Al-Jazeera’s report on the South Ossetia invasion and the Russian response on al-Jazeera English. The interview was conducted late last week.
An Apology to Cynthia McKinney and Chuck Baldwin
On Friday August 15, Antiwar.com featured a front page template with the images of John McCain, Barack Obama, Bob Barr and Ralph Nader below the caption, We are holding their feet to the fire: Without fear or favor. Some of our readers expressed a concern that by not including Cynthia McKinney we were deliberately ignoring a prominent woman of color.
If you note, we did not include Chuck Baldwin either. The reason is simple. Former Representative McKinney and the Reverend Baldwin are unequivocally antiwar.
We apologize if that was not explicit.
American Girl on Fox News: “I was running from Georgian troops, I want to thank the Russian troops”
I don’t think Fox News was expecting this, so they cut them off:
Justin Raimondo on Russian TV
Antiwar.com’s editorial director Justin Raimondo was interviewed by Russia Today at his home in San Francisco.
The Arrogant Hypocrisy of the U.S. Government
Is there any government more hypocritical than the U.S. government? Has there ever been? The United States is considering punishing Russia for its military actions in Georgia by cancelling U.S. participation in an annual Russia-NATO naval exercise. Read the full story here. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insists that “the Russians need to stop their military operations as they have apparently said that they will, but those military operations really do now need to stop because calm needs to be restored.”
Well, how about the United States stopping its military operations in Iraq so calm can be restored? The very idea that the U.S. government would seek to lecture Russia about its military actions in Georgia is ludicrous. Has Uncle Sam no shame about the genocide its military has unleashed in Iraq?
Deadly Shell Game: Picking Afghanistan’s Casualty Figures
A frenzy over the 500th U.S. servicemember to die in Afghanistan developed in the media this week. According to the Associated Press, the U.S. death toll in Afghanistan surpassed 500 GIs recently, or perhaps it will reach that milestone soon…or…did we actually cross that line long ago? While the AP admits that accurate casualty figures are hard to come by thanks to lags in Defense Department reports and the difficulty of independent confirmation in the region, the situation gets a little more complicated than that. Operation Enduring Freedom, often referred to as the Afghan War, actually spans several nations. The South Asian country is simply the main focal point of this “war on terror” that was formulated in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The AP specifically counted deaths in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Elsewhere, the New York Times came up with a slightly different set of numbers themselves, but their handy chart quickly reveals just how spread out the operation really is. U.S. servicemembers were also killed in countries as far from Afghanistan as are the Philippines, Mali, and even Cuba, so while the AP admirably tallied the deaths in and around Afghanistan, the worldwide U.S. toll for this military excursion is almost 15% higher. Perhaps AP cherry-picked these particular numbers because 500 is more of a “newsworthy milestone” than 562 deaths (Pentagon figures) or 569 deaths (Icasualties.org), but whatever the reason behind it, keeping the deadliness of the “Afghan War” in the headlines is of utmost importance, especially during this campaign season.