In These Times

"You feel like a child playing around with a magnifying glass, burning up ants." That is how one Israeli soldier described Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Defense Force's (IDF) invasion of the Gaza Strip, which began in December 2008.

His is one of 54 testimonies collected by the Israeli organization Breaking the Silence in a 110-page report that paints a disturbing picture of urban warfare in one of the world's most densely populated areas, where more than 1.5 million people occupy a narrow strip of land between… more

Frida Berrigan, a senior program associate at the New America Foundation’s Arms and Security Initiative and In These Times contributing editor, ...

A $7 billion missile-defense system for the United Arab Emirates. An estimated $15 billion potential sale of Lockheed Martin’s brand-new fighter plane to Israel. Billions of dollars in weaponry for Taiwan and Turkey. These and other recent deals helped make the United States the world’s leading arms-exporting nation.

In 2007, U.S. foreign military sales agreements totaled more than $32 billion -- nearly triple the amount during President Bush’s first full year in office.

“It’s sort of like trying to play chicken with the new administration,” says William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New ...

A Marine squad was on a dusty road in Iraq, far from home. Suddenly, a deadly roadside bomb explodes the early morning calm and kills a lance corporal and wounds two other Marines. The mission: tend to the wounded and find those who were responsible … Or make someone pay? Three sleeping families awaken to the sound of grenades and guns.

By the end of the "operation," 24 people were dead, including three women and six children. Bullets, fired at close… more

It’s become fashionable in conservative Washington circles -- among commentators with extraordinary access to the Bush administration -- to suggest that people concerned about the threat of war with Iran are howling at phantoms. As the New York Times’ David Brooks wrote in a Nov. 6 column, “The Bush administration is not about to bomb Iran (trust me). It’s using diplomacy to build a coalition to balance it, and reverse an ugly tide.”Washington Post columnist George Will struck… more

In the fall of 2001, the editors of 12 prominent medical journals collectively announced that they would refuse to publish research on new prescription drugs unless the authors provided assurances that they had had unimpeded access to the data and were fully responsible for the paper's conclusions. The announcement was an extraordinary admission of just how extensive industry control over medical research had become. The editors noted that more and more, the authors of scientific papers -- even authors based… more