Meanwhile, back in Afghanistan...

"A US airstrike that killed dozens of guests at a wedding party in Afghanistan in July was justified, a US military investigation has concluded. The US say their gunship was fired on. Its report says people at the party in central Afghanistan's Uruzgan province who fired at US aircraft were to blame, not the American pilots who returned the fire."

Of course, the Afghan government doesn't agree with this conclusion (much to its credit), and the U.S. has provided no evidence at all to support its version of events.

Read the BBC News story here.

posted by Michael Curry at 9:28 AM

Supporting the war against Iraq?

Today's Boondocks comic is great (as it often is). Check it out here.

posted by Michael Curry at 9:17 AM

Don't believe everything the media tells you

"Anyone who spends a little time in Baghdad knows there is one thing the dwindling, beaten-down middle class of that country fears more than the hideous regime of Saddam Hussein: an Islamic uprising. The Iraqis sent millions of young men to their deaths in the 1980s fighting exactly the kind of fundamentalist Islamic mentality that we so dread now. As much as they hate their dictator, Iraqis hate the Islamists even more. As a Sunni Muslim, so does Saddam. As in the 1980s, this creepy strongman is standing between Iraqis and the jihad.

This observation is not difficult to come by. All it takes is a little time and little guts. Any journalist who spends a few weeks on the ground in Baghdad will start to hear this talk. People -- women especially, who have more rights in Iraq than any other Arab country -- are terrified of the jihadis in Iraq, even more than they are terrified of their dictator with his creepy Big Brother pictures staring at them from every crack and crevice of their wasted, wilted country."

This article asks the important question of why the American media has failed to investigate Bush administrations claims that Saddam is (or soon may be) working with Al Qaeda. Even more than in the first Gulf War, the major American news channels seem to be willing to accept anything our government tells them at face value.

Read the full article here, and an excellent related article (about past propaganda lies) here.

posted by Michael Curry at 10:20 PM

"Still missing in the rubble of 9/11 is the idea of America that enriched, strengthened and protected us for more than two centuries. Overcome with fear and anger, and later in denial parading as pride, we hardly noticed it was gone."

This week, TomPaine.com published another of their fine ads on the op-ed pages of the the New York Times and other newspapers around the country. This brief essay by Sam Smith (who has been mentioned by me more than once before) manages to convey what I think most needed to be said on this anniversary.

Read the whole ad here.

posted by Michael Curry at 10:08 PM

Whatever happens, bomb Iraq

Another excellent This Modern World comic, this time about what the President has learned since 9/11/2001. Don't miss it.

posted by Michael Curry at 9:59 PM

The rush toward war

"George W. Bush and his advisers, with their obsessive focus on Saddam Hussein, transformed the 9/11 recall-a-thon into a prep session for war. They have exploited a terrible event for their next crusade. And on their watch, the horror of that day has been used not to lessen the distance between America and the rest of the world, but to increase it, as other nations recoil from and fear Bush’s march to war."

An excellent piece on the Bush administrations insistence that there is no option that should be considered other than war with Iraq. It's very much worth reading.

Read the entire article here.

posted by Michael Curry at 9:56 PM

Why Arab nations oppose the war

"Arab governments worry that this war, if it happens, will look like an Anglo-American effort to install a client regime in Baghdad - and that their own peoples will punish them for supporting it."

A brief, but insightful, analysis of why (with the obvious exception of Israel) governments in the Middle East are opposed to Bush's quest to take out Saddam Hussein, despite the fact that none of them actually like him.

Read the full story here.

posted by Michael Curry at 9:47 PM

Mandela takes the U.S. to task

"Because what [America] is saying is that if you are afraid of a veto in the Security Council, you can go outside and take action and violate the sovereignty of other countries. That is the message they are sending to the world. That must be condemned in the strongest terms. And you will notice that France, Germany Russia, China are against this decision. It is clearly a decision that is motivated by George W. Bush’s desire to please the arms and oil industries in the United States of America."

Nelson Mandela did an interview for this week's issue of Newsweek in which he has few good things to say about U.S. foreign policy, both during the current "crisis" and in past decades. Of course, most of the rest of the major American media outlets have (as far as I can tell) all but ignored this story in their rush to support the President.

posted by Michael Curry at 9:41 PM