Dispatches

Why a War?
12.21.2005 07:06 | RUSS WELLEN
In The Emotional Life of Nations (Other Press, 2002), Lloyd deMause, the founder of psychohistory, writes that the real reason a state prosecutes war is not to conquer another state or even jump-start its economy. In fact, the most destructive wars, measu...

Slice of Lice
12.19.2005 09:56 | RUSS WELLEN
At holiday time, the call goes out: "Remember the needy." The early sixties, prosperous for most, afforded Americans the luxury of developing a social conscience. Thus was created a climate receptive to Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. However...

Premiere of Freezerbox's Commentator of the Week Award
12.16.2005 07:20 | RUSS WELLEN
The first winner of the Freezerbox Commentator of the Week award goes to former CIA analyst Ray McGovern--long a leading light of the Internet--for his TomPaine.com article, "McCain's Defining Moment," on "enhanced interrogation techniques." I had just...

George Shrinks
12.14.2005 06:16 | RUSS WELLEN
At age 87, Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes, who started in 1956, may have set a record for most years spent continuously working in the public eye. He got yet more media attention for his profanity-laced interview with the Boston Globe's Suzanne Ryan. The high...

Tripping Jihadis on Ultimate Bummer
12.12.2005 08:11 | RUSS WELLEN
Tripping Jihadis on Ultimate Bummer On DefenseTech.org, a subdivision of Military.com, David Hambling reports on one Marine's blog (now protected by a USMC security screen). Titled "The Green Side," its author is Lt. Col. Dave Bellon, an intelligence o...

Christlamic Fundamentalism
12.09.2005 07:09 | RUSS WELLEN
One reason Islamism (political Islam) and the US are on a collision course is that we're too alike. This thought crystallized when I came across the passages below, from Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Metropolitan...

Banks Bear Your Interest
12.07.2005 07:20 | RUSS WELLEN
Ever wonder how banks evolved? For those of you as financially challenged as me, Ellen Brown explains in "Returning the Money to the People," an article on FinancialOutrage.org.uk. It was excerpted from her forthcoming book, The Wizards of Wall Street and...

A Bore of a War
12.05.2005 08:40 | RUSS WELLEN
James Fallows's article in the December Atlantic Monthly, "Why Iraq Has No Army" (for subscribers only, but currently available online elsewhere) is as explosive as it is comprehensive. An excerpt: "'There is still no sense of urgency,' T. X. Hammes [...

The President: On Soma--or in a Coma?
12.02.2005 08:07 | RUSS WELLEN
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson, who's set a new benchmark for administration turncoats, says President Bush was "too aloof, too distant from the details" of post-war planning. In "Bush's Shrinking Safety Zone...

The Cave from Which Terrorism's Wellspring Flows
11.30.2005 08:20 | RUSS WELLEN
Lloyd deMause, the director of the Psychohistory Institute, has no qualms about spelling out the primitive impulses that fuel American foreign policy. But in The Emotional Life of Nations (Other Press, 2002), he maintains: "The roots of current terrori...

Can Democrats Turn Republican Led into Gold?
11.26.2005 18:59 | RUSS WELLEN
"I think that would cause more problems for Americans." --Senator Hillary Clinton "I'm not there yet." --Senator Joe Biden (his time) Why are Congressional Democrats balking at Representative John Murtha's call for withdrawal from Iraq (or, more a...

French Riots as Cyclic as Tour de France
11.23.2005 06:50 | RUSS WELLEN
Calling French rioters by the derogatory term racaille (rabble), Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy only reveals his fear of a new French Revolution. However, it's been fomenting for fifteen years. Lorenzo Vidino of Steven Emerson's Investigative Project...

Bush, bin Laden Headed for Melt-Down?
11.21.2005 07:07 | RUSS WELLEN
Melt-downs come in different shapes and sizes. There's the kind that can happen to plutonium in a nuclear reactor. Or to vast expanses of the planet should bin Laden sanction the detonation of nuclear suitcase bombs in the US and President Bush retaliates...

A King Rat Inches His Way Off Sinking Ship
11.18.2005 06:19 | RUSS WELLEN
In "Wrestling with History" (the November 13 Sunday Washington Post Magazine), David Von Drehle provides some of the deepest insight yet into ex-college wrestler Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He reports on a memo which Rumsfeld periodically remind...

Chalabi's Bay of Pigs
11.14.2005 14:33 | RUSS WELLEN
What is this love affair the administration continues to conduct with Ahmad Chalabi? Upon revisiting Patrick and Andrew Cockburn's Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein (HarperCollins, 1999), which chronicles how Hussein solidified his weak...

Al-Qaeda Losing Credibility on the Arab Street
11.11.2005 10:49 | RUSS WELLEN
From BBC News: "But actions such as the Amman bombing of the wedding tend to undermine mainstream support that al-Qaeda might have had. . . . hundreds of people [protesting against] Zarqawi. . . But the way to measure this [is in] public reporting on t...

The Wonders of the Web
11.11.2005 07:42 | RUSS WELLEN
From an article on Nuclear Threat Initiative: "The [Website} 'al-Firdaws', or 'Paradise', contains 80 pages of instructions and photographs of making bombs. . . lessons such as 'The Nuclear Bomb of Jihad' and the 'Way to Enrich Uranium.' . . . 'Normall...

Cheney Still Flogging the Old Torture Canard
11.09.2005 08:59 | RUSS WELLEN
From a November 5 article in Editor & Publisher about a Defense Intelligence Agency document from February 2002: "It shows that an al-Qaeda official [Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi] held by the Americans. . . 'was intentionally misleading the debriefers' in mak...

Iranq
11.07.2005 09:10 | RUSS WELLEN
Noted Iraqi blogger Riverbend, either modest to a fault or, equally appealing, lacking in media savvy, fails to mention her new book, Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq (Feminist Press, 2005) anywhere on her homepage. But her November 6 entry neatly sum...

Let Us Not Be Too Quick to Hail Chavez
11.04.2005 14:30 | RUSS WELLEN
Urged on by soccer legend Diego Maradona, ten thousand protesters chanted "Get out, Bush on Friday, November 4, by way of welcoming our president to Mar Del Plata. The Argentinean resort is hosting the Summit of the Americas, where the administration will...