By Robert Fisk - Wednesday, 4 November 2009

As in Vietnam...Karzai is going to rule over an equally tiny island of corruption, protected by US mercenaries while the Americans perform their familiar role of propping up a dictator...Our Western mission in Afghanistan is going to end in utter disaster.

By Jeremy Kuzmarov - Znet

While [Cannabis Advocate Marc] Emery and thousands of other non-violent offenders have been left to rot in the North American penal-industrial complex, Mr. Karzai and his gangster associates remain free to acquire lavish mansions and are immune from prosecution owing to their utility to Western imperial interests.

By JOHN ROSS - October 28, 2009

Three years after he was gunned down by Oaxaca state security agents October 27th 2006 while filming a confrontation between activists and local police during the oft-violent campaign to oust tyrannical governor Ulisis Ruiz Ortiz...U.S. photojournalist Brad Will is still dead...So are 55 other journalists working in Mexico over the past ten years (eight more remain missing)...16 of those on the kill list have been slain since Brad's still unresolved death. With rare exception, the murders of journalists in Mexico are never solved.

By DAVE LINDORFF - October 28, 2009

...[W]here the US goes, the drug trade soon follows, and the leading role in developing and nurturing that trade appears to be played by the Central Intelligence Agency...Americans, who for years have supported a stupid, blundering and ineffective “War on Drugs” in this country, and who mindlessly back “zero-tolerance” policies towards drugs in schools and on the job, should demand a “zero-tolerance” policy toward drugs and dealing with drug pushers in government and foreign policy, including the CIA.

Emory Douglas first served as the art director for the Black Panther Party’s newspaper, and later served as Minister of Culture until 1980. Throughout these years, Douglas’ iconic artwork was published in the BPP newspaper and beyond. His artwork is featured in the new book entitled Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas.

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS - October 26, 2009

Evidence that the US is a failed state is piling up faster than I can record it...One conclusive hallmark of a failed state is that the crooks are inside the government, using government to protect and to advance their private interests...Another conclusive hallmark is rising income inequality as the insiders manipulate economic policy for their enrichment at the expense of everyone else.

This is a very interesting Youtube video that shows how Canadian money and banking works.

By RAMZY BAROUD - October 15, 2009

...[T]he post-Oslo culture has espoused a class of contractors. These are businessmen who are either high-ranking officials in the [Palestinian Authority] and the Fatah party...or closely affiliated with them. Much of the billions of dollars of international aid that poured into Palestine following the signing of Oslo found its way into private bank accounts...The class of businessmen, still posing as revolutionaries, encroached over every aspect of Palestinian society, used it, controlled it, and eventually suffocated it. It espoused untold corruption, and, naturally, found an ally in Israel, whose reign in the occupied territories never ceased.

Grand theft America.

By Scott Horton - Antiwar.com

"We would leave with the same parameters of an exit strategy but we might perhaps be more flexible about a timeline,...That’s where we have opened ourselves...to some other possibilities. We have been feeling a sense of fear of the people of the return of the Taliban. So many people are saying that, ‘If the U.S. troops left, the country would collapse. We’d go into civil war.’ A palpable sense of fear that is making us start to reconsider that."

--Code Pink Co-founder Medea Benjamin

By Ali Abunimah - October 03, 2009

Just when it seemed that the Ramallah Palestinian Authority (PA) and its leader Mahmoud Abbas could not sink any lower in their complicity with Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the murderous blockade of Gaza, Ramallah has dealt a further stunning blow to the Palestinian people...The Abbas delegation to the United Nations in Geneva...abandoned a resolution requesting the Human Rights Council to forward Judge Richard Goldstone's report on war crimes in Gaza to the UN Security Council for further action.

By MARTHA ROSENBERG - September 30, 2009

Pfizer's nice little 2004 Corporate Integrity Agreement (CIA) in which a company promises to sin no more...was for fraudulent marketing of seizure drug Neurontin. It was preceded by a CIA for fraud related to Pfizer's cholesterol drug, Lipitor, in 2002...And this month it's followed by a CIA for mis-marketing pain drug Bextra, antipsychotic Geodon, seizure drug Lyrica and antibiotic Zyvox.

By Ann Jones - September 22, 2009

Afghans are Afghans. They have their own history, their own culture, their own habitual ways of thinking and behaving, all complicated by a modern experience of decades of war, displacement, abject poverty, and incessant meddling by foreign governments near and far -- of which the United States has been the most powerful and persistent. Afghans do not think or act like Americans. Yet Americans in power refuse to grasp that inconvenient point.

Doctors complicit in torture.