In October 2003, the TV series Frontline did a show from Iraq, "Truth, War, and Consequences," that featured a remarkable scene shot the previous April, not long after American troops arrived in Baghdad. A group of GIs have captured some Iraqis whom they accuse of...
I met Muzamil Jaleel, the Kashmir Bureau Chief for the Indian Express, last spring while teaching at the University of California (Berkeley) Graduate School of Journalism. He was on a brief leave from his civil-war-torn land, but every passing story he happened to...
Here were a few headlines from yesterday's papers: "Bush Urges Congress Join Him on Budget Cuts" (Reuters); "President Offers Budget Proposal With Broad Cuts" (New York Times); "Bush Spending Plan Hits Social Programs" (Boston Globe); "Bush: Budget Cuts Part of...
Okay, under the rubric of "the war on terror" (which turns out to be just so versatile, so useful for so many much-desired but once back-burner policies, programs, and products), the military is having a grand old time protecting us from the Enemy up close and...
Since ancient Rome, imperial republics have invariably felt a tension between cherished republican practices at home and distinctly unrepublican ones abroad; or put another way, if imperial practices spread far enough beyond the republic's borders and gain enough...
In the United States, the long-awaited Jan. 30 Iraqi election, assessed below by Dilip Hiro, might be labeled the "until" election or, more recently, the "in-the-days-before" election. Since "sovereignty" was turned over to the interim Iraqi government last June (a...
"'It's a finesse to give power to Rumsfeld – giving him the right to act swiftly, decisively, and lethally,' the first Pentagon adviser told me. 'It's a global free-fire zone.'" (Seymour Hersh, "The Coming Wars," the New Yorker magazine) George Bush's...
Recently, I wrote once again about the spread of torture as a way of life in the Bush administration's offshore imperium. I offered my version of a national "self-portrait" for the New Year ("American Gothic") and considered the latest torture news, now practically...
Here's a strange, small tale of our times, as reported from Washington by Guy Dinmore in the sober British Financial Times. According to an anonymous counterinsurgency expert Dinmore evidently interviewed, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has a "brutally accurate"...
The other day I posted a Dahr Jamail piece entitled, Iraq: The Devastation, but another word has recently come to mind that, I suspect, might apply no less aptly to Iraq and other areas where the Bush administration is exerting its muscle. That word is "desolation."...
