When I was young, the Philadelphia Bulletin ran cartoon ads that usually featured a man in trouble — dangling by his fingers, say, from an outdoor clock. There would always be people all around him, but far too engrossed in the daily paper to notice. The tagline was: “In Philadelphia, nearly everybody reads the Bulletin.” …
Continue reading “The 0% Doctrine”
With the 10th anniversary of the crime that was 9/11, the question inevitably crops up: Who won, the United States or al-Qaeda? According to the politically correct answer, although al-Qaeda has been decimated, it has been a Pyrrhic victory for Washington. In defeating al-Qaeda, the U.S. government engaged in many unnecessary violations of human rights …
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Documents found in the files of Muammar Gadhafi’s intelligence services in Libya, which indicated that the now overthrown dictator cooperated closely with U.S. rendition of terrorist suspects to his torture chambers, should prompt questions about how much President Barack Obama has improved civil liberties from the bad old days of George W. Bush. Answer: not …
Continue reading “Comparing Obama and Bush on Civil Liberties and War”
George W. who? I mean, the guy is so over. He turned the big six-five the other day, and it was barely a footnote in the news. And Dick Cheney, tick-tick-tick. Condoleezza Rice? She’s already onto her next memoir, and yet it’s as if she’s been wiped from history, too. As for Donald Rumsfeld, he …
Continue reading “Obama’s Bush-League World”
If in 2008 someone had said that Obama’s war policy would be more belligerent and costlier than another round of Bush’s, nearly no one would have believed it. Bush started a preventive war in Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands without any credible correlation to U.S. security, except perhaps a very negative one. He turned a …
Continue reading “Worse Than a Third Bush Term?”
When George W. Bush rejected a Taliban offer to have Osama bin Laden tried by a moderate group of Islamic states in mid-October 2001, he gave up the only opportunity the United States would have to end bin Laden’s terrorist career for the next nine years.The al-Qaeda leader was able to escape into Pakistan a …
Continue reading “US Refusal of 2001 Taliban Offer Gave bin Laden a Free Pass”
Ray McGovern on Bush’s European problem
Why should George W. Bush have been “angry” to learn in late 2007 of the “high-confidence” unanimous judgment of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon four years earlier? Seems to me he might have said “Hot Dog!” rather than curse under his breath. Nowhere in his memoir, …
Continue reading “US Intelligence Thwarted Attack on Iran”
After a three-year investigation, President Barack Obama’s mantra – "look forward and not backwards" – appears to have trumped the rule of law as a special prosecutor declined to pursue criminal charges against the Central Intelligence Agency operatives involved in the destruction of video recordings of interrogations of "war on terror" suspects. The human rights …
Continue reading “Outrage Mounts over Bush’s Waterboarding ‘Confession’”
As George W. Bush does a rash of media interviews to promote his new book, Decision Points, some people – even his nemesis, hip-hop star Kanye West – have begun to mute their criticisms of his presidency. This is nothing new; as time passes and old wounds heal, the nation’s impression of former presidents – …
Continue reading “Can W. Reinvent His Presidency?” 
