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Annals of Liberation: Afghanistan

Ted Rall tells some hard truths about “The Other Bad War” – the highly popular Afghan expedition, which is largely a mirror-image of the now much-derided disaster in Iraq. Some excerpts: Everyone loves Bush’s war against Afghanistan, even though it was based on just as many lies as his assault on Iraq: Osama bin Laden probably wasn’t in Afghanistan on 9/11 and was certainly not there by the time bombs began falling. People approve even though, as in Iraq, Bush didn’t send enough troops–8,000 where 500,000 were required–to provide basic security. Even though Afghans didn’t greet us as liberators. Even

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The Monolith Crumbles: Reality and Revisionism in Iran

It is a well-known fact – except among the American
media, the American government, and about 98.7 percent of the American
people – that Iran is not a monolithic state where sheep-like masses
bray with a single voice in chorus with their demented leaders, but is,
on the contrary, a complex society where many conflicting opinions on
matters political, religious, social, historical, etc., contend with
each other in open debate. True, it does have a government dominated by
repressive clerics, who exercise the kind of veto power over secular
law that George W. Bush’s vaunted “base” dreams of seeing

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Bubbles and Blood: A Limited Look at Unlimited Folly

Limited, Inc. – recently, and rightly, recommended by Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution – has some cogent thoughts on “Life in the Empire of Bubbles.” As always with LI, the whole thing is worth reading, but here are some choice excerpts to get you going.


Excerpt: From the NYT Week in Review: “Iraq is less a nation than an artificial entity drawn created by the British. In recent years, only the brutality of Saddam Hussein held its parts together.”


1. Actually, all parts of the Ottoman empire, after it

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Voice of America: The Noble Buzz of Truth

Buzzflash.com is one of the indispensible tools of truth in our time. For years, they have scoured the world to unearth nuggets of reality from the slag-heap of lies, propaganda and nonsense dumped on us daily by powerful elites and their braying sycophants. But like all those who speak truth to power, the price is steep — and money, which loves power, is hard to come by. So scoot on over to the Buzz today and show them some love. Pick up one of the premiums from their rich trove

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Pit Boss:Blair’s Dark Kingdom

Britain’s New Statesman magazine has put together a powerful package of stories detailing how the government of George W. Bush’s beloved disciple,
Tony Blair, is “persecuting innocent people, tearing up our freedoms
and undermining the judiciary.” The basis of the stories is a new, blistering report from Amnesty International on the degraded state of civil liberties in the UK today.

The first NS story, Shamed, by Martin Bright,
gives an overview of the Amnesty report. Two other stories are not<br

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Squandering a Precious Heritage

By Philippe Sands/NEW STATESMAN, Feb 27, 2006   Amnesty International’s report coincides with the 60th anniversary of a famous telegram. Writing from Moscow on 22 February 1946, the diplomat George Kennan painted for his masters in Washington the classic picture of the vast scale and sinister character of the postwar Soviet threat. But he concluded on a note of caution. “We must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society,” he declared. The greatest danger was that “we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping”.Today’s British government would

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When Even Actors Aren’t Safe

Rizwan Ahmed was part of a prizewinning team at the Berlin Film Festival. When he got back to Luton Airport, however, he was a terror suspect. By Clive Stafford Smith/NEW STATESMAN, FEB 27, 2006When Michael Winterbottom’s Road to Guantanamo won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival on 19 February, Rizwan Ahmed, one of the stars of the movie, was there. “It was an emotional experience,” he told me later. “The film had an amazing reception and on some levels it felt like the Tipton boys had been vindicated.”The Tipton boys, better known as the Tipton Three, are Asif

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History Lessons

The original version appeared in the Feb. 22 edition of The Moscow Times.

BERLIN, May 12, 2153 – Within the ivy-covered walls of Farben University, a great battle is now raging. But although the Reich’s ancient capital has seen its share of warfare down through the centuries, today’s combatants have no swords, no guns, no bio-disrupters – just words and pictures, marshalled on either side of a fierce debate that has split the staid academic world in two, and is beginning to spill over into national politics as well. It

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Ship of Fools: Free Trade Fundamentalism Trumps National Security

David Sirota serves up an interesting angle on the UAE-port security imbroglio in The dirty little secret behind the UAE port security flap. It seems that free-trade fundamentalism has once again reared its extremist head, overriding any security concerns. Of course, it’s long been evident that the Bush gang could not care less about actually protecting the useless lives of the rabble out there; but it’s striking how their sneering contempt for ordinary Americans is coming more and more to the forefront. Meanwhile, John Nichols at The Nation also parts the curtain of katzenjammer to reveal

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Uncle Rummy’s Magic Words

Hey kids, your ever-lovin’ Uncle Donny Rummy has come up with a neat idea to get you out of trouble next time your parents catch you telling a whopper! Let’s say you told them that the car fender got smashed by fleeing bank robbers who sideswiped you at 90 miles an hour when you were on your way to buy Grandma a birthday card, and then they find out that you actually rammed the car into your ex-girlfriend’s motorcycle in a fit of drunken rage when you saw

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