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Iraq invasion skeptics, listen up. You’re right: it was always about oil.
Now the other shoe is dropping – in India of all places. That’s where the oil and money connection back to Iraq can be found.
The evidence is buried in a New York Times article headlined “BP to Pay $7.2 Billion for Stake in Oil Fields in India.”
With the recent events in the Middle East and the union busting in Wisconsin, Americans can learn something useful about fighting back from our neighbors across the pond. In the UK, a group of ordinary citizens decided to disrupt business as usual: By spreading the word on Twitter and holding nation-wide protests of the largest cell phone provider Vodafone, they demanded the company pay up for billions in taxes owed.
While the US government expresses outrage over the brutality of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi toward his own people, we’re missing a complex but significant wrinkle that ties Qaddafi to America’s cover-up of the true path to war in Iraq.
In May, 2009, a man named Ibn Shaikh al-Libi supposedly committed suicide while being held in a Libyan jail. Al-Libi is a deeply, deeply interesting fellow. Back in 2002, he was tortured by Egypt under US direction. It appears that the reason the US government had him tortured was not to stop some imminent attack on the United States, but to generate alleged—and false— links between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that could justify invading Iraq.
It seems unusual for a staid, respected publication (one that has received three National Magazine Awards in just this past decade) to start treating a celebrated journalist (who himself has won two National Magazine Awards in just this past decade) as if he were nothing more than a paranoid crank. [Read the rest]
Soon, Texas college professors and students will be able to carry concealed handguns on campus. Does this make you feel safer?
Here’s the story, as reported by the Associated Press and carried in the San Francisco Chronicle (a city whose Mayor, George Moscone, was killed by another elected official with a registered gun).
On February 15, President Obama bestowed the Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest award, to a group of people which includes former president George H.W. Bush. Having spent five years researching the elder Bush and discovering a staggering array of secrets to the man’s life—none of them favorable, I was curious why Obama gave Bush the medal.
Anyone who still wonders why the Bush administration invaded Iraq would do well to become familiar with an institution whose existence few Americans are aware of: the American University of Iraq-Sulaimaniya.
Located in Kurdistan, at the nexus of northern Iraq’s border with Iran and Turkey, AUI-S opened its doors in 2007. At the time, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times wrote about it with the sort of wide-eyed enthusiasm that had generally accompanied the invasion itself four years before. “Imagine for a moment if one outcome of the U.S. invasion of Iraq had been the creation of an American University of Iraq…Imagine if we had created an island of decency in Iraq…Well, stop imagining.”
[Read the rest]
With all the attention on crowds of ordinary people rising up and asserting themselves against corruption and self-dealing by an oligarchy, we’re missing what the oligarchs are doing right at home. Take, for example, the activities of one of our biggest banks, JPMorgan Chase. Newly released documents show that high officials of the bank knew […]
In Donald Rumsfeld’s new book, Known and Unknown, out February 8, Rumsfeld offers an account of George W. Bush’s early interest in Iraq. This was just days after the 9/11 attacks. There were no apparent reasons for Bush to focus on Iraq, instead of on the actual perpetrators of the attacks. Here’s the Rumsfeld version […]
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Book By John Loftus America’s Nazi Secret is not what you’d call extremely reader-friendly material. Sometimes it feels like a chore to read it. But wow—does it ever provide powerful insight into the “deep politics” of US policy. Born of the Boston Irish, John Loftus never imagined that he would end up tracking down Byelorussian […]
With news reports mostly emphasizing the Israeli government’s wariness about events in Egypt, here’s an interesting development: It took the Arab-run news outlet, Al Jazeera, to run a piece about Jews being supportive of the Egyptian people’s self-determination. Writes Rabbi Michael Lerner: Ever since the victory over the dictator of Tunisia and the subsequent uprising […]