Stephen Lendman

Rusting T-62 Soviet battle tanks sit in a battle tank graveyard.

A May 30 Delaware County Times editorial headlined, "Is US fighting unwinnable war in Afghanistan" asking:

"Why should America (believe) it can (accomplish what the) Soviet Union (and) Britain couldn't....? Public sentiment against it is growing, and "Many pundits say the war....can never be won militarily...." How many more "US service member" deaths are tolerable?

On January 21, 2010, Britain's New Stateman sounded the same theme calling the Afghan war "unwinnable," recent events showing intensified fighting, rising casualties, and a popular resistance determined to prevail. Britain should be making plans to withdraw, the publication concluded. So should America with no right to be there ethically, morally or legally, the war clearly in violation of US and international law like all others US forces waged since WW II.

On June 26, the UK Spectator, published since July 1828, was just as unequivocal, calling US and Kabul leadership

"fractious, confused and contradictory, a sure sign that the war is being lost....Yes, the war in unwinnable. History and time are on the Afghans side."

Other publications voice the same sentiment, but not American ones, misreporting and backing lawless, losing bet despite souring public sentiment. A new Rasmussen poll shows nearly 60% of US voters believe American forces can't win or they're not sure, and 53% said the war isn't worth the cost. In Britain, nearly two-thirds of the public call the war unwinnable, saying UK forces shouldn't be there.

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Khalid Amayreh

A few days before his scheduled visit to Washington on 7 July, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appears as deliberately thwarting American efforts to push forward indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA).

This week, an Israeli government body was set to approve "an unprecedented master plan" for an all-out expansion of Jewish settlements that would effectively -- using the words of one Palestinian official -- "decapitate" East Jerusalem's Arab identity.

The plan would see the building of tens of thousands of Jewish-only apartments in East Jerusalem to be constructed on Arab owned land.

The Jerusalem Municipal Council, controlled by fanatical Jewish radicals advocating ethnic cleansing of non-Jews in the city, is trying to enforce the plan with a discernible green light from the government.

In essence, the plan would leave a zero room for future expansion of Arabs in Jerusalem, as virtually all remaining open space or "green areas" would be used for "Jewish development".

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Patrick Martin

Senate approves Petraeus nomination by 99-0

The US Senate voted by 99-0 to approve the nomination of Gen. David Petraeus as the top US-NATO commander in Afghanistan. The vote Wednesday demonstrates the complicity of both big business political parties in the war crimes being perpetrated in this imperialist war.

The swift confirmation of Petraeus demonstrates the priorities of the politicians of both the Democratic and Republican parties. The US Senate has failed to act for an entire month on the extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed. Extensions have been repeatedly blocked, sometimes by a single senator’s objection.

But an appointment which signals a new and even more bloody escalation of the violence in Afghanistan, where tens of thousands of innocent civilians and more than a thousand American soldiers have been slaughtered, speeds through the Senate in barely 24 hours. Petraeus appeared before a Senate committee Tuesday morning, his nomination was rubber-stamped on Wednesday, and he was on a plane out of Washington before nightfall.

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Maidhc Ó Cathail

"But what is it that bothers Lieberman so much about the internet? Could it be that it allows ordinary Americans access to facts which reveal exactly what kind of “friend” Israel has been to its overgenerous benefactor? Facts which they have been denied by the pro-Israel mainstream media."

It would be hard to think of anyone who has done more to undermine American freedoms than Joseph Lieberman.

Since 9/11, the Independent senator from Connecticut has introduced a raft of legislation in the name of the “global war on terror” which has steadily eroded constitutional rights. If the United States looks increasingly like a police state, Senator Lieberman has to take much of the credit for it.

On October 11, 2001, exactly one month after 9/11, Lieberman introduced S. 1534, a bill to establish a Department of Homeland Security. Since then, he has been the main mover behind such draconian legislation as the Protect America Act of 2007, the Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010, and the proposed Terrorist Expatriation Act, which would revoke the citizenship of Americans suspected of terrorism. And now the senator from Connecticut wants to kill the Internet.

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Glenn Greenwald

"The real issue here is the same one raised by the malleable, manipulative use of the term "Terrorism." It's to be expected that governments will try to propagandize their citizenry by applying completely different standards -- even completely different language -- to their own conduct as opposed to when other countries engage in exactly the same conduct. But when the media copies that behavior (as ours does), they're amplifying and bolstering government propaganda rather than critically scrutinizing and debunking it. Isn't that a fairly serious problem?"

A newly released study from students at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government provides the latest evidence of how thoroughly devoted the American establishment media is to amplifying and serving (rather than checking) government officials. This new study examines how waterboarding has been discussed by America's four largest newspapers over the past 100 years, and finds that the technique, almost invariably, was unequivocally referred to as "torture" -- until the U.S. Government began openly using it and insisting that it was not torture, at which time these newspapers obediently ceased describing it that way:

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