February 10th, 2005

The Iraqi people gave America the biggest ‘thank you’ in the best way we could have hoped for.” Reading this election analysis from Betsy Hart, a columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service, I found myself thinking about my late grandmother. Half blind and a menace behind the wheel of her Chevrolet, she adamantly refused to surrender her car keys. She was convinced that everywhere she drove (flattening the house pets of Philadelphia along the way) people were waving and smiling at her. “They are so friendly!” We had to break the bad news. “They aren’t waving with their whole hand, Grandma—just with their middle finger.”

December 24th, 2004

So it turns out Pottery Barn doesn’t even have a rule that says, “You break it, you own it.” According to a company spokesperson, “in the rare instance that something is broken in the store, it’s written off as a loss.” Yet the nonexistent policy of a store selling $80 corkscrews continues to wield more influence in the United States than the Geneva Conventions and the US Army’s Law of Land Warfare combined.

December 4th, 2004

David T Johnson,
Acting Ambassador
The US Embassy, London

Dear Mr Johnson,
On November 26, your Press Counselor sent a letter to the Guardian taking strong exception to a sentence in my column of the same day. The sentence read: “In Iraq, US forces and their Iraqi surrogates are no longer bothering to conceal attacks on civilian targets and are openly eliminating anyone—doctors, clerics, journalists—who dares to count the bodies.” Of particular concern was the word “eliminating.”

November 30th, 2004

Jeremy Hinzman tells me that he’s thinking about going to Ottawa to join today’s protests against George W. Bush. But if he does, he won’t be giving any fiery speeches. “It’s not a good time for that,” he observes.

November 24th, 2004

Iconic images inspire love and hate, and so it is with the photograph of James Blake Miller, the 20 year old Marine from Appalachia who has been christened “the face of Fallujah” by pro-war pundits and the “The Marlboro Man” by pretty much everyone else. Reprinted in over a hundred newspapers, the Los Angeles Times photograph shows Miller “after more than 12 hours of nearly non-stop deadly combat” in Fallujah, his face coated in war paint, a bloody scratch on his nose, and a freshly lit cigarette hanging from his lips.

November 9th, 2004

P. Diddy announced on the weekend that his “Vote or Die” campaign will live on. The hip-hop mogul’s voter-registration drive during the U.S. presidential elections was, he said, merely “phase one, step one for us to get people engaged.”

October 28th, 2004

Less than twenty-four hours after The Nation disclosed that former Secretary of State James Baker and The Carlyle Group were involved in a secret deal to profit from Iraq’s debt to Kuwait, NBC was reporting that the deal was “dead.” At The Nation, we started to get calls congratulating us on costing the Carlyle Group $1 billion, the sum the company would have received in an investment from the government of Kuwait in exchange for helping to extract $27 billion of unpaid debts from Iraq.

October 14th, 2004

Next week, something will happen that will unmask the upside-down morality of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. On October 21, Iraq will pay $200-million in war reparations to some of the richest countries and corporations in the world.

October 12th, 2004

When President Bush appointed former Secretary of State James Baker III as his envoy on Iraq’s debt on December 5, 2003, he called Baker’s job “a noble mission.” At the time, there was widespread concern about whether Baker’s extensive business dealings in the Middle East would compromise that mission, which is to meet with heads of state and persuade them to forgive the debts owed to them by Iraq. Of particular concern was his relationship with merchant bank and defense contractor the Carlyle Group, where Baker is senior counselor and an equity partner with an estimated $180 million stake.

September 30th, 2004

My first run-in with Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army came on March 31 in Baghdad. The US occupation chief Paul Bremer had just sent armed men to shut down the young cleric’s newspaper, Al Hawza, on the grounds that its articles comparing Bremer to Saddam Hussein incited violence against Americans. Sadr responded by calling for his supporters to protest outside the gates of the Green Zone, demanding al-Hawza’s reopening.

September 15th, 2004
By Jeremy Scahill

When Simona Torretta returned to Baghdad in March 2003, in the midst of the “shock and awe” aerial bombardment, her Iraqi friends greeted her by telling her she was nuts. “They were just so surprised to see me. They said, ‘Why are you coming here? Go back to Italy. Are you crazy?'”

September 10th, 2004

Russian President Vladamir Putin is so fed up with being grilled over his handling of the Beslan catastrophe that he lashed out at foreign journalists on Monday. “Why don’t you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House and engage in talks,” he demanded, adding that, “No one has a moral right to tell us to talk to child-killers.”