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The documents on the U.S. War in Iraq published by WikiLeaks contained data on 15,000 Iraqis killed in incidents that were previously unreported in the Western media or by the Iraqi Health Ministry, and therefore not counted in compilations of reported Iraqi war deaths by Iraqbodycount.org.
Besides offering new details about the horrors that George W. Bush’s invasion unleashed on Iraq – where a severed head could be casually tossed into a busy intersection – the nearly 400,000 pages of secret U.S. military records released by WikiLeaks show that a variety of factors beyond Bush’s much-touted “surge” in 2007 contributed to the gradual drop in violence.
In late 1998, when the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying under oath about a sexual affair, many on the Right insisted that the issue wasn’t the sex but the perjury. They are now confronted with a parallel case in which U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas quite clearly perjured himself to get his seat on the bench.
Your recent e-mail, wondering "what the f--- is going on" these days, questioning whether we Americans have taken "more than your usual amount of stupid pills," is well deserving of a considered response.
During the 1980s and early ’90s, the CIA worked in partnership with BCCI in what was, at the time, the agency’s largest covert operation ever, pumping an estimated $10 billion into funding the Afghan mujahedeen. Through this operation, Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network was formed. Bin Laden had accounts in BCCI and ran CIA/BCCI-funded camps.
Read on.Michael Oren is the Israeli ambassador to the United States. This means he stands in a line of foreign diplomats who are often quite out of the ordinary.
One of the most memorable moments in television coverage of American politics came during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968.
It seems I upset a lot of people with my recent article looking at the four previous times in modern U.S. politics when many on the Left chose to punish the Democrats by casting ballots for third parties or not voting, a tactic under consideration again this year.
The talk in Washington of late has been Bob Woodward’s book Obama’s Wars. The books are piled in the front of every bookstore in town, and people are whispering in the usual “inside baseball” way, about who in the Washington security bureaucracies dissed whom to Woodward.
Read on.In all of our current economic issues, there is always a “back story, a deeper context” that is usually missing, “disappeared” like those Salvador Allende supporters in Chile in the l970’s who wanted to empower workers, not just rescue them when they get buried in a deep hole.
There were a lot of us in the run-up to Sept. 11 who had seen warning signs that something devastating might be in the planning stages. But we worked for ossified bureaucracies incapable of acting quickly and decisively.
The great divide between politicians and the people is showing itself in California where polls show the voters support Proposition 19 and where the mainstream politicians mostly oppose it.
President Harry S. Truman created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947 to ensure that the policy community would have access to independent intelligence analysis that was free of the policy advocacy of the State Department and the Defense Department.
In July, the United States military issued its largest release of raw data on deaths during the Iraq war. The Pentagon tallied almost 77,000 Iraqis – both civilians and security forces – as having died in the carnage between January 2004 and August 2008.
Read on.If my e-mail inbox is any indication, many American progressives plan to use the Nov. 2 election as an opportunity to “teach the Democrats a lesson” by either not voting or casting ballots for third parties, even if this contributes to the expected Republican (and Tea Party) landslide.
In 2002, as the Bush administration was turning to torture and other brutal techniques for interrogating "war on terror" detainees, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz loosened rules against human experimentation, an apparent recognition of legal problems regarding the novel strategies for extracting and evaluating information from the prisoners.
Thumbing through Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars, I should not have been surprised that the index lacks any entry for “intelligence.”
One thing that comes through clearly in Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, is the contempt felt by Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, toward President Barack Obama.
Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was at the United Nations on Tuesday to address the Millennium Development Goals Summit. What he had to say was, as usual, a mixed bag of worthwhile insights and questionable assertions.
Read on.In interviews in recent weeks, Gen. David Petraeus has been taking a line on what will happen in mid-2011 that challenges President Barack Obama’s announced intention to begin a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan by that date.
In 1971, President Richard Nixon appointed Pennsylvania Gov. Raymond P. Shafer to chair a national commission to report on the effects of marijuana and other drugs and recommend appropriate drug policies. Though Shafer was a former prosecutor and was known as a "law and order" governor, he did not give Nixon the alarmist findings that the President wanted.
As Election Day 2010 approaches – as the United States wallows in the swamps of war, recession and environmental degradation – the consequences of the nation’s three-decade-old decoupling from reality are becoming painfully obvious.
Read on.Oh, Hamid, Oh Hillary: How your worlds converge and diverge.
There is a strong intuition among the American people that there is a fundamental difference between publishing a secret for all the world to read and secretly informing an enemy of a secret.
Lies aren't used just to start wars, but also to escalate them, continue them, and even reduce or end them. And we got a pile of war lies from President Barack Obama on Tuesday evening.
When you connect the dots in your writing or look for deeper explanations behind the decisions of policymakers, market makers and media-makers, it’s easy to be dismissed as a conspiracy nut.
Among the many TV ad jingles sadly cluttering my brain since childhood (although useful in trivia contests) is the one that went, "The finest apples from Apple Land/Make Mott's Apple Sauce taste grand!"
An underlying issue in the dispute over a proposed Islamic center near the site of 9/11’s Ground Zero is the emergence of Christian nationalism, which embraces a vision of the world in which every knee bows and every tongue confesses that Christ is Lord.
