This New York Times story provides a clear lesson — not only for “young Afghans,” but for all of us in this increasingly drone-covered world: Do not, under any circumstances, “move in a tactical fashion.” Or else  the defenders of Western civilization will blast you into bloody goo. 8 Young Afghans Killed in Strike, NATO Acknowledges … Afghan relatives of those who died and Mohammed Tahir Safi, an adviser to President Hamid Karzai and the leader of the Afghan investigation team, said that those killed were young boys who had taken their sheep and goats to graze outside the village.

Here’s a piece of “imaginative journalism” I published 10 years ago, before the invasion of Iraq. It speaks both to the imagined future of the then-impending war crime — and to the future of the Terror War era … a nightmare of history we are still growing into. The Base NSA Echelon 33, CentComm: Email monitored 10/22/04. Dispatched DC Yo, Ed! I’m looking out the window of Watchtower 19 in Force Zone Seven. They’re loading up the dead wagon. Three friendlies, two uncardeds, the usual collateral – and one bug. We zapped the market before the bug got his hard-on

I had a curious experience in reading one of Glenn Greenwald’s recent posts about the relentless push for war with Iran by the media. It was, as usual, a powerful piece, marshalling a wealth of damning evidence that laid bare the corporate media’s avid — not to say rabid — eagerness to serve the desire of our ruling elites to finally break the “recalcitrant tribe” of Persians and restore Washington’s dominance over that strategically situated — and oil-rich — land. One cannot underestimate the simmering resentment still felt by American elites from their “humiliation” during the 1980 hostage crisis —

If you want to know what is happening in Greece — and what the powers that be have in mind for your country as well — see this remarkable story by Mike Whitney at Counterpunch. What are seeing in Greece is not an” economic” program; it is — most openly and brazenly — a political program: a savagely destructive extremist ideology being imposed on ordinary people by force. In its all-pervasive brutality and tyrannical control of every aspect of life, it makes the “Shariah law” bogeyman of right-wing nightmares look like an anarchists’ picnic. And make no mistake: the extremist

Arthur Silber follows up the post we linked to yesterday with some more specifics on how an effective campaign against the war with Iran might look: “The First Ad: Who Are the Nazis Now?“ Ads like these would be a devastating Zen slap in the head to the stunted American consciousness. Get on over there and read it now. Meanwhile, the Peace Laureate is tightening the screws on Iran even further. Barack Obama took a few minutes away from the big game on Super Bowl Sunday and imposed still more sanctions on Tehran — to punish them for legally pursuing

It’s hard to say which is more disturbing in Patrick Cockburn’s recent analysis of America’s warmongering toward Iran: his portrait of wily Jews manipulating and “bamboozling” the American power elite into acting against their own interests and good intentions; or the ‘Amos and Andy’ echoes in the image of a Negro President too dumb to know he’s being played by wicked Hebrews. In any case, it is an astounding — and dismaying — performance from a writer who has long been one of the very best in delineating the operations of empire in the Middle East. As so often happens,

  One unanticipated benefit of the relentless drive to turn every nook and cranny of the American war machine into a cash cow for private profit is the fact that so much of the nitty-gritty operational work is now put out for bids. And this can give us an occasional glimpse — through the weeds of contract arcana — of what our poobahs and satraps are really up to on the far-flung fields of empire. For example, in olden times — when war pork was confined more to vittles and blankets and bullets and such — we might never have

(UPDATED BELOW) This week, the warlords of the West took yet another step toward their long-desired war againt Iran. (Open war, that is; their covert war has been going on for decades — via subversion, terrorism, and proxies like Saddam Hussein.) On Monday, the European Union obediently followed the dictates of its Washington masters by agreeing to impose an embargo on Iranian oil. The embargo bans all new oil contracts with Iran, and cuts off all existing deals after July. The embargo is accompanied by a freeze on all European assets of the Iranian central bank. In imposing these draconian measures