“Someone pointed me to Charlie Wilson’s War the other day. My response was that it was Charlie Wilson’s war that gave birth to the Taliban we know as an enemy today. It was Charlie Wilson’s War that justified building up and training young men to fight the Soviets without any thought or regard to what

READ PT ONE: TREASON “It’s like a great darkness falling; it’s the beginning of forgetting.” – Marguerite Duras PART TWO: CASUALTIES For just about as long as we’ve been at war there the recent and distant history of Afghanistan has been wrapped in a cloud of myth that’s worked hard to obscure the context of

“The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility.” – Chris Hedges PART ONE: TREASON There are one or two things ahead that your friend and humble narrator here simply avoids having to discuss, that are deflected plus joked about rather than detailed whenever they come up—but that nevertheless form

Ok so for about the last day and half I’ve been trying to think of a name. We [meaning the United States] desperately need someone to replace the decidedly disappointing  Karl Eikenberry as U.S. Ambassador in Kabul … The thing is that name would need to belong to a person who was a couple a

“Hardly a day goes by without the op-ed page of the Washington Post carrying an article by a veteran of the Bush Administration holding forth on foreign policy. Michael Gerson, a former Bush speechwriter and policy advisor, even has a regular columnist gig. And today Yosemite Sam advocates bombing Iran. It’s as if in 1969,

dtsv.dtse_post_486_permalink = ‘http://news.arsonplus.com/2009/06/20/image-union-inshallah-aka-gr88-iranelection/’; dtsv.dtse_post_486_title = ‘Image Union [Inshallah aka #GR88 #IranElection]‘

There’s really nothing left for me to write or say except that I am simply awed by their courage dtsv.dtse_post_484_permalink = ‘http://news.arsonplus.com/2009/06/20/2112-tv-iranelection-gr88-protest-20-june-2009/’; dtsv.dtse_post_484_title = ’2112 TV [#IranElection #GR88 Protest 20 june 2009]‘

FREEGATE For some reason it looks like Freegate — popular amongst Chinese users seeking to get around the Great Firewall. What’s even better is that multiple ground reports from Iran tell me it’s even fast! With Freegate’s tiny size of 400k, people can pass this around on tiny thumb drives or grab it from one

Here’s a rough translation of her whispers of …. “Tomorrow is the Saturday of destiny….Tonight the Allaho Akbar is louder than other nights….Where is this place? A country were people have only God left to reach out to… This is a country where every night people’s scream of Allah O Akbar is louder than the

Ok so Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, spoke at Tehran University for Friday prayers, [Live-tweets from the speech are here]  he said that the elections are fair and the protests have gone far enough. According to this translation, there’s the predictable crap about “Zionist, American [and] British” interloping, and he called Ahmadinejad the “legal president”