When Colin Powell endorsed the Iraq Study Group report during his Dec. 17 appearance on Face the Nation, it was another curtain call for a tragic farce. Four years ago, "moderates" like Powell were making the invasion of Iraq possible. Now, in the guise of...
(Author's note: Some things don't seem to change. Five years after I wrote this column in the form of a news dispatch, it seems more relevant than ever.) WASHINGTON – There were unconfirmed reports yesterday that the United States is not the center of the world....
The lead-up to the invasion of Iraq has become notorious in the annals of American journalism. Even many reporters, editors, and commentators who fueled the drive to war in 2002 and early 2003 now acknowledge that major media routinely tossed real journalism out the...
The American media establishment has launched a major offensive against the option of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. In the latest media assault, right-wing outfits like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page are secondary. The heaviest firepower is...
Saddam Hussein has received a death sentence for crimes he committed more than a year before Donald Rumsfeld shook his hand in Baghdad. Let's reach back into history and extract these facts: On Dec. 20, 1983, the Washington Post reported that Rumsfeld "visited...
No one knows exactly how many Iraqi civilians have died from the war's violence since the invasion of their country. The new study from public health researchers at Johns Hopkins University estimates that the number of those deaths is around 601,000, while saying the...
Moments after hearing about North Korea's nuclear test, I thought of Albert Einstein's statement that "there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the...
The uproar over Bob Woodward's new book has intensified the media focus on a basic controversy that's summed up this way: Is Iraq a quagmire? Like many other debates that flourish in American mass media, the standard answers on both sides are wrong – because the...
The Sept. 25 edition of Time magazine illustrates how the U.S. news media are gearing up for a military attack on Iran. The headline over the cover-story interview with Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is "A Date With a Dangerous Mind." The big-type subhead...
The USA's mass media constantly tell us how Americans see the "war on terror." But the same outlets rarely tell us much about how the rest of the world sees it. Five years after 9/11, the gap between perceptions is enormous. Countless polls confirm the overall chasm....
