The Voice of Africa in New York, Nicholas Kristoff, once again asked in his most plaintiff voice why nothing is being done about the savagery being perpetrated against women and children in Congo. Mere weeks after Peter Daou’s article appeared on The Huffington Post, questioning why action on Haiti was immediately funded and aid-workers [...]

Banks create biggest financial crash since Depression, receive $700+ billion in taxpayer-funded bailout, subsequently cease all lending while raising credit card interest rates/fees to record levels!
President Obama extends war in Afghanistan to include relentless drone-bomber strikes on Pakistan, receives Nobel Peace Prize!
Supreme Court credits Corporations with ‘personhood’, human beings credited with colluding in ending Constitutional [...]

What is it about “intelligence” that seems to bring out the stupid in our National Security agencies?
The infamous memo of August 6, 2001, presented at President George W. Bush’s Daily Briefing, was actually titled, “Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States”. Multiple reports detailed suspicions of an imminent al Qaeda plot to [...]

Don’t you love how these guys pull “5 years” out of their asses, when in fact the future of the rest of his fraudulently-acquired term – let alone Afghanistan itself – is less assured than Aerosmith’s tour dates?
‘“We will decrease the role of international forces,” Mr. Karzai said at a midday ceremony held at the [...]

Just what is going on in Afghanistan?
Any “news” that can be trusted is damn scarce. We have heard about the car-bombings that have killed over 300 people. We have heard that two military helicopters collided killing 9 U.S. soldiers. And that President Hamid Karzai’s brother – Ahmed Wali Karzai, suspected to oversee [...]

12:35 PM ET — « U.S. behind the attacks. » A reader sends in this unverified note: « Hi I’m located in Dubai but we have access to Iranian State T.V. here. I just witnessed a program on official state television depicting young Iranians with there faces blurred ‘testifying’ to visiting the U.S. and being trained and told [...]

While every western press tries to present the opposition party in Iran as some kind of Obama who is rising up to do business with progressive countries, the reality of the situation is plain to anyone who has been doing something more constructive than watching the media-coverage of the Iranian election.  The fact is, there [...]

Well, well, well.
Since my last post, I have been trying to write something meaningful about Sri Lanka, but something told me I would have to wait to find the correct angle from which to view that mess and find something true in it.
Unfortunately, unless you want to go read the 30-year history of the war [...]

“We have met the enemy and they is us.” – Pogo
What the hell is going on in Afghanistan?  Business as usual.  What about Pakistan?  They’re all hotted up, killing “hundreds”** of Taliban fighters near the Swat valley.  Where was all this energy when the Bush Administration was handing over $100m checks with zero accountability for [...]

“President Obama has correctly refocused American attention on Afghanistan and Pakistan, the real front in the war on terror. But the recent surge in bombings is an alarming reminder of all of the unfinished business from President Bush’s unnecessary war in Iraq.”
Unfinished business, eh?  The entire NY Times editorial from which this is quoted sounds [...]

A lie told often enough becomes the truth. – Lenin
With the GOP in bizarro-Washington, however, it’s the truth repeated over and over again that Dick Cheney wants to turn into a lie.  The truth is, the United States DID torture, waterboarding IS torture, and he is guilty of authorizing torture.  Donald Rumsfeld mandated torture.  Condoleeza [...]

« What I have said is that my administration is going to operate in a way that leaves no doubt that we do not torture, and that we abide by the Geneva Conventions, and that we observe our traditions of rule of law and due process, as we are vigorously going after terrorists that can do [...]

“President Robert Mugabe’s top lieutenants are trying to force the political opposition into granting them amnesty for their past crimes by abducting, detaining and torturing opposition officials and activists, according to senior members of Mr. Mugabe’s party.
“Mr. Mugabe’s generals and politicians have organized campaigns of terror for decades to keep him and his party in [...]

It’s been almost a month since I last blogged.  In that time, Congo and Zimbabwe have hardly been reported on, except that in the case of the latter, the press seems to be rehabilitating Mugabe for inexplicable reasons.  In fact, the spin on the news has amazed me:  all eyes are focused on Timothy Geithner [...]

We had the worst president in history, we have the best president in history.  The age of foolishness is now the age of wisdom.  It was the epoch of absurd ‘belief’, it is the epoch of…incredulity?
With Mr Obama promising to ‘cure cancer in our lifetimes’, the limits of my ability to ‘believe’ are indeed strained.
With [...]

In a video interview which took place on February 7, 2009, on France 24 English, Christopher Hitchens made the following, astonishing, statement when explaining how he came to support Bush’s Iraq war:
“If you look at the drapeau, the flag in my lapel, which is that of the Iraqi Kurds, almost all of my Iraqi Kurdish [...]

Just two months ago today, this blog reported on a massacre in Congo which took place as ‘a contingent of 100 U.N. peacekeepers’ were less than a mile away, supposedly unaware of the execution-style killings that claimed over 150 lives in one day. “The peacekeepers were short of equipment and men, United Nations officials said… [...]

Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon went to Gaza last week.  He went to see first-hand the devastation, death, and homelessness wrought by the Israeli army and air forces.
“A visibly furious Ban Ki-moon condemned as ‘outrageous, shocking and alarming’ the destruction he had seen while touring Gaza, and described as ‘excessive use’ of [...]

In May of last year, Edgar Eusebio Millán Gómez, Mexico’s national chief of police, who had spearheaded a heroic 17 month effort to battle the power over the Mexican government of drug cartels, was assassinated by no less than nine bullets outside his home.  At the time, The Washington Post reported a narcotics expert stating, [...]

The war crimes perpetrated by Israel now include chemical warfare.
It beggars the imagination, but it’s true:  white phosphorus, used not only against Gazan civilians – excuse me, ‘Hamas’ – but also against the headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. « We do not want such incidents to take place” said Prime Minister Ehud [...]

As the days draw on, in article after article, Israel’s military strikes on Gaza are not only being condemned as war crimes and atrocities, but also as some kind of “beginning of the end” for Israel as we now know it.
The language being used to condemn the brutality of the onslaught, not only by Mr [...]

So, no one will lift a finger, no one will breathe a credible word of censure, no one will do anything whatsoever to prevent the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians.   (http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-leaders-lie-civilians-die-and-lessons-of-history-are-ignored-1215045.html)
And let us be clear:  though every newspaper calls this a war between Israel and ‘Hamas’, it is nothing less than the sanctioned murder of civilians by [...]

This week I had intended to write about the latest outrages perpetrated by Israel in Gaza.
But I find I can only echo Israel’s critics throughout the world, who multiply in number each passing day, who are demanding a change in the way Israel has failed to be held accountable by the international community for decades, [...]

We read today, 11 Dec 2008, about UN peacekeeping forces meeting only an hour from the site of yet another massacre in Congo, bloody brutality rampaging without restraint from any quarter.  They were reportedly there to evacuate foreign aid workers and to locate a missing journalist, and trying to “understand the situation”, while people were [...]

Last June, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Bush-lackey extrordinaire and self-championed advocate of promoting democracy throughout the world, was quoted in headlines following a report to Washington, that “The Mugabe regime cannot be considered legitimate”, but the unquoted part of that sentence contained a caveat, “in the absence of a run-off”.  Yes, a run-off [...]

So we learn tonight, that Hollywood activist/journalist Mr Sean Penn has confirmed what many suspected, regarding the reason the United States is pressing the Columbia Trade Agreement through a spineless – without Obama – Congress:  the United States may have plans to invade Venezuela, and is ‘co-operating’ with Bogota in order to stage its latest [...]

Breitebart, via headline shrieking conservative mouthpiece Matt Drudge, has supplied us with yet another heroic reason to prolong the war in Iraq.  “[T]he Gulf would be infested by pirates…if the U.S. quits Iraq too soon”, Iraq’s Defense Minister is quoted as saying at a press conference held in Bagdad today.
Except the pirates, who have been [...]

Many times in its history, the United States has acted unethically, prompted by reasons ranging from mere jingoistic nationalism which rallied around a Jesuitical plea for ends justifying means, to justifications from pure greed by which the bottom line becomes the number one priority.
But in the case of Columbia and the trade agreement that today [...]

Yesterday in Washington, President-Elect Obama attempted to discuss with lame-duck President George W. Bush, terms for allowing the US Auto Industry to share in the multibillion dollar federal bailout plan, only to be told that Mr. Bush would only consider offering support if Mr. Obama would engage Democrats in supporting a free-trade agreement with Columbia.
Democrats [...]

“It took months for the 58-year-old woman from Kindu to reach Rutshuru hospital for treatment and to tell her story. The Mai Mai shot her husband when he didn’t have any money to hand over. When her children screamed they shot them too. Then the woman was raped by five men. One of her attackers [...]

Niki Lambros, MA (Cambridge, UK), is a writer, critic and ex-theologian, recently settled in Canada after almost two decades in Europe, Asia, and the United States. She joined Le Panoptique in January 2008 as Editor of the History Section, and contributes articles to various publications in Canada and on the Web.
Understanding what’s going on in [...]

On 8 August, 2008, the Sunday New York Times covered the war between Georgia and Russia with many columns and whole pages of photos devoted to revealing the utter destruction Russian bombs had wrought in South Ossetia.  Suffering on a massive scale in the cities of Gori and Poti, among others, was explicitly reported, with [...]