They’ve Only Just Begun…

"They've only just begun, To kill. White lace and Abu Ghraib, A kiss for luck and we're on our waaaaaay…" With apologies to the shade of Karen Carpenter, the lyrics of her famous song – with a few creative tweaks here and there – pretty much sum up the...

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Rummy Dropped From the Loop?

Update: In my nominations for the TomDispatch Political Comedy Awards of 2005, I suggested that the Bush administration, rejected by several top choices in its search for a director of national intelligence and evidently desperate, had "hit on what was clearly a...

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Beware of Dog!

It is not very flattering to be paraded like a Rottweiler on a leash, whose master threatens to let him loose on his enemies. But this is our situation now. Vice President Dick Cheney threatened a few weeks ago that if Iran continues to develop its nuclear...

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Just Say ‘No’ to Military Recruiters

Suppose a traveling salesman came to your door. He said he was representing a foreign country that had a bad government. He would like for your son to volunteer to overthrow that government and possibly get killed in the process. What would you do? I'd slam the door...

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Soulless Soldiers

"That all goes to show that wars are not won through newspaper articles, but rather with ideas, soldiers, weapons and munitions. A people wins when it has the prerequisites to victory, when it wants to win and when it must win. All that is true for us. This...

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Backtalk February 21, 2004

Soldier's Injury Leaves Void My daughter, Mariela, in the U.S. Army, was attacked, Dec. 18, in Kuwait. She was changing a tire on her truck with three other soldiers. A civilian vehicle from Kuwait ran over them on purpose and ran away. Two of the soldiers died; my...

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Baiting a Trap for Bush?

If Syria's Bashar Assad was behind the assassination of ex-Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri of Lebanon, he is, in the edited version of Gen. Tommy Franks' phrase, "the dumbest … man on the planet." The Beirut car bombing that killed Hariri smashed Assad's hope of any...

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Outfoxed by bin Laden

President Bush's invasion has turned Iraq into a recruiting and training ground for anti-U.S. terrorists, according to CIA Director Porter Goss in testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Feb. 16. Goss' report was supported by Vice Admiral...

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Targeting Nonexistent Nukes?

On March 19, 2003, Bush informed Congress that Saddam posed "a continuing threat to the national security of the United States" by "continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons...

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