On the fifth anniversary of the illegal occupation of Iraq, Bush offered more illogic - that the invasion has made the world a better place and the United States safer... Clearly, George Bush lacks the ability to recognize facts. So, he creates his own reality, one unique to him and to supporters with whom he holds sway. And he stands behind his decisions even when experts differ. Bush listens only to people who agree with him and either scorns or forces retirement on those who don't...

Bush can't grasp that he is, was, or ever could be wrong. Many believe he has no conscience to guide him. Tragically, this means Bush lacks the capacity to understand that he, himself, is the brutal tyrant responsible for countless deaths and disasters. And, so, removing him from power is not only the right decision, it is crucial. It is, also, urgent, because George Bush may commit more crimes against humanity in order to "help" our faltering economy. [More] . . read more

By week's end, the evidence that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other top government officials had deliberately created a system of torture which they knew was illegal – indeed, a capital crime – under U.S. law was so plain, so overwhelming, and so handily concentrated that it broke through the levees of institutional cover-up and media complicity that had held this clear truth at bay for so long. The grim facts had finally worked their way into "conventional wisdom." It was now permissible for good "centrist" folk to speak of such things, even condemn them, without being automatically relegated to ranks of "the haters," the "unserious," the "shrill partisans," etc.

And yet, even as this new consensus was forming, you could see the sandbags piling up in the background to make sure that the water didn't reach too far. A line of defense was being laid that would allow the purveyors of conventional wisdom to vent a bit of righteous outrage at official wrongdoing without actually having to do anything about it or admitting of any flaws in their fundamentalist doctrine of American exceptionalism. No one need take any risks, make any effort, or discomfort themselves in any way to rectify the injustice; indeed, even the perpetrators should be left undisturbed. Instead, our uniquely good and smooth-running political system will magically make everything all better, and somehow prevent the bad things from happening again. [More] . . read more

John Pilger offers a menu of good news to celebrate in 2009.

January: Tony Blair is arrested at Heathrow Airport as he returns from yet another foreign speaking engagement (receipts since leaving office: £12m). He is flown to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes for his part in the illegal, unprovoked attack on a defenceless country, Iraq, justified by proven lies, and for the subsequent physical, social and cultural destruction of that country, causing the death of up to a million people. According to the Nuremberg Tribunal, this is the "paramount war crime". The prosecution tells Blair's defence team it will not accept a plea of "sincerely believing". Cherie Blair, a close collaborator who has compared her husband with Winston Churchill, is cautioned.

February: Following the inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the United States, his predecessor, George W Bush, is arrested leaving the Church of the Holy Crusader in his home town of Crawford, Texas. He is flown to The Hague in War Criminal One. (See above for prosecution details.) Laura Bush, after a plea bargain, agrees to give evidence against the former president, "for God's sake".

March: Former vice-president Dick Cheney shoots himself in the foot hunting squirrels following a prayer breakfast in Hope, Florida.

April: Aung San Suu Kyi is released from house arrest and assumes her rightful place as the democratic head of the government of Burma.

May: All American and British troops leave Iraq, including the "300-400" British troops who are to stay behind to "train Iraqis" and do the kind of special forces dirty work almost never reported by embedded journalists.

June: All Nato troops leave Afghanistan.

July: The British government calls a halt to selling arms and military equipment to ten out of 14 conflict-hit countries in Africa. The chairman of the arms company BAE Systems is arrested by the Serious Fraud Office.

August: The British Department for International Development ends its support for privatisation as a condition of aid to the poorest countries.

September: Sir Bob Geldof and Bono visit Tony Blair in prison, suggesting a worldwide Crime Aid gig to raise money for their hero's defence.

October: The Booker prizewinner Anne Enright apologises to Gerry and Kate McCann, parents of the missing child Madeleine McCann, for speculating in the London Review of Books about the possible involvement of the McCanns in the disappearance of their daughter.

November: Gordon Brown is kidnapped, hooded and forced to listen repeatedly to his 2007 speech to bankers at a Mansion House banquet: "What you as the City of London have achieved for financial services, we as a government now aspire to achieve for the whole economy."

December: Tony Blair is sentenced to life imprisonment and beatified by the Pope.

If you think none of this will happen, you are probably right. But beware 2010...

It is now an incontrovertible fact, known all over the world, that George W. Bush and his regime lied through their teeth in order to launch wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq, and that the Bush regime is doing the same thing again in hopes of launching an attack on Iran.

As a consequence of Bush’s lies, there are a million dead Iraqis, mostly women and children, and four million displaced Iraqis, 4,100 dead American soldiers and tens of thousands of seriously wounded. No one knows how many dead in Afghanistan. And there is the ongoing Israeli slaughter of Palestinians and Lebanese that has fallen under the rubric of the “war on terror.” The only ones pleased with these wars are the American neoconservatives, the Israeli right-wing, the U.S. corporate military-security complex, and Osama bin Laden...

Reelecting Republicans means the end of the United States as a land of liberty. [More]

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. . . read more

You'd be excused if you didn't know this happened. There was almost no reporting on the event that day or the next... A week later, it has still not been reported in the New York Times, the nation’s self-described “newspaper of record,” even though the Times had just days before Rep. Kucinich’s action, editorialized about the enormity of the president’s lies in tricking the country into invading Iraq — one of the crimes leading Kucinich’s long list....

The unwillingness of the nation’s news media to seriously consider the need for Congress to respond to and challenge the president’s clear abuses of power—even as they themselves condemn of those abuses of power—is a blot on the journalistic profession perhaps worse, and of more lasting consequence, than their failure to act as watchdogs and critics during the run-up to the Iraq War, when they acted more as patriotic cheerleaders than as news organizations. [More] . . read more

As part of its alleged "desire not to hold detainees any longer than necessary," the Pentagon announced on Tuesday that two Guantánamo prisoners had been transferred to Algeria. This follows the repatriation of two other Algerians - Mustafa Hamlili and Abdul Raham Houari - at the start of July, the first Algerians to be released from the prison in its six-and-a-half year history.

Cynics could argue, with some justification, that the releases were less to do with benevolence than with the fact that the U.S. administration has finally decided to clear out as much of the dead wood at Guantánamo as possible, following the U.S. Supreme Court's momentous decision in June, that the prisoners have constitutional habeas corpus rights; in other words, that they have the right to challenge the basis of their long detention without charge or trial before an impartial judge.

Like Hamlili and Houari before them, the two men just released had been cleared for release, following what the Pentagon refers to as "a comprehensive series of review processes," since 2005-06, on the basis that they no longer constituted a threat to the U.S. and its allies and/or no longer had ongoing intelligence value. These have become such commonplace expressions in connection with the Guantánamo prisoners that it's easy to forget that holding prisoners for over six years without charge or trial and then releasing them because they are no longer regarded as a threat or as a source of intelligence to be exploited like lab animals is utterly illegal. [More]

Find any bill that sticks it to the ordinary folk on behalf of the Money Power and you’ll likely detect Biden’s hand at work. The bankruptcy act of 2005 was just one sample... Biden blocked all efforts to hinder bankrupt corporations from fleeing from their real locations to the legal sanctuary of Delaware. Since Obama is himself a corporate serf and from day one in the U.S. Senate has been attentive to the same masters that employ Biden, the ticket is well balanced, the seesaw with Obama at one end and Biden at the other dead-level on the fulcrum of corporate capital...

Biden is a notorious flapjaw. His vanity deludes him into believing that every word that drops from his mouth is minted in the golden currency of Pericles. Vanity is the most conspicuous characteristic of U.S. Senators en bloc, nourished by deferential acolytes and often expressed in loutish sexual advances to staffers, interns and the like... His “experience” in foreign affairs consists in absolute fidelity to the conventions of cold war liberalism, the efficient elder brother of raffish “neo-conservatism”. [More] . . read more

Ms Greer loves to attack 'tall poppies' in print and in interview and you can't help wondering if the preoccupation with the status of others is because of her insecurity about her own. She is also a curator of the Museum of Bad Timing. Her otherwise justified attack on Steve Irwin took place on his death, while next month is the 10th anniversary of Princess Di's passing.

It's sad to see such a great innovative talent disappearing down the plug-hole in sea of vitriol. From the female eunuch to the female you knock, alas. . . read more

War, or an armed attack, can itself be a disproportionate response to some offense. If Britain, for example, declared war on Sweden for producing Abba, that would be disproportionate. It would also be wrong, because Abba isn't cause enough for initiating violence. Britain could at least ask for a large indemnity first. The Nuremberg tribunals placed aggression, a "crime against peace", ahead of war crimes. Perhaps this was meant to remind us that wars usher in far worse than war-fevered cheerleaders suppose, and are virtually always an immoral and disproportionate response to offences...

There is also a relationship between war as an immorally disproportionate response, or starting war for the wrong reasons, and all its consequences. When you start a war for the wrong reasons, you are responsible for all that follows, even the other side's atrocities. Though the other side is to blame for its crimes, so are you. You don't even have the right to kill in self-defense. If you are wrong to start a war, you don't suddenly fall into the right just because, contrary to your expectations, it's you, not the other guy, who has to defend himself.

War is not like self-defense in civilian life, when the response must be proportionate to the threat... The unacceptably disproportionate response was Georgia's in starting the war, not Russia's in finishing it. [More] . . read more

The people who keep the big wheels turning like electricity workers or HPD journalists deserve their bonus time rate and it all goes into the mix of how we live in a history soaked world with a complexity that can amuse all of us. It’s a pity the Kiwis will be on holiday not reading this.  . . read more