Month: October 2007

As with most of the controversies that have embroiled the US in Iraq, the activities of the George W. Bush administration’s mercenary force remained murky and opaque. Enabled by the US State Department, private security firms such as Blackwater USA seemingly occupied a state of legal limbo that allowed their guards to operate with impunity. … Continue reading “Heat Turns Up on Blackwater Inquiry”

Major General John Kelly is one of the Marine Corps’ most thoughtful and most able leaders. Many who hope to see the Marine Corps’ doctrine of Maneuver Warfare someday become real instead of just words on paper pray he has a bright future. When, as a major, he was commander of Infantry Officers’ Course at … Continue reading “No, the US Is Not Winning in Anbar”

Dozens of neo-Nazis were arrested in the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad on Sunday, as they rallied despite a government ban and clashed with a crowd of protesters. Western media hurried to make hay of the incident; the New York Times appended the two-paragraph report to the end of a story about the resurgent … Continue reading “The Phantom Menace”

Utopian fantasies have long transfixed the human race. Yet today a much rarer fantasy has become popular in the United States. Millions of Americans, the richest people in history, have a death wish. They are the new “Armageddonites,” fundamentalist evangelicals who have moved from forecasting Armageddon to actually trying to bring it about. Most journalists … Continue reading “America’s Armageddonites”

Updated at 11:25 p.m. EDT, Oct. 10, 2007At least 131 Iraqis were killed or found dead and 88 others were wounded during the latest violence. Attacks on political or security targets occurred in Mosul and Tikrit, and Baghdad saw several attacks staged by gunmen. Also, two U.S. servicemembers were killed in separate non-hostile events.An MND-B … Continue reading “Wednesday: 2 GIs, 131 Iraqis Killed; 88 Iraqis Wounded”

In a major rebuff to human rights and government accountability activists, the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday declined to take up the case of a German citizen who was allegedly abducted, detained and tortured by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as part of the CIA’s "extraordinary rendition" program. By declining to hear the appeal, the court … Continue reading “High Court Won’t Hear Rendition, Torture Case”

If ever there was an archetypal anti-libertarian, a politician whose views exemplify all the very worst aspects of the authoritarian personality, then that man is Rudy Giuliani, who infamously intoned: "We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong … Continue reading “Rudy’s Radicals”

Günter Grass’ revelation in Peeling the Onion that at 17 he had served in the Waffen SS came as a bolt from the blue. What stuck in people’s craw was not so much that the German novelist and Nobel Prize winner had served a murderous Nazi instrument and had waited 60 years to come clean, … Continue reading “A Quagmire of Complicity”

Updated at 10:52 p.m. EDT, Oct. 9, 2007At least 76 Iraqis were killed or found dead and 131 more were wounded during a particularly active day in Iraq. Yet another deadly incident involving a private security company has surfaced in Baghdad. A significant number of bombings also occurred in Baghdad and Baiji as well. The … Continue reading “Tuesday: 1 GI, 76 Iraqis Killed; 131 Iraqis Wounded”

Despite the U.S. military command’s frequent assertions that the primary threat to U.S. forces in Iraq comes from Iranian meddling, its real problem is that Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army is determined to end the occupation and is simply too big and too well entrenched to be weakened by military force. The U.S. command … Continue reading “Unable to Defeat Mahdi Army, US Hopes to Divide It”