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According to the geniuses who misled Americans into supporting the war against Iraq, the fighting should have been over a long time ago. The dancing in the streets should have long ago blossomed into a democracy Thomas Jefferson would have been proud of. The soothing effects should have spread throughout the Middle East. Unfortunately, reality … Continue reading “Debased Citizenship”

Soon after the American death toll in Iraq passed the 1,000 mark, I thought of Saadoun Hammadi and some oratory he provided two years ago. At the time, Hammadi was the speaker of Iraq’s National Assembly. "The U.S. administration is now speaking war," Hammadi said. "We are not going to turn the other cheek. We … Continue reading “The Brave Posturing of Armchair Warriors”

"The American political system has never been as sick as it is today," says Belgian philosopher Lieven De Cauter, in a wide-ranging interview where he discusses his theories about the "state of exception" in the context of the Bush administration’s "war on terror." De Cauter’s ideas are especially timely in light of the continuing revelations … Continue reading “Bush ‘Exceptionalism’ Led to Abu Ghraib”

Democrats should face it: they are incompetent and Bush will be reelected. With less than two months to go before the election, John Kerry is yet to address a single important issue. William Rivers Pitt, who runs the liberal web site Truthout, vented his frustration by declaring the election the dumbest ever. The entire election, … Continue reading “Hate and Delusion Have the Bit in Their Teeth”

Three years after al-Qaeda-commandeered planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon, the leaked ruminations of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld seem more pertinent than ever. "Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror," he wrote in a memo to his … Continue reading “After Three Years, War on Terror Looks Like a Loser”

In early 1943, J. Robert Oppenheimer – professor of theoretical physics at the University of California (UC) – set out to recruit a scientific staff for a purpose he could not disclose, to work at a place he could not specify, for a period of time he could not predict. In April, Robert M. Underhill, … Continue reading “Outsource Nukes?”

The Bush administration’s three-year "war on terrorism" has amounted to a "major failure of leadership and makes Americans more vulnerable rather than more secure," according to a new report by Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF), a network of mainly progressive policy and security analysts. The report, "A Secure America in a Secure World," concludes that … Continue reading “‘Realist’ Group: War on Terror a Failure”

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell Thursday declared that the past 18 months of attacks by government forces and Arab militias on black African farmers in the western region of Darfur amounted to "genocide" and pledged to push hard at the UN Security Council for tough measures against Khartoum to stop it. Following a two-month … Continue reading “Powell Declares Darfur Situation ‘Genocide’”

The third anniversary of 9/11 reveals nothing but our continued ignorance of the circumstances surrounding that event, which seems ever more shrouded in mystery. This in spite of the plethora of official reports, issued by the Senate, various congressional committees, and an official U.S. government commission devoted to the subject, which held public hearings, and … Continue reading “Ghosts of 9/11”

GENEVA – The stalemate continues in the Conference on Disarmament (CD), which for the eighth year in a row ended its annual sessions this week without reaching an agreement on a working program among its 66 member states. The CD works by consensus, which means it cannot undertake new work without the agreement of all … Continue reading “Eight-Year UN Disarmament Stalemate Continues”