Washington’s spin machine is in overdrive to counter the massive leak of documents on Afghanistan. Much of the counterattack revolves around the theme that the documents aren’t particularly relevant to this year’s new-and-improved war effort. The White House seized on the time frame of the documents released by WikiLeaks. “The period of time covered in …
Continue reading “State of Denial: After the Big Leak, Spinning for War”
JERUSALEM – “It was consensual, I owe an apology to no one other than my wife and two children. They’re the ones who’ve suffered from this. And myself.” Sabbar Kashur, 30, is a Palestinian Arab resident of the Shuafat neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem. He’s just been convicted by an Israeli court of “rape by …
Continue reading “Rape, Deception, or Racism?”
Updated at 6:10 p.m. EDT, July 27, 2010
Admiral Mike Mullen arrived in Iraq, where he lauded Iraq’s “stunning progress” in security over the last three years, while new attacks left at least seven Iraqis killed and 38 more wounded. Parliament again delayed meeting thanks to a political impasse that threatens long-term security. Meanwhile, inquiries and investigations in the U.K. and U.S. further underscore the lack of accountability in the build-up to the war and in the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food program. Also, the amount of classified documents related to the Iraq War that WikiLeaks is reportedly holding could be three times larger than what was just released on Afghanistan.
The brutality and fecklessness of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan have been laid bare in an indisputable way just days before the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on whether to throw $33.5 billion more into the Afghan quagmire, when that money is badly needed at home. On Sunday, the Web site WikiLeaks posted …
Continue reading “Afghan War Leaks Expose Costly, Deceitful March of Folly”
Listen to Ron Paul deliver these remarks here. I have often spoken about the excessive size of government, and most recently how waste and inefficiency needs to be eliminated from our military budget. Our foreign policy is not only bankrupting us, but actively creating and antagonizing enemies of the United States and compromising our national …
Continue reading “On the Bloated Intelligence Bureaucracy”
Vlahos on new war critics in Tea Party, GOP
Have you ever thought about just how strange this country’s version of normal truly is? Let me make my point with a single, hardly noticed Washington Post news story that’s been on my mind for a while. It represents the sort of reporting that, in our world, zips by with next to no reaction, despite …
Continue reading “All the Strangeness of Our American World in One Article”
CAIRO – Almost two months since Egypt announced it would reopen its Rafah border terminal with the Gaza Strip, operation of the crossing remains sorely limited. “Rafah has only been opened to passengers and some medical supplies,” Hatem al-Buluk, journalist and resident of al-Arish, located some 25 miles west of Rafah, told IPS. “Everything else, …
Continue reading “Egypt Punishes Gaza More”
It’s a sign of the New American times that even when we know we don’t have cogent grounds to continue our woebegone wars, we can’t invent compelling reasons to end them. In September 2009, President Obama caved to Pentagon demands to send more troops to the Bananastans* even though nobody in the Department of Defense …
Continue reading “The Stepmother of Invention”
Updated at 6:18 p.m. EDT, July 25, 2010
Despite extra precautions, belligerents detonated a car bomb in Karbala. A separate car bomb destroyed the al-Arabiya studios and a lawmaker’s home in Baghdad. At least 46 Iraqis were killed and 88 more were wounded in those two attacks. Curiously, no other attacks in Iraq were reported. Meanwhile, members of the Iraqiya party refuse to allow the political impasse preventing the formation of the next government to become “internationalized.”
