By David Swanson

Of the hundreds of corporate and independent media outlets that falsely claimed this week that ABC News had broken a story about NSA spying that I broke at AfterDowningStreet over a year ago, only the guys at McClatchy (formerly Knight Ridder, the same people who have done better reporting on Iraq than any other corporate journalists) have had the decency to put out a correction, and only the Sacramento Bee has posted (though probably not printed) it:

By David Swanson

1. WMD Lies

By David Swanson

Last March, veterans of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan gathered to talk about what they'd seen and done and survived. The event was called "Winter Soldier" and the soldiers' testimony is recorded in a powerful new book: "Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations," by Iraq Veterans Against the War and Aaron Glantz.

The book reveals two worlds that are little known to producers employed by the corporate media cartel, people who believe in threats from third-world nations, wars for democracy, surges, war against terrorism, trickle-down economics, and the justifiability of torture.

The first new world revealed is that of the crimes these young men and women committed, witnessed, and understood as part of the official policies they were ordered to carry out. Here are some excerpts from the statements of those who lived to tell about it:

By David Swanson

Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who in 1964 was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King, Jr., has published a new book of advice to Americans and to U.S. Congress members called "Calming the Fearful Mind: A Zen Response to Terrorism."

Hanh's words of wisdom strike me as potentially of great value for a variety of types of conflict resolution, but of somewhat limited -- if still significant -- value for Congress or for U.S. foreign policy.

"If Congress doesn't engage in Right Action," claims Hanh, "it is because it doesn't have Right Understanding about the suffering within our own country and in the world."

Washington DC— Congresswoman Maxine Waters (CA-35), Chairwoman and co-founder of the Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus, issued the following remarks in advance of House consideration of the Defense Authorization for FY 2009, which authorizes nearly $70 billion in emergency war funding:

The Defense Authorization for FY 2009 to be voted on today under suspension of the rules is unacceptable. This package will give President Bush an additional $70 billion to continue the war in Iraq as he sees fit. We cannot give another blank check for the President’s war that the taxpayers just can’t cash.

By David Swanson

Excerpted from remarks at an Augusta Coalition for Peace and Justice event at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia, September 23, 2008.

Have you heard the latest news? John McCain is now in favor of regulating Wall Street. But, of course, local son Woodrow Wilson was reelected as a peace candidate. And candidate George W. Bush was opposed to nation building. Now he's borrowing money from China to build a nation in Iraq and another one here in the United States, except that Iraq has not so much been built as irrevocably destroyed, and nobody seems terribly confident that bailing out Wall Street will work.