply knowing what it means to defeat the enemy. Consider history. We were certainly victorious in World War II; both Germany and Japan surrendered to our … Continue reading “What Is Victory?”

Cooking Intelligence Again In his article dated Aug. 29, 2006, Gordon Prather states that the “International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors had been allowed back into Iraq (in 2000, 2001, and 2002) to inspect all the remaining nuclear-related sites in Iraq – including Kuwaitha, where our ‘intelligence’ had suggested the Iraqis might be doing something untoward … Continue reading “Backtalk Sept 7 2006”

It’s "a state within a state," and its fighters regularly cross over into a neighboring country to carry out terrorist attacks, the most recent on Monday, when two people were killed and 14 wounded in a strike on popular tourist haunts. The terrorists claim they are fighting to "liberate" their people, who, they claim – … Continue reading “Pawns of the War Party”

LONDON – The Taliban have regained control over the southern half of Afghanistan and their frontline is advancing daily, a group closely monitoring the Afghan situation said in a report Tuesday. The report on the reconstruction of Afghanistan marking the fifth anniversary of 9/11 is based on extensive field research in the critical provinces of … Continue reading “Report: Taliban Taking
Over Again”

In the struggle over U.S. policy toward Iran, neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration spoiling for an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites have been seeking to convince the public that the United States must strike before an Iranian nuclear weapons capability becomes inevitable. In order to do so, they must discredit the intelligence community’s … Continue reading “Neocons Discredit Intel in Haste to Attack Iran”

A wag once famously said that Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was a play where nothing happened… twice. The two former co-chairmen of the 9/11 commission report, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, have released a new book, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission. This book goes Beckett one better – it is … Continue reading “The 9/11 Commission: A Play on Nothing in Three Acts”