Multinational drug firms seeking to crash the gates of the UK’s National Health Service are getting a boost from the White House. The Guardian says that the US deputy health secretary wants the NHS formulary open to every new drug and wants the British government to permit consumer drug advertising rather than limiting it to […]

You are perhaps aware that George Bush personally expedited the internet publication of instructions for building a nuclear weapon. Today, New Hampshire’s Manchester Union Leader has run a blistering editorial placing the blame for the fiasco squarely where it belongs: on Al Gore and John Kerry.
The short version of the story is that the documents […]

Thanks to a blogging librarian in San Antonio, we now know a bit more of what George Bush thinks constitutes torture. BiblioSquirrel has unearthed a 1967 New York Times story in which Bush downplays his fraternity’s practice of branding new recruits with the Delta Kappa Epsilon emblem.
A former president of Delta [said] that the branding […]

You might think the significance of the massacre in Haditha is self evident, but in the event it eludes you, The Nation helpfully explains. Even though Iraq is, they say, a place where civilians are being killed in scores by a variety of people, including us, “there remains a distinctly sickening horror in close-up systematic killing of civilians that’s at odds with the declared US mission in Iraq and is repugnant to our national ideals.”

Newsweek reports today on Iraq’s Facility Protection Services, a large police group accountable to, apparently, no one.

(Via Raw Story) The father of a man on trial for lying about whether he attended a terrorist training camp in Pakistan says the camp was manned by a thousand sword wielding masked ninjas who pole-vaulted rivers in a massive underground training facility.

Among the many tragedies arising from the war in Iraq is that most, if not all of the explosives and weapons being used to kill US troops and Iraqi civilians are leftovers from Saddam’s regime that the US failed to secure during and after the invasion. Indiana Republican senator Dick Lugar and Illinois Democrat Barrack Obama have introduced legislation that would fund a US effort to secure similar quantities of abandoned armaments elsewhere in the world.

Dennis Morrisseau, a retired Vermont businessman who is running in the Republican primary for one of Vermont’s two House of Representative seats, has sent an open letter to Congress calling on the federal legislature to fulfill their Consitutional responsibilities regarding the commitment of US forces to combat. “The power and responsibility to declare war are yours alone under the Constitution and cannot be delegated,” Morrisseau tells Congress.

The editorial board of the Des Moines Register became the first US newspaper to call for an independent investigation into the Downing Street memo, top secret minutes from a July, 2002, meeting between British prime minister Tony Blair and senior members of his Cabinet who said they believed the US had determined to attack Iraq […]