Iraq Feature: The Costs of a War (Duss/Juul)

The ceremony in Iraq marking the end of the US intervention

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Total Costs

Total deaths: Between 110,663 and 119,380

Coalition deaths: 4,803
U.S. deaths: 4,484
U.S. wounded: 32,200
U.S. deaths as a percentage of coalition deaths: 93.37 percent
Iraqi Security Force, or ISF, deaths: At least 10,125
Total coalition and ISF deaths: At least 14,926
Iraqi civilian deaths: Between 103,674 and 113,265
Non-Iraqi contractor deaths: At least 463
Internally displaced persons: 1.24 million
Refugees: More than 1.6 million

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US Feature: 5 Top Facts About Defense Spending --- and What It Costs America (Holland)

Head Start provides education, health, nutrition, and parenting services to low-income children and their families. It's an incredibly successful, effective and popular program, but there are only 900,000 places in the program for more than 2.5 million eligible kids. According to the National Priorities Project, what we've spent on the Afghanistan war so far could fund Head Start for all eligible children for the next 15.6 years.

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Bin Laden Follow-Up: He Didn't Change the Arab World --- He Changed "America" (Engelhardt)

Bin Laden’s greatest wizardry was performed on us, not on the Arab world, where the movements he spawned from Yemen to North Africa have proven remarkably peripheral and unimportant.  He helped open us up to all the nightmares we could visit upon ourselves (and others) -- from torture and the creation of an offshore archipelago of injustice to the locking down of our own American world, where we were to cower in terror, while lashing out militarily.

In many ways, he broke us not on 9/11 but in the months and years after.

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Is the FBI Shutting Down Progressive Dissent? (Howell)

Is free speech worth the constitutional paper it’s written on?

After the September 26 FBI raids on peace activists’ homes in Minneapolis, Chicago and North Carolina, it appears to depend on who’s speaking and what they’re saying.

The pretext for the raids was investigating “material aide to terrorists”, resulting in grand jury subpoenas and confiscation of computers, books, music CDs and from one home, a Martin Luther King poster. The targeted Minneapolis activists have openly protested US military policy since the 1980s. The FBI certainly knows they have nothing to do with terrorism. These activists simply have the audacity to challenge bi-partisan US invasions, occupations and support for dictatorships and human rights abusers. Dissent on the left has long been seen as ‘criminal behavior’. Where once “the communist threat" was the argument for such repression, now, “terrorism” is.

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