U.S. Government

The U.S. State Department's new Arabic-language magazine hits newsstands in the Middle East this week. Hi magazine "will dispel misinformation and misconceptions about the United States by focusing on similarities between American and Middle Eastern cultures with articles about lifestyle, technology and health," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. "We're fighting a war of ideas as much as a war on terror," Tucker Eskew, deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Global Communications, said during a visit to Atlanta.

"That the Bush administration misled the public is quite clear; what has
been less clear is that it also misled the military," William O'Rourke writes for the Chicago Sun-Times. "If, all along, the
cause and the aims of the war had been stated honestly, the military
would have prepared for the war they found: one where the regime was
toppled quickly and the population did more lasting damage to the
country's institutions and infrastructure than our forces did."

"Viva Nihilism! It must be great working in the Bush White House. Zero accountability," writes Russ Baker for TomPaine.com. "It's All Spin, All the Time. Nothing matters but politics, hence no unfounded claim requires correction or apology. Unless, of course, they are pushed to the end of the plank, as they were recently with the tale about Niger and nuclear materials."

Veteran peace activist William "Bud" Combs recently spent 90 days in jail for protesting against Fort Benning's Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation (aka the School of the Americas). "What the veteran peace activist didn't know was that he would spend eight days of his sentence in solitary confinement," writes Bill Berlow. "His apparent offense: receiving and sharing with other inmates what federal authorities consider disruptive, if not subversive, political literature.