Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth: And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, With windlasses and with assays of bias, By indirections find directions out. — Shakespeare, Hamlet Britain’s "Chilcot Inquiry" into the origins of the invasion of Iraq has largely faded from the headlines, following Tony Blair’s bravura display of pious bluster before the panel of Establishment worthies last month. And in truth, it has been a rather toothless affair, with the already deferential worthies further constrained by the narrow confines placed upon their investigation by the government: chiefly, the cloak of secrecy wrapped

Barack Obama’s Bush-like "surge" in Afghanistan has not even reached its full strength yet, but it is already driving tens of thousands of Afghan civilians from their homes, as they flee an upcoming massive attack in Helmand province. The attack — which the Americans have been trumpeting far in advance — is designed, we’re told, to "protect" the people of the key town of Marjah from the twin scourges of Taliban nogoodniks and drug traffickers. Yet the primary effect of the much-publicized preparations has been to send the residents of the town running for their lives to escape becoming part

Here’s the way the game works. First you get the outright lie, then later, in dribs and drabs, you get a few, grudging crumbs of the truth. For example, first you get: "No, there are no Blackwater operatives in Pakistan. None. That’s just a conspiracy theory, terrorist propaganda. These kinds of lies just make it harder for us to do good in the region." Then later: "Well, yes, we do have Blackwater operatives in Pakistan. But, uh, we don’t actually cut their checks directly in the Pentagon." Or what about this more recent example? First: "The United States has no

The American elite’s unbounded, unquestioned, indeed unconscious sense of imperial entitlement and dominance — based ultimately on war, the threat of war and the profit from war — is one of the defining characteristics of our age. And if you would like to see a glaring example of this attitude in action, look no further than the front page of Tuesday’s New York Times, where one David Sanger gives us his penetrating “news analysis” of the Administration’s just-announced $3.8 trillion budget. Sanger focuses on the huge, continuing deficits that the budget forecasts over the next decade. Completely ignoring the plain

Even as progressives were savoring Barack Obama’s "masterful" – indeed, "brain-searing" – performance at the House Republicans’ retreat last Friday, their dazzling champion was busy applying himself with renewed and reckless vigor to that most un-progressive of occupations: saber-rattling around the world.  The last few days have certainly seen a remarkable display of bellicosity by the Obama Administration, putting almost every tool in the militarist kit to use: nukes, ships, missiles, money, proxies and war-profiteering. With just a few flicks of the imperial wrist, Obama sent waves of destabilization through some of the most volatile regions on earth. There was

We are the San Patricios, a brave and gallant band There’ll be no white flag flying within this green command We are the San Patricios, we have but one demand, To see the Yankees safely home across the Rio Grande… This looks like something worth looking for on the radar: "San Patricio," an upcoming release by The Chieftains and Ry Cooder: ‘San Patricio’ (the Spanish name for St. Patrick) tells the nearly forgotten story of the brave San Patricio battalion – a downtrodden group of Irish immigrant conscripts who deserted the U.S. Army in 1846 to fight on the Mexican

On Friday, Tony Blair appeared before the "Chilcot Inquiry," the panel of hoary, lugubrious Establishment worthies set up to "examine" — with extreme circumspection, exquisite politeness, and all due reverence to authority — the "origins" of Britain’s involvement in the mass-murder spree known as the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The event could be summed up entirely in a single headline: Tony Blair to a million dead Iraqis, and the grieving survivors of British soldiers: Fuck you. Blair’s appearance before the panel has occasioned some entirely misplaced and uninformed kudos from some in the American progressiverse, who laud the Brits

Entertain conjecture of a remarkable scenario. An American president – born at the margins of society, raised by a pacifist mother – takes office at a time of national turmoil. He inherits a deeply unpopular, highly divisive war from his predecessor and must also deal with a burgeoning, worldwide financial crisis. Yet despite the fractured, fractious political atmosphere, he doesn’t dither, doesn’t waffle, but immediately launches the most far-reaching program of government activism in half a century. He doesn’t “freeze” domestic spending but greatly expands funding of government benefit programs, and even creates new ones, including direct payments from the

As the overflow of pundit effluent after the State of the Union speech continues to sulfurize the political air, Glenn Greenwald brings up a background point that we have been hammering on about here for years: i.e., the fact that the President of the United States claims the arbitrary right to kill anyone on earth — including U.S. citizens — without charges, without trial, without warning. As I first wrote in November 2001, George W. Bush proclaimed this divine power shortly after 9/11. And as we have often noted (here, for example), Barack Obama has reaffirmed this megalomaniacal principle. Greenwald

America lost two distinctive and important voices this week, two writers whose works dealt with absolutely vital but virtually ignored elements of the nation’s history and character: the ‘marginal’ classes and the ruling class. Without the histories of Howard Zinn and the fiction of Louis Auchincloss, we would have a poorer understanding of the forces that form and move our society, for good and ill. The more well-known of the two departed, Howard Zinn, was of course the author of A People’s History, which even though "it told an openly left-wing story" (as the New York Times notes, in mildly