On April 19, 1993, agents of the U.S. government assaulted the Branch Davidian “compound” at Waco, Texas – a religious community of Adventists under the leadership of David Koresh – killing 74 men, women, and children, including 12 children younger than five years of age. It was an act of state terrorism so blatant that …
Continue reading “Waco as Metaphor”
“All great truths begin as blasphemies,” said George Bernard Shaw. But not all blasphemies are the beginnings of great truths, a distinction worth remembering when it comes to Ward Churchill. The chairman of the ethnic studies program at the University of Colorado gained notoriety for calling the victims of 9/11 “little Eichmanns.” By this he …
Continue reading “Yes, Some People Do Push Back”
http://www.independent.org/tii/antiwar/e050419.html
WASHINGTON, D.C. – When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee votes on John Bolton’s appointment as ambassador to the United Nations Tuesday, they will do so having never asked him about his support for a group called the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, an Iranian dissident group that was backed by Saddam Hussein for almost two decades and has a …
Continue reading “Laying the Groundwork for War With Iran”
NEW DELHI – Barely 10 days after launching a landmark bus service connecting the two divided parts of Kashmir, India and Pakistan Monday took a giant stride forward by declaring that the peace process between them is "irreversible" and will be pursued sincerely and purposefully. This is the cheerful outcome of a three-day hurricane-speed visit …
Continue reading “India, Pakistan Take a Big Stride Forward”
Memo to: Paul Volcker As if you don’t have enough trouble in preparing your final report to UN General Secretary Kofi Annan on the so-called “Oil-for-Food Scandal,” now the U.S. Justice Department has jumped the gun and indicted Houston oilman David Bay Chalmers Jr. and his Bayoil USA company. For what? For paying “illegal kickbacks” …
Continue reading “The Real Oil-for-Food Scandal”
"You know, Josh Burkeen is our rep down here in the southeast area. He lives in Colgate and travels out of Atoka. He was telling me lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it. Think about that …
Continue reading “The High Priest of Empire”
That the world is “a carnival of buncombe,” as H. L. Mencken put it, is an idea that is proved every day – nay, every hour – as the news of our leaders’ cluelessness unfolds, but this past week must have had the old iconoclast shaking the earth over his coffin with waves of seismic …
Continue reading “Our Bizarro World
Foreign Policy”
Once the Senate confirms John Bolton to be our ambassador to the United Nations, he vows to “forge a stronger relationship between the United States and the United Nations, which depends critically on American leadership.” Like the leadership exhibited when Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 in defiance of the authority reserved to the UN Security …
Continue reading “Bonkers at the UN”
A month ago at TomDispatch, I wrote an essay, "Which War Is This Again?," about the naming of the “war” our president declared in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The neocons fell in love with the idea of us being in a generational struggle like the Cold War (which they thought …
Continue reading “Waiting for DE-Day” 
