Progressive Opinion

ft.com — It may well be that the US political system requires an administration to sell the threat to make a case for war, but this inevitably militates against the development of a rounded picture of opponents.

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nybooks.com — There is a working assumption among the American people that a new president enters the White House free to call off a war begun by a predecessor. No one would expect something so dramatic on the first day of a new administration but it remains a fact that the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces, and the power that allowed one president to invade Iraq would allow another to bring the troops home.

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nytimes.com — Congress is finally moving to shut down an egregious forms of Iraq war profiteering: defense contractors using offshore shell companies to avoid paying their fair share of payroll taxes. No one will be surprised to hear that one of the suspected prime offenders is KBR, the Texas-based defense contractor, formerly a part of the Halliburton conglomerate allied with Vice President Dick Cheney

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wesh.com — Too often in this war, the news media seem to have tried to shield the public from the suffering this war has brought to Americans and Iraqis.

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politico.com — The New York Time's 7,600-word investigation of the Pentagon's military analyst program has been noticeably absent from television airwaves since the story. While bloggers have kept the story simmering, Democratic congressional leaders also are speaking out, calling for investigations that could provoke the networks to finally cover the Times story — and, in effect, themselves.

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prwatch.org — Eight thousand pages of documents related to the Pentagon's illegal propaganda campaign, known as the Pentagon military analyst program, are now online for the world to see. Will the broadcast television news outlets implicated in the program continue their blackout?

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thenation.com — What should we do when Big Media fails democracy? First, don't let it get even bigger

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fpif.org — Amid all the talk about the U.S. military "surge" in Iraq, little has been said about the accompanying "surge" of Iraqi prisoners, whose numbers rose to nearly 51,000 at the end of 2007. Four years after the Abu Ghraib scandal, occupation forces are holding far more Iraqis than ever before and thousands more languish in horrendous Iraqi-run prisons.

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consortiumnews.com — Congress should be asking some simple questions. Why are civilian contractors being employed in connection with the interrogation of persons under detention in wartime, a function which previously has been entirely in the hands of the uniformed military? Evasion of military rules and discipline, as well as avoidance of congressional oversight might be at the heart of the answers.

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huffingtonpost.com — The Pentagon says that it has suspended its pundit program, but we still don't know what really happened. We know the life-or-death consequences of policy decisions in Iraq and Afghanistan — and we know that these policies should be debated and defended without secret programs designed to tailor the news for the administration's goals.

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