In an excellent piece in the UK's premier conservative magazine, the Spectator, Michael Wolff, a Vanity Fair columnist who covered the invasion from Centcom headquarters, sums up the present moment in Iraq quite well: "All in all, after more than two years of combat...
Signs of Decline
I see President Bush's speech Tuesday as a bit of evidence that the empire, at the very moment it seems to hold sway over all and sundry as the "sole superpower," is in serious decline. That the putatively most powerful man in the world should have so little insight...
Maniacs on Pedestals
"[B]y false interpretations, and naked usurpations, the government has been made in practice a very widely, and almost wholly, different thing from what the Constitution itself purports to authorize. But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another,...
Groups Say Terror Lists Are ‘Arbitrary’
BRUSSELS - Government blacklists that proscribe groups and individuals as terrorists are arbitrary, secretive, and unjust, according to a new report by a network of civil rights groups. Statewatch, which monitors the civil liberties in the European Union (EU), the...
Gonzocons Erase History
Oh, to be a gonzocon in denial! Has National Review online (NRO) become the National Backward Glance? Are all the rah-rah warmongers and Star Trek fans on "The Corner" beginning to feel the breath of history down the backs of their necks? Or, to paraphrase...
Report: ‘Appalling Fraud and Greed’ in Iraq Contracts
As a congressional committee heard testimony last week that billions of Iraqi dollars held in trust by the U.S. government still cannot be accounted for, the inspector general charged with tracking the funds said he has referred three contractors to the...
Bush’s Iraq Speech Falls Flat
Despite a strong delivery, solemn demeanor, and a respectful military audience, U.S. President George W. Bush's effort to rally the nation behind his Iraq strategy through a prime-time televised speech at Fort Bragg, N.C., offered nothing new to reassure a restive...
The Mask of Power
Atrocity Porn, Human Rights, and Empire Three weeks after it went public, the video of Serb militiamen shooting six Muslims in the mountains of Bosnia has turned into a media monster. The supposedly "irrefutable" evidence of Serbian involvement in the...
Stay the Crooked Course
The editors of the New York Times this morning feign shock that in his speech at Fort Bragg yesterday evening President George W. Bush would "raise the bloody flag of 9/11 over and over again to justify a war in a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with...
Jesus Is Not Our Co-Pilot, Academy Insists
The U.S. Air Force continued to carry out damage control Tuesday before a congressional committee looking into religious intolerance at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., which trains future officers. A military task force reported last week that there...


