Wordfall, by Kaleem Omar

America has had several presidents who were not exactly bursting with intelligence. These luminaries include Republican Chester A. Arthur (president from 1881 to 1885), Republican Benjamin Harrison (1889 to 1893), Republican Gerald R. Ford (1974 to January 20, 1977 – Ford, who people said was solid cement between the ears and interested only in American football, was Nixon’s vice-president and became president when Nixon resigned in August 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal), and the avuncular fuddy-duddy Republican Ronald Reagan (1981 to January 20, 1989). Read the rest of this entry »

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War has produced a sea change in the way countries go about developing and acquiring weapons. Smaller defence budgets have reduced the influence of traditional military powers in the market place while at the same time inducing ever-greater attention to the cost implications of acquisition decisions, cost-effectiveness tradeoffs, and even to the acquisition process itself.

This is the theme of a paper by two leading American research scholars on arms issues, Andrew W. Hull and David R. Markov of the Washington-based Institute for Defence Analyses (IDA). Read the rest of this entry »

Sold to the world by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as a plan to withdraw from some of Israel’s Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which are considered illegal under international law, Israel’s so-called “Convergence Plan” is the latest move by the Zionist state to further the colonisation of Palestinian land and the expulsion of its people.

The diabolical scheme is aimed at permanently annexing Palestinian territory west of the West Bank, sealing Palestinians in from the east, and surrounding a series of Palestinian Bantustans. The plan will annex all Palestinian territories and resources west of Israel’s monstrous Apartheid Wall, also known as the “New Berlin Wall” and the “Segregation Wall,” consolidate the annexation and ethnic cleansing of occupied Jerusalem (al-Quds), and ensure that Palestinian rights continue to be negated and violated. Read the rest of this entry »

The long list of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people includes its totally illegal occupation of Jerusalem, known to Muslims the world over as al-Quds. Israel’s occupation of Jerusalem dates back to 1967, and the Zionist state has ignored numerous UN resolutions calling upon it to withdraw from the city and other occupied territories.

Now, the Israeli government has announced it will confiscate the right of Palestinian citizens who hold foreign passports, in addition to their required Israeli-issued ID and Palestinian passports, to continue living in the future capital of the Palestinian state. Read the rest of this entry »

American soldiers have long had a reputation for being trigger-happy and killing civilians. – a reputation that goes all the way back to the mid-nineteenth century when cavalry regiments of the US Army routinely slaughtered entire populations of Red Indian villages, including old men, women and children during the so-called Indian wars.

Many of the Red Indians were killed when they refused to be herded off their traditional lands into US government-designated “reservations” to make way for white settlers and railway lines being built across America by robber baron-controlled railroad companies. Read the rest of this entry »

Whether it’s the Bush government, the Blair government or that of any other country, they have one thing in common: all of them tend to think they are the cat’s whiskers, the best thing to come along since sliced bread.

All governments also tend to think their predecessor governments were unmitigated disasters who did nothing for the people and ended up in the dust bin of history, or in the “trash can” of history, if we’re talking about governments in America – a country about which the British playwright George Bernard Shaw once famously remarked that “England and America are two countries separated by the same language.” Read the rest of this entry »

Detainees and guards at the infamous and much-criticised US Guantanamo Bay prison camp fought a pitched battle on Thursday that ended only after shotgun blasts were fired by the American guards in what was described as the worst outbreak of violence at the isolated tropical gulag since it opened in early 2002 as a detention centre for hundreds of mostly Muslim detainees being held there. Read the rest of this entry »

The United States has repeatedly asserted its ‘right’ to intervene militarily against so-called “failed states” around the globe. Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq are all examples of this neo-imperialist policy, as was the bombing of Libya by the Reagan administration in 1986. Oil-rich Iran might well become another example, if the pro-Israeli neo-cons in the Bush administration have their way, Oil-rich Venezuela and its democratically elected populist president, Hugo Chavez, too, are now in Washington’s gun sight. Read the rest of this entry »

Like millions of people around the world, many Americans are opposed to the war against Iraq. And more and more of these Americans are asking questions. Take what happened last week. Appearing before a foreign affairs group at the Southern Centre for International Studies in Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday, May 5, US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld faced tough questioning. Several anti-Iraq war hecklers were ejected from the room, and Rumsfeld had a sharp exchange with a man in the audience who is a former intelligence analyst. Read the rest of this entry »

Could it be that US Secretary of Defence Donald H. (“Weapons of Mass Destruction”) Rumsfeld is about to get his comeuppance at last? One asks the question in light of the growing chorus of calls from former senior officers of the American military demanding that he resign.

A story published in the New York Times on Friday said: “The widening circle of retired generals who have stepped forward to call for Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s resignation is shaping up as an unusual outcry that could pose a significant challenge to Mr Rumsfeld’s leadership, current and former generals said on Thursday.” Read the rest of this entry »