In two brief posts over the past week, Scott Horton at Harper’s gives us a harrowing sketch of the entrenchment and ever-spreading expansion of the Torture Matrix that now sits enthroned at the very heart of the American state. This entrenchment and expansion has been carried out — enthusiastically, energetically, relentlessly — by the current president of the United States: a progressive Democrat and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Horton notes the uncovering of the Zelikow Memo, written by one of the chief factotums of the Bush Administration, Philip Zelikow. While serving as a State Department lawyer in 2006,

Not that anyone cares, but the United States committed itself to yet another war on Sunday — yes, April Fool’s Day — as the ever-bellicose Hillary Clinton teamed up with the extremist tyrants in Saudi Arabia and other international humanitarians to supply moolah and military materiel to the rebels in Syria. The self-proclaimed “Friends of Syria” group has now undertaken to pay the salaries of the “Free Syrian Army” and supply the rebel forces, led largely by Islamist factions — although Western leaders and their parrot-like media still pretend (at least in public) that the armed uprising is aimed at

This week brings another excellent article from Andy Worthington outlining the continuing atrocity of injustice that is the essence of America’s “Terror War” gulag. This time, he details the plight of several forgotten captives from Afghanistan condemned to an apparently eternal limbo in the apparently eternal gulag camp at Guantanamo — despite the fact that great high warlords of the Potomac Empire have actually dropped the (highly specious) charges against some of the men. Meanwhile, Worthington notes, Washington has been working hard on a deal that would release five top Taliban figures from Guantanamo — men who in some cases

I’m so old that I can remember when Juan Cole was a powerful opponent of warmongering Western elites who  pushed “intervention” to bring about “regime change” in Muslim lands. Who can forget his stinging rebuke to that now-departed beater of war drums, Christopher Hitchens, way, way back in the last decade (emphasis Cole’s): All the warmongers in Washington, including Hitchens, if he falls into that camp, should get this through their heads. Americans are not fighting any more wars in the Middle East against toothless third rate powers. So sit down and shut up. One, two, three, four! We don’t

An alternative scenario rooted in ghastly reality: WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama today bestowed posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom awards on the “Deep Six” team of national security operatives who carried out the extrajudicial killing of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. “For too long, these heroes have gone unsung,” the president said in a Rose Garden ceremony with the surviving widows and children of the six men — a super-secret team comprised of agents of the FBI, CIA, and Secret Service, along with two Green Berets — who staged the successful operation at the Lorraine Motel

If any one person can be said to have ended the direct involvement of the United States military in Iraq, it is not the man whose champions claim this deed as one of his glorious accomplishments: Barack Obama. As we all know (and 99 percent of us have forgotten), Obama fought doggedly to extend the murderous occupation of Iraq into the indefinite future. No, if you had to choose one person whose actions were the most instrumental in ending the overt phase of the war, it would not the commander-in-chief of the most powerful war machine in world history, but

In “honor” of the Russian “elections,” here’s a song that was born in Moscow. It’s a little something of the other side of that history-battered land, something drawn from the strangely compelling spiritual depths that have supercharged and transformed the lives of so many seekers, native-born and alien wanderers: the “immortal communion” of mortal souls as they pass, and touch, in the brief strands of light. Something far away from the blood-soaked, iron-gutted ravagings of power…..  

A few days ago, UK Prime Minister David Cameron hosted a high-profile international conference on the fate of war-torn Somalia. It seemed a bit incongruous at first. Dave — the Old Etonian toff turned PR apparatchik turned Slasher-in-Chief of Austerity Britain — is not exactly renowned for his abiding commitment to the betterment of the kind of folks his illustrious predecessor, Winston Churchill, liked to call the “recalcitrant tribes” who burden the earth with their wearisome presence. Yet here was Dave — and yes, one calls him Dave, in token of the hearty, plain-man persona he affects (about as successfully