Month: May 2019

Kirkuk was the scene of several bombings

The U.S. government protects itself, not democracy. That’s what is most apparent about its 18-count indictment of Julian Assange, not to mention the ongoing imprisonment of Chelsea Manning, for the leaking and release of State Department and military documents and videos a decade ago. The current reporting on the indictment is mostly about Assange himself: … Continue reading “Assange Indictments Hide the Context of War”

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Think of U.S. policy in the Middle East as the proverbial broken record. Explain it as you will, Washington’s focus always comes back to Iran. Seldom has a country that remains anything but a superpower (even a regional one) loomed larger. It all started in 1953 when the CIA overthrew Mohammad … Continue reading “Key American Allies in the Middle East Are the Real Tyrants”

When the UN Security Council met last week to discuss the deaths and devastation caused to civilians in ongoing military conflicts and civil wars, the killings in Yemen and the air attacks on hospitals, schools, mosques, and market places – whether deliberate or otherwise – were singled out as the worst ever. But the destruction … Continue reading “US ‘Emergency’ Arms Sales to Mideast Nations Under Fire”

“We didn’t ‘spy’ on anyone’s campaign,” writes former FBI director James Comey in a recent Washington Post op-ed. “We asked a federal judge for permission to surveil” former Donald Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, but that’s not “spying.” Before that (unmentioned in the op-ed), we infiltrated an informant into the campaign to gather information on … Continue reading “‘Spying’: Comey Doth Protest Too Much”

It is astonishing how often one still hears well-informed, otherwise reasonable people say about Julian Assange: “But he ran away from Swedish rape charges by hiding in Ecuador’s embassy in London.” That short sentence includes at least three factual errors. In fact, to repeat it, as so many people do, you would need to have … Continue reading “Endless Procedural Abuses Show Julian Assange Case Was Never About Law”

Fighting between Turkish forces and PKK guerrillas left two Turks dead.

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Call it strange, but call it something. After all, never in history had there been such active opposition to a war before it began. I’m thinking, of course, about the antiwar surge that, in the winter and early spring of 2003, preceded the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Starting in the autumn … Continue reading “The 12 Days of Bombing That Never End (for Me)”

During the run-up to the continent-wide elections to the European Parliament that just took place, our European press and electronic media sounded the alarm over the threat of a populist, nationalist, Euroskeptic tide overwhelming the “peace project” that the European Union is said to be. The great fear was that the Center would not hold, … Continue reading “The 2019 European Parliamentary Election: Prospects for Peace”

Palestinian groups, Fatah, Hamas and others should not confine themselves to simply rejecting the Trump Administration’s so-called "Deal of the Century". Instead, they should use their resistance to the new American-Israeli plot as an opportunity to unify their ranks. Leaked details of the "Deal of the Century" confirm Palestinians’ worst fears: the "Deal" is but … Continue reading “Resurrecting the PLO Is Palestine’s Best Response to the ‘Deal of the Century’”