Bush's Shame

Watching the pathetic, mealy-mouthed response of President Bush and his State Department to Egypt's decision to sentence the leading Egyptian democracy advocate to seven years in prison leaves one wondering whether the whole Bush foreign policy team isn't just a big bunch of phonies. Shame on all of them. [read more]

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Aggressive New Tactics Proposed for Terror War
Covert Acts Eyed as Rumsfeld Seeks to Revitalize U.S. Effort

The chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command proposed a series of aggressive new covert actions against al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in a closed-door meeting with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday, part of a new Pentagon initiative to reenergize the 10-month-old counteroffensive against terrorism. [read more]

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Gulf War Lite

This confusion has reached such heights that many are beginning to call this a "Wag the Dog" war, an attempt to avoid a Republican disaster in the November elections. While the exact timing may be affected by domestic considerations, the claim that they are the reason for the war itself is implausible when you consider that there has been talk about war on Iraq ever since 9/11, at a time when the world was Bush's oyster. In fact, the war is simply a continuation of the "regime change" policy of over 10 years' standing -- except that in the post-9/11 world the government believes that it can get away with anything by invoking terrorism as a threat.

So what is really going on? [read more]

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The End of Innocence

In the light of the tragedy and the devastating images from New York City, in the shadow of embarrassingly stupid remarks made by the major western 'free world' leaders and in the light of the call for a western jihad against a faceless enemy, I feel obliged to expose the lie that stands in the center of the current liberal democratic militant enthusiasm. [read more]

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Invasion on autopilot
The Bush wars and public dissent—then and now

This week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is holding hearings of George Junior's intent to invade Iraq again. Just like Daddy. Unlike 12 years ago, there is no compelling invasion of Kuwait (or fake incubator deaths) to spur global outrage (and alarm over oil supply). There is, in fact, no compelling reason of any sort to go to war against Iraq. The only recent development cited by the Bush Administration is the claim that Iraq is developing new "weapons of mass destruction." That claim that has consistently been considered patently absurd by the rest of the world, including a succession of United Nations officials charged with looking into such things. Several of the ones who've headed the "Food for Oil" program, or who've served as weapons inspectors in Iraq, have quit their jobs (and careers) and become full-time activists trying to counter White House propaganda (under both Clinton and Bush) and the steady, inexorable war drums of the past two years. [read more]

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War and forgetfulness
A bloody media game

Three and a half years ago, some key information about U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq briefly surfaced on the front pages of American newspapers—and promptly vanished. Now, with righteous war drums beating loudly in Washington, let's reach deep down into the news media's Orwellian memory hole and retrieve the story. [read more]

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Bush held up plan to hit Bin Laden

The Bush administration sat on a Clinton-era plan to attack al- Qaida in Afghanistan for eight months because of political hostility to the outgoing president and competing priorities, it was reported yesterday. [read more]