Tag: Iraq War

The Mystery of Neocon Influence

The neocons despite the disastrous Iraq War and other harm they have caused remain influential in Official Washington, given time on talk shows and space on op-ed pages to expound on their latest dreams of American intervention in the Middle…

Whitewashing Rachel Corrie’s Death

Two recent rulings, one in Israel blaming American Rachel Corrie for her own death while obstructing the demolition of Palestinian homes and another in America absolving torturers in the murder of detainees, suggest that national security trumps justice and international…

An All-Clear for Bush’s Torturers

Even as Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu urges a war-crimes trial for George Bush and Tony Blair for invading Iraq, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder gives an all-clear to Bush’s subordinates for homicides that resulted from torture in Afghanistan and Iraq, a repudiation of…

Will Downing St. Memo Recur on Iran?

Exclusive: A decade after the infamous “Downing Street Memo” and its “fixed” intelligence for invading Iraq, the pressure is on again to make the case whatever the facts for a new war with Iran. Will the UK’s MI6 and the CIA bend…

July 14, 2003: A Day of Infamy

From the Archive: July 14 is a French holiday celebrating the 1789 liberation of the Bastille prison in Paris, leading to the overthrow of the monarchy. But there were less auspicious events connected to that date in 2003, during the autocratic…

The Enigma of Yasser Arafat

The late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is back in the news over suspicions his death in 2004 was the result of poisoning, possibly exposure to polonium. The year before his death on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq…

Double Standards on Civilian Deaths

Whenever U.S. forces inflict massive civilian casualties, it’s a “mistake” or the fault of the targets because they were “hiding” in populated areas. Yet, when civilian deaths occur in the country of a “designated enemy,” all ambiguity is swept aside and no…

War’s Secondary Casualties

The horrible toll of war is not only inflicted on soldiers and their families but on the doctors and nurses who care for the wounded. For the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of the injured are flown to Landstuhl in…

Setting the Stage for More Wars

U.S. news correspondents often compete to cover Americans wars with an eye to making a name or building a career. But when the wars drag on or when problems are just festering the news media quickly loses interest, ironically setting…

The US Press Sell-out on Iraq War

As President George W. Bush rushed the nation to war in early 2003, some Americans took personal risks to warn the country about the misleading evidence on Iraq, but most U.S. news outlets turned a deaf ear, sometimes leaving the…