Intelligence services across the world are busy analyzing the latest speeches of Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and Ayman al-Zawahri, the three leaders of the jihadist movement, released almost simultaneously at the end of April. Their hope and objective is to...
Downplaying the Dead
Death in Iraq. It is relentless and incessant. Know what it is like when scores of your fellow citizens are being killed every single day while the world proceeds unheedingly on? As a journalist, I've had but a taste of that poison during my eight months in Iraq. Try...
Groups Urge Overhaul of Pentagon Budget
With Congress on the verge of approving yet another record Pentagon budget, a task force of nearly two dozen progressive policy analysts is calling for major changes in the way the United States allocates money for its common defense. Noting that Washington currently...
War With Iran?
Thank the gods for the U.S. government, and I mean that at all levels, local, state, and federal. What would we do without them watching out for us 24/7, preparing for whatever threats may come our way, including especially the Great 666 Threat, which is looming fast...
Backtalk, May 3, 2006
Mad CowIf Condi is going around saying that the UNSC has approved a deadline for Iranian compliance with IAEA demands, then just what is that deadline supposed to be? Does she mention a specific date? If there really was no deadline approved, then how does she expect...
Cold Assumptions
Supporters of the Bush administration's approach to what is sometimes grandly (or grandiosely) called the Global War on Terror (GWOT), if accounts of some intra-administration discussions are accurate, have sometimes been fond of asserting that the world changed on...
Exporting the American Model
After those weapons of mass destruction never appeared and Saddam's al-Qaeda connection proved but a figment of the overly vivid neocon (and vice-presidential) imagination, the Bush administration wheeled out the shiniest of American exports, democracy. It had worked...
Gitmo Releases Suggest Numerous Mistakes
News that the Pentagon will soon release about a third of the prisoners still detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has prompted the U.S. media and many in the blogosphere to recall Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's 2002 statement referring to Guantanamo prisoners as "the...
Internal Feuds Develop
Among Palestinians
JERUSALEM - The often unruly Gaza Strip has become a hot zone of Palestinian frustration over the inability of the recently sworn-in Hamas government to pay civil servants. Many have reportedly not received salaries since March. Distressed police officers in the last...
Iraq, Afghanistan Among Top Ten Failed States
Despite receiving some $8 billion a month in economic aid and military support over the past year, Iraq and Afghanistan rank among the world's 10 weakest states, along with much of Central Africa, according to the "Failed States Index" for 2006 released here...


