March 2010

U.S., Afghan officials hope insurgent feud signals split

by Paul Woodward 03.09.2010

McClatchy reports: Simmering divisions between rival Islamist groups erupted into open warfare in northern Afghanistan this weekend as Taliban forces battled fighters from one of their main allies, Afghan officials said Sunday. With their leader pursuing tentative peace talks with the Afghan government, more than 100 Hezb-i-Islami militants fighting the Taliban put down their weapons [...]

Read the full article →

Strong showing for Moqtada al-Sadr

by Paul Woodward 03.08.2010

Reuters reports: Supporters of a fiery anti-U.S. cleric may have staged a comeback in Iraq’s parliamentary election in Baghdad’s Sadr City slum, once a bastion of Shi’ite militants and now a bellwether of Shi’ite political sentiment. Moqtada al-Sadr, who galvanized Iraqi Shi’ites against the U.S. military after the 2003 invasion but has faded from the [...]

Read the full article →

Who would want credit for Iraq?

by Paul Woodward 03.08.2010

Daniel Larison writes: Whenever possible, I refer to the Iraq war as a war of aggression, because that is what it is and has always been. One thing that has often puzzled me about the reflex to declare victory in Iraq, as a Newsweek cover story did recently, is that I don’t know what it [...]

Read the full article →

Incompetent McCarthyism and shared beliefs

by Paul Woodward 03.08.2010

Scott Horton takes on the neocon campaign against a group of lawyers, now working for the Obama Administration, who “voluntarily represented terrorists.” …the incompetent McCarthyites haven’t done their homework. On a list of lawyers in recent government service who have served alleged terrorists, the first name might be Michael Chertoff’s. Chertoff served as counsel to [...]

Read the full article →

The Iranian riddle

by Paul Woodward 03.08.2010

Trita Parsi writes: Iran is the 21st century equivalent of 1930s Russia — a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. The Iranians haven’t stumbled upon this mystifying state coincidentally, and the enigma isn’t the result of outsiders’ failure to try to understand them. Rather, the Iranian government has a deliberate policy aimed at [...]

Read the full article →

Israel’s game of bluff

by Paul Woodward 03.08.2010

Didi Remez has translated parts of a column by Nahum Barnea that appeared in Hebrew in Yediot‘s Friday political supplement. Barnea considers the assessments by Dr. Moshe Vered who published a study last year on possible scenarios that would result from an Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Barnea goes on to say: The [...]

Read the full article →

How the war on drugs gave birth to a permanent American undercaste

by Paul Woodward 03.08.2010

At TomDispatch, Michelle Alexander writes: Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its 44th president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation’s “triumph over race.” Obama’s election has been touted as the final nail in [...]

Read the full article →

Does Obama have a vision?

by Paul Woodward 03.08.2010

At Time, Mark Halperin writes: Who would have thought that one of Barack Obama’s biggest missteps as president would be repeating some of the bad habits of George W. Bush? No single factor was more instrumental in Obama’s 2008 victory than his pledge to completely reverse the nation’s course once in the White House. Instead, [...]

Read the full article →

The theft of Africa

by Paul Woodward 03.08.2010

Rich countries, faced with the prospect of future food shortages, are buying up massive tracts of land in Ethiopia and elsewhere across the continent with little regard for the rights and needs of the indigenous populations. The Observer reports: The land rush, which is still accelerating, has been triggered by the worldwide food shortages which [...]

Read the full article →

US preparing to send Special Ops forces into Somalia

by Paul Woodward 03.08.2010

The New York Times reports: The Somali government is preparing a major offensive to take back this capital block by crumbling block, and it takes just a listen to the low growl of a small surveillance plane circling in the night sky overhead to know who is surreptitiously backing that effort. “It’s the Americans,” said [...]

Read the full article →

‘We have an American occupation and an Iranian administration’

by Paul Woodward 03.07.2010

Anthony Shadid reports from Falluja on the Iraqi elections: In this town, nicknamed the City of Mosques, the scratchy loudspeakers of muezzins that once preached resistance to the American occupation implored Sunni Arabs to defy bombs and vote Sunday. They did, in a landmark election that demonstrated how far Iraq has come and perhaps how [...]

Read the full article →

The real Ajima

by Paul Woodward 03.07.2010

Al Jazeera reports from Ajimi, the location of the Oscar-nominated film of the same name. Haaretz reports: A day before a film about crime and tension in Jaffa will compete for an Academy Award, protestors took to the streets to denounce what they see as increased police violence in Jaffa. “We are calling out, together, [...]

Read the full article →

Iraqi elections

by Paul Woodward 03.07.2010

The New York Times reported: A concerted wave of attacks struck Baghdad and other cities across the country on Sunday as Iraqis voted to elect a new parliament and possibly a new prime minister. Explosions reverberated across the capital moments before the polls opened and continued through the morning haze for the first hours of [...]

Read the full article →

There has never been an Israeli peace camp

by Paul Woodward 03.07.2010

Gideon Levy at his best: The Israeli peace camp didn’t die. It was never born in the first place. While it’s true that since the summer of 1967, several radical and brave political groups have been working against the occupation – all worthy of recognition – a large, influential peace camp has never existed here. [...]

Read the full article →

Belafonte on King and Obama

by Paul Woodward 03.06.2010

Harry Belafonte interviewed on PBS: Barack Obama is first and foremost a man. He is flawed. He has his contradictions. He has revealed those contradictions. There is a question that we have: do we get behind him and push him to become what we know he should be? Or do we lay back, watch him [...]

Read the full article →

Obama advisers set to recommend military tribunals for alleged 9/11 plotters

by Paul Woodward 03.06.2010

The Washington Post reports: President Obama’s advisers are nearing a recommendation that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, be prosecuted in a military tribunal, administration officials said, a step that would reverse Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s plan to try him in civilian court in New York City. [...]

Read the full article →

The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

by Paul Woodward 03.06.2010

In Harper’s, Scott Horton writes: When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great.” Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo Naval Base “shall be closed [...]

Read the full article →

Arctic seabed methane stores destabilizing, venting

by Paul Woodward 03.06.2010

Physorg reports: A section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas, according to the findings of an international research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov. The research results, published in [...]

Read the full article →

Rage on the Right

by Paul Woodward 03.06.2010

The Southern Law Poverty Center reports: The radical right caught fire last year, as broad-based populist anger at political, demographic and economic changes in America ignited an explosion of new extremist groups and activism across the nation. Hate groups stayed at record levels — almost 1,000 — despite the total collapse of the second largest [...]

Read the full article →

Marines face skepticism after taking Afghan town

by Paul Woodward 03.06.2010

Reuters reports: U.S. forces who pushed the Taliban out of their main stronghold in Marjah, southern Afghanistan, have found residents there deeply skeptical of the Afghan government’s promises to rebuild, a top U.S. commander said on Thursday. The concerns raised by Brigadier General Lawrence Nicholson, the Marine commander in southern Afghanistan, put a spotlight on [...]

Read the full article →

Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue

by Paul Woodward 03.05.2010

Must-read commentary from Pankaj Mishra: There were chuckles and sniggers in Qatar last month when Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, warned that a military dictatorship was imminent in Iran. Threatening America’s most intransigent adversary, Clinton seems to have been oblivious to her audience: educated Arabs in the Middle East where America’s military presence [...]

Read the full article →

Brazil rebuff for Iran sanctions drive

by Paul Woodward 03.05.2010

The Financial Times reports: Brazil delivered a wounding blow to Washington’s hopes of international consensus for sanctions on Iran on Wednesday when its president declared his opposition to such measures hours before meeting Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state. In an indication of Brazil’s growing self-confidence on the international stage – and its effort to [...]

Read the full article →

Genocide vote harms US-Turkey ties

by Paul Woodward 03.05.2010

Stephen Kinzer writes: For the US house of representatives foreign affairs committee to decide that the killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 constituted genocide, as it did Thursday by a one-vote margin, would be acceptable and even praiseworthy if it were part of a serious historical effort to review all the great atrocities [...]

Read the full article →

The new McCarthyism

by Paul Woodward 03.05.2010

In The American Prospect, Adam Serwer writes: The “Gitmo Nine” aren’t terrorists. They weren’t captured fighting for the Taliban. They’ve made no attempts to kill Americans. They haven’t declared war on the United States, nor have they joined any group that has. The “Gitmo Nine” are lawyers working in the Department of Justice who fought [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →