On Tuesday April 18, Chinese President Hu Jintao landed in the United States and, after a tour of a Boeing plant, made his official way, with all due pomp and ceremony, to the expectable "state banquet" in Washington… no, not at the White House but at the...
You can count on one thing. All over Washington, Republicans are at least as capable as I am of watching and interpreting the polling version of the smashup of the Bush administration. With each new poll, the numbers creep lower yet. Presidential approval in the...
In the first part of his unique history of the car bomb, "The Poor Man's Air Force," Mike Davis (author of the only significant book on the Avian flu, The Monster at Our Door, and Planet of Slums, a startling analysis of the way significant parts of our planet have...
In a column on March 23 ("A Vision, Bruised and Dented"), David Brooks of the New York Times wrote about "the rise of what Richard Lowry of the National Review calls the 'To Hell With Them' Hawks." In part, Brooks characterized these hawks as being conservatives who...
Words fail. As last week ended, the vice president, we learned (in papers filed in federal court by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald in the Plame-Niger-uranium, sixteen-fateful-words, disagree-with-us-and-we'll-whack-you case), told his chief of staff, "Scooter"...
It didn't take long after the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003 for one of the radioactive words of the Vietnam era to make its first appearance, even if in stunted, referential form. Media pundits, former military men, and others began fretting, even as American...
In the Vietnam era, the subject of war crimes was the last to arrive and the first to depart. When, in 1971 in Detroit, Vietnam Veterans Against the War convened its Winter Soldier Investigation into U.S. war crimes in Southeast Asia, it was roundly ignored by the...
Just last week, a jury began to deliberate on the fate of Zacarias Moussaoui, who may or may not have been the missing 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks. At the same time, newly released recordings of 911 operators responding to calls from those about to die that...
In Part 1 of his interview, Chalmers Johnson suggested what that fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall, end-of-the-Cold-War moment meant to him; explored how deeply empire and militarism have entered the American bloodstream; and began to consider what it means to live in an...
As he and his wife Sheila drive me through downtown San Diego in the glare of midday, he suddenly exclaims, "Look at that structure!" I glance over, and just across the blue expanse of the harbor is an enormous aircraft carrier. "It's the USS Ronald Reagan," he says,...
