A senior American diplomat recently told representatives of the Israeli Defense and Foreign ministries, “I don’t want your security officers to check our cars. What if there are settlers among them? I will not have my people end up like (slain Prime Minister Yitzhak) Rabin.” (full article…)

President Shimon Peres tells Washington Post prime minister’s agreement to two-state solution, freezing of settlements connotes shift from right-wing ideology; adds that Netanyahu is unfairly portrayed as an extremist in US (full article…)

Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are “entitled” to some of Iraq’s crude because of the large number of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the country and the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Iraq. (full article…)

The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.”

…

One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. (full article…)

Seymour Hersh published this report in the New Yorker back in 2008. The group in question – Jundallah – is now claiming responsibility for the recent suicide attack in Iran which killed over 40 people. Yet predictably, the US media is now dismissive of any connection… I can’t think of a better example of the media’s deference to power.

One of the taboo topics in the American media is how the U.S. Government routinely violates the principles we espouse for, and try to impose on, the rest of the world. We systematically torture Muslims and then cover it up and protect our torturers while preaching accountability and the rule of law; we condemn deprivations of due process while maintaining and expanding lawless prison systems for Muslims; we demand adherence to U.N. dictates and international law while blocking investigations into U.N. reports of war crimes and possible “crimes against humanity” by our allies; we righteously oppose aggression while invading and simultaneously occupying numerous countries, while threatening to attack still more, and arming countries like Israel to the teeth to wage still other attacks, etc. etc. (full article…)

First, you are required to get over your initial disgust that such legislation is even necessary, that such clauses even exist and that the Pentagon is already doing business with such contractors (hi, Halliburton/KBR!), and that there has already been a truly horrible case validating it, wherein a 20-year-old female employee was allegedly gang-raped by contractors, locked in a shipping container, abused every way from Sunday, and found out later she was unable to sue. (full article…)

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…)

In 2003, U.S. diplomatist Peter Galbraith resigned at the end of a distinguished, 24-year government career. Over the years that followed, he worked as a contract-based adviser to leaders in Iraq’s Kurdish community, while also arguing passionately in public media that Iraq’s Kurds should be given maximum independence from Baghdad – including full control over any new sources of oil.
(full article…)

American officials say Washington will likely exercise its veto power if report accusing Israel of war crimes in Gaza is brought to a Security Council vote. (full article…)

Republican members of the Congressional Anti-Terrorism Caucus said the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) have tried to plant “spies” within key national-security committees in order to shape legislative policy. (full article…)

This is interesting (and shameful)… When an Islamic lobby groups gets interns inside Congress, they’re called spies and House members cite passages from a book entitled Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that’s Conspiring to Islamize America.

Yet, when Jewish lobby members conspire to gain access to government secrets, or when American politicians arrange back-room quid-pro-quo deals with AIPAC… all is forgive. For some reason, no one cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

So are British troops in Afghanistan there to defend the UK from al-Qa’ida attack, as Gordon Brown says?

No, we are there because the priority of British foreign policy is to stick close to the Americans. The Americans are still trying to work out why they are there, but President Obama is also citing the need to deny al-Qa’ida a base. Undermining this argument is the fact that al-Qa’ida and similar groups are primarily located in Pakistan these days and there they can tap into support from fundamentalist groups not just in the borderlands, but far to the east and south in Lahore and Karachi. (full article…)

Amnesty International has condemned the execution of Behnoud Shojaee, a 21-year-old Iranian, at Tehran’s Evin Prison at dawn on Sunday, for a murder he was accused of having committed when he was 17. (full article…)

Invading Afghanistan was a clear war crime, despite the tendency to term it the “good war” by so-called antiwar voices in the West. Instead of treating the 9/11 attacks as a unique crime and cooperating with the international community to arrest Bin-Laden and his acolytes, Bush launched his Global War on Terror and invaded Afghanistan on flimsy grounds despite the awareness that an invasion of the country would place millions at risk of starvation and widespread suffering. But this mattered little to a country gripped in an rage of narcissistic compassion.

As Gilbert Achcar wrote within months of 9/11:

[W]hat was so truly extraordinary about the terrorism of mass destruction that took 3,300 lives … on September 11? On the scale of carnage for which the US government is directly responsible, and has never expressed the least regret for, it was all in all a pretty ordinary massacre. (Clash of Barbarisms, 2002, p. 19)

Nothing really changed on 9/11 – the canard that so many continue to repeat – despite what was justified in its aftermath. In fact, the only thing unusual about 9/11 was that Americans experienced a tiny fraction of the terror they have exported abroad for the better part of the last century – and continue to export in places like Afghanistan.

So as the US entered the ninth year of occupation in Afghanistan yesterday, what has been accomplished apart from mass suffering? The US-led forces have not been able to expel the reactionary fundamentalist organization it tacitly supported during the mid-1990s: the Taliban. Obama has now spread the war to Pakistan, a move that will potentially push the North-Western tribal region into an alliance with the Taliban. 90% of the hundreds killed in unmanned drone attacks have been civilians, yet these attacks have increased under Obama’s watch. Meanwhile, women continue to be subjected to widespread repression and violence, outside of the militarized bubble that is Kabul. And the puppet Karzai regime is powerless and corrupt, apparently capable only of rigging elections and granting legal immunity against warlords and rapists.

This is not the “good war”. It is a continuation of an illegal and unjustified invasion.

For all the recent uproar over Iran’s nuclear program, little attention has been paid to the fact that the country which first provided Tehran with nuclear equipment was the United States.

In 1967, under the “Atoms for Peace” program launched by President Eisenhower, the US sold the Shah of Iran’s government a 5-megawatt, light-water type research reactor. This small dome-shaped structure, located in the Tehran suburbs, was the foundation of Iran’s nuclear program. It remains at the center of the controversy over Iranian intentions, even today. (full article…)

The decision by the United Nations Human Rights Council to delay the vote on the findings of its report into the Gaza conflict – in line with a request by the Palestinian Authority – has shocked the Palestinian public.

Palestinian sources told Haaretz that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas made the decision to delay the vote immediately after meeting with the U.S. Consul General last Thursday, without the knowledge of the PLO leadership or the government of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, and without any consultation. (full article…)

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…)

Not all are persuaded. Glenn Greenwald, an author and a left-leaning blogger for the online magazine Salon, called the parallels with the charges that Iraq had so-called weapons of mass destruction in 2002 “substantial and disturbing.”

“The administration is making inflammatory claims about another country’s W.M.D. program and intentions without providing any evidence,” he said.

Gary Sick, an expert on Iran at Columbia University, said that ever since 1992, American officials had claimed that Iran was just a few years away from a nuclear bomb. Like Saddam Hussein, the clerical government in Iran is “despised,” he said, leading to worst-case assumptions.

“In 2002, it seemed utterly naïve to believe Saddam didn’t have a program,” Mr. Sick said. Now, the notion that Iran is not racing to build a bomb is similarly excluded from serious discussion, he said. (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…)

PA source: US to press Israel on settlements (full article…)

The New York Philharmonic scratched its trip to Cuba at the end of October because the United States government was barring a group of patrons from going along, the orchestra said on Thursday. (full article…)

In a startling shift, the Palestinian delegation to the United Nations Human Rights Council dropped its efforts to forward a report accusing Israel of possible war crimes to the Security Council, under pressure from the United States, diplomats said Thursday. (full article…)

In August the charismatic Dahlan, 47, who has worked closely with the Israelis and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, was elected to Fatah’s 18-member Central Committee, the movement’s executive body, at landmark legislative elections. (full article…)

I suppose they already forgot that this “charismatic” figure was the force behind the U.S.-backed failed coup in Gaza… not to mention that there was nothing “legislative” about the “elections”.

Time magazine observed that “his fledgling regime distinctly bore the label ‘Made in U.S.A.’ ” Always sensitive to any hint of Yankee imperialism, Latin American governments, including Communist Cuba and Chile’s right-wing military regime, sharply criticized the United States’ action and the new Panamanian government — even though some of these countries had severely castigated General Noriega. (full article…)

Ms. Rice denied a double standard. The report had a lopsided focus on Israel, which is capable of investigating possible war crimes, while Sudan is not, she said. (full article…)

Prolonged stress from the CIA’s harsh interrogations could have impaired the memories of terrorist suspects, diminishing their ability to recall and provide the detailed information the spy agency sought, according to a scientific paper published Monday. (full article…)

Western critics of America’s Afghan campaign are enraged because they have been shown to be wrong at every step: no, US forces weren’t humiliated the way the Russians had been; and yes, the air strikes did work; and no, the Northern Alliance didn’t massacre people in Kabul; and yes, the Taliban did crumble away like the hated tyrants they were, even in their southern strongholds; and no, it wasn’t that difficult to get the militants out of their cave fortresses; and yes, the various factions succeeded in putting together a new government that is surprising people by functioning pretty well. (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…)

The administration also concluded, wrongly, that obtaining an unconditional Israeli settlement freeze was an essential first step. In fact settlements are no longer a strategic obstacle to peace; as a practical matter, most of the construction is in areas that will not be part of a Palestinian state. (full article…)

This is the kind of absurd editorial that can only appear in the U.S. media. Who says that the illegally settled West Bank enclaves will remain in Israel’s hands? Who but the Israeli government? I suppose the Washington Post doesn’t mind that East Jerusalem is being depopulated of its Palestinian population as families are thrown out of houses they have lived in for fifty years. No that’s the kinds of ethnic cleansing they like.

Every single settlement is illegal, including all the building in East Jerusalem. Every new housing unit is a slap in the face of international law and to initiate peace talks while this continues is to repeat the conditions of every single episode of bilateral talks for the past 40+ years. The only way the settlements can be ignored is if the talks address borders immediately. Once the prospect of remaining under Palestinian rule dawns on the settlers, they will stop of their own accord.

President Barack Obama is considering VP Joe Biden’s idea to scale back the troop presence in Afghanistan. (full article…)

About a third of Foreign Service officers in jobs that require language skills don’t have the proficiency required to do their jobs, hurting America’s ability to advocate its interests around the world, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office.

The report, which has not yet been released, but was obtained by The Cable, spells out the consequences of having a Foreign Service that in many cases can’t communicate with local officials or populations, relies too heavily on local staff for critical functions, and can’t respond to bad press when it appears in foreign languages. (full article…)

Many elderly Las Vegas residents were alarmed and confused Wednesday after receiving a mailer with an enclosed letter signed by the Chief Medical Officer of Humana Medicare, Philip Painter, claiming that Congress and the President are considering proposals to cut “important benefits and services” of Medicare. (full article…)

First of all, I don’t think much of those theories, but I am bombarded with letters about this subject. It’s not only a huge industry but it’s kind of a fanatic industry. Many other people think I ought to change my priorities. But of the couple of hundred letters I’m getting every day, the flood that’s really abusive, which says, “It’s your responsibility to set this as your highest priority and to drop everything else,” is coming from the “9/11 truth” people. It’s almost a kind of religious fanaticism.

There are some questions you have to ask. One has to do with the physical evidence. There are the unexplained coincidences, personal accounts, and so on, which don’t amount to much. That’s found in any complex world event. With regard to the physical evidence, can you become a highly qualified civil and mechanical engineer and expert in the structure of buildings by spending a couple of hours on the Internet? If you can, we can get rid of the civil and mechanical engineering departments at MIT. Why go to the university? If you really believe any of this evidence, then there is no easy way to proceed. Go to specialists who can evaluate it. You may have found one physicist somewhere, though as far as I know no one has been willing to submit anything to a serious peer-reviewed journal. But that aside, you can go to the civil and mechanical engineering departments. Maybe the “9/11 truth movement” believes they’re all in on the conspiracy. If it’s that vast, we may as well forget it. These people claim that they’re afraid. There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s one of the safest positions to take among those who are critical of power, as anyone with experience in these matters knows. If fact, it’s treated rather tolerantly by power centers.

Which takes us to another question. Why is this discussion of 9/11 treated so tolerantly? I suspect people in positions of power like it. It’s diverting enormous amounts of energy away from the real crimes of the administration, which are far more serious. Suppose they did blow up the World Trade Center? By their standards, that’s a minor crime. Increasing the threat of nuclear war and environmental disaster is a far worse crime, which might lead to the extinction of the species. Take the invasions of Iraq and Lebanon. Or look at what they’re doing to working people in the United States. We can go on and on. They’re committing real crimes, and there is very little protest about it. One of the reasons—not the only one, of course—is that so much potential activist energy is directed into 9/11 discussions. From the point of view of power centers, that’s great. We’ll give these people exposure on C-SPAN and have their books right up front at the local bookstores. A pretty tolerant reaction. We sort of say we think it’s a bad joke, but you don’t get the kind of reaction you do when you really go after hard issues.

So yes, it’s a terrible drain of energy away from much more serious problems. And I don’t think the evidence is serious. I don’t think the people who are presenting the physical evidence are even in a position to evaluate it. These are hard technical questions. What doesn’t seem to be understood is that there’s a reason scientists do experiments. They don’t just take a videotape of what’s happening out the window. The reason is that what’s happening out the window involves so many variable that you don’t understand what you’re getting in this complex mess. You can find all kinds of unexplained coincidences, apparent violations of the laws of nature. Even with controlled experiments, there are plenty of problems. You read the letters column of the science journals, you will find countless examples. So the fact that you’re finding out this happened, that happened, and so on, doesn’t mean anything.

The “Who benefits from 9/11?” argument has little force. I think in my first interview after 9/11, I made the not very brilliant prediction that every power system in the world would immediately exploit this for their own purposes. So Russia will step up its atrocities in Chechnya, Israel will in the West Bank, Indonesia will in Aceh, China in western China. In the United States, it was exploited, as we know, but also in ways that weren’t very well advertised.

Source: Noam Chomsky, What We Say Goes: Conversations on US Power in a Changing World, (Metropolitan Books: New York, 2007), pp. 35-37.

“I think there is no doubt that in 2002, the United States had at the very least full knowledge about the coup, and could even have been directly involved,” Carter said in an interview with El Tiempo published Sunday. (full article…)

Overall whites in Louisiana can expect to outlive African Americans by more than four years. The gap is larger when considering geography and race combined. Whites in Orleans Parish outlive their African American neighbors, on average, by a full decade. African American life span in Orleans, at 69.3 years, is nearly as low as that of North Korea, and below that of Sri Lanka, Algeria, the Philippines, and many other developing countries in the same year, 2007. (full article…)

Last week, the Census Bureau released a statistical report on the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency. The numbers were brutal. On every indicator, Americans lost ground during the Bush era. The median income slumped. The poverty rate increased. The percentage of Americans without health insurance rose. (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…)

Coupled with this was a requirement for new tactics, like training more Nato troops in local languages so they would be “seen as guests of the Afghan people and their government, not an occupying army”. (full article…)

But we have a political culture which believes, literally, that the CIA must operate above and beyond the law (recall Joe Klein’s argument against torture prosecutions: CIA agents “behave extra-legally for the greater good of the nation”). Even though the American people have enacted numerous laws through their Congress which explicitly criminalize certain behavior on the part of the intelligence community (torture, warrantless eavesdropping, failing to brief Congress), there is a widespread belief that we can and must allow the CIA to commit crimes with impunity. The CIA’s personal spokesman at The Washington Post, David Ignatius, argues outright that the CIA should not be prosecuted for crimes because we want to ensure they are willing to act illegally in the future. (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 the period between Election Day last November and the end of June, the groups scheduled 70 fundraisers for members of Congress. Along the way, they made $6 million in federal campaign contributions.

Thirty-five of those 70 wingdings — half! — were thrown by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its lobbyists. And a third of the money contributed to candidates came from the American Banking Association and affiliated lobbyists. Both organizations are fighting hard to keep the government from clamping down on the financial industry. In fact, the Chamber of Commerce is planning on spending a hundred million bucks to keep the noses of federal snoops out of their business. (full article…)

In the most recent fighting, the army carried out three air raids and blew up houses in Saada city – under government control – on Friday.

About 87 people died on Wednesday in an air raid at a makeshift camp for displaced persons in Harf Sufyan in Saada.

Navi Pillay, the chief of the UN human rights commission, said in Geneva that an inquiry into the air raid should take place and called the casualty reports “deeply disturbing”. (full article…)

The two were immediately taken into custody and for four days whisked from hideout to hideout, in an effort to avoid detection. However, coalition forces were monitoring their cell-phone conversations and a helicopter-borne rescue operation was soon mounted by British commandos.

The commandos stormed the hideout and Munadi, dressed in Afghan clothes, came out shouting “Journalist, Journalist.” He was immediately shot. (full article…)

“The Israelis and the United States are close to a deal and are agreed in principle on the broad strokes, but Israel’s piece is contingent on similar gestures from the Palestinians and the Arabs. And the Palestinians are refusing to deal,” is how one source characterized the current state of play.

The drive to blame the Palestinians is already underway, with some saying that the administration let them off the hook by not requiring any confidence-building measures up front. (full article…)

Alhurra, set up under former President George W. Bush to broadcast an American perspective of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, was the subject of a joint investigation last year by ProPublica and CBS’ 60 Minutes.

The investigation and a series of ProPublica articles revealed serious staff problems, financial mismanagement and long-standing concerns inside the U.S. government and Congress regarding Alhurra’s content. Those stories led to congressional inquiries in the House and Senate. The station has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $600 million since it began broadcasting in 2004. (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…)

We have long expressed our very serious concern with the mandate that was given (to Goldstone’s team) by the Human Rights Council prior to our joining the Council, which we viewed as unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable. (full article…)

Strange, the same adjectives have been used to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Prison officers described how, after about an hour of hunting for a suitable vein, Broom helped them by turning on to his side, by moving rubber tubing along his arm and by flexing his hand and muscles. At one point, technicians found what appeared to be a suitable vein but it collapsed as they inserted a needle, apparently because of past drug use.

Broom, who was convicted of kidnapping, raping and killing 14-year-old Tryna Middleton, became so distressed that he lay on his back and covered his face with both hands. One of the execution team handed him a toilet roll to wipe away tears. (full article…)

A new report on global wealth says that Europe has overtaken the United States to become the richest region in the world. But the Americans still have more millionaires then the EU — and should you want to marry one, you might be better off in Singapore or the Middle East. (full article…)

There are about 1.4 billion Muslims in the world. Embedded withing this healthy body are, perhaps, 100,000 people who are eager and active in pursuit of the goal of killing us. Just as successful treatment of cancer requires killing of the malignant cells, we will need to kill this small minority, since we have no evidence that they can be induced to change their minds. (full article…)

Take Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the chairman of the influential Senate Finance Committee, leader of the bipartisan “Gang of Six” spearheading the Finance Committee’s healthcare negotiations, and architect of that committee’s much anticipated healthcare legislation. He’s also one of the top five recipients of health industry-related money in Congress, pocketing $2.9 million in his career. (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.“

US President Barack Obama extended the White House’s 47-year trade embargo against Cuba on Tuesday – missing an opportunity to improve the human rights situation for people on the island. (more…)

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

Ask yourself: Wouldn’t the U.S. have been safer and more secure if all the money, effort and planning had gone toward “nation-building” in America? Or do you really think we’re safer now, with an official unemployment rate of 9.7 percent, an underemployment rate of 16.8 percent, and a record 25.5 percent teen unemployment rate, with soaring healthcare costs, with vast infrastructural weaknesses and failures, and in debt up to our eyeballs, while tens of thousands of troops and massive infusions of cash are mustered ostensibly to fight a terrorist outfit that may number in the low hundreds or at most thousands, that, by all accounts, isn’t now even based in Afghanistan, and that has shown itself perfectly capable of settling into broken states like Somalia or well-functioning cities like Hamburg. (more…)

In January 2007, the country’s ruler, King Abdullah II, announced his intention to develop a peaceful nuclear program, a plan that has US backing. (more…)

After 9/11, it could all have been different, profoundly different. And if it had, there would have been no children imprisoned without charges or release dates in our gulag in Cuba; there would have been no unmanned drones slaughtering wedding parties in the rural backlands of Afghanistan or the Iraqi desert; there would have been no soldiers returning to the US with two or three limbs missing or their heads and minds grievously damaged (there were already 320,000 traumatic brain injuries to soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan by early 2008, according to the RAND Corporation); there would not have been a next round of American deaths–4,334 in Iraq, 786 in Afghanistan to date; there would have been no trillion dollars taken from constructive projects to fatten the corporations of war; no extreme corrosion of the Bill of Rights, no usurpation of powers by the executive branch. Perhaps. (more…)

A hundred yards further on, Cathy sits on a bench. “I’m exhausted,” she says. “I have no insurance, no job, no place to live.” Cathy sleeps in subway carriages or on the benches in Tompkins Square Park. She’s a bag lady now in a raincoat, with all her belongings in a shopping cart. Cathy used to be a broker at Merrill Lynch, but she never put anything aside. Now she has nothing. (more…)

There is no question that many of the detainees who have been imprisoned at Guantanamo — and still are imprisoned there — are innocent. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that they have the constitutional right to a habeas corpus hearing, federal judges in 28 out of 33 cases have found insufficient evidence to justify their detention. It takes a morally warped person not to be outraged by the imprisonment of people for years — held incommunicado and indefinitely, under brutal conditions, as Terrorists, thousands of miles away from their homes — who have done absolutely nothing wrong. And it requires an equal level of moral depravity to question the sincerity of those who object to such travesties, to attribute to opponents of preventive detention ignoble motives — as though only a desire for greater fundraising could motivate anger over the imprisonment of innocent people without charges. (more…)

France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on Tuesday. (more…)

US General Stanley McChrystal, head of the International Forces in Afghanistan (Isaf), decided to bar boozing after launching an investigation into the bombing in northern Afghanistan.

Staff at the Kabul headquarters were ‘either drunk or too hungover’ to answer his questions. (more…)

Mr Keller was not an obvious choice for the job — he spoke no Middle Eastern languages, and was not an expert on al-Qaeda or Pakistan. (more…)

Three days after the U.S. administration criticized the decision of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to authorize the construction of hundreds of new housing units in settlements, the Israel Lands Administration published tenders for the construction of 486 apartments in the neighborhood of Pisgat Ze’ev in East Jerusalem. (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…)

Pakistanis are reacting to what many here see as an “imperial” American presence, echoing Iraq and Afghanistan, with Washington dictating to the Pakistani military and the government. Polls show that Pakistanis regard the U.S., formally a close ally and the country’s biggest donor, as a hostile power. (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…)

Despite a recession that knocked down global arms sales last year, the United States expanded its role as the world’s leading weapons supplier, increasing its share to more than two-thirds of all foreign armaments deals, according to a new Congressional study.

The United States signed weapons agreements valued at $37.8 billion in 2008, or 68.4 percent of all business in the global arms bazaar, up significantly from American sales of $25.4 billion the year before. (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…)

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told Christian Zionists that U.S. policies in the Middle East must be “firmly grounded” in Judeo-Christian principles. (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…)

Fighting between Islamist militias and government-aligned forces has caused 204,000 people to flee Mogadishu since May and forced the closure of some of the Somali capital’s few health centres, the UN refugee agency said today. (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…)

A person who knows a lot about Middle East affairs and knows the persons in question, tells me that contrary what is widely perceived, Dayton hates Muhammad Dahlan and Dahlan hates Dayton. Dayton never forgave Dahlan for the performance of his gangs in Gaza against Hamas. (more…)

The English-language cousin of the Qatar based news channel Al Jazeera launched yesterday in the Washington D.C. area after signing its first major U.S. cable deal with non-commercial MHz Networks last week.

The MHz deal means 2.3 million subscribers will now have access to the channel, adding to the 140 million households currently receiving Al Jazeera English worldwide. (more…)

The United States, Mr. Biden said in an interview broadcast on ABC’s “This Week,” “cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do.” (more…)

A baker scraping by when American tanks rolled into Baghdad, Mr. Mohsin recently spent $50,000 to throw a one-night bacchanal at the exclusive Hunting Club here. When guests visit his second home, in Baghdad, he proudly shows off the two peacocks he imported from Dubai, to join a menagerie of exotic birds that he sometimes gives away to friends.

“I have four cars,” he said proudly. “The Land Cruiser cost $80,000.”

The car is parked on a street still littered with debris and lined with blast walls from the sectarian war that was fiercely fought in his neighborhood, Mansour. Fingering his gold watch — the one he is wearing costs $2,000; he reserves a $20,000 timepiece “for big parties” — Mr. Mohsin said that only in America, or an American occupation, was his story possible. (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…)

He made no mention of American troops in a nationally televised speech, even though nearly 130,000 remain in the country; most had already pulled back from Iraq’s cities before Tuesday’s deadline. The excitement, however, has rung hollow for many Iraqis, who fear that their country’s security forces are not ready to stand alone and who see the government’s claims of independence as overblown. (more…)

The Iraqis really want the U.S. occupiers to stay? Yeah, only if every poll in existence is wrong about the overwhelming desire that the U.S. get out now.