The Senate Intelligence Committee’s hearing on John Brennan to head the CIA focused on lethal drones, but Brennan’s loose talk lumping Iran with North Korea as nuclear threats could be even more worrisome, recalling Iraq WMD exaggerations, as Veteran Intelligence...
Iraq: Judge, Sahwa Fighters among 17 Killed
Honor Bradley Manning
Bradley Manning has slipped off the media's radar, and not because he isn't newsworthy: his "trial"—which has now reached its 1000th day – has been conducted largely in secret, with motions classified and testimony not available to the general public. This...
Cut Commitments, Not Muscle
In that year of happy memory, 1972, George McGovern, the Democratic nominee, declared he would chop defense by fully one-third. A friendly congressman was persuaded to ask Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to expatiate on what this might mean. The Pentagon replied the...
Afghanistan, Garden of Empire
Excerpted from Cruel Harvest: US Intervention in the Afghan Drug Trade (Pluto Press, 2013), by Julien Mercille. As Obama proclaims that the US adventure in Afghanistan will draw to a close over the next couple years, we may look at the balance sheet with respect to...
One Thousand Days When One is Too Many
Think of that, count it off...1,000 days; that is how long Bradley Manning has been incarcerated without a trial. Even though he has been incarcerated for nearly three years most Americans have no idea what he did, why he did it or how he has been mistreated coming...
String of Attacks Leaves 26 Killed, 50 Wounded Across Iraq
Rand Don’t Need No Education
A lot of otherwise smart people are twisting themselves into pretzels explaining why Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky is taking the foreign and defense policy positions that he has. Paul’s latest gambit was to join in the looney tunes voices on the Likud fringe of the...
Congress: End Endless War and Stop Becoming “the Evil That We Deplore”
Congress waited six years to repeal the Tonkin Gulf Resolution after it opened the bloody floodgates for the Vietnam War in August 1964. If that seems slow, consider the continuing failure of Congress to repeal the "war on terror" resolution – the...


