How, as a sailor, did I deal with gays while in the Navy? There was only one time that I dealt closely with someone and he turned out to be gay.

With General Petraeus’ stop on CBS Evening News with Katie Couric now halfway over, it’s worth taking a moment to unpack the unchallenged, false assertions and implications he’s piled up thus far on his media tour. We decided to look into the claims he made about “oil spots” of “progress” during his interview with NBC’s David Gregory. Both claims were absolute fantasies, and the remaining journalists on Petraeus’ tour owe their viewers more rigorous skepticism than what we saw on Meet the Press.

General Petraeus’ media blitz is just getting started. We’ve got to push our media–hard–to ask real questions and prevent easily disproved spin from polluting the debate. Petraeus wants to change public opinion, and he’s spending your money to sell you a brutal, futile war that’s not making us safer. If you’re tired of this kind of manipulation, join the tens of thousands of other people working to end this war with Rethink Afghanistan.

A new article at Truthout, by H.P. Albarelli and Jeffrey Kaye, describes how the CIA’s Artichoke Project was the contemporaneous and operational side of the MK-ULTRA mind control research program. It was not superceded by MK-ULTRA in the 1950s, as often supposed. Even more, Artichoke-derived methods of using drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation and overload, behavioral modification techniques and other methods of mind control have resurfaced as a primary component of U.S. interrogation practice.

It’s hard to imagine a desirable and sustainable world with the world’s largest naval base still in it, but it’s hard for a lot of people in Norfolk, Virginia, to imagine it gone. The military is not just the force of good that selflessly patrols the world, slaughtering evildoers for the betterment of humanity, but it’s also the primary source of jobs.

How the cowardly Bush administration sullied the reputation of a once valiant ship by using it to help them abuse prisoners.

The US Navy has prevailed in it’s battle against environmentalists and will be allowed to conduct Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Exercises off the California coast.