In an attempt to defend President Obama’s foreign policy decisions the Center for American Progress has released a terribly misguided one page chart comparing the Iraq war and the Libya war. The chart’s basic message is that Obama is better than Bush, because Obama is much more thrifty when he launches a war, even an illegal one based on lies.

Everything changed on September 11, 2001. It’s become an American truism. And for many, it’s also absolutely true. It certainly was the case for Tom Engelhardt. He was roughly seven miles north of the World Trade Center that morning and that’s about the furthest he’s been from it since.

What’s amazing about the wet-thighed conservative worship of John Bolton is that it’s being showered by people who claim to espouse “conservative family values” onto a guy who has yet to satisfactorily answer allegations that he forced his first wife into group sex and was known to frequent the swinger’s club Plato’s Retreat, which flourished in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Muslim-hating WaPo bigot-blogger Jennifer Rubin is again very displeased with President Obama, because he has the audacity to want to withdraw the troops from Iraq before we have had the opportunity to drain all the oil that lies beneath the sand and kill all the people who live above it. Will Petraeus save us?

More than 390,000 US military field reports from the Iraq War were released by WikiLeaks one year ago. The reports—the Iraq War Logs, which range from 2004 to 2009, revealed the truth of the US occupation of Iraq. When they were released, editor-in-chief Julian Assange hoped the logs would help correct the attacks on the truth that had occurred before, during and after the war’s official conclusion.

Lost Decades looks at why the explosion of debt happened through the traditional lens of supply-and-demand. It examines the motivations and situations of people on both side of this debt. Why did demand for debt increase in the United States? The first reason Chinn and Frieden identify is the huge deficits run during the George W. Bush years. These are the trillions spent on the Bush tax cuts, the expansion of Medicare part D and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that weren’t paid for.

A Major Crimes Task Force (MCTF) assisted by the FBI and other US investigators interviewed 77 adult and juvenile detainees. They reported their jailers: forced them to confess to crimes they did not commit, beat them with wooden sticks or subjected them to electric shocks and raped them or sodomized them with objects. Juveniles reported being raped “multiple times by the same person or persons.”

A US State Embassy cable marked “confidential” and published by WikiLeaks reveals details on the detention of juveniles held in “Site 4″ in a Iraq Interior Ministry (MOI) detention complex. The juveniles allege sexual abuse by Iraqi interrogators, specifically that rapes were being used in the prison to induce confessions. The discovery of widespread abuse and torture, according to the diplomat who wrote the cable, is the worst since the infamous Jadriyah “Bunker” facility was discovered in 2005.

The deluge of 9/11 reflections and editorials on the aftermath has been overwhelming. It is tempting to contribute more commentary on how the US has responded to terrorism and what the government has treated as “terrorism” since the attacks. It would be easy to go through incident by incident and point to atrocity after atrocity, loss of liberty after loss of liberty to show that the US has responded in a way that likely brought joy to Islamic extremists seeking to wage war against America. But, as I sit and think about 9/11, how it defined my teenage years and transformation into the writer I am today, I find it more appropriate reflect through some the music the event has inspired.

A short documentary film, “Incident in New Baghdad,” has been earning critical praise and awards as it goes from film festival to film festival. The short tells the story of Iraq war veteran Ethan McCord, a soldier who was at the scene of the “Collateral Murder” incident uncovered by WikiLeaks over a year ago. McCord rescued children, who were injured in the 2007 Apache helicopter attack that killed two Reuters journalists along with a “good samaritan” who tried to rescue the journalists that had been fired upon.