Month: July 2007

Updated at 1:15 a.m. EDT, July 14, 2007At least 100 Iraqis were killed or found dead and 56 more were wounded during violence mostly centered on Baghdad. No foreign casualties were reported, but the dead included an Iraqi reporter who worked for the New York Times.In Baghdad, U.S. forces killed six Iraqi policemen and seven … Continue reading “Friday: 100 Iraqis Killed, 56 Wounded”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who imagines himself as Winston Churchill in temporary political exile, desperately wants to be president. He imagines himself running not just America, but the world. Worse, he thinks that is what the American people want. In criticizing President George W. Bush, Gingrich opined: “You hire presidents, at a minimum, to … Continue reading “Running the Country, Running the World?”

Despite the media’s and official Washington’s focus on Iraq and Iran as the most urgent challenges to US foreign policy, a growing chorus of voices is calling for a major shift towards what they regard as the "central front in the war on terror" – Pakistan. In their view, not only has the increasingly beleaguered … Continue reading “Bush-Musharraf Alliance Under Growing Attack”

What if you spoke regularly of “haji food,” “haji music” and “haji homes”? What if your speeding convoys ran over civilians often enough that no one thought to report the incidents? What if your platoon was told pointblank: “The Geneva Conventions don’t exist at all in Iraq, and that’s in writing if you want to … Continue reading “Iraq on My Mind”

We didn’t just invade Iraq – when we launched “Operation Iraqi Freedom” the American people not only signed on to an occupation that resembles, in many respects, Israel’s occupation of Palestine, we also bought into a serial war strategy, the first of which was Gulf War I. Gulf War II landed us in our present … Continue reading “Is War With Iran Inevitable?”

The American political system has failed. The fabled checks and balances of American politics were no match for a neoconservative administration with a secret agenda. The American people were deceived and tricked into supporting two invasions that are war crimes under the Nuremberg standard. US aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq and the indiscriminate slaughter of … Continue reading “A Reform to Restore the People’s Power”

Updated at 12:24 a.m. EDT, July 13, 2007At least 97 Iraqis were killed or found dead and 71 more were wounded during the latest violence, which includes an attack on a wedding in Tal Afar. Also, a U.S. soldier was killed during a rocket attack east of Baghdad. In Baghdad, a Reuters’s photographer and driver … Continue reading “Thursday: 97 Iraqis, 1 GI Killed; 71 Iraqis Wounded”

For the second year in a row, violence and persecution in Iraq fueled a sharp rise in the number of people worldwide who were forced to flee their homelands, according to the latest edition of "World Refugee" released here Wednesday by the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI). By the end of 2006, according … Continue reading “Iraq Exodus Fuels Rise in Refugees, Displaced”

Recently, the General Accounting Office studied nineteen instances where the president issued so-called "signing statements." In such statements, the president essentially begins the process of interpreting legislation – up to and including declaring provisions unconstitutional, hence often refusing to enforce them. The GAO study found that in nearly 1/3 of the cases studied, the administration … Continue reading “Signing Statements Erode Constitutional Balance”

As the editor of Chalmers Johnson’s Blowback Trilogy for the American Empire Project, I was struck by an oddity when the second volume, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, was published in 2004 to splendid reviews in this country. Johnson’s focus in the book – its heart and soul, … Continue reading “Planet Pentagon”