It didn't take long for the supporters of Viktor Yushchenko, the West's Ukrainian sock puppet, to point to the KGB as the perpetrators of the poisoning of their candidate with a major dose of dioxin: "When asked by ABC News' Bill Weir if the Russian government,...
Another Iraq Exit Strategy
A while back in 2003, there was a lot of commentary and partisan whining on the lack of an "exit strategy" for Iraq. Bush got us into a quagmire, and we can't get out! In May of this year, William Pfaff suggested playing to Iraqi "nationalism," as...
Iraq Blowback Is Global and Growing
Blowback is a term invented by the Central Intelligence Agency to describe the unintended consequences of policies kept secret from the American people. Chalmers Johnson's excellent book, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, helped popularize the...
The Third Intifada
To appreciate the breathtaking magnanimity expressed by this short slogan, one needs to remember its context. Imagine: a foreign army occupies your village for decades, reduces you to subjects without any rights, arrests you arbitrarily, savagely tortures the...
Virtual Nukes
David Sanger's recent interview with Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has resulted in a New York Times article about "virtual nukes." What is a "virtual" nuke? Well, apparently, it's a nuke that...
Intel Bill No Win for Rights
NEW YORK - Many of the more draconian provisions affecting privacy, secrecy, and asylum-seekers originally included in Congress' intelligence reform bill passed this week were omitted in the law's final version. But the agreed compromise still contains language that...
Rebuilding Iraq: ‘Somebody Has to Do It’
While billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars have been awarded in lucrative contracts to companies such as Bechtel and Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), there are few signs that any reconstruction has actually taken place in war-torn Iraq. The...
Burying Water, Hiding Truth
In the summer of 1994, I was part of a four-person Christian Peacemaker Team dedicated to filing reports on human rights conditions in Jeremie, located in the southern finger of Haiti. When I arrived, I spent one day in Port au Prince, waiting to travel by ferry to...
We Are the Problem
Every time Iraqi soldiers and policemen boogie away from combat, the standard answer that comes out of the U.S. government is that they need to be "trained up" better. That's nonsense. Training teaches technique; it does not teach the will to fight. Given...
Backtalk, December 11, 2004
Feeding the Iraq Moloch ... There is no excuse for government's paying for innocent hostages. Killing innocents will isolate the terrorists to the support of immoral people. The exchange of hostages is only reasonable if all are combatants. As long as we release their...


