contributions

by William M. Arkin
Today, somewhere in the DC metropolitan area, the military is conducting a highly classified Granite Shadow "demonstration."
Granite Shadow is yet another new Top Secret and compartmented operation related to the military’s extra-legal powers regarding weapons of mass destruction. It allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control.
A spokesman at the Joint Force Headquarters-National Capital Region (JFHQ-NCR) (…)

by Michael T. Klare
It has long been an article of faith among America’s senior policymakers — Democrats and Republicans alike — that military force is an effective tool for ensuring control over foreign sources of oil. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first president to embrace this view, in February 1945, when he promised King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia that the United States would establish a military protectorate over his country in return for privileged access to Saudi oil — a (…)

By Jim Horney, Robert Greenstein, and Richard Kogan
Some conservative lawmakers and pundits are arguing that while the funding for relief and recovery efforts from the hurricane may be money that the nation has to spend, the costs will swell federal spending to dangerous and unprecedented levels. This claim is being used both to advance calls for sharp cuts in other domestic programs - in order to offset the costs of relief and recovery efforts - and to reject any suggestion that the tax (…)

These elections have been called by the German Federal President on the initiative of chancellor Schröder one year before the term of the red green government ended. Confronted with a dramatic fall in popularity and a long series of lost lander elections because of his neo-liberal economic and social policies, its brutal dismantling of the German welfare state, the chancellor took what he saw as the last chance to receive the voters’ mandate to stay in power. SPD and Greens made their (…)

How to bring this country together? Listen to the message of New Orleans
By WYNTON MARSALIS
Now the levee breach has been fixed. The people have been evacuated. Army Corps of Engineers magicians will pump the city dry, and the slow (but quicker than we think) job of rebuilding will begin. Then there will be no 24-hour news coverage. The spin doctors’ narrative will create a wall of illusion thicker than the new levees. The job of turning our national disaster into sound-bite-size (…)

By Dan Froomkin
The Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal reached into the White House yesterday, picking off President Bush’s top procurement official — who just barely had time to resign before being arrested.
The federal charges against David Safavian stem from his tenure as chief of staff of the General Services Administration, predating his arrival at the White House a year ago. But his arrest nonetheless draws renewed attention to the ongoing corruption and influence-peddling inquiry (…)

Arctic Folly By Jimmy Carter www.washingtonpost.com
Congress is about to make one of those big decisions that marks an era. Unless wiser heads prevail, it may do it badly — making the wrong decision in the wrong way and about the wrong place. At stake is America’s greatest wildlife sanctuary, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. To dissuade Congress from this environmental tragedy, Americans must rally, and quickly.
Congress had its Pyrrhic energy victory this summer, with a new energy (…)

By Peter Fredson
We wonder by what right American soldiers are walking around in Iraq with weapons in hand, far from Brooklyn or Crawford, Texas, shooting at the inhabitants of Iraq, destroying their homes, knocking down their businesses, destroying their infrastructure, lobbing grenades into rooms, pointing automatic weapons ceaselessly at people? We know they didn’t go to Iraq as tourists to look at one of the earliest civilizations in the world.
We know they were commanded, as (…)

by Alaa Habib
Iraq denounced British forces on Tuesday over a dramatic rescue of two undercover soldiers that could stoke hostility to the army in increasingly volatile southern Iraq.
British troops used an armored fighting vehicle on Monday to burst into an Iraqi jail in search of soldiers held by police in Basra. The British commander said he learned they had been handed to militia and ordered their rescue from a nearby house.
"It is a very unfortunate development that the British (…)

by Arianna Huffington
I’m now hearing that the investigation may be inching closer to never-confirmed UN Ambassador John Bolton.
According to two sources, Bolton’s former chief of staff, Fred Fleitz, was at least one of the sources of the classified information about Valerie Plame that flowed through the Bush administration and eventually made its way into Bob Novak’s now infamous column.
After delving into Fleitz, I can safely report that he is, at a minimum, a very interesting (…)