With U.S. casualties rising sharply and the level of sectarian violence reaching proportions that render the "debate" over "is there a civil war yet?" patently ridiculous, the great neocon vision of a "liberated" Iraq as a beacon for the...
Bob Woodward's revelation that Condoleezza Rice was warned by George Tenet and two other top CIA officials, on July 10, 2001, that a terrorist attack on the U.S. was imminent continues to reverberate – auguring potentially devastating consequences for the Bush...
The revelation in Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial, that Condoleezza Rice (then national security adviser to the president) brushed off CIA chief George Tenet when he came to her a few months before 9/11 with dire warnings of an imminent terrorist attack, is...
There has been a great deal of discussion about the Military Commissions Act of 2006 [.pdf], recently passed by both houses of Congress, and most of it has to do with the provisions allowing torture of alien detainees, that is, of non-citizens apprehended in, say,...
How quickly we forget. It seems like only yesterday that the headlines were ablaze with news of the color-coded revolutions supposedly inspired by our president's commitment to fostering "democracy" throughout the globe. In an inaugural speech widely derided by those...
Our parent organization, the Randolph Bourne Institute, is named after an early 20th-century liberal famous for, among other things, his trenchant observation that "war is the health of the State" – a phrase that takes on quite a different connotation in our...
It is, of course, purely coincidental that news of the alleged death of Osama bin Laden – or, at least, his imminent demise – has been "leaked" by the Saudis via a French intelligence document just as the American election season hits its stride. This time,...
Once again, the UN is entertaining – and that's not a good thing. Its ominous meaning is that the world crisis is deepening, but in the meantime we are in for quite a spectacle. Hugo Chávez stole the show the other day, with his remarks likening the...
What's wrong with American foreign policy is actually a lot more complicated than the subhead of this piece would have it, but I just couldn't resist the temptation: besides which, our president is a major cause – albeit not the only cause – of the...
What is an erudite and perhaps overly scholarly pope to do in the face of a news media that insists on cherry-picking his pronouncements – buried amidst references to obscure Byzantine emperors and abstruse theological constructs – and making of them blazing...
