Despite the growing likelihood of confrontation between their two countries, U.S. President George W. Bush and Iranian President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad share a number of remarkable similarities. Juan Cole, a prominent blogger and Middle East historian at the University of Michigan, noted last week that the two men’s campaign tactics suggest that they are "soul mates," …
Continue reading “Ahmadinejad and Bush: Separated at Birth?”
“At a breakfast meeting with reporters, Wolfowitz said he hasn’t read the [Downing Street] memos because he doesn’t want to be ‘distracted’ by ‘history’ from his new job as head of the world’s leading development bank. He returned this weekend from a tour of four African nations. “‘There’s a lot I could say about what …
Continue reading “Immoral Relativism”
David Aaronovitch, formerly a Communist Party youth leader and now the freshest shoot in Britain’s bumper crop of Blairite neocons, tried to smear me once before, and I dealt with him here. The Stalinist school of falsification never sleeps, however: its practitioners just keep churning out lies, in the hope that sheer repetition will do …
Continue reading “Comrade Aaronovitch
Strikes Again”
The George W. Bush administration’s policies on indefinite detention and "extraordinary rendition" are coming under heavy fire from a number of institutions and organizations, including the United Nations, Amnesty International, and members of the U.S. Congress itself. "The prohibition of torture is nonnegotiable," said UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the International Day in Support of …
Continue reading “US Terror Policies Draw Outrage at Home and Abroad”
"Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle." – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn When Bush decided, prior to Sept. 11, to attack Iraq, he committed himself to lies and deceit. As his British co-conspirators realized, only victory could save them from the consequences. On June 27, General George Casey, U.S. commander …
Continue reading “A Defeat Bred in Deceit”
The FBI is carrying out "unwarranted investigations for religious or political reasons," according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which charges that "the agency has sunk back into the kind of political monitoring it did in the 1960s and 1970s." The Washington-based advocacy group said a series of FBI inquiries across the country shows …
Continue reading “Rights Groups Detail Growing Police State”
http://www.independent.org/tii/antiwar/e050628.html
Ten days ago, in one of southern Tehran’s poor neighborhoods, I interviewed some voters in line to cast ballots for Iran’s next president. After a while, when an official at the polling station asked who I thought would win, I repeated the conventional media wisdom: "Rafsanjani." "It will never happen," he replied flatly. "I promise …
Continue reading “From Tehran to Washington, Demagogues Rule”
Vietnamese Prime Minister Phan Van Khai is not a democratic leader – and he doesn’t play one on Fox News television. If a “[pick favorite color] Revolution” were to take place in the streets of Hanoi, one could expect that PM Khai and the other Communist Party bosses would prove to be quite ruthless in …
Continue reading “Trading, Not Invading: US Hums Different Tune on Vietnam”
Last Friday, the price of light sweet crude oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange for August delivery closed 16 cents short of $60/barrel – the highest price ever and an ironic outcome for the millions of Americans who believe that cheap oil was the reason for Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Equally shocking to Americans …
Continue reading “The Last Throes of US Dominance” 
