Will The US Government And Media Finally Report The Slaughter Of Iraqis By The US Military?

I recently received a set of questions from Le Monde Diplomatique reporter Kim Bredesen about the 2007 Project Censored story about 1,000,000 Iraqi deaths due to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq....

The argument about torture has continued without resolution since the exposure of Abu Ghraib. Much of the discussion centers on the concatenation of three related, but nevertheless separate, questions: What is "moral"? What is "legal"? What is "effective"? The slippery linkage of the three questions is fully expressed in a...

Dean Baker of Truthout recently published a wonderful article about McCain's plan for oil drilling off the Florida coast.

Baker makes three very important points about this plan.

First, there is simply not enough oil there to make any kind of difference in terms of the energy crisis:...

Collateral Damage, a new book by Laila al-Arian, an independent journalist and Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and former Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times, offers the best account so far of what Hedges calls the "vast enterprise of industrial slaughter unleashed in Iraq," and its...

Ashley Smith has just published a fine article in the International Socialist Review analyzing the consequences of Bush's surge. It is short and to the point, and it frames the situation in Iraq very well. Here is a brief summary of what I think are the most important points:

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The best "Top Ten" list for the year 2007 is from Juan Cole: The Top Ten Myths About Iraq. This has been a myth-making year in Iraq, starting with the major media climbing aboard the Bush Administration effort to spin the "surge" as a big success in reducing violence--which...

Sometimes Paul Krugman cuts to the heart of some issue in a way that few people can. His December 17 Op Ed in the New York Times is an example. He compares the positions of John Edwards and Barack Obama on medical care, and finds Obama to be severely...

It doesn't matter what the news from Iraq is, the official bottom line is always the same (for all our leaders, Democrat as well as Republican): we have to stay there until the job is done.

Tom Engelhardt, in a recent "Tom Dispatch," clarifies what this means by...

The recent declarations about the success of the surge from both Bush Administration officials and from the media has stirred many comments about the latest (apparent) paradox of the imperial venture in Iraq: why, with violence declining (at least in Baghdad and Anbar) and the military continuing to disintegrate from...

Without denigrating Al Gore's work on global warming, which I think is pretty damn wonderful, let's not forget his history as an altogether too typical American politician, as this snatch from Richard Clarke's book (Against All Enemies, 143-4) demonstrates:

"extraordinary renditions", were operations to apprehend terrorists abroad,...

A recent article by Asia Times reporter Pepe Escobar, one of the most informed and astute observers of Iraq events, analyzes some potentially momentous developments inside Iraq in the last few weeks, developments that could actually result in making the American occupation militarily and politically untenable.

Basically Escobar says...

If you are not already convinced that the Democratic party leadership supports the war and does not want to end it, this Washington Post poll should help you change your mind.

The Democratic Party leadership keeps saying that they cannot vote a reduction in the $190 billion supplemental...

Most Americans have probably already satisfied themselves that the Petraeus/Crocker duet was singing off key. But I have just read my hometown newspaper's coverage and it simply does not address all the distortions and outright lies that this testimony contains; and I then watched a fifteen minute treatment of CNN's...

Go to this site and take four minutes and thirty seconds of your time to watch this gut-wrenching video from Iraq. Salee, an adorable little Iraqi girl, tells how she lost her legs and her two friends to a precision attack by an American air-to-surface missile.

Let's be...

Here is a conundrum that I think is on a lot of people's mind, sent to me by a friend: Even the most elementary student of guerrilla warfare knows that if you loudly proclaim that you're going to attack at H, and actually deploy your forces and do attack at...

The "anti-Al Qaeda" "alliance" between the U.S. military and "former" Sunni insurgents is now all over the news. I said a couple of things about this in my just published commentary on the failure of the surge, but I think we need to talk about the larger significance...

Today is a banner day for aficionados of the CIA. After a 15-year Freedom of Information Act struggle, the National Security Archive has finally forced the CIA to reveal the "family jewels" -- a 702 page treasure trove of documents characterized in The New York Times as a "catalog...

Late last month, Joshua Holland and Raed Jarrar published a very important article on AlterNet that exposes the ugliest part of the U.S. occupation. This is exactly the sort of news that the mainstream media should be publishing on the front page as part of the constitutional mandate to...