George Bush’s
War of the Words

[Note for readers: The first TomDispatch book to be published this season has just arrived in the stores. (The second will be not an October, but a late November, surprise.) Mission Unaccomplished, TomDispatch Interviews With American Iconoclasts and Dissenters...

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A Libby Pardon for Christmas?

Sometimes, the proximate cause of an unraveling, even an implosion, may catch everyone by surprise. This week the "tipping point" (to borrow a Bush administration phrase from the Iraq War) for the possible unraveling of Republican control of Congress may be the...

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The Pentagon Befriends MySpace.com

Congressman Mark Foley (R-Fla.), who co-chaired the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children and billed himself as an enemy of pedophiles and online predators everywhere, just resigned over e-mails and instant messages sent to underage male congressional pages...

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Iraq at the Gates of Hell

Recently, in one of many speeches melding his Global War on Terror and his war in Iraq, George W. Bush said, "Victory in Iraq will be difficult and it will require more sacrifice. The fighting there can be as fierce as it was at Omaha Beach or Guadalcanal. And victory...

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The Facts on the Ground

This August, a site of shame, shared by Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush, was emptied. Abu Ghraib prison is the place where Saddam's functionaries tortured (and sometimes killed) many enemies of his regime, and where Bush's functionaries, as a series of notorious...

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12 Steps to a Misfit Military

Recently, the Washington Post, and then the New York Times, reported a top-secret assessment by the Marines' chief of intelligence that focused on the catastrophic situation of his undermanned Corps in the heartlands of Iraq's Sunni insurgency. He concluded, according...

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Before 9/11, There Was 11/9

With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, American leaders declared "victory" in the Cold War no less firmly or repeatedly than our president has promised "victory" in his Global War on Terror – no less than 12 times, in fact, in an August speech to the American...

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9/11 in a Movie-Made World

[This article, which will appear in the Sept. 25 issue of The Nation (on the newsstands this week), is posted here with the kind permission of the editors of that magazine.] We knew it was coming. Not, as conspiracy theorists imagine, just a few top officials among...

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Beirut Diary

With a truce in Lebanon shakily in place but challenged by small incidents almost every day, it's just another tenuous week in the Middle East. The 33-day war may be provisionally over, but it probably has not ended – and the scale of the destruction in Lebanon...

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