Originally published in Truth-out

By Gareth Porter

The report of the fact-finding mission of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla released last week shows conclusively, for the first time, that US citizen Furkan Dogan...

After the Bush administration went to war based on charges of WMD programs that were later found to have been nonexistent, you would think there would be a strong demand for a thorough examination of the strategic rationale the next time an administration proposes a new war or a major...

The front-page story in the Washington Post Tuesday reports the intention of Barack Obama to commit a stunningly irrational blunder: to escalate dramatically the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan even though he has no clear proposal from the Pentagon on what is to be accomplished with the new "surge"...

Robert Kaplan is a throw-back to the late nineteenth century imperialists who believed in the inherent right of the United States to dominate the lesser breeds and believed that the manly art of war is good for civilization. In Imperial Grunts he talked without a trace of irony about the...

In Sunday's New York Times, investigative reporter David Barstow exposes television's "military analysts" on the Iraq War as sock puppets of the Pentagon who consciously peddle the Bush administration's talking points on Iraq while hiding their own vested economic interest in selling the public on the Bush administration's happy...

The Bush administration suddenly seems hell-bent on sending U.S. troops into Pakistan -- covertly if necessary. Democratic leaders had bettter get their heads straight on this issue, because a slide into an American war in Pakistan would be an almost unimaginable disaster for U.S. and global security.

The New...

The accusation by both Clinton and Bush administrations that Iran was behind the 1994 terror bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires is now so widely accepted that my investigation of that issue, published last weekend at thenation.com, will be shock to many readers.

The Pentagon has been caught with its pants down on the bogus story of Iranian boats threatening to "explode" U.S. warships in the Strait of Hormuz January 6. Now that that patently false story has blown up in its face, Congress should find out who is responsible and make them...

Right-wing pundit Michael Barone has published a column on the surge in Iraq that may be the clearest expression so far of the American triumphalism over the U.S. military and Iraq that emerged in 2007. The current popularity of that idea reflects the degree to which the apologists...

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto may plunge Pakistan into much more serious chaos and violence. But the tragedy should at least be a clarifying moment for American policy toward Pakistan. It should make us more determined than ever to throw light on the shadowy policy of the Bush-Cheney administration of...

Condi Rice is the latest administration official to dissemble and conceal in answering a question about when she and other top officials -- including Bush -- knew about the dramatic new intelligence about Iran's having dropped all its covert work on nuclear weapons in 2003. She refused to answer a...

John Bolton's attack in today's WaPo on the Iran NIE and its unwelcome conclusion that Iran stopped work related to nuclear weapons in fall 2003 makes it clear that the Cheney faction is furious at the intelligence community and still trying to discredit its primary judgment.

Bolton was...

By indicating his readiness to consider being a running mate for a Democratic candidate, Sen. Chuck Hagel has raised the possibility of a precedent-shattering move by one of the Democratic contenders that could transform the race for the Democratic nomination. Such a move may also offer the best chance this...

Michael O'Hanlon and Fred Kagan, who first advocated U.S. preparing military intervention in Pakistan last spring well before the current political crisis of the Musharraf regime, have now taken advantage of that crisis to get their ideas into a New York Times op-ed.

Their piece is the...

As I reported for Inter Press Service this week, Dick Cheney has been trying to pressure intelligence analysts who have not drunk the neocon kool-aid on Iran to go along with his line on the issues at stake in a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that the White House...

The debate on Iran policy has yet to focus on the real problem: the strategy of diplomatic coercion which Hillary Clinton has made it clear she strongly supports. She believes it is an alternative to war, but in fact is the main danger of war with Iran.

Diplomatic coercion...

The more I read the press releases and public statements of the U.S. military command in Iraq (the "Multinational Force Iraq") under Gen. David Petraeus, the more I am reminded of the dystopian future empire of George Orwell's 1984, in which the state controls thought processes through an ingenious language...

Since her vote for the odious Kyl-Lieberman amendment, Hillary Clinton has been forced to make what appear to be moves in the direction of the position of the vast majority of Democratic voters on the issue of war with Iran. But these moves, aimed at assuaging the anxiety and anger...

Only two days after holding a hearing on Blackwater's atrocities, Rep. Henry Waxman is on the warpath against the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the State Department for attempting to cover up the unwillingness of the al-Maliki government to do anything about massive and systematic corruption in Iraq.

...

The Lieberman-Kyle amendment has just passed the Senate overwhelmingly after two sections were removed to satisfy Democrats that it will not serve as a backdoor authorization for war against Iran, using U.S. forces operating in Iran. Even after that compromise, it remains a poison chalice, because it endorses a set...