Last week, a 41-year-old U.S. Army sergeant from Hinesville, Ga., was released from prison after serving 13 months of a 15-month sentence for refusing to board a plane bound for Iraq. Born in Alabama and raised in rural Tennessee, Sgt. Kevin Benderman first joined the...
Bush Yields to Geneva Conventions on Detainees
In a major victory for the State Department and career military lawyers, the Pentagon Wednesday released a new Army field manual that requires all detainees held by the U.S. military, including suspected terrorists, to be treated according to the Geneva Conventions....
Backtalk Sept 7 2006
Cooking Intelligence Again In his article dated Aug. 29, 2006, Gordon Prather states that the "International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors had been allowed back into Iraq (in 2000, 2001, and 2002) to inspect all the remaining nuclear-related sites in Iraq ...
What Is Victory?
President Bush says we must achieve victory in Iraq. What is "victory?" The dictionary defines it as defeating an enemy or an opponent. Under this definition, the problem becomes simply knowing what it means to defeat the enemy. Consider history. We were...
US Losing Control of al-Anbar Province
With Ali al-Fadhily RAMADI - The U.S. military has lost control over the volatile al-Anbar province, Iraqi police and residents say. The area to the west of Baghdad includes Fallujah, Ramadi, and other towns that have seen the worst of military occupation, and the...
Spinning the Troop Levels in Iraq
This month began with 140,000 American troops in Iraq 13,000 more than in late July. Almost 30 months have passed since Time magazine's mid-April 2004 cover story, "No Easy Options," reported that "foreign policy luminaries from both parties say...
The 9/11 Commission: A Play on Nothing in Three Acts
A wag once famously said that Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot was a play where nothing happened twice. The two former co-chairmen of the 9/11 commission report, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, have released a new book, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the...
Neocons Discredit Intel in Haste to Attack Iran
In the struggle over U.S. policy toward Iran, neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration spoiling for an attack on Iran's nuclear sites have been seeking to convince the public that the United States must strike before an Iranian nuclear weapons capability...
Report: Taliban Taking
Over Again
LONDON - The Taliban have regained control over the southern half of Afghanistan and their frontline is advancing daily, a group closely monitoring the Afghan situation said in a report Tuesday. The report on the reconstruction of Afghanistan marking the fifth...
Pawns of the War Party
It's "a state within a state," and its fighters regularly cross over into a neighboring country to carry out terrorist attacks, the most recent on Monday, when two people were killed and 14 wounded in a strike on popular tourist haunts. The terrorists claim...


