Burma on the Potomac: Another Step Deeper Into Tyranny
(UPDATED BELOW.)
One day, you’ll open up your eyes and
You’ll see where you are.
— Bob Dylan
Three days after a 24-year-old college graduate spoke out on her immigration plight in USA TODAY, U.S. agents arrested her family — including her father, a Vietnamese man who once was confined to a “re-education” camp in his home country for anti-communist activities. Rep. Zoe Lofgren,
Man Bites Dog, Sun Sets in East: Congressman Tells Truth
I know that a lot of people are linking to this, but it’s so rare for anyone in Congress to tell the truth about anything at all that it seems worth recording it here at our fruit stand as well. Here’s Rep. Pete Stark from the debate over Bush’s veto of child health insurance (which was, inevitably, upheld):
Face-Off: Airbrushing Accountability in the Terror War
Here’s the Terror War ethos in action: when the security forces are caught red-handed in a flagrant act of, literally, overkill — in this case, the totally unprovoked, multiple shooting to death of an innocent man in a London subway — they will resort to any measure to avoid the consequences for their action. The BBC reports:
<span style="font-family: Final Descent: Arthur Silber’s Call to Action
Arthur Silber is back, and as brilliant as ever. As with all of his major pieces, you urgently need to read the whole thing, but after the jump, we will offer a few gems of wisdom and insight from the essayto get you going. How fortunate we are to have a voice like this blazing in the wilderness of our degraded, dangerous times.
Of course, Silber is not just a voice of doom — although doom is indeed
Home and Away: Spreading the Seed of Torture and Tyranny
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem.”
— Bob Dylan, “Blind Willie McTell”
Truthteller Chris Hedges shines the torchlight on one of the ugliest corners of the “<span style="font-family: Georgia; font-style:
Dead Republic Blues: Bush Illegal Wiretapping Scheme Gets Darker and Dirtier
(UPDATE: Last year, my colleague Rich Kastelein created a website where readers could thank Qwest
for refusing to take part in the Bush Administration’s illegal
surveillance of American citizens. Rich
Annals of Liberation: Iraqis Speak From Reality’s Ground Zero
Iraqis voiced outrage Friday over a U.S. military airstrike that killed an estimated 15 civilians — nine children and six women, one of the highest reported civilian death tolls from an American bombing in months. The bombing occurred Thursday evening after U.S. troops raided a suspected leadership meeting of the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq that was taking place south of Lake Tharthar, near the city of Samarra in western Iraq…
“This could have been done through the infantry,”
War Without End, Amen: The Sanguinary Vision of Robert Gates
There are actually some quarters where Pentagon honcho Robert Gates is considered a moderate of some kind, one of the few sensible, responsible figures in the Bush Administration able to restrain – or at least moderate – the raging-bull belligerence of Dick Cheney and his crew. This has always been a curious reputation for a man who has spent most of his career hip-deep in militarist skullduggery, as Robert Parry, among others, has amply demonstrated. (Here and here, for example.) But in such desperate and degraded times as
Unguarded Moment: Another Brake on Tyranny Stripped Away
Who will guard the guardians? Why, the guardians, of course.
CIA Director Michael Hayden has launched an investigation of the agency’s Inspector General — who, in our brave new authoritarian state, where Congress has long abandoned its oversight of a regime which brazenly disregards all legal restrictions on its arbitrary power, is one of the few remaining checks on the torture squads, rendition ops and assassination teams of the security apparat. Yes, we have sunk so low; like the subjects of the old Soviet Union, we
Unhappy Birthday: The Meltdown in Pakistan
That hardy purveyor of stone-cold truths, Winter Patriot, has the low-down on the alarming events unfolding in Pakistan, the nuclear-armed basket case whose regime is being held together by baling twine and Bush largess. WP skillfully weaves together reports on mass slaughters of civilians carried out to please Washington, and on sleazy backroom political deals carried out to please Washington: all of which is exacerbating the chaos in Pakistan. This is outstanding work; you should read the whole thing, now.
Meanwhile, Tariq Ali gives us some