US officials recently announced the somewhat jarring news that Israeli security forces will be training American soldiers in the techniques of urban warfare. Apparently Israel's illegal thirty-five year occupation of Palestine has enabled it to perfect tactics that...
One of the useful things done by the late Michel Foucault was to remind us of what a looney Jeremy Bentham was. He did this by setting up Bentham's screwball plans for a "panopticon" prison, as a central metaphor in his Birth of the Prison. This pretty much...
Thoughts on the American empire … Is It an Empire? Whenever I say that America has become an empire, someone is sure to say I’m being ridiculous. But what do you call a government that has tried (usually successfully) to force "regime changes" in...
National Review Online recently posted "Ten Questions for Adel al-Jubeir," yet another rant by Stephen Schwartz, the Michael Ruppert of the Right, who claims that the Saudi government was really behind the 9/11 attacks. It is the usual fare from the neocons'...
I feel pretty safe in my little netbar across from one of the biggest vegetable/meat/fish/assorted goodies markets in Chengdu. I am surrounded by Diablo (the latest computer game craze to take China by storm) playing young fellows, dirty side streets, hot pot stalls...
Shall we agree on a few things? If Mr Blix and his Unmovic chums are even squinted at by some Ba'athist oaf, that will be pretext enough for war. If there is then a war, it will, presumably, be waged at least as efficiently as the last one – and although there...
Uh-Oh …. Don't look now, but last week President Vladimir Putin had the bright idea of bringing back the five-pointed red star as the insignia of the Russian military. It all begins to make sense if we note the Russian government's crackdown on … Barbie! The...
Thousands of American troops already occupy Afghanistan, and perhaps hundreds of thousands more are poised to attack Iraq. The justification given for these military invasions is that both nations support terrorism, and thus pose a risk to the United States. Yet when...
Some of the media are politely calling it an inspired choice. But does anybody really think we will learn anything we didn’t already know from the commission to be headed by Henry Kissinger to look into the intelligence and enforcement failures that led up to the...
Rarely has there been a display of unanimity such as the universal hissing that greeted Henry Kissinger's appointment as chairman of the "National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States." From Maureen Dowd's reliably b*tchy response –...
