From the New York Times: Sunni Fighters Say Iraq Didn’t Keep Jobs Promises The American military marked another milestone the other day in the initiative perhaps most responsible for taming the violence in Iraq: All but 10,000 of the 94,000 Sunni militiamen — many of them former insurgents who agreed, for cash, to stop killing American soldiers — had been turned over to the control of the Iraqi military. Significantly, the militiamen themselves were not celebrating. The same day, one group of the fighters north of Baghdad announced they were resigning from their Awakening Council, the Iraqi name for what

Politics is entertainment. It’s a sport. It’s for the well groomed and well-heeled. The impeccably dressed. Party animals. Politicians are interchangeable…The real power is in the hands of small groups of people and I don’t think they have titles. — Bob Dylan Following up from yesterday’s post, we now turn to Winter Patriot for a deeper look into how the world really works — or rather, how the American power structure really works. In this powerful and detailed piece, WP takes “dissident” icon Seymour Hersh to task for his very typical schizophrenic reaction to the literally atrocious crimes that he

Well, the weak get weaker;The strong stay strong.The train keeps rollin’All night long….— Bob Dylan, “Marching to the City” Do you want to know how the world works? This is how the world works. From Scotland’s Sunday Herald: The late President Milosevic’s secret police chief and organiser of Serb death squads during the genocidal ethnic cleansing of disintegrating Yugoslavia was the United States’ top CIA agent in Belgrade, according to the independent Belgrade Radio B92. The claim that from 1992 until the end of the decade, Jovica Stanisic, head of Serbia’s murderous DB Secret Police, was regularly informing his CIA

The Guardian reports on some admirable candor from the paladins at Shell Oil, still raking in gargantuan profits despite the global economic cratering. Shell says it is dropping its much-publicized work on alternative energy sources – because the bucks just aren’t big enough. Green energy, it seems, just doesn’t produce enough long green for the Oil Lords. Instead, they are going to keep scraping out carbon from the guts of the earth – and going in for biofuels, i.e., diverting vast acreages of arable land from food production for the world’s poor to energy for the world’s rich. From the

Here are some lines first set down in the typescript of a 14-page songbook, “Alonzo Zilch’s Own Collection of Original Songs and Ballads,” written by a 23-year-old high school dropout named Woodrow Wilson Guthrie in 1935. With only the slightest revision in the presidential moniker, it could stand as a viable and vibrant political program for our day. If I was President RooseveltI’d make the groceries free —I’d give away new Stetson hatsAnd let the whisky be.I’d pass out suits of clothingAt least three times a week —And shoot the first big oil manThat killed the fishing creek. *For more,

The recent emergence of the 2007 report by the Red Cross confirming, in copious detail, the widespread, systematic use of criminal torture by the Bush Administration is a welcome development. Although its facts will doubtless be drowned, or at least waterboarded, by the usual diversions — faux shock in the Beltway over Wall Street fat cats paying themselves big bonuses with the free money that Washington knowingly gave them, for example — it is still good to see the long-known record of this belching of filth by the nation’s leaders dragged out into the light momentarily again. Every small nugget

Surely there is no one who still needs to be apprised of the fact that the New York Times is one of the chief organs of the American Empire, operating in a semi-official fashion to disseminate the intentions and wishes of our rulers. The fact that the paper also publishes some excellent reporting — and can even, on occasion, assume an adversarial stance against one faction of the elite or another — in no way undermines its essential function in the imperial power structure. After all, Pravda and Izvestia did the same under the Soviets. [Of course, the dead hand

Moon of Alabama brings the disturbing — if unsurprising — news that the Obama Administration appears to be closely following a “neocon strategy against Iran” devised by many of the same good folks who brought us the war in Iraq. Several recent policy moves — and strategic media leaks — by the Obama White House line up in lock-step with plans laid out by the aptly named “Bipartisan Policy Institute” to bring on a war with Iran. MoA rightly likens the BPI to our old friends at The Project for a New American Century, who openly yearned — back in

Although Professor Juan Cole is lamentably jejune in his abiding trust in Barack Obama’s good intentions in Iraq, he has been doing yeoman service in covering the ongoing atrocity in Gaza. The inhuman conditions in the world’s largest open-air concentration camp have slipped almost entirely from notice in the Western press. At most one sees a few comforting headlines or crawl-lines about “pledges of aid” from the world community for poor Gaza, which seems to have suffered some sort of unavoidable natural disaster, like a flood or earthquake. Forgotten is the fact that Gaza was ravaged in a relentless, murderous