The most important content of Presidential speeches is often what they don’t say. Here are some things that President Obama didn’t say about Libya in his speech last night. The President did not answer his critics who asked why he took America into war without authorization by Congress. This question was made sharper on Sunday…
Surely no-one has been surprised to see Senator McCain engaged in what Defense Secretary Gates has rightly called "loose talk" about the use of U.S. military force in Libya. But to see Senator John Kerry, the Democratic head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – the man who as a Vietnam veteran joined other anti-war…
Pop quiz on the news: who said this week, referring to the dispute between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. military commander David Petraeus over U.S. Special Forces "night raids" that break into Afghans’ homes in the middle of the night: Many Afghans see the raids as a … humiliating symbol of American power….
On Wednesday, the Washington Post carried a remarkable article reporting that according to U.S. government assessments, the U.S. military escalation in Afghanistan has failed. The Post’s Greg Miller reported that An intense military campaign aimed at crippling the Taliban has so far failed to inflict more than fleeting setbacks on the insurgency Miller explains…
This week, an Israeli military court convicted Abdallah Abu Rahmah, whom progressive Zionists have called a "Palestinian Gandhi," of "incitement" and "organizing and participating in illegal demonstrations" for organizing protests against the confiscation of Palestinian land by the "Apartheid Wall" in the village of Bilin in the West Bank, following an eight month trial, during…
It’s bad enough that the editors of the New York Times have refused so far to tell the truth about what we know about the magnitude of the death toll in Iraq as a result of the US invasion and occupation of the country since 2003, according to the standards that are used to describe…
No reasonable person would have bet serious money that news editors at the New York Times would be huge fans of Oliver Stone’s new documentary about South America, “South of the Border.” A key point of the film is that mainstream US press coverage of South America in recent years has generally followed State Department…
Sao Paulo – New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is on the warpath. Not only against his "Great Satan" of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but also against Brazil’s President Lula and Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan, because they had the temerity to succeed in negotiating an agreement with Iran to try to de-escalate the confrontation between…
U.S. officials are “probing a possible attempted coverup” in the deaths of five Afghan civilians in February in a raid carried out by U.S. Special Forces accompanied by Afghan troops, the Los Angeles Times reports. Among the charges is that the bodies were tampered with by U.S. forces to conceal the cause of death. But…
On Thursday the New York Times made an astonishing editorial choice, for which its editors owe the public an explanation: it published an op-ed by an obscure and poorly identified author attacking General Stanley McChrystal for his directive last July that air strikes in Afghanistan be authorized only under "very limited and prescribed conditions." The…