Here’s a story that seems to be getting little play in the American media: a candidate for the U.S. Congress who is proudly running on his record as a torturer of innocent civilians in Iraq. Pressing time constraints today prevent me from writing fully on this, but read Johan Hari’s report in The Independent. (Yes, once again, you have to cross the ocean to find out what’s going on in America): So what will be left of the Republican Party after next week’s US election? The answer lies in the sands of Florida, where the sunshine-state Republicans have nominated an

(UPDATED BELOW) Taking a page from the new bipartisan strategy now being employed in Afghanistan — waging cross-border military raids into sovereign countries in order to protect a failing military occupation in a neighboring country — the United States has apparently launched its first known incursion into Syria: the usual assault from on high with the usual tally of children as “collateral damage.” The BBC reports that American forces launched a small ground-air attack on the border village of Sukkiraya on Sunday, with military helicopters disgorging a squad of troops who attacked a building and killed “a man, his four

A well-educated, highly intelligent and articulate young progressive candidate promising hope and change — and a withdrawal of troops from Iraq — ousts a long-entrenched, hidebound, deeply corrupt rightwing faction from power. Once in office, he makes a number of symbolic gestures — signing the Kyoto treaty, offering apologies for past national abuses of minorities, appointing women to prominent posts, etc. — while governing as a pragmatic centrist, a “Third Way” figure in the mold of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, combining a heavily pro-corporate agenda and a commitment to a strong military and “humanitarian intervention” abroad, while retaining his

Michael Schwartz paints a picture of what Barack Obama and John McCain have both called the “success” of George W. Bush’s “surge” in Iraq. Indeed, Obama has stated that the “surge” — the euphemism immediately adopted by the entire press and political establishment for what used be known in plain English as an “escalation” — has “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams”: a mighty strong endorsement from a man who way, way back in olden times — the cave-man days of, oh, 2006 or so — was once perceived as “anti-war.” And the surge is a great success in at least

Just to be clear, Barack Obama’s brand-new foreign policy advisor, Colin Powell, wants you to know that he continues to support the decision to launch a war of aggression against Iraq in March 2003 — an act that, according to principles established by the United States and its allies at Nuremberg in 1945, is a war crime punishable by death. In fact, the only thing that Powell — the wise and steady statesman, the “grown-up,” the “moderate” — can find to criticize in the conduct of the war he helped launch is the fact that it wasn’t savage enough to

Come, let’s away to prison:We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laughAt gilded butterflies, and hear poor roguesTalk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;And take upon’s the mystery of things,As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,That ebb and flow by the moon. I.Democratic Party circles are in raptures over Colin Powell’s

Readers of The Guardian were greeted with this leading story — front-page, up top — on Saturday morning: Wall Street banks in $70bn staff payoutPay and bonus deals equivalent to 10% of US government bail-out package Having laid out the thrust of the story very plainly in the headline and sub-head, the paper then detailed the way that the Bush-Obama bailout (the most apt moniker for a scheme devised by the top echelons of the bipartisan elite) is yet another inside job by the Beltway bandits who move in and out of the revolving door between “public service” and vast

Don’t tell Obama and McCain, but the war they are both counting on to make their bones as commander-in-chief — the “good war” in Afghanistan, which both men have pledged to expand — is already lost. Their joint strategy of pouring more troops, tanks, missiles and planes into the roaring fire — not to mention their intention to spread the war into Pakistan — will only lead to disaster. Who says so? America’s biggest ally in the Afghan adventure: Great Britain. This week, two top figures in the British effort in Afghanistan — Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, UK ambassador to Kabul,

You’ve seen the news. You know the score. The House of Representatives has now completed the economic terrorist attack inflicted on the American people by the nation’s elite. The bailout bill — or as Arthur Silber more rightly terms it, the “Extortion Bill” — is already law, thanks to the Democrats in Congress, and to Barack Obama, who spent the day working the phones and twisting arms to make sure the $700 billion bonanza for the filthy rich passed without any more of the hiccups that held it up earlier this week. The plan that Obama made his own —

Here is a follow-up to yesterday’s post about Somalia. The BBC has a report from inside “Africa’s Guantanamo,” the Ethiopian prison where refugees fleeing the American-backed invasion of Somalia were “renditioned,” often with help of U.S. agents. [Yes, I know that no one cares about this. I know that the fact that thousands of Somalis have been slaughtered and millions more driven into suffering and desolation by a vicious war being conducted at every step with American assistance, in America’s name — in your name, if you’re an American — is not nearly as important as whether or not Joe