From the Archive: Not only have George W. Bush and the Iraq War architects skated away from meaningful accountability, but so too have the media figures who provided the propaganda framework for the illegal invasion, a break with a principle sternly enforced…
Category: Human Rights
The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War
Exclusive: Americans today know a lot more about Iraq than they did ten years ago, knowledge gained painfully from the blood of soldiers and civilians. But a crucial question remains: why did George W. Bush and his neocon advisers rush headlong into…
The Undying Shame of the Iraq War
The Iraq War killed almost 4,500 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The destruction also shamed the consciences of decent Americans who must now face the fact that the only real accountability has been exacted against whistleblowers like…
Iraq War: An Affront to Nuremberg
The tenth anniversary of the Iraq War has understandably focused on the thousands upon thousands of people killed and the chaos unleashed. But the war also dealt a harsh blow to the legal principles that U.S. leaders helped enshrine after World…
Liberation Theology Haunts New Pope
Liberation theology holds that Jesus was committed to making society address the needs of the poor, not just giving them charity. But traditional Church leaders condemn it as Marxism in Christian trappings and have sat back as rightist regimes tortured…
Taking ‘Gun Rights’ Global
For years, the NRA and the American Right have played games with some imprecise wording in the Second Amendment, which was always about a state’s right to have a well-regulated militia, but now those games are distorting U.S. foreign policy,…
A Warfare State of Mind
Many Americans forget how intimidating it was a decade ago for any U.S. citizen to speak out against President George W. Bush’s rush to war with Iraq. For example, the Dixie Chicks got death threats and actor Sean Penn was…
Pope Francis, CIA and ‘Death Squads’
Exclusive: In the 1970s, Father Jorge Bergoglio faced a moment of truth: Would he stand up to Argentina’s military neo-Nazis “disappearing” thousands including priests, or keep his mouth shut and his career on track? Like many other Church leaders, Pope Francis…
Evita, the Swiss and the Nazis
From the Archive: Jorge Bergoglio’s election to be Pope Francis has revived troubling questions about the Catholic Church’s role in the Argentine “dirty war” and other right-wing repression in Latin America of the 1970s and ’80s. But the history goes back to ties to the Nazis, as the…
Bureaucracy v. Bradley Manning
Awash in evidence of U.S.-inflicted civilian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning chose action over silence, releasing thousands of documents via WikiLeaks to the public. In doing so, he violated the code of faceless bureaucratic complicity, writes…