The ‘Surge’ Is A Red Herring

Bush's "surge" speech is a hoax, but members of Congress and media commentators are discussing the surge as if it were real. I invite the reader to examine the speech. The "surge" content consists of nonsensical propagandistic statements. The real...

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Iraqi Media Under Growing Siege

BAGHDAD - The U.S. administration continues to tout Iraq as a shining example of democracy in the Middle East, but press freedom in Iraq has plummeted since the beginning of the occupation. Repression of free speech in Iraq was already extreme under the regime of...

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Sound and Fury

Coverage of the Democratic takeover of the U.S. Congress in the past couple weeks has focused on Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.), the first female Speaker of the House, and her "100 hours" agenda. But if most of the voters who booted the Republican incumbents in...

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Jimmy Carter Speaks Truth to Propaganda

Jimmy Carter, probably the most decent man to occupy the White House, received a lot of grief during his term in office, most of it undeserved. His latest book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid has brought him even more grief, none of it deserved. My own appreciation of...

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Israel’s Purging of Palestinian Christians

There is an absurd scene in Palestinian writer Suad Amiry's recent book Sharon and My Mother-in-Law that is revealing about Israeli Jews' attitude to the two other monotheistic religions. In 1992, long before Israel turned Amiry's home city of Ramallah into a...

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They Never Learn

The series of blunders and willful miscalculations that led to our present predicament in Iraq are now being replicated in Somalia, where a rather large U.S. footprint is being stamped into the hard Somali soil. Well, it isn't a footprint, quite yet, but rather a...

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Raptors, Robots, and Rods from God

Just this week, the Bush administration is considering making a little futuristic news. The president might soon approve "a major step forward in the building of the country's first new nuclear warhead in nearly two decades," the Reliable Replacement Warhead. If only...

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Hardliner’s Hardliner Led Bush’s Iraq Review

When President George W. Bush's unveils his long-awaited new strategy on Iraq Wednesday night, he will be relying heavily on the counsel of one J.D. Crouch II, perhaps the most hardline – if most obscure – of his hawkish advisers. Over the past 15 years, the...

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