History, Farce, and David Petraeus History, it is said, arrives first as tragedy, then as farce.  First as Karl Marx, then as the Marx Brothers.  In the case of twenty-first century America, history arrived first as George W. Bush (and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and the Project for a [...]

The political trial of a caring man In 1999, I travelled to Iraq with Denis Halliday who had resigned as assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations rather than enforce a punitive UN embargo on Iraq. Devised and policed by the United States and Britain, the extreme suffering caused by these “sanctions” included, according to Unicef, [...]

Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision not to prosecute CIA torturers in two high-profile homicides bows to the political difficulty of going after field agents while sparing superiors, including ex-President George W. Bush. But the all-clear on torture sends a dangerous message, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern. When Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu said last week that the ex-leaders of [...]

In April of 2003, I returned from Iraq after having lived there during the U.S. Shock and Awe bombing and the initial weeks of the invasion. Before the bombing I had traveled to Iraq about two dozen times and had helped organize 70 trips to Iraq, aiming to cast light on a brutal sanctions regime, [...]

 Iraq, Libia, Siria: no tenemos derecho a creernos Dios En una película tradicional de vaqueros, sabemos qué hacer: buscamos al sujeto que lleva el sombrero blanco para saber a quién aplaudir, y al que lleva el sombrero negro para saber quién merece morir, de preferencia horriblemente, antes de que empiecen a mostrar los créditos. Si Hollywood [...]

Iraq, Libya, Syria: We have no right to play God In a traditional cowboy movie, we know what to do: we look for the guy wearing the white hat to be sure who to cheer, and for the one wearing the black hat to know who deserves to die, preferably gruesomely, before the credits roll. If [...]

Ya saben, todos los medios de comunicación prostituidos han escrito centenares de trinos sobre esa mascarada llamada [Cumbre de] la Liga Árabe en Bagdad. Nos han dejado la impresión de que Iraq ha sido acogida de nuevo bajo la benevolente ala árabe… ¿Qué árabe, qué benevolencia, qué ala y qué Iraq? La gente es una ilusa [...]

 Media smears suggest Swedish complicity in a Washington-driven push to punish Julian Assange War by media, says current military doctrine, is as important as the battlefield. This is because the real enemy is the public at home, whose manipulation and deception is essential for starting an unpopular colonial war. Like the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, attacks on Iran [...]

On April 10, 2002, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the House of Commons, “Saddam Hussein’s regime is…developing weapons of mass destruction, and we cannot leave him doing so unchecked.” A year later, Blair, enthusiastically joined a US-led coalition that launched an illegal war against Iraq. Their hunt for weapons of mass destruction was futile [...]

Faluya aún soporta las secuelas de la guerra; de los escombros de las casas bombardeadas se siguen sacando esqueletos y lo que es peor: la tasa de malformaciones congénitas en nacimientos y en la infancia se han disparado. Se está reconstruyendo, pero los cortes de electricidad y de agua potable prevalecen. El ambiente general de la [...]