Month: May 2017

After a three year wait, 200 families returned to Abu Ghraib.

The Really Serious People – you know, the politicians and pundits who have been wrong on every call on foreign policy in recent memory – think that talking to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un would be foolish because it would “legitimate” him and his brutal regime. This war caucus is ably represented by retired Rear … Continue reading “The War Party Talks Nonsense on Korea”

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Since the late eighteenth century, the United States has been involved in an almost ceaseless string of wars, interventions, punitive expeditions, and other types of military ventures abroad – from fighting the British and Mexicans to the Filipinos and Koreans to the Vietnamese and Laotians to the Afghans and Iraqis. The … Continue reading “What Obsessing About Trump Causes Us To Miss”

I’m a big fan of Twitter, where I spend an inordinate amount of time, and so I was quite surprised – and even shocked – to find that they’re censoring my tweets, or at least some of them. See here: Here is the original tweet: It’s “sensitive” to tell the truth these days. It can … Continue reading “The Day of the Censors”

At a time of growing tensions between nuclear powers – Russia and NATO in Europe, and the US, North Korea, and China in Asia – Washington has quietly upgraded its nuclear weapons arsenal to create, according to three leading American scientists, “exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to … Continue reading “These Nuclear Breakthroughs Are Endangering the World”

Militants attacked a Kurdish base were U.S. advisers are stationed.

A suicide bomber attacked civilians in the city of Haditha.

Donald Trump is “America” in the most pejorative sense. "Make America Great Again" is a bitter, depressed motto that worked beautifully as the perfect slogan for a country that pushes other nations around, then plays innocent when the result is anger or even violence. Somewhere like Iran couldn’t possibly have a legitimate distrust of the … Continue reading “Justice for No One Except Jeff Sessions”

The following letter (original PDF) was obtained on May 4, 2017 by IRmep via the Freedom of Information Act (release letter PDF) from a classified FBI and Department of Homeland Security dossier. The letter was presumably sourced from an INTERPOL intercept. It is an appeal for assistance written by convicted felon Richard Kelly Smyth to … Continue reading “Letter from a Málaga City Jail”

The ruins carpeted the city market, rippling outwards in waves of destruction. Broken beams, collapsed roofs, exploded metal shutters and fossilized merchandise crumbled underfoot. In one of the burnt-out shells of the shops where raisins, nuts, fabrics, incense and stone pots were traded for hundreds of years, all that was to be found was a … Continue reading “In Yemen, Shocked to His Bones”