By now, everyone has either seen or knows about the video of U.S. Marines urinating on the corpses of dead Taliban fighters. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said that “the conduct depicted in the footage is utterly deplorable.” According to Secretary of State...
Goldstone’s Rethink
Israeli leaders have barely hidden their jubilation at an opinion article in last Friday’s Washington Post by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone reconsidering the findings of his United Nations-appointed inquiry into Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008. For...
The Censored War and You
America’s Stay-at-Home Ex-President
Bradley Manning and the Rule of Law
The case of Pfc. Bradley Manning raises legal issues about his pre-trial detention, freedom of speech and the press, and proving his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Putting aside Manning's guilt or innocence, if Bradley Manning saw the Afghan and Iraq war diaries as...
The Pentagon Must Protect Whistleblowers
The grisly details continue to drip out. Five American soldiers have been accused of setting up "kills" and murdering innocent Afghans earlier this year, according to charges filed by the U.S. Army against them. But could some of the murders have been stopped earlier?...
Frago 242
The biggest US security breach in our history, carried off by WikiLeaks, reveals a wealth of information – hundreds of thousands of field reports, the raw material collected by the US military on the ground in Iraq. It will be quite a while before the...
An Award for WikiLeaks
You are not likely to learn this from the “mainstream media," but WikiLeaks and its leader Julian Assange have received the 2010 Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) award for their resourcefulness in making available secret U.S. military...
Such a Parcel o’ Rogues in a Nation
Lancing the Boil
Author's note: These brief remarks were given at the rally for Bradley Manning Aug. 8 in Quantico, where he is imprisoned. The rally was sponsored by Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, and the Courage to Resist. We are living in a liminal time, that is to say we live on...