The Bush administration has just provided a textbook demonstration of the successful manipulation of public opinion. By repeating the theme that the United States is winning the war in Iraq for weeks, George W. Bush has now convinced 60 percent of Americans that the...
Lump of Coal for Condi
If Santa has been keeping a list, Secretary of State Condi Rice will be lucky to find even a lump of coal in her Christmas stocking. Where on the list to begin? On the Korean peninsula, where the South Korean National Security Council rebuffed Washington's contingency...
Drums in the Streets
The Protests The protests last Saturday that resulted in the jailing of 944 activists were breathtaking to behold and a breakthrough for the anti-WTO movement and the South Koreans in particular. All week the Koreans had been subjected to media scrutiny: Who are these...
Toward a Peace Culture
This is no week (at least for me) to go on about unwarranted searches and surveillance, or whether a Bush bump in approval ratings is due to superficially frank speeches, a growing economy, the reduction in gasoline prices, or some combination thereof, let alone the...
Christmas in Malaysia
To say that Malaysia is not what I imagined would be an understatement of epic proportions. Situated just south of Thailand, north of Indonesia, and quite close to the equator, the country describes itself as officially "Islamic," and this, at least in the minds of...
Backtalk, December 23, 2005
World Peace Forum Moves to Create International Peace Secretariat Kudos to you for attending the Malaysian peace seminar. I missed it as I could not get a firm seat to get back home. I would have loved to have met you guys. Your Web site is great. Your thoughts are...
The Humanitarian With the War Machine
David Aaronovitch, the London Times columnist who supported the war in Iraq, is sorry. He is sorry "for Abu Ghraib and for Donald Rumsfeld. For not understanding the insurgents. For the looting. For the dire planning." He's also sorry for "the election workers...
A New Salvo of
Bright Spinning Lies
Three days before Christmas, the Bush administration launched a new salvo of bright spinning lies about the Iraq war. "In an interview with reporters traveling with him on an Air Force cargo plane to Baghdad," the Associated Press reported Thursday morning, Donald...
Will Republican Senators Save the Republic?
I'll say this for Vice President Dick Cheney: he puts it right out there, whether it is trying to ensure legal protection for those torturing prisoners, or insisting as he did on Tuesday that a wartime president "needs to have his powers...
Shoot the Moon and Forget About the Bell Curve
Consider this latest piece by former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega, who writes regularly for TomDispatch on the Plame case and Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation, as my way of signing off with good cheer until the New Year. In our embattled...


