NEW YORK - Secret detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan must be included in U.S. military monitoring of prisoner mistreatment, according to an article in the Lancet medical journal that details collusion between medical staff and abusive interrogators. While much...
Neocons Seek Vindication in Escalation
"The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." This is the heart of the Bush Doctrine from the president's "axis of evil" address to Congress. And the...
Poor Choice for a Fake Casus Belli
When the Warsaw Pact disintegrated in 1989 and the Soviet Union two years later most of us heaved a humongous sigh of relief. The Cold War was over! Our "containment" strategy had worked. Now we could begin dismantling thousands of...
Buchanan Against the Empire
If you take only one book to the beach this summer, let it be Patrick J. Buchanan's Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency. Marshalling his considerable ability as a polemicist, his wide...
How Do They Get Away With It?
It is not an enjoyable experience watching the Republican Party descend into the depths of propaganda and falsehood. Today's disaffected Republicans once believed the GOP to be the party of principle. Any remaining claim to principle ended with Bush's invasion of...
The Persistence of Bigotry
It's easy to avoid bigotry if you just remember that most of the time when our minds leap from the particular to the general, we are making an error in reasoning. Inductive reasoning, which goes from many, many particulars to the general, does not condone going from...
A Letter from Belgrade
Belgrade (Beograd) means "White City" in old Slavic as well as modern Serbian. The city stands on the confluence of two major rivers, the Sava and the Danube, and presently has almost two million residents. With many of them away on vacation in the dog days of early...
Credibility of Afghan Vote Threatened by Violence, Fraud
UNITED NATIONS - With battle-scarred Iraq in shambles, the United States is now trying to showcase war-ravaged Afghanistan as a potentially vibrant multi-party democracy on the road to political success, say UN diplomats and Afghan experts. "[U.S. President...
FBI Launches ‘Preemptive’ Investigations
MONTREAL - Sarah Bardwell did not get the names of the four FBI agents and two police officers who questioned her and her roommates late on the afternoon of July 22 on the front porch of their house in Denver. "We asked them for their names and they said they...
Violence Slows Iraqi Economy
BAGHDAD - Seventeen months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, many Iraqi traders say the economy is stagnating. Last year in August the streets of Baghdad were bustling with commercial activity. At almost every corner sat a man exchanging money or selling something,...


