An Afghan woman and a child were killed in a joint NATO-Afghan operation against insurgents in Afghanistan on Friday, sparking a protest by a group of angry villagers. (full article…)

To those who say a Nobel is too much too soon in Obama’s young presidency, “we simply disagree … He got the prize for what he has done”, said the committee chairman, Thorbjorn Jagland. (full article…)

Heavily armed Ethiopian troops crossed over into some villages in Somalia’s central border town of Beledweyne and arrested some villagers they suspected of being Islamist sympathizers, witnesses said on Sunday. (full article…)

President Obama announced in March that he would be sending 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. But in an unannounced move, the White House has also authorized — and the Pentagon is deploying — at least 13,000 troops beyond that number, according to defense officials. (full article…)

True, Obama didn’t ask for this. It was obvious, from his halting delivery and slightly shamefaced air last Friday, that he wishes the Nobel committee hadn’t put him in this spot.

But he still wasn’t brave enough to tell it no. (full article…)

“It is hard to imagine that he will be receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Dec. 10 and then come empty-handed to Copenhagen a week later,” she said. (full article…)

Speaking in Washington, Obama said he did “not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honoured by this prize”. (full article…)

President Obama should thank the Nobel committee and ask them to hold on to the Peace Prize for a couple more years. The prize should be awarded for achievement, not aspiration, and so far Obama’s main achievement has been getting elected President, which is in a different category. (full article…)

The U.S. administration is furious over Israeli incitement against President Barack Obama, Democratic congressmen close to Obama told an Israeli source who returned from a visit to Washington this week. (full article…)

Issam al-Khazraji, a day labourer in Baghdad, said: “He doesn’t deserve this prize. All these problems — Iraq, Afghanistan — have not been solved…The man of ‘change’ hasn’t changed anything yet.” (full article…)

After the June 28 coup, President Obama joined the region in condemning the action and calling for President Zelaya to be returned to power, even though the Honduran president is an ally of Mr. Chávez, America’s biggest adversary in the region. (full article…)

In an article discussing the $400,000 being spent by the coup regime on lobbying the US Congress, the Times gives extended coverage of their ridiculous propaganda, provides no context, and does not once provide the perspective of President Zelaya or his supporters. The offer only this token sentence, which is then negated by aligning Zelaya with Hugo Chavez. But according to the standards of the NYT, this justifies the coup… They have made this very clear in their shoddy coverage since the ordeal began last August.

His successor in the White House is now sending different signals. US President Barack Obama began his career as an opponent of the Iraq war, but now, after moving to the White House, he too is making use of the superpower’s military might. Obama is increasing US troop numbers in Afghanistan while, in neighboring Pakistan, his administration is attacking the Taliban with remote-controlled drones. (full article…)

Afghan tribal elders said Thursday that eight people, at least five of them civilians, were killed in an airstrike in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday. An American military spokeswoman, Capt. Elizabeth Mathias, confirmed the airstrike, in the Nad Ali district of the troubled province of Helmand, but declined to estimate the number of casualties before a review of the attack. (full article…)

Barack Obama has talked down the importance of sealing a global deal on climate change before the end of the year, world leaders said yesterday. (full article…)

The White House acknowledged for the first time that it might not be able to close the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay by January as President Barack Obama promised. (full article…)

Perhaps one of the most jarring comparisons here is the fact that ACORN is being attacked. Yet the Obama administration continues to contract with Blackwater, the Bush administration’s favorite mercenary company, which is headed by Erik Prince. Prince was a major donor to Republican causes and campaigns, including those of some of the Defund ACORN bill’s sponsors, like Indiana Republican Mike Pence, one of the key figures hunting down Van Jones. A former employee recently described Prince as a man who “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe” and said that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.” (full article…)

I’ve had plenty of criticisms of the Obama team’s tactical choices along the way — letting the settlements battle draw out, not acting to alleviate the Gaza disaster, unreasonably expecting Arab concessions in response to tepid Israeli statements, and do on. But they’ve made it clear that the time for games is coming to an end, and that their patience is wearing thin. To succeed, they are going to need to have some real sticks to wield — and I suspect that they will be better able to wield them after demonstrating such astonishing restraint in the face of Netanyahu’s repeated provocations.

Lord knows I’m not optimistic about final status negotiations– I’m never especially optimistic — but in this instance I think a lot of people are being blinded by shiny flashing lights and missing what’s really going on. (full article…)

Nonetheless, it was disappointing that the Obama administration felt it had to denounce the report within days of its release, despite Goldstone’s impeccable credentials (former member of South Africa’s Constitutional Court and chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for Bosnia and Rwanda) and his strong Zionist convictions. Israeli PM Netanyahu hasn’t been doing Obama any favors of late, and the release of the report would have been a golden opportunity for Obama to play a little hardball and remind him that stiffing your principal patron has a price. And the Administration didn’t even have to endorse the report; all they had to do was refrain from criticizing it. (full article…)

Why is Netanyahu defying Obama so openly? Because he has long been committed to the dream of a “greater Israel,” and the only Palestinian state he might accept would be an archipelago of disconnected enclaves under de facto Israeli control. (full article…)

In a troubling legal brief filed last week, the Obama administration followed the disreputable example of the Bush White House by opposing judicial review of military detentions, even for a discrete segment of prisoners: the 30 or so non-Afghan Bagram prisoners who were seized outside Afghanistan, far from any recognizable battlefield, and who have been incarcerated for more than six years. (full article…)

On Friday, seven former CIA directors urged President Obama to end the inquiry, arguing that it would inhibit intelligence operations in the future and demoralize agency employees who believed they had been cleared by previous investigators. (full article…)

In a move with potentially major strategic implications, U.S. President Barack Obama announced Thursday he is scrapping plans by the George W. Bush administration to deploy long-range-missile defence systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. (full article…)

On the second anniversary of the single worst massacre of Iraqi civilians committed by a private force since the US invasion, President Obama should be forced to explain to the American people and the people of Iraq and Afghanistan why he continues to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to this company and why he permits them to remain on the ground, representing the United States in these countries. At a recent hearing of the bipartisan Wartime Contracting Commission, commissioner Linda Gustitus asserted that in not canceling Blackwater’s contracts after Nisour Square, the State Department “helped to send a message to other contractors that you can do a lot and not have your contract terminated.” (full article…)

The two candidates’ starkly different reactions to that ruling was supposed to underscore one of the true differences between them: that Obama, the Constitutional Law Professor, would insist on adherence to core Constitutional liberties even while prosecuting the War on Terror, but McCain wouldn’t. Yet here we are, barely more than a year later, and the Obama DOJ is filing a legal brief chock full of Bush/Cheney/McCain arguments about how “Habeas rights under the U.S. Constitution do not extend to enemy aliens detained in the active war zone at Bagram” and “No court has ever extended the Great Writ so far” and granting such rights “risks opening habeas claims brought by detainees in other theaters of war during future military actions” and doing so would pose “impediments to the military mission and threats to the national interest.” As The New York Times‘ Charlie Savage wrote about the District Court proceeding: “The Obama administration has told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team.“

The top US commander today signalled for the first time that Washington will almost certainly deploy more troops to Afghanistan later this year. (more…)

So that gap, that wealth gap, that race-wealth divide, as it’s often called, is widening in the midst of the crisis. And the Obama administration is absolutely refusing to talk about the need for policies that will look at this specifically, at closing the gap. (more…)

The prosecutor of the international criminal court is collecting information on alleged war crimes committed by Nato and the Taliban in Afghanistan. (more…)

The only real solution %u2014 one that replaces the profit motive with actually keeping us healthy and operates in most civilized nations on the planet %u2014 has already been taken off the negotiating table by our government-corporate plutocracy, and that is a single-payer system.(more…)

“Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again,” Obama said. “If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”(more…)

The message to President Obama, he said, is that this is Jewish land. He did not use the president’s name, but an insulting Hebrew slang for a black man and the phrase “that Arab they call a president.” (more…)

Netanyahu appears to be suffering from confusion and paranoia. He is convinced that the media are after him, that his aides are leaking information against him and that the American administration wants him out of office. Two months after his visit to Washington, he is still finding it difficult to communication normally with the White House. To appreciate the depth of his paranoia, it is enough to hear how he refers to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, Obama’s senior aides: as “self-hating Jews.” (more…)

The U.S. government revoked the visas of four members of Honduras’s de facto government Tuesday, escalating the pressure on officials there to reinstate the president, who was kicked out of the country a month ago. (more…)

The scrolling electronic sign, a low-tech version of New York’s Time Square ticker, escalated the US’s propaganda war with Cuba’s leader three years ago by flashing human rights messages in five-foot high crimson letters. But history, or more specifically Barack Obama, appears to have pulled the plug on the billboard which flitted across 25 windows of the US interests section in Havana. (more…)

Obama’s choice of words might not have been politic, but he was merely stating the obvious when he said the police behaved “stupidly.” (more…)

A new survey of global opinion reveals strong negative feelings toward U.S. foreign policy, even as an average of 61 percent of those polled have at least some confidence in President Barack Obama to make sound decisions. (more…)

As the predictions for global warming get more and more alarming, talks on a worldwide climate treaty have stalled — largely due to the United States.(more…)

“Still, administration officials said that they did not expect that the military would go so far as to carry out a coup. “There was talk of how they might remove the president from office, how he could be arrested, on whose authority they could do that,” the administration official said. But the official said that the speculation had focused on legal maneuvers to remove the president, not a coup.” (more…)

The government will agree to preserve the secret overseas sites where a defendant in a terror case was once held and, his lawyers say, subjected to harsh interrogation techniques after his capture in 2004, a prosecutor indicated in court in New York on Thursday. (more…)

When Manuel Zelaya was elected president on November 27, 2005 in a close victory, he became president of one of the poorest nations in the region, with approximately 70% of its population of 7.5 million living under the poverty line. Though siding himself with the region’s left in recent years as a new member of the leftist trade bloc, Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), Zelaya did sign the Central American Free Trade Agreement in 2004. However, Zelaya has been criticizing and taking on the sweatshop and corporate media industry in his country, and increased the minimum wage by 60%. He said the increase, which angered the country’s elite but expanded his support among unions, would “force the business oligarchy to start paying what is fair.” (more…)

And, yes, this was a military coup. It does not matter that there is no military junta, or that the arrest of the president was allegedly approved by other state institutions (Supreme Court and congress). I heard a news item today that the US government has not officially branded the act a military coup, because to do so would force the cutoff of aid. If that is true, shame on the Obama administration. If it is actually governed by a democratic administration, the US must cut off military aid and diplomatic relations until the coup is reversed and the proper constitutional order is restored in Honduras. This must not be allowed to stand, and mere words of condemnation are not enough. The military needs to feel some economic pain for its actions. Update: See Two Weeks Notice on the question of aid and military coups. Which is, of course, what this coup was, except in the Obama administration’s hairsplitting terminology. How very Clintonian of the US government. (more…)

The promotion of Middle East adviser Dennis Ross to a senior White House position may open the door to a more positive tone by the United States toward the Israeli government, experts believe. (more…)

The missile attacks targeted a suspected Taliban camp and a religious school used by fighters in the rugged tribal border region of South Waziristan, said a local official from the region and a resident, who said at least 13 people were killed. (more…)

On Thursday morning, 4,000 American Marines began a major offensive to try to take back the region from the strongest Taliban insurgency in the country. (more…)

When US President Barack Obama called on Palestinians to practice nonviolence, I laughed just like Mahmoud. Palestinians like Mahmoud have never needed to be told about nonviolence. The English word may be unfamiliar but the steadfast, daily acts of resistance known as nonviolence are nothing new. In the south Hebron hills, Palestinians face Israeli soldiers and violent Israeli settlers who are illegally expanding their settlements and attacking Palestinians, including children walking to school. In response to this profound injustice, Palestinians are organizing demonstrations, refusing to comply with military orders, filing complaints against settlers, and courageously working their land despite the risk of arrest and attack. They don’t need President Obama to tell them to practice nonviolence. (more…)

But Mr. Bush, in an appearance here on Wednesday, maintained that he would not criticize President Obama, though he did discuss his policies.

“I will just tell you that there are people at Gitmo who will kill Americans at the drop of a hat,” Mr. Bush said at a dinner held by a group of business leaders. “Persuasion isn’t going to work. Therapy isn’t going to change their mind.” (more…)

This is potentially one of the worst aspects of Bush’s presidency… We are going to have to suffer through his bumbling, ignorant speeches for every dinner from the American Chamber of Commerce to the Rotary Club. Oh… and he’s also writing a book. I can’t wait.

But American gays and lesbians are still waiting in vain for Obama to fulfill his election promises. While the US in general is clearly heading in the direction of a relaxation of homophobic policies, the White House is shying away from the issue. Even worse, on some issues, it has actually put new stumbling blocks in the way of gay rights. (more…)

If, like me, you’ve been following America’s torture policies not just for the last few years but for decades, you can’t help but experience that eerie feeling of déjà vu these days. With the departure of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from Washington and the arrival of Barack Obama, it may just be back to the future when it comes to torture policy, a turn away from a dark, do-it-yourself ethos and a return to the outsourcing of torture that went on, with the support of both Democrats and Republicans, in the Cold War years. (more…)

CLIMATE CHANGE: Obama Sounds Too Much Like Bush (more…)

The Obama administration has all but abandoned plans to allow Guantanamo Bay detainees who have been cleared for release to live in the United States, administration officials said yesterday, a decision that reflects bipartisan congressional opposition to admitting such prisoners but complicates efforts to persuade European allies to accept them. (more…)

AP Edits Palestinian Suffering Out of Obama’s Speech (more…)

“Just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” said Obama, “does not serve Israel’s security.” That was all. The killing of 1,300 people in what is now a concentration camp merited 17 words, cast as concern for the “security” of the killers. This was understandable. During the January massacre, Seymour Hersh reported that “the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ’smart bombs’ and other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel” for use in Gaza. (more…)

Imagine the positive reaction Obama would have received throughout the Arab and Islamic world if, instead of simply expressing eloquent but vague words in support of freedom and democracy, he had said something like this:

“Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.”

Could he have said such a thing?

Yes. In fact, those were his exact words when, as an Illinois state senator, he gave a speech at a major antiwar rally in Chicago on Oct. 2, 2002. (more…)

The worst part of this devolution is the centrality of Obama, the prophet of “hope” and “change” who once said that “cynicism is a sorry kind of wisdom.” If that’s true, then he has become America’s wisest man — the guy who seems to know my kids will laugh when I tell them politicians and voters once believed in democracy and took campaign promises seriously. (more…)

David Horowitz, the fanatical persona behind Campus Watch, approves of Obama’s Cairo speech.

Bahaieddin Hasan, head of the Cairo Centre for Human Rights Studies, described the address as “superficial” and devoid of details. “There didn’t appear to be any concern for either democratic reform or human rights,” he was quoted as saying in the Friday edition of independent daily Al-Dustour. “This came as a major disappointment.” (more…)

Of course, I didn’t expect much, but I found Obama’s brief remarks yesterday about the Palestinians extremely disingenuous and misleading. After pontificating to the audience in Cairo on the Holocaust (as if he were addressing a crowd of affirmed anti-Semites), Obama said the following about Palestine:

“[I]t is also undeniable that the Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation.”

Suffered in pursuit of a homeland? They had a homeland—and it was stolen from them in 1948. Let’s call a spade a spade. This was ethnic cleansing, not the “pain of dislocation” as Obama euphemises.

And why did Obama not mention Israel specifically in relation with the Palestinians’ suffering? Instead, your average viewer in the United States is justified in coming away with the impression that the occupation is prosecuted by some nameless evil. Everyone talks about a change in rhetoric from Washington, but I don’t see it. When it comes to the Middle East, the ritual transition of power called democracy in the U.S. causes a mere fluctuation in the degree of slavish support for the Zionist project.

Obama is not a man of courage: if he was politically courageous, he would have said that Al-Azhar under the rule of Nasser was a force of progressive thought, enlightenment, state feminism support, and quasi-secularism. Under American puppets, Sadat and Mubarak, Al-Azhar became a force of obscurantism, fanaticism, misogyny, religious intolerance, and violence. Al-Azhar does not deserve any praise whatsoever. The Copts, Freethinkers, and women all sufferes because of rulings from Al-Azhar. Ideas of Al-Qa`idah and religious fanaticism’s in general should be blamed on that obsolete institution which serves as a tool of the dictators in Egypt. His reference to the early roots of Islam in America is so disingenuous: he has one bland quote from John Adams and leave out various expressions of bigotry against Muslims by founding fathers. And he then condemns (unspecified) Western stereotypes of Muslims and then matches them with what he calls Muslim stereotypes of America as empire. But those two are not symmetrical: American stereotypes of Muslims are racist and essentialist, and the notion that the US is a war mongering Empire is shared by none Muslims and Muslims alike around the world. (more…)

Labeling America’s “other” as a nebulous and all-encompassing “Islam” (even while professing rapprochement and respect) is a way to avoid acknowledging what does in fact unite and mobilize people across many Muslim-majority countries: overwhelming popular opposition to increasingly intrusive and violent American military, political and economic interventions in many of those countries. This opposition — and the resistance it generates — has now become for supporters of those interventions, synonymous with “Islam.” (more…)

US President Barack Obama met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo on Thursday as he continued his trip to the Middle East.

Amnesty International has documented a series of human rights violations in Egypt. It is particularly concerned about the extension of the state of emergency and the planned new anti-terrorism law, which seeks to grant security forces emergency-style powers.

Counter terrorism continues to be used to justify human rights violations, such as administrative detention lasting in hundreds of cases for more than a decade, prolonged incommunicado and secret detentions, torture an unfair trials before emergency and military courts.

US involvement in these practices has extended to “renditions” by US intelligence services to Egypt, making it a key transit and destination country for the interrogation or indefinite detention and torture of terror suspects. (more…)

President Obama should not have decided to come to Egypt. The visit is a clear endorsement of President Hosni Mubarak, the ailing 81-year-old dictator who has ruled with martial law, secret police and torture chambers. No words that Mr. Obama will say can change this perception that Americans are supporting a dictator with their more than $1 billion in annual aid. The Western press is clearly excited about Mr. Obama’s “significant” choice of Egypt, and his destination, Cairo University, which the news media seem to consider a symbol of enlightenment, secularism and freedom. The truth is that for years, Cairo University students have been demonstrating against the rising cost of education, demanding the university subsidize expensive text books, only to be rebuked by the authorities, who claim no funds are available. Yet the university somehow managed to find the money to polish up the building dome that will shine above Mr. Obama’s head when he delivers his address. As for the other host of the president’s visit, Al Azhar University, one of its students, Kareem Amer, is languishing in prison after university officials reported his “infidel, un-Islamic” views to the government, earning him a four-year sentence in 2007. In advance of the visit, Egyptian security forces have rounded up hundreds of foreign students at Al Azhar. We do want allies in the West, but not from inside the White House. Our real allies are the human rights groups and unions that will pressure the Obama administration to sever all ties to the Mubarak dictatorship. Their visits to Egypt are more meaningful, even if unlike Mr. Obama, they do not get a lavish reception. (more…)

“Israel must seriously address the issue of settlements,” agreed Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Florida) in a conversation with The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday. But he stressed that Israel was not being asked to act unilaterally, saying that freezing settlements must be accompanied by “significant, concrete steps in the Arab world to normalize relations with Israel.” (more…)

Obama said he was “very much looking forward” to that part of his trip, but that he wanted to meet with Mubarak first because he is someone “who obviously has decades of experience” on a range of issues. (more…)

Yeah, a whole range of issues: torture, censorship, eradication of political opponents, etc.

The Saudi government is permitting journalists accompanying President Obama entry into the country without a visa or the usual customs procedures. While in Saudi Arabia, therefore, journalists are expressly prohibited from leaving the hotel or engaging in any journalistic activities outside of coverage of the POTUS visit. Those who do so risk arrest and detention by Saudi authorities. (more…)

But on human rights, I fear he will disappoint: I asked him straight whether Hosni Mubarak (the Egyptian leader for 28 years!) was an autocrat. Mr Obama told me he was a force for stability and good. (more…)

He also added an element not heard before. “There are a lot of Israelis who used to be Americans,” Obama said, in a not overly successfully phrase, since the overwhelming majority of those Americans who have become Israelis have retained their US citizenship. (more…)

Obama has told Netanyahu firmly that Israel must stop building settlements on expropriated Palestinian land in the West Bank, but such words have been uttered by the president’s predecessors. Unless these statements are followed by decisive action–perhaps to limit American subsidies to Israel–there’s no reason to believe the lip service that failed in the past will suddenly be more effective. (more…)

“Anyone who was expecting a major rift in the U.S.-Israeli relationship is going to be disappointed.” (more…)

“The Obama administration is giving up the decades-old intimacy the White House had with the State of Israel.” (more…)

They come in with their Darth Vader outfits, and they literally gang-beat prisoners. There are five men, generally, that are sent in. Each of them is assigned to one body part of the prisoner: the head, the left arm, the right arm, the left leg, the right leg. They go in, and they hogtie the prisoner, sometimes leaving them hogtied for hours on end. They douse them with chemical agents. They have put their heads in toilets and flushed the toilets repeatedly. They have urinated on the heads of prisoners. They’ve squeezed their testicles in the course of restraining them. They’ve taken the feces from one prisoner and smeared it in the face of another prisoner. (more…)

US President Barack Obama had thought he could clean up the Bush administration’s questionable human rights legacy on his own terms. Recent decisions regarding Abu Ghraib pictures and military tribunals show that he was mistaken. His message of “change” is at risk. (more…)

President Obama’s decisions this week to retain important elements of the Bush-era system for trying terrorism suspects and to block the release of pictures showing abuse of American-held prisoners abroad are the most graphic examples yet of how he has backtracked, in substantial if often nuanced ways, from the approach to national security that he preached as a candidate, and even from his first days in the Oval Office. (more…)

Barack Obama will revive the heavily criticised George Bush-era military tribunals for detainees at Guantánamo Bay but will make them fairer, according to US officials. (more…)

Video has emerged showing two protesters confronting former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the White House Correspondents’ dinner on Saturday night. As Rumsfeld entered the building, Desiree Fairooz and Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK were there to greet him.

Desiree Fairooz: “War criminal! War criminal! War criminal! Arrest this man! Arrest the war criminal! I wish I had some handcuffs right now to arrest this man! He is responsible for the death of millions of people! (more…)

“That SOB doesn’t want a deal,” growled Mr Clinton at a particularly frustrating juncture in diplomacy. It remains to be seen whether—or how fast—Mr Obama may come to the same conclusion. (more…)

“This tragic, misguided, and unprincipled reversal seems to be consistent with the fact that instead of getting a real ‘change’ on policies under the Obama administration, the American people are experiencing continuity across the board with those of the discredited and criminal Bush administration when it comes to international law, human rights, and U.S. constitutional law related thereto.” (more…)

Human rights advocates and legal scholars fear that the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama may resurrect the military commissions designed by his predecessor to try Guantanamo detainees after Obama’s 120-day moratorium on proceedings expires on May 20. That possibility appeared to move a step closer to reality when Guantanamo’s chief judge refused to delay a May 27 pretrial hearing for Ahmed Al-Darbi, 34, a Saudi Arabian accused of providing material support for terrorism and participating in a conspiracy to commit murder and other crimes. (more…)

The president is seeking to overturn a deal made last month between the Pentagon and the American Civil Liberties Union to make public the pictures from Abu Ghraib and other prisons after a court ruled they should be released. Obama instructed the White House legal office to argue in court against the immediate release of the photographs after several senior military officers, including the former US commander in Afghanistan and Iraq, General David Petraeus, and the present commander in Baghdad, General Ray Odierno, said their publication would endanger US troops. (more…)

An investigation appointed by President Hamid Karzai concluded on Monday that 140 civilians, including children, were killed in the US air strikes in Afghanistan last week, a police chief said. (more…)

The Obama administration says it may curtail Anglo-American intelligence sharing if the British High Court discloses new details of the treatment of a former Guantanamo detainee. (more…)

If Obama is sincere in treating Muslims as partners and engaging them with mutual respect, his very pretty words must inspire legitimate policy reform. First, he must use this opportunity to empathize with the people’s concerns by denouncing the heinous crimes and oppressive, intolerant conduct of client autocrats, such as Mubarak and the Saudi royal family – just to name a couple. (more…)