Joseph Wilson blasts the secretive neoconservative cabal that plunged America into a disastrous war, in this excerpt from his new book. Note: In July 2003, former ambassador Joseph Wilson revealed in a New York Times piece that President Bush's assertion that Saddam Hussein was seeking to acquire uranium from the African nation of Niger was false and should have been known by the Bush administration to be false. Wilson was in a position to know: He himself had been sent by the CIA (acting ...

Several major weapons manufacturers and military contractors reported higher than expected first quarter profits or increased revenue at the end of April. Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, and Halliburton were three of the companies that have benefited from recent US military contracts, as more reports of heavy fighting and evidence of torture underline the brutality of the continuing occupation of Iraq. "I am pleased with the progress the Boeing team made during the quarter to deliver value to...

A little publicized piece by Ali Abunimah in Lebanon’s Daily Star titled Israeli link possible in US torture techniques: In exchange for interrogation training, did Washington award security contracts? should be getting a lot more attention. While it is doubtful that the Pentagon and its defense contractors would need to barter with Israel to get their interrogation techniques (they’ve had them for decades), the Abunimah article provides a gold-mine worth of resources establishing, yet again,...

Only a year after defeating Absolute Evil in Iraq, the Bush politburo has decided that some former members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party may be useful in controlling the population the United States has liberated from Saddam’s tyranny. Whether you find this confusing or amusing depends, I suppose, on your temperament. It’s not unusual, though, for Absolute Evil to become only a relative evil, or even a positive good, after a war. Japan and Germany were Absolute Evil during World War II,...

We speak with two whistleblowers from different eras about their experiences in speaking out: Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator hired to translate pre-9/11 intelligence, has said the U.S. had considerable evidence that al Qaida was planning to strike the U.S. with airplanes. The Bush administration is now trying to block her from testifying at a major 9/11 lawsuit. And Daniel Ellsberg, perhaps the most famous whistleblower in U.S. history who leaked the Pentagon Papers setting in motion ...

Last week, CBS's Sixty Minutes II program showed footage of American soldiers creating "human pyramids" from detained Iraqis. However, it should be remembered that Iraqis, and indeed Muslims in general, are no strangers to "human pyramids." The last time that such pyramids were built in the region was in the 13th century when the hordes of Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, sacked Iraq. After massacring entire towns and villages, they would assemble huge pyramids of human skulls as a remi...

CHICAGO, Illinois: The head of the American defense contracting firm implicated in the torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison has close ties to Israel and visited an Israeli "anti-terror" training camp in the occupied West Bank earlier this year. Jack London, chairman, president and CEO of CACI International Incorporated, traveled to Israel in January this year as part of a high-level delegation of US Congressmen, defense contractors and pro-Israel lobbyists, sponsored and paid for in part...

"Slay the unbelievers wherever you find them . . ." (Sura 9:5). The Islamic idea of jihad, which is derived from the Arabic root meaning "to strive" or "to make an effort," connotes a wide range of meanings, from an inward spiritual struggle to attain perfect faith to an outward material struggle to promote justice and the Islamic social system. The former meaning was emphasized by Sufis (Muslim mystics), who popularized a tradition describing the inner jihad as greater than the outer jih...