The UK Guardian has published a “staggering… blockbuster” investigatory report, including 51-minute video, detailing the role of top US government and military officials in the organization of terror and torture during the Iraq War. The report has been largely ignored by the US media. It should be introduced as evidence in the trial of Bradley Manning, as it was US connivance with torture in Iraq that motivated him to turn whistleblower.

Revelations that now-former CIA director David Petraeus had an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, have pulled into focus how the press reveres America’s highest-ranked military generals. Not only does the affair itself show the folly of someone allowing his or her self to become too embedded with any one military officer but it also [...]

President Barack Obama and other United States government leaders marked World Press Freedom Day yesterday. Obama issued a statement to pay “special tribute to those journalists who have sacrificed their lives, freedom or personal well-being in pursuit of truth and justice.” He invoked the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which proclaims that every person has [...]

The CIA launched a drone strike in Pakistan on Sunday that killed “three suspected militants” in an “abandoned school building” in Waziristan. As the New York Times notes in a report on the strike, this was the “first such attack since the country’s Parliament demanded an end to those missions just over two weeks ago.” [...]

The CIA is pushing for the authority to expand drone operations and would like permission to attack “terrorism suspects,” even if they are not certain those people being attacked are, in fact, the “suspects” that are believed to be “enemies” of the United States. The push to expand comes as government agencies continue to withhold [...]

A new study out from the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) provides some of the clearest accounting yet of the United States’ covert war on terror in Yemen, including the use of drone strikes. It shows that seventy-five percent of US drone attacks there have taken place since May 2011 during the instability created [...]

In July, General David Petraeus was approved as CIA Director by both the Senate Intelligence Committee and then the full Senate, whose vote was an astounding 94-0, astounding because this is a man who is was deeply implicated in war crimes, including torture.

While Petraeus’s record on backing both torture and death/terror squads in Iraq had been looked at before, literally no one brought up this record when the Obama administration’s nomination of Petraeus was being sped through the constitutional “advice and consent” process. The failure of any U.S. Senator to ask questions about Petraeus’s record on these matters demonstrates the utter bankruptcy of the two political parties, and even more, of U.S. civil society as a whole.