The Obama administration's nation-building effort in Afghanistan is one of the most gratuitous failures of the whole post-9/11 era. The US has left a Taliban insurgency as strong as ever, built up degenerate criminal gangs in the Afghan Local Police, botched its...
The Military-Industrial-Media Complex Comes to Charlotte for the DNC
Jingoistic platitudes were all the rage at the recently-completed Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. Foreign Policy Magazine's Uri Friedman reported that Democratic Party apparatchiks used Osama Bin Laden's name, in bragging about slaughtering him, some 21...
Did US Marines Die Protecting Prince Harry?
Two US Marines were killed yesterday protecting a US-British base complex in Helmland Province of Afghanistan. Prince Harry is currently assigned to the British portion of the base and serves as a helicopter pilot. His presence at the base was revealed last week. Many...
Consequences in Libya
It's commendable that Maddow so meticulously illustrated the extent to which this attack on the US consulate building was the work of former US-backed Libyan rebels connected with al-Qaeda. But she should have gone even further. Reports now say that infiltrators...
Scenes From the Protest at the US Embassy in Yemen
Protests and attacks at US embassy building spread across the Muslim world today, cropping up in Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Israel, Gaza, and Bangladesh.
Bibi, Gone Rogue
From David Remnick in the New Yorker: It is hard to overestimate the risks that Benjamin Netanyahu poses to the future of his own country. As Prime Minister, he has done more than any other political figure to embolden and elevate the reactionary forces in Israel, to...
Surprise: Increased US Aid to Kenya Associated With Increased Human Rights Abuses
Unsurprisingly, increased US military and financial support of the Kenyan government is correlated with increases in human rights abuses, according to Jonathan Horowitz at Foreign Policy, who says that the US "may rightly be criticized for aiding and abetting human...
Is the Libyan Attack on the US Consulate the Work of Al-Qaeda?
It seems there is a strong possibility that the attacks on the US consulate in Libya, which killed four Americans including the US Ambassador, had much less to do with a dirty anti-Islam movie than with al-Qaeda's presence in that "recently liberated" country. Very...
US Taxpayers Spend More on Israeli Defense Than Israeli Taxpayers, Says Former IDF Official
Jerusalem Post: In an apparent reference to the public spat between the United States and Israel, former IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi told the Calcalist conference on Tuesday that preserving strong ties with the United States is an Israeli security necessity. "We...
Criminal Negligence in the Bush Administration Pre-9/11
Kurt Eichenwald reminds us in the New York Times that the infamous briefing declassified for the 9/11 Commission entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” was just one of many, many pre-9/11 classified warnings that an attack was imminent. He writes that "the...