August 2010

A ruined country

by News Sources 08.31.2010

Anthony Shadid reports on Iraq’s dead who still have no names. In a pastel-colored room at the Baghdad morgue known simply as the Missing, where faces of the thousands of unidentified dead of this war are projected onto four screens, Hamid Jassem came on a Sunday searching for answers. In a blue plastic chair, he [...]

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The Israeli consensus: Palestinians are inferior

by Paul Woodward 08.31.2010

Update below Israelis might argue about whether the settlements are going to destroy Zionism or help it survive; they differ much less when it comes to their views about Palestinians. Gadi Taub is ringing the now familiar alarm bell that without a swift end to the occupation, Zionism itself will be in jeopardy. Salvation depends [...]

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Treatment for PTSD may be killing veterans

by News Sources 08.31.2010

Associated Press reports: Andrew White returned from a nine-month tour in Iraq beset with signs of post-traumatic stress disorder: insomnia, nightmares, constant restlessness. Doctors tried to ease his symptoms using three psychiatric drugs, including a potent anti-psychotic called Seroquel. Thousands of soldiers suffering from PTSD have received the same medication over the last nine years, [...]

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Mosque opponents help the Taliban

by News Sources 08.30.2010

Newsweek reports: Taliban officials know it’s sacrilegious to hope a mosque will not be built, but that’s exactly what they’re wishing for: the success of the fiery campaign to block the proposed Islamic cultural center and prayer room near the site of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan. “By preventing this mosque from being built, [...]

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How to kill gentiles and influence people: Israeli rabbis defend book’s shocking religious defense of killing non-Jews

by News Sources 08.30.2010

Max Blumenthal reports: When I went into the Jewish religious book emporium, Pomeranz, in central Jerusalem to inquire about the availability of a book called Torat Ha’Melech, or the King’s Torah, a commotion immediately ensued. “Are you sure you want it?” the owner, M. Pomeranz, asked me half-jokingly. “The Shabak [Israel's internal security service] is [...]

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Gideon Levy in conversation with Jon Snow

by News Sources 08.30.2010

Gideon Levy in conversation with Jon Snow from Palestine Campaign UK on Vimeo. Amnesty International UK’s Human Rights Action Center, London, Tuesday August 24, 2010. (H/t Ann El Khoury.) Share

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Al-Qaida in Yemen: Poverty, corruption and an army of jihadis willing to fight

by News Sources 08.30.2010

In a two-part series, The Guardian‘s intrepid Ghaith Abdul-Ahad reports from Yemen: With its conservative Islam, ragged mountains, unruly tribes and problems of illiteracy, unemployment and extreme poverty, Yemen has been dubbed the new Afghanistan by security experts. The Guardian spent two months in the country, travelling to the tribal regions of Abyan and Shabwa, [...]

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Saudi Arabia: the end of progress without change

by News Sources 08.30.2010

A reader alerted me to a speech Chas Freeman gave earlier this year in a noble effort to educate fellow Americans on the little understood nation of Saudi Arabia (where Freeman served as US ambassador from 1989 to 1992). I have been asked to speak to you about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This is [...]

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How Arabs view the anti-mosque movement

by News Sources 08.29.2010

Marc Lynch writes: Two recent arguments about the impact of the rising anti-Islam trend in the U.S. — from the Stupid!Storm around the Manhattan mosque to the lunacy of “national burn a Quran day” — on the Arab world strike me as not quite right. Last week, Bill Kristol cited the translation of a column [...]

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Pastor’s plan to burn Koran fuels tensions

by News Sources 08.29.2010

The New York Times reports: If building an Islamic center near ground zero amounts to the epitome of Muslim insensitivity, as critics of the project have claimed, what should the world make of Terry Jones, the evangelical pastor here who plans to memorialize the Sept. 11 attacks with a bonfire of Korans? Mr. Jones, 58, [...]

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How 30 million DVDs sent in 2008 election fuel the anti-mosque debate today

by News Sources 08.29.2010

At TPMMuckraker, Rachel Slajda reports: In the last weeks before the 2008 elections, an organization called the Clarion Fund spent some $16 million to reprint and distribute 28 million copies of their 2005 film about radical Islam and terrorist groups. “Obsession” was inserted into newspapers — and packaged with scary photos of scarf-clad men — [...]

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For critics of Islam,’sharia’ becomes shorthand for extremism

by News Sources 08.29.2010

The Washington Post reports: Protesters of the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero waved signs there Sunday with a single word: sharia. Their reference to Islam’s guiding principles has become a rallying cry for those critical of Islam, who use the word to conjure images of public stonings and other extreme forms of punishment in [...]

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Pakistan’s misery shows no sign of abating

by News Sources 08.29.2010

At The Atlantic, Max Fisher looks at five long-term effects of the Pakistan floods: After weeks of flooding in Pakistan displaced two million people and left more than 10 million at risk of disease outbreak because they lack access to clean water, renewed flooding in Pakistan has displaced an additional one million people over the [...]

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CIA making secret payments to members of Karzai administration

by News Sources 08.28.2010

The Washington Post reports: The CIA is making secret payments to multiple members of President Hamid Karzai’s administration, in part to maintain sources of information in a government in which the Afghan leader is often seen as having a limited grasp of developments, according to current and former U.S. officials. The payments are long-standing in [...]

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Beirut in Baghdad: Is the ‘Lebanonization’ of Iraq complete?

by News Sources 08.28.2010

At Foreign Policy, Lara Setrakian writes: Four years after a flurry of predictions about the “Lebanonization” of Iraq, they may be coming true. “Lebanonization” was a derogatory term, a hint at imminent civil war, political deadlock, Iran’s hand in local militias and on many domestic levers. The columns and commentary on Iraq’s “Lebanonization” issued a [...]

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Turkey’s search for regional power

by News Sources 08.28.2010

At Middle East Report, Yüksel Taşkın from Marmara University in Istanbul writes: Under the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey is carving out a greater role for itself in Middle Eastern affairs. Since 2008, Turkey has sought the role of Middle East intermediary in trying to broker a peace agreement between Israel and [...]

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The 9/11 hijackers now defending Ground Zero

by Paul Woodward 08.27.2010

The opponents of Park51, the so-called “Ground Zero mosque,” have decided that the litmus test for identifying “good Muslims” is to ask them whether they regard Hamas as a terrorist organization. Andy McCarthy, one of the lead knights in the crusade to stop “the Islamization of America,” strikes the latest blow — this time against [...]

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Andrew Bacevich: how Washington rules

by TomDispatch 08.26.2010

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com The unmaking of a company man An education begun in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate By Andrew Bacevich Worldly ambition inhibits true learning. Ask me. I know. A young man in a hurry is nearly uneducable: He knows what he wants and where he’s headed; when it comes to [...]

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Wikileaks — short on intelligence

by Paul Woodward 08.26.2010

Maybe Wikileaks has come to the cynical conclusion that in the contemporary media environment the headline is more important than the story. CIA Red Cell Memorandum on United States “exporting terrorism” That sounds like damning material. Plans to insert US-trained terrorists into Iran or Venezuela perhaps? Is Wikileaks exposing yet more dirty secrets from the [...]

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CIA wants to cover up US war crimes in Yemen

by Paul Woodward 08.25.2010

A missile strike on December 17 in Yemen last year that killed 41 people including 21 children and 14 women was most likely the result of a US cruise missile strike — an opening shot in a US military campaign that began without notice and has never been officially confirmed. Amnesty International says it has [...]

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How Pakistan shut down Afghan-Taliban peace talks

by Paul Woodward 08.25.2010

In the New York Times, Dexter Filkins reports: When American and Pakistani agents captured Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s operational commander, in the chaotic port city of Karachi last January, both countries hailed the arrest as a breakthrough in their often difficult partnership in fighting terrorism. But the arrest of Mr. Baradar, the second-ranking Taliban [...]

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Liberal defenders of “mosque” get it wrong

by News Sources 08.24.2010

Aisha Ghani points out that much of the liberal defense of Park51 requires that the center be shown as presenting a sanitized form of Islam. [I]t is clear that the kindergarten logic of “hear no evil, see no evil” is being utilized in order to sway public opinion in favor of the Center, but while [...]

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When misanthropy and philanthropy go hand in hand

by Paul Woodward 08.24.2010

In a society that trumpets its faith in equal opportunity, freedom and the power of the people — government of the people, by the people and for the people, and all that — it’s ironic that again and again, we discover that some of the most powerful people in America are men (invariably men) who [...]

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Tony Karon: the bomb-Iran debate from hell

by TomDispatch 08.24.2010

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com For Star Trek fans, the news is grim.  Some set of maniacs on planet Earth is ready to take all the pleasure out of that low-budget TV show and its ensuing set of big-budget movies.  They are actually planning someday to manufacture phasers, ones large enough to vaporize incoming missiles and others small [...]

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