For most Americans the death squads and torture chambers that killed thousands in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua in the 1980’s are difficult to understand and easy to forget because, aside for an apology by President Bill Clinton in 1999 – the United...
Ten years after reaching the height of their influence with the invasion of Iraq, the neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks are fighting hard to retain their control of the Republican Party. That fight was on vivid display last week at the Conservative...
Ten years after the invasion of Iraq, the war criminals are still at large. Saddam Hussein is dead and buried, but the cabal that lied us into war is still around – and not only that, they are mocking us from their podiums in the media, justifying and obscuring their...
We don’t get it. We really don’t. We may not, in military terms, know how to win any more, but as a society we don’t get losing either. We don’t recognize it, even when it’s staring us in the face, when nothing -- and I...
The Iraqi puzzle of life confirms an endless number of tragedies: Ethnic tension and sectarianism have become a major element in Iraqi politics since the US/UK invasion of 2003, a polarization of inter-group relations Iraqis had not known before. This...
Ten years ago, as President George W. Bush and his administration were putting the finishing touches on their unprovoked invasion of Iraq, the mainstream U.S. news media had long since capitulated, accepting the conventional wisdom that nothing could – or should –...
Soon after the joint US-British bombing campaign "Operation Desert Fox" devastated parts of Iraq in December 1998 , I was complaining to a friend in the lobby of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. I was disappointed with the fact that our busy schedule in Iraq - mostly...
Ten years ago, Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations in a speech which routed what was left of American resistance to the Bush/Cheney push for invading Iraq. The next day, the Washington Post’s editorial pages spoke for the conventional wisdom,...
Ten years ago, Katharine Gun, then a 28-year-old British intelligence officer, saw an e-mailed memo from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) that confirmed for her in black and white the already widespread suspicion that the U.S. and U.K. were about to launch war...
It was like walking through a nightmare: drifting in an out of hospital rooms, down the long hallways, her contact with shock-ravaged Iraqi parents interrupted only by glimpses of their physically deformed and terminally sick babies who in many cases, would never see...
