TomDispatch.com

"'We took ground fire and we returned fire… We estimate that around 40 were killed. But we operated within our rules of engagement."

There's a simple calculus here -- and it applies whether you're talking about abusing prisoners or sending tanks into holy neighborhoods in Shiite Iraq: In a political context, when nationalist feelings have been aroused, brute force widely and brutally applied, whether to get information from priso

Bush's Mission in Iraq Remains Unaccomplished

The war of guns is only part of any great military enterprise. It is always supplemented by a war of words and, in the modern world, a war of images.

With its Cold War overtones of nuclear annihilation, World War IV implies that our very existence as a nation is in immediate danger and will be for years, decades, perhaps a century or more to come; and yet it is also a familiar, even reassuring image -- another global war in the triumphant traditi

The young American Marine is exultant. "It's a sniper's dream," he tells a Los Angeles Times reporter on the outskirts of Fallujah. "You can go anywhere and there so many ways to fire at the enemy without him knowing where you are."

Imperial quote of the week (or: you don't keep the New Rome waiting in the New Spain): "A senior administration official traveling with [Secretary of State Colin] Powell described the meeting [after the funeral service for the Madrid bombing victims] as 'good, positive and straightforward,' adding,

Finally, on the first anniversary of the Vietnam (oops, Iraqi) War, this "light at the end of the tunnel" comment from U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Martin Dempsey, overall commander of U.S. operations in Baghdad.

As unemployment and inequality rose throughout the 1990s in Argentina, the International Monetary Fund's "star pupil" -- so called, because Argentina's rulers applied the IMF's dictates of privatization and social cuts more rigorously than almost any other nation in the world

Today, flat-earthers within the Bush Administration--aided by right-wing allies who have produced assorted hired guns and conservative think tanks to further their goals--are engaged in a campaign to suppress science that is arguably unmatc hed in the Western world since the Inquisition.

Wilderness is not just the stuff of scenery-slick calendars or articles in outdoor adventure magazines like Outside and Men's Journal.

History and hope. They don't always seem like the perfect couple, but just when you think it's hopeless, along comes Adam Hochschild to remind us that even the most embedded of institutions can, in fact, be uprooted in little more than a long lifetime.

Words must be credible. Well, that seemed a sentence to live by, and given that the State of the Union is meant to be the President's version of "the word of America"

The apocalyptic imagination has spawned a new kind of violence at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Even if we manage to squeak by somehow on this planet, it could prove a mighty lonely place. The noisier our synthetic surroundings get, the more we're in the presence of images of species of every sort (just check out the Discovery Channel), the emptier our planet becomes.

As we enter the new millennium, hope appears to be an American attribute that has vanished for many, no matter what their class or condition in life. The official word has never been more arrogantly imposed.

"Those budget deficits? They indicate how we're finally learning to live within our means!"

Imagine such time-scapes and you know a great deal not about what's going to happen, but about the Bush administration's vision of our occupation of Iraq -- which is never to depart.

Just before Halloween, the pressure differential between the Colorado Plateau and Southern California begins to generate the infamous Santa Ana winds. A spark in their path becomes a blowtorch.

The practical problem of Iraq's future remains. The Iraqi state has been forcibly removed. That state was a horrible one; yet a nation needs a state.

The glue that holds the Intelligence Community together is melting under the hot lights of an awakened press. If you do not act quickly, your intelligence capability will fall apart--with grave consequences for the nation.