The controversy over "cooking the books" on Iraq intelligence to promote an aggressive war might make one think that Dick Cheney and his minions were somehow breaking new ground. But the precedent for fabricating a threat to justify the use of military force was set...
Cooking the Books:
J. Edgar Hoover With Supercomputers
On Dec. 19, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Deputy Director of National Intelligence Gen. Mike Hayden held a press conference in which they once again misled the American people. Gonzales and Hayden answered questions about reports that the National Security...
Kurdistan: Meet the New Bosses
The neocons in Washington love to talk about how they're promoting freedom and democracy in Iraq. They often cite as their example the country's Kurdish population, staunch allies of Washington, who have been protected by the American military since no-fly zones were...
Sharon’s Epitaph
The Rev. Pat Robertson, the prominent American televangelist and "Christian Zionist," says the felling of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with a massive stroke is punishment from God "for dividing the Land of Israel." According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency,...
Troop Reduction Legerdemain
Just before Christmas, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld signaled the possible beginning of U.S. troop reductions in Iraq when he announced that two brigades scheduled for combat tours would not be deployed and that troop levels might fall below 130,000 U.S....
A Cult of Presidential Power
As 2006 begins, we seem to be at a not completely unfamiliar crossroads in the long history of the American imperial presidency. It grew up, shedding presidential constraints, in the post-World War II years as part of the rise of the national security state and the...
Quarrels Overshadow Talk of Iraq Consensus
ARBIL - Clasping his hands together in a sign of unity, a cheerful Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Shia-dominated United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), entered the hall in this Kurdish city amid applause. Al-Hakim was here to bring Shia groups from the south and Kurds from...
‘Good News’ From Iraq
The news that the Lincoln Group, a heretofore obscure public relations firm owned and operated by GOP hacks, has been planting "good news from Iraq" stories in the Iraqi media (and now even paying Sunni Muslim clerics to get on board the "democracy" choo-choo train)...
US Headed for Confrontation With Iran
I've been embarrassed a few times in the past with my predictions (for example, that it was going to be U.S. President John Kerry in 2004), but I've also been right on a few occasions (for example, my book, Quagmire: America in the Middle East, was published in 1992)....
Time to Talk to Tehran
Does President Bush intend a preventive war, early this year, to effect the nuclear castration of Iran? Or are we rattling sabers? What makes the question urgent are German reports that CIA Director Porter Goss has been in Ankara, Turkey, negotiating for U.S. use of...


