Norman Solomon

There is no more techno-advanced country in the world than Japan. Nuclear power is not safe there, and it is not safe anywhere.

It wasn't long ago that Hosni Mubarak's regime -- with all its repression and torture -- enjoyed high esteem and lavish praise in Washington.

Compared to the kind of secret cables that WikiLeaks has just shared with the world, everyday public statements from government officials are exercises in make-believe.

"How can we create a sustainable green future that includes economic equity and social justice?"

We keep hearing that Iraq is not Vietnam. And surely any competent geographer would agree. But the United States is the United States — still a country run by leaders who brandish, celebrate and use the massive violent capabilities of the Pentagon as a matter of course.

Contempt for the empirical that can't be readily jiggered or spun is evident at the top of the executive branch in Washington. The country is mired in a discourse that echoes the Scopes trial dramatized in "Inherit the Wind."

Reading his "Letter From Baghdad" column in the New York Times on Wednesday, you'd never know that Thomas Friedman has a history of enthusiasm for war.

Last week, a media advisory from "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" announced a new series of interviews on the PBS show that will address "what Iraq might look like when the U.S. military leaves."

This week's cave-in on Capitol Hill — supplying a huge new jolt of funds for the horrific war effort in Iraq — is surprising only to those who haven't grasped our current circumstances. Public opinion polls aren't the same as political leverage.

The people running the Iraq war are eager to make an example of Ehren Watada. They've convened a kangaroo court-martial. But the man on trial is setting a profound example of conscience -- helping to undermine the war that the Pentagon's top officials are so eager to protect.

President Bush may be a headless horseman. But the biggest problem is what he rode in on.

The lead-up to the invasion of Iraq has become notorious in the annals of American journalism. Even many reporters, editors and commentators who fueled the drive to war in 2002 and early 2003 now acknowledge that major media routinely tossed real journalism out the window in favor of boosting war.

No one knows exactly how many Iraqi civilians have died from the war's violence since the invasion of their country.

When the USA's biggest newsweekly devotes five pages to scoping out a U.S. air war against Iran, as Time did in the same issue, it's yet another sign that the wheels of our nation's war-spin machine are turning faster toward yet another unprovoked attack on another country.

This is the time of year when media campaigns for the latest digital products are apt to go into overdrive. Schools are back in session, and the holiday sales blitz is getting underway.

This month began with 140,000 American troops in Iraq -- 13,000 more than in late July.

Since the Soviet Union collapsed a decade and a half ago, nuclear weaponry has been mostly relegated to back pages and mental back burners in the United States. A big media uproar about nuclear weapons is apt to happen only when the man in the Oval Office has chosen to make an issue of them.

The Baghdad bureau chief of the New York Times could not have been any clearer.

Two years from now, Hillary Clinton might be pleased to hear the kind of boos and antiwar chants that greeted her days ago when she spoke at the annual Take Back America conference of Democratic activists and argued against a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.

I've been thinking about Tariq Aziz a lot since the New York Times printed a front-page story on the former Iraqi deputy prime minister in late May.

People who are concerned about the state of the U.S. news media in 2006 might pause on Memorial Day to consider those who have lost their lives in the midst of journalistic neglect, avoidance and bias.

We see this kind of news story now and again. Sometimes we try to imagine the people behind the numbers, the human realities underneath the surface abstractions. But overall, the responses testify to journalism's failings -- and our own.

Weeks after a British magazine published a long article by two American professors titled "The Israel Lobby," the outrage continued to howl through mainstream U.S. media.

Is President Bush guilty of war crimes?

The third anniversary of the Iraq invasion was bound to attract a lot of media coverage, but scant recognition went to the pundits who helped to make it all possible.

As each new season brings more waves of higher-tech digital products, I often think of Mark Twain.

Evidently the president's trip to India created an option too perfect to pass up: The man who has led the world in violence during the first years of the 21st century could pay homage to the world's leading practitioner of nonviolence during the first half of the 20th century.

Death is always in the news. From local car crashes to catastrophes in faraway places, deadly events are grist for the media mill. The coverage is ongoing -- and almost always superficial.