Some reaction to yesterday's Wikileak disclosure of horrific footage from an American helicopter gunship mowing down unarmed* civilians, as crewmen gloated over the killings. James Fallows: I can't pretend to know the full truth or circumstances of this. But at face value it is the most damaging documentation of abuse since the Abu Ghraib prison-torture photos. As you watch, imagine the reaction in the US if the people on the ground had been Americans and the people on the machine guns had been Iraqi, Russian, Chinese, or any other nationality. As with Abu Ghraib, and again...

06 April, 2010

This week, the Washington Post, a once great newspaper that has descended deep into neocon territory, fired Dan Froomkin, a blogger whose column on the White House appeared on the Post's website. Post editors and columnists frequently belittled Froomkin as "liberal" or "opinionated," but his real sin was doing what was once thought to be a journalist's main job: challenging the factual assertions underpinning White House policies and pronouncements. He was a rare exception to the craven press corps cheerleading in the run-up to the Iraq war, and he had begun holding Obama's feet to the fire when the Post dropped...

20 June, 2009