Peter Laufer

Good evening, my friend.

I wish you were still in Santa Cruz because I'm coming down to make a presentation at the Capitola Book Café about my book Mission Rejected: U.S. Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq (have you read it?).

I would love it were you in the audience...

In his fear-mongering September 11th speech, President Bush again invoked the names of the soldiers he sent to their deaths in his Iraq War. He claimed again, as he has so many times before, that the war must go on so that their sacrifice is not wasted.

The President noted,...

Google Josh Wolf and the first citation is www.joshwolf.net. Josh Wolf's website. It's certainly not as famous as the Huffington Post or the New York Times, but essentially it's the same thing. It's a news outlet run by Josh Wolf.

Josh Wolf is the journalist who was locked...

I've been on the receiving end these last few days of some harsh criticism for saying San Francisco Chronicle photographer Darryl Bush's exquisite photograph of a solider leaving his girlfriend for Iraq was quasi-pornographic.

My critics are correct. I erred by suggesting it's quasi-pornographic. Drop the quasi. Bush's extraordinary snap...

As I travel the country telling the stories of the soldiers I profile in my book Mission Rejected: U.S. Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq, one question recurs regularly from the audiences I speak with and it is a question that is all-but-impossible to answer: How many soldiers oppose the...

The U.S. government hasn't shot military deserters since World War II (progress), but are we yet ready to recognize Iraq War deserters as heroes fighting on the front lines for our nation's soul?

History often mocks contemporary actions, and it is incumbent for us to make careful choices as we...

U.S. soldiers refusing to fight in Iraq can now embrace new compatriots: Israeli soldiers refusing to fight in Lebanon. The news from Israel is that today's war is popular with most Israelis. That may be true, but there are some Israelis opposed to the war, and some Israeli soldiers rejecting...

Did you see the story being floated that the U.S. Army is considering outsourcing Fort Belvoir as a propaganda tool? According to the Washington Post, the idea is to build a military theme park at the suburban Virginia fort, which is located just across the Potomac from that other theme...

"What's going on in Iraq?" That was the belabored question members of the Senate Armed Forces Committee peppered the U.S. military leadership with the other day when they appeared, grudgingly, to testify about the disaster they are overseeing in Iraq.

The senators are asking the wrong soldiers. If the Committee...

Josh Wolf is a new federal prison inmate, and he could be locked up until next summer. His crime? Shooting video at an anti-G8 summit protest in San Francisco and refusing to turn the tape over to the cops or testify to a federal grand jury investigating a riot that...

The intense Hezbollah-Israeli fighting these last days keeps the Iraq War off the front pages, despite the fact that, as Frank Rich points out in the New York Times, the ongoing daily Iraq casualty count far exceeds the death toll in Lebanon and Israel. Columnist Rich even quotes my new...

What an unlikely pair. It was all on the up-and-up. A producer from the show called the publisher of my book Wetback Nation the other day (the paperback edition is coming out), and invited me to appear on his TV show. I spent a couple of days deciding whether to...

President Bush showed up for a photo-op at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington the other day where he'd come to witness the naturalization ceremony for three U.S. soldiers wounded in Iraq. The three were injured in bomb explosions so their active duty status made them eligible for citizenship. The president...

I've got breaking news to report about a U.S. soldier who deserted to Canada rather than be redeployed to fight in Iraq. Darrell Anderson is his name, I first met him last year while researching my book about U.S. soldiers rejecting the mission in Iraq. And he's not just any...

The pictures of war damage in Lebanon are horrible, along with the rising number of civilian deaths, not just there but also in Israel and Gaza, as the latest fighting continues. But these latest Middle East battles are obscuring reports from Iraq on the increasing number of civilians killed there...

Always assume the mic is on. That mantra is essential to survival as a broadcaster, and those of us who grew up in radio know it well. Classic is the perhaps apocryphal story of the radio personality Uncle Don who finished his popular children's program, thought the microphone was off,...

I was just in Berlin to accept a prize for Mission Rejected, my book about American soldiers who oppose the Bush Administration war on Iraq. The prize comes from the German Körber Foundation; I was one of many prize recipients who were recognized for projects that help people engaged in...

It's been fifty years since Hungarians took to the streets of Budapest in an attempt to overthrow the communist government. Moscow sent in tanks and troops and crushed the rebellion. Washington watched. It was the middle of the cold war and the two superpowers had already agreed on how they...

Over and over when people ask me what I'm working on and I tell them about the collected stories of opposition, about the profiles in Mission Rejected, I hear comments like, "There are soldiers against the war? But it's a volunteer army..."

Civilians sometimes ask why these men and women...