Steve Fainaru on “Big Boy Rules: America’s Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq”Top Justice Department prosecutors are reportedly reviewing a draft indictment against six Blackwater security guards who opened fire in a crowded Baghdad square more than a year ago killing seventeen Iraqi civilians. The indictments would mark the first time armed private contractors from the United States face justice.
A lot of people have compared Obama’s run this year to the final two seasons of the West Wing, in which a charismatic young congressman upsets a Washington insider (Jeb Bartlett’s vice president). The parallels are striking, but they may be getting ahead of themselves: those West Wing seasons provide a blueprint not for how to defeat an incumbent of the other party, but for how one party can hold the White House for more than eight years.
Recently released reports confirm that the United States still has very important unfinished business with regard to torture. Civilians at the highest levels of government as well as military generals have committed crimes. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, State Department Legal Adviser John Bellinger, and documents from 2003 and 2004 provide further evidence that the White House endorsed the use of torture. The Department of Justice, Department of Defense, Department of State, Intelligence, and other leadership have all been complicit.
Two trends are crashing against one another. Both are well-known. They are that world population is getting larger while food and water is getting less.
PRESS RELEASE On September 17th Dean Lawrence Velvel of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, wrote an essay on the growth and effect of unregulated, uncontrolled corporate gigantism over the last 50 years.
Expressions of hope are only as truly hopeful as the honesty of the assessment of reality from which they emerge. Conjuring up hope rooted in a denial of reality can only deepen despair in the long run.
Speculation is rampant over what will be President-elect Barack Obama’s first bold move when he takes power January 20. Will he bail out Detroit? Will he move to revamp the health-care system? Will he unveil a comprehensive plan to revive the economy?
Among the first things that President Obama will have to decide when he assumes office is whether to continue President Bush’s and the Pentagon’s plans to install missile interceptors in Eastern Europe. Let’s hope that he rejects those plans. Otherwise, all that will be accomplished will be to increase tensions with Russia, which, not surprisingly, will provide the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex with new excuses to increase their perpetually ever-growing budgets.
