Iraq war

Dear Mr. Sulzberger, 
I read with great interest news accounts of your conversation with President Trump, in which you admonished him for his inflammatory characterization of the media as “fake news” and asserted that such polarizing language poses a threat not only to journalists but to American democracy itself.

The death of weapons expert and UN inspector Dr David Kelly in the summer of 2003 is one of the Iraq War’s most enduring mysteries. While the case was officially ruled a suicide, this conclusion was reached by an informal government inquiry which the Blair government used to replace the normal, legal inquest procedure. In […](Read more...)

Intentional acts, targeted individuals and death rituals + this day in history w/the Bite of the Century and our song of the day by Florence + the Machine on your Morning Monarchy for June 28, 2018.

Part of the "Collateral Murder" video that Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning gave to WikiLeaks. It's worth watching to the very end. Two staff members from Reuters news were among those murdered on the street, along with others from a van shot up while trying to collect the wounded. Visible in the van were two children, who were also wounded. "Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids to a battle," says one of the Americans doing the shooting.

This time, they think they have it right. So declared an Associated Press story reporting an upbeat assessment by this country’s top military officer at the end of a five-day visit to Afghanistan earlier this spring. Marine General Joseph Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was heading home from the war zone, the AP reporter wrote, “with a palpable sense of optimism” about the U.S.-supported war against Taliban and Islamic State fighters there.

In the third and final part of his series, Nicolas JS Davies investigates the death toll of U.S. covert and proxy wars in Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen and underscores the importance of comprehensive war mortality studies. By Nicolas J…Read more →

Grayson has his own campaign to worry about and his own campaign funds to raise, but Kucinich is not just an old friend, but someone who inspired him Yesterday he officially endorsed Kucinich and asked his own supporters to contribute to Kucinich's campaign.

By Frederick Kuo | Asia Times | April 11, 2018 The images flooding US news sources are the stuff of nightmares. Children gasping for air, their chests heaving in pain, strange foam flooding from their mouths. This time, the images are coming out of Douma, one of the last strongholds of the opposition rebels resisting […]

The mess that’s been created in Syria is extraordinary. Syria is also definitively where international law died. Arguably, Iraq and Libya saw international law already collapsing: but Syria is where even all pretense of international law died. It is where borders, sovereignty and the right to self-determination got tossed out the window. It is also […]

The war on Iraq won’t be remembered for how it was waged so much as for how it was sold. It was a propaganda war, a war of perception management, where loaded phrases, such as “weapons of mass destruction” and “rogue state” were hurled like precision weapons at the target audience: us.
To understand the Iraq war you don’t need to consult generals, but the spin doctors and PR flacks who stage-managed the countdown to war from the murky corridors of Washington where politics, corporate spin and psy-ops spooks cohabit.