Month: October 2007

Speaking to journalists last week, Navy Capt. Theodore Fessel Jr., the chief representative at Guantánamo for the Pentagon’s Office of Administrative Review of Detained Enemy Combatants (OARDEC), which oversees the tribunals and review boards convened to assess the detainees’ status, hinted that the authorities had "begun seeking new or previously overlooked evidence that may warrant … Continue reading “Gitmo Whistleblower Condemns Proposals to Hold New Tribunals”

I‘m not surprised that Christopher Hitchens, the village atheist, is now advocating genocide. His recent speech to a conference of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, in Madison, Wisc. – a portion of which can be seen here – dramatizes the completion of his evolution from a trendy leftist of the Trotskyist variety into a full-fledged, … Continue reading “Christopher Hitchens and Genocide”

When I hear mention of the "Clash of Civilizations," I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. To laugh, because it is such a silly notion. To cry, because it is liable to cause untold disasters. To cry even more, because our leaders are exploiting this slogan as a pretext for sabotaging any possibility … Continue reading “The Mother of All Pretexts”

“Starting from Zero” To the extent that the media spotlight is ever directed at Africa, it has focused on Darfur, in western Sudan, where several hundred thousand people have died in ethnic violence since 2003. Just next door, beyond the glare of the spotlight, however, is South Sudan, where an estimated 2.2 million people were … Continue reading “With the Lost Boys in
Southern Sudan”

The Blackwater scandal has gotten plenty of media coverage, and it deserves a lot more. Taxpayer subsidies for private mercenaries are antithetical to democracy, and Blackwater’s actions in Iraq have often been murderous. But the scandal is unfolding in a U.S. media context that routinely turns criticisms of the war into demands for a better … Continue reading “The Pro-War Undertow of the Blackwater Scandal”

Last week, the White House issued a new National Strategy for Homeland Security. This new Strategy is supposed to reflect "our increased understanding of the terrorist threats confronting the United States today." Indeed, one of the key components of strategy is to know your enemy – a phrase often attributed to the ancient Chinese philosopher-strategist … Continue reading “Not -So-New Homeland Security Strategy”

Updated at 12:12 a.m. EDT, Oct. 17, 2007Bombings in Baghdad and Mosul injured scores of people. Overall, 56 Iraqis were killed or found dead and 144 more were wounded. No foreign military deaths were reported. In Baghdad, four unidentified bodies were found dumped in as many neighborhoods. A car bomb killed seven people and wounded … Continue reading “Tuesday: 56 Iraqis Killed, 144 Wounded”

The June issue of Commentary featured a long article by Norman Podhoretz, the godfather of the neoconservatives, titled "The Case for Bombing Iran.” A shorter version of the article had already been published in the Wall Street Journal, and the piece itself was based on a speech that Podhoretz had given at a summit of … Continue reading “Norman Podhoretz’s War Prayer”

TYRE – The explosion ripped through the tiny garden in rural south Lebanon, hurling Naemah Ghazi to the ground. The shrapnel from the bomb sliced through her legs, and she rapidly lost consciousness. “There was a lot of blood,” her mother Khadija recalls. “All her body was bleeding.” Naemah, 48, lived quietly with her mother … Continue reading “Lebanon: What a ‘Safe’ Cluster Bomb Did”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has admitted knowing for several years about the Bush administration’s eavesdropping on Americans without a court warrant. She said she was briefed on it when she was ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. But was she told that the illegal surveillance began well before 9/11? Referring to her briefing in … Continue reading “NSA Spying: What Did Pelosi Know?”