"Kill Him"—A Political Chronicle
Two white skinhead believers in "white power" who planned to assassinate candidate Barack Obama in a shooting spree that also targeted African American school children have been arrested by federal authorities in Tennessee. The two men, 20 and 18, are charged with illegal possession of a sawed-off shotgun, plans to rob a firearms dealer and making threats against a presidential candidate. The arrest, weeks before the election, is a concrete sign that the terrifying "A-word" of U.S. politics has entered a tumultuous and ground-breaking battle for the White House.... {Read this essay}

Waterboarding and U.S. History
Some high U.S. officials claim not be aware of it, and Judge Michael Mukasey, the President's choice for attorney general, prefers to equivocate, but water boarding has long been a form of torture that causes excruciating pain and can lead to death. It forces water into prisoner's lungs, usually over and over again. The Spanish Inquisition in the late 1400s used this torture to uncover and punish heretics, and then in the early 1500s Spain's inquisitors carried it overseas to root out heresy in the New World... {Read this essay}

Blood, Race and Cherokee Sovereignty
As President Bill Clinton and others arrived in Selma, Alabama for the 42nd anniversary of the "bloody Sunday" march that prodded Congress to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Cherokee Nation chose a lower road. Members voted overwhelmingly for an amendment to their constitution that revokes citizenship rights for 2,800 members because their ancestors included people of African descent... {Read more}

Iraq (2006) and the Philippines (1906): Occupations and Consequences
Critics of the U.S. occupation of Iraq usually trace its origins to Viet Nam and the baleful efforts of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to sustain public support for a war that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in southeast Asia, took 60,000 American lives and deeply divided the country....Though Viet Nam resonates ominously in 2006, the trajectory that landed U.S. troops in Iraq began much earlier... {Read more}

Resistance To US Occupation, Florida, 1837
The US invasion and occupation of Florida triggered 42 years of warfare and ended in a quagmire and a failure to subdue the resolute Seminoles. As casualties rise and Iraq spins out of control, this first US foreign invasion and occupation offers vital lessons... {Read more}

The Meaning of Hugo Chavez
US attacks on Chavez caricature him as a tyrant in the class of Saddam Hussein, or a Marxist, or a ferociously anti-American clone of Castro. Actually, his populist uprising springs from multicultural grass roots that pre-date the foreign invasion of the Americas that began in 1492... {Read more}

A Time to Look Over President Wilson's Shoulder
As more US soldiers are buried in the shifting political sands of occupied Iraq, President Bush still claims his invasion and occupation were justified, and that US citizens are now safer.... President Woodrow Wilson, who led the country into the bloodbath that was World War I, chose a different ideological trajectory... {Read more}

Albert Einstein, Paul Robeson and Israel
At a moment when so many people in the world decry the shockingly senseless, destructive militarism of the Israeli state and demand protection of the sacred rights of Palestinian people, the historic relationship between Jewish people and Zionism requires reexamination... {Read more}