Antiwar.com Blog

The Christian Science Monitor‘s Warren Richey covers the trial of Jose Padilla and his fellow accused.

MP3 here.

Warren Richey is the Miami and Washington staff reporter for the Christian Science Monitor.

Independent Institute senior fellow and Antiwar.com columnist Charles Peña discusses the most-likely false terrorist threat in the case of the Ft. Dix six, and how America ought to handle the real terrorist threat.

MP3 here. (40:58)

Charles V. Peña is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute, a senior fellow with the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, a senior fellow with the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute, an adviser to the Straus Military Reform Project, and an analyst for MSNBC television. He has also appeared on CNN, Fox News, NBC Nightly News, ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and The McLaughlin Group, as well as international television and radio. Peña is the co-author of Exiting Iraq: Why the U.S. Must End the Military Occupation and Renew the War Against al-Qaeda, and author of Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism.

His articles have been published by Reason; The American Conservative; The National Interest; Mediterranean Quarterly; Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics, & Public Policy; Journal of Law & Social Change (University of San Francisco); Nexus (Chapman University); and Issues in Science & Technology (National Academy of Sciences).

His exclusive column appears every other Wednesday on Antiwar.com.

Oprah’s going to Israel at Elie Wiesel’s invitation. Fine by me. But then there’s this:

Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Gillerman, who attended the event, said that a visit of a figure with such influence on the international media could help bring an end to the indifference towards the terror threat faced by Israelis.

Yeah, that’s some indifference.

(Ynet link via Jonathan Schwarz.)

Via Michael Ledeen’s blog, I see that the look-how-many-Iraqi-potholes-we’ve-filled meme lives on in the pro-war blogosphere, long after even Arthur Chrenkoff quit, um, “Chrenkin’ off”:

Glenn Reynolds has an email from Michael Yon, the great milblogger and photographer who may have been the first reporter to suggest that there was a “civil war” going on in Iraq. In short, he’s no apologist for W. His email to the Instapundit is quite dramatic, since he reports on the absence of violence. No shooting, no rockets, no mortars, every now and then an IED. Almost apologetically he says “I have no bad news to report today.”

And here’s the part that popped open my sleepy eyes:

In addition to basic services being restored, the city of Hit has rebuilt its library. Citizens had stored away the books during the war here. They are preparing to re-stock the library.

Just compare those three simple declarative sentences to the stereotype of Iraqi Arabs as unbeknighted, ignorant barbarians who could not possibly govern themselves.

Speaking of ignorance – since Ledeen is what passes for a brain among the warbots – there’s no such word as “unbeknighted,” or even “beknighted.” The word he’s looking for here is “benighted,” meaning unenlightened. Of course, if the Iraqis were stereotyped as “unbenighted,” that would be a compliment, so Ledeen, as usual, is peddling nonsense squared, wrapped in illiteracy.

As the Pentagon announced the deaths of 10 more US soldiers in Iraq on Memorial Day, May has become the worst month since 2004.

At the end of the month, May 2007 had the highest death toll for US troops (124) since November 2004.

With White House plans to double the number of combat troops in Iraq by Christmas, these numbers are unfortunately likely to continue to rise.

Dahr Jamail explains the Earthly Hell that the U.S. government has created for the people of Iraq.

MP3 here. (40:30)

In late 2003, Weary of the overall failure of the US media to accurately report on the realities of the war in Iraq for the Iraqi people and US soldiers, Dahr Jamail went to Iraq to report on the war himself.

His dispatches were quickly recognized as an important media resource. He is now writing for the Inter Press Service, The Asia Times and many other outlets. His reports have also been published with The Nation, The Sunday Herald, Islam Online, the Guardian, Foreign Policy in Focus, and the Independent to name just a few. Dahr’s dispatches and hard news stories have been translated into French, Polish, German, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic and Turkish. On radio as well as television, Dahr reports for Democracy Now!, the BBC, and numerous other stations around the globe. Dahr is also special correspondent for Flashpoints.

Dahr has spent a total of 8 months in occupied Iraq as one of only a few independent US journalists in the country. In the MidEast, Dahr has also has reported from Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Dahr uses the DahrJamailIraq.com website and his popular mailing list to disseminate his dispatches.