When an Army official says "This is terrifying. We do not know what's going on," there's a problem. It may be looking at the grimmest suicide statistics yet. If the seven confirmed suicides plus 17 pending cases are compared to the 16 combat deaths in January, it seems the Army's previous fear may be reality: more deaths by suicide than combat. Col. Kathy Platoni, the Army's chief psychologist, Read more

Study Abroad in Iraq? The headline jumped out of the Daily Beast, and I knew I had a story. Until, that is, I read it and learned the average American student cannot register for a semester in Baghdad the way they can in Strasbourg. But mon Dieu!, someday soon they will. As for now, only US service members can sign up. Courses like child psychology, American government, and cultural anthropology Read more

If simulated drowning isn't enough, you can add music to America's weapons of mass degradation. Amped-up tunes are used as "sonic bludgeons" at US military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. Songs such as Britney Spears's "Baby One More Time" are turned up and set to repeat to create fear, disorientation, and a prolonged capture shock. It can cause long-term psychiatric problems Read more

While debris from collapsing financial institutions continue to fall during the final days of the Bush Administration, the President has found something he considers a "success" — the Iraq war. In an interview played on Japanese TV this week, a "very pleased" Bush said: I think the decision to remove Saddam Hussein was right. . . . We are bringing troops home because of the success in Iraq. Read more

Slang is hard to define, but you know it when you hear it. It's sarcastic and witty (when it's good) and establishes social bonds. War slang is no different, though it serves the additional function of exposing military problems. Slang from earlier wars — skedaddle, triumph, ballistic — has made a home in our vernacular, and now US soldiers in Iraq are playing with words, too. Check out what Read more

Citizen Rob Simpson set out on a mission: to find out what else the US could have purchased for the $1 trillion dollars the war will probably cost. As with superhumanly large numbers, most recently and famously, the $700 billion bailout, it's helpful to put the number in concrete terms. That's what Simpson did with his new book What We Could Have Done With the Money. The book's corresponding Read more

Foreclosures Grow by 70%: The number of homes in a state of foreclosure grew 70 percent in the third quarter of this year, compared with the same time last year. Almost 766,000 homes received at least one foreclosure related notice between July and September. By the end of the year it's thought there will be a million bank-owned properties for sale, or a third of all houses on the market. US Read more

While the subject of a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq has been hotly debated, it's a decision that might prove moot. The US may very well have to leave whether it's considered strategically correct or not. The democratically elected Iraqi government may actually want to employ their sovereignty, leading both US and Iraqi negotiators reportedly close to setting a withdrawal date, mostly at the Read more

Bush Defends Measures: In a speech at the US Chamber of Commerce moments ago, President Bush defended the government's recent intervention in the financial crisis as measures of "last resort," saying that it will "take a while" for the credit system to thaw and that Americans can be confident it will. He said of the intervention, "Had the government not acted. . . We would have been forced to Read more