Over the past week+

Playing catch up is a painful process, but I've tried to collate most of the relevant material from the past week or so below.

* Following up on his influential NYRB piece from last year, Michael Massing examines how the press's handling of Iraq influenced the recent election in the US.

* Liz Sly of the Chicago Tribune reports that the "best, brightest, wealthiest" Iraqis are fleeing the country, "taking with them the skills, the capital and the expertise that Iraq will need whenever the country becomes stable enough to start the still-stalled process of reconstruction."

* Cursor points out that a "60 Minutes report echoes findings of UPI's Mark Benjamin on the Pentagon's lowballing of the number of U.S. casualties in Iraq."

* Greg Mitchell of E&P uses a vivid report by Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder to show what the battle of Fallujah was really like, at least for American soldiers.

* The killing of unarmed civilians, mass graves filled with women and children, "dead-checking," vestiges of napalm and assorted "uncoventional weapons," etc. These are the legacies of the recent attack on Fallujah. As the Washington Post reports that "Medics Testify to Fallujah's Horrors," Juan Cole has more on the aftermath of the assault.

* Anthony Cordesman says any declaration of "victory" in Fallujah, even one that ignores the massive civilian toll, is premature and foolish.

* "Impunity -- the perception of being outside the law -- has long been the hallmark of the Bush regime," writes Naomi Klein in The Nation. "What is alarming is that it appears to have deepened since the election, ushering in what can best be described as an orgy of impunity. In Iraq, US forces and their Iraqi surrogates are assaulting civilian targets and openly attacking doctors, clerics and journalists who have dared to count the bodies. At home, impunity has been made official policy with Bush's nomination of Alberto Gonzales -- the man who personally advised the President in his infamous 'torture memo' that the Geneva Conventions are 'obsolete' -- as Attorney General."

* Tom Hayden offers some advice on how to end the Iraq War.

* Mark Danner weighs in on Colin Powell's resignation, noting the irony that the failure to heed the warnings found in Powell's memoir is coming back to haunt the US in Iraq.

* After recently calling for the abolishment of the CIA, Chalmers Johnson provides an exegesis of how recent moves in Washington are creating a WIA -- Worthless Intelligence Agency.

* According to Jim Lobe, a recently-released Defence Science Board report suggests that "Al-Qaeda and radical Islamists are winning the propaganda war against the United States" and "Bush administration policies in the Middle East, its fundamental failure to understand the Muslim world and a lack of imagination in using new communications technologies are responsible."

* "Five months after embarrassed State Department officials acknowledged widespread mistakes in the government's influential annual report on global terrorism," reports the LA Times, "internal investigators have found new and unrelated errors — as well as broader underlying problems that they say essentially have destroyed the credibility of the statistics the report is based on."

* Jason Burke of the Observer looks at how terrorists are growing adept at using the videocamera to spread their propaganda.

* Will Iran Be Next? James Fallows and some helpers simulated a Pentagon war game to address this ever-present question.

* "The U.S. government knew of an imminent plot to oust Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chávez, in the weeks prior to a 2002 military coup that briefly unseated him, newly released CIA documents show, despite White House claims to the contrary a week after the putsch," reports Newsday.

* "For almost two decades," Jim Lobe reports, "the United States has urged Latin American militaries to move away from the Cold War 'national-security' doctrines that resulted in so many [human rights] abuses in the region." Two weeks ago, however, Donald Rumsfeld "appeared to be preaching the virtues of reviving such an approach, perhaps under a new name, like 'national sovereignty.'"

* Tom Regan rounds up stories on "Israel's Abu Ghraib."

* HRW has called on Caterpillar, Inc. to "immediately suspend sales of its powerful D9 bulldozer to the Israeli army" since the IDF "uses the D9 as its primary weapon to raze Palestinian homes, destroy agriculture and shred roads in violation of the laws of war." Now, if only we could get the US government to stop subsidizing the same destruction with its military aid to Israel...

* The Guardian's Ian Traynor writes that the Ukranian "orange revolution" is "an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes." Additionally, Cursor provides a link to some "facts on the Ukrainian melodrama" and BBC Europe is keeping track of the situation in Kiev as it evolves.

* Dave Lindorff observes the "irony and hypocrisy" of the treatment of the contested presidential election in Ukraine, and notes that a "nation of sheep in America is getting a lesson in democracy from the former Soviet state."

* Bill Blum and Noam Chomsky offer their post-election thoughts.

* 12 million Americans struggle to feed themselves on a daily basis, observes Bob Herbert. "These are dismal statistics for a country as well-to-do as the United States. But we don't hear much about them because hunger is associated with poverty, and poverty is not even close to becoming part of our national conversation. Swift boats, yes. Sex scenes on 'Monday Night Football,' most definitely. The struggle of millions of Americans to feed themselves? Oh no. Let's not go there."

* In the NY Times, Frank Rich writes that "the outcry of the past two weeks" over indecency in the media is a perfect example of "how the hucksters of the right work their scam." On a related front, Kevin Moore simplifies this issue, in 'toon form.

* Patrick Martin dissects the "inglorious exit of CBS anchorman Dan Rather."

* Is this the end of the line for ABC's Nightline? As flawed as Koppel's platform is -- an infamous example was its whitewashing of the most important media story of 2002-2003 -- it's one of the few shows on TV that still does journalism. Public discourse would suffer even more if Nightline were to be canned in favor of cheap, profitable late night comedy fare.

* The Village Voice's Joy Press contends that shake ups at PBS, particularly with Bill Moyers' imminent departure from NOW, indicate that a "'rebalancing' of the news media is clearly the latest front of the culture wars."

* The past four weeks of PBS' Frontline have been particularly good. All the programs are available for viewing online: "Rumsfeld's War," "The Persuaders," "Is Wal-Mart Good for America?," and "The Secret History of the Credit Card." This week's episode, "Diet Wars," also looks promising.

* Dialogic urges you to check out a recent 3-part documentary from the BBC, "The Power of Nightmares." I'll second that.

* JoAnn Wypijewski, who penned a detailed article on the Matthew Shepard case in 1999 for Harper's, looks back on the killing six years later. See also: "of Shepard and Dirkhising" and the "art of hate."

* Kevin Drum has been reading George Lakoff's book, Don't Think of an Elephant, and has some interesting things to say about it.

* Via Professor Kim comes an engaging essay on the often misread legacy of Booker T. Washington and modern black conservatism.

* Juan Cole discusses the absurdity of the Right's continued efforts to seek "balance" in academia.