In a 1972 book, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychology Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, Irving Janis identified the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba as particularly compelling examples of how very smart people can collectively make very...
THE SETTING Toby Dodge's Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied 1 (03) constitutes a very interesting guide to the British period in Iraq - or Mesopotamia, as it was then called. The period began, naturally enough, in World War I. Like...
As the United Nations prepares to organize elections and help create a new interim government in Iraq starting in July, skepticism is growing about the wisdom of risking UN lives in a country swirling in violence and chaos.. The UN mission in Iraq is bound to fail,...
The blithering, the blathering, the pontification, and the grandstanding – that about describes the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings on the Abu Ghraib filth-fest. The Democrats were so hot to link Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld directly to the...
The star witness before yesterday's Senate Armed Services Committee hearing was Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. Taguba carried out an investigation on the activities of the Army's 800th Military Police Brigade at Abu Ghraib prison. Afterward, he wrote a 6,000 page...
On a barren hilltop in the Palestinian Jerusalem neighborhood Abu Dis, a gap of several hundred meters interrupts the wall Israel is building in the city. The grey concrete elements come to a stop just before a property with Israeli flags, armed guards and a...
Amid growing evidence of systematic abuse of prisoners held by the U.S. military in Iraq and elsewhere, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) are calling on the Pentagon to open all U.S.-run detention facilities used in the Bush administration's "war on...
President Bush learned about the US torture of Iraqi detainees the same way you did – from TV news – compelling evidence that Bush has been manipulated by VP Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and the neocon warmongers. And you thought President Bush was in...
The allegations of prisoner torture by our troops in Iraq are disturbing, and clearly drastic action must be taken to ensure such conduct stops immediately. But why are we condemning a small group of low-level reservists when we do not yet know the full story? As...
