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By Robert Parry
What is perhaps most striking about the Iraq debacle - what distinguishes it from almost any other geopolitical disaster in modern history - is the lack of accountability so far from those in government who dreamt up the policies and those in the news media who played along.
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Throughout American history, leaders who screwed up on the battlefield, in particular, paid with their careers. Abraham Lincoln went through a revolving door of Union (…)

Marlon Brando’s Col. Kurtz character in "Apocalypse Now" applied crystal logic to the madness of the Vietnam War, concluding that what made sense was to descend into barbarism. The U.S. military hierarchy, judging Kurtz’s tactics to be "unsound," ordered the colonel eliminated to keep at least a façade of civilization.
A reprise of that tragedy — a kind of "Apocalypse Again" — is now playing out in Iraq, with U.S. soldiers sent halfway around the globe to invade and occupy a country (…)

By Patrick Martin
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The Bush administration appealed to Senate Democrats July 27 to move ahead with the confirmation of two top-level diplomatic nominees whose appointments have been delayed because of their role in defending right-wing dictatorships and death squads in Central America.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden (D-Del) said through a spokesman that a hearing for John Negroponte, (…)

Negroponte pressed Powell to pressure Chile’s and Mexico’s weak-willed leaders to discharge their U.N. ambassadors over Iraq votes.
· Negroponte has a sordid human rights record in Honduras.
· A Cruel Joke: Negroponte, the arch authoritarian, teaching democracy to the Iraqis.
· Life under Saddam somewhat prepares you for the Negroponte era.
· Senate Foreign Relations Committee unlikely to closely scrutinize Negroponte nomination.
· Like the (…)

Operation Phoenix Rises from the Ashes of history Death squads didn’t work in Vietnam, but the CIA is betting they’ll be great in Iraq
by Nick Schou
Never pretty, the war in Iraq is about to get a whole lot uglier. U.S. officials have begun to recruit ex-officers of Saddam Hussein’s infamous Mukhabarat, or secret police, to hunt down resistance forces fighting U.S. troops in Iraq.
According to human rights groups, the Mukhabarat was responsible for torturing and murdering tens of (…)

On the television network that his company owns, Disney CEO Michael Eisner dismissed the idea that forbidding Disney subsidiary Miramax to distribute a controversial new documentary by Michael Moore was a form of censorship. "We informed both the agency that represented the film and all of our companies that we just didn’t want to be in the middle of a politically-oriented film during an election year," he told ABC World News Tonight (5/5/04), referring to Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, which (…)

This interview appears in the April 23, 2004 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Interview: Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg
Sharon and Bush ’Will Fry in Hell’
Rabbi Hertzberg, former president of the American Jewish Congress, and former vice president of the World Jewish Congress, was interviewed by Marjorie Mazel Hecht on April 15. Her review of his newest book, The Fate of Zionism, is below.
EIR: After years of devolution and increasing tension, we’re at a critical point in terms of (…)

Matthew Wells
Mildred McHugh leaned against a steel crowd-control barrier on Manhattan’s Third Avenue and wondered whether her son Steve was alive or dead.
Steve is serving in Iraq, and although they spoke recently, events move fast. "Four died in my son’s division today and I don’t know that he’s not one of them. People are dying at an astounding rate, while the president paints a rosy picture of a country being reborn," she said.
Most days she rides around her New Jersey town on a (…)

In the ongoing debate on the nightmare events in Iraqi prisons which you are engaged in, some of your contributors have classified all Americans as vile psycopaths.
This is unjust, wrong and futile. Young men, stuffed to the gills with arrogance and racist propaganda (and steroids) will behave like sadists given the opportunity, whether they are Saddam’s ’security’ police or half-witted, ill-educated morons from some trailer park in Hicksville.
The real guilt lies with the neo-con clique (…)

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1103870.htm
Abuse of Iraqi prisoners ’common’ Three US military policemen who served at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison say they have witnessed unreported cases of prisoner abuse and that the practice against Iraqis is commonplace.
The latest revelations come as US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is set to face the Senate to explain what he knew about the abuse.
Sergeant Mike Sindar, 25, of the Army National Guard’s 870th Military Police Company, (…)