August 2010

Pakistan floods

by News Sources 08.14.2010

BBC News reports that Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani says 20 million people have been affected by the country’s floods, a much higher estimate than the UN’s 14 million. Share

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A campaign for war with Iran begins

by News Sources 08.13.2010

In response to Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic article, “The Point of No Return,” Trita Parsi writes in Salon: Whether characterizing it as “mainstreaming war with Iran” or “making aggression respectable,” Goldberg’s article serves to create a false narrative that claims that the two failed meetings held between the U.S. and Iran last October constitute an exhaustion [...]

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What would George Orwell say about the US withdrawal from Iraq?

by Guest Contributor 08.13.2010

By Hannah Gurman As the Second World War drew to a close, George Orwell looked back on the various prognoses of war and peace that had emerged in recent years: “All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way,” he observed. “People can foresee the future only when it coincides with [...]

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Fears of al Qaida return in Iraq as US-backed fighters defect

by News Sources 08.13.2010

The Guardian reports: Al-Qaida is attempting to make a comeback in Iraq by enticing scores of former Sunni allies to rejoin the terrorist group by paying them more than the monthly salary they currently receive from the government, two key US-backed militia leaders have told the Guardian. They said al-Qaida leaders were exploiting the imminent [...]

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Mark Engler: paying oil’s true cost

by TomDispatch 08.13.2010

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com I won’t claim it was the first time in all these months, just the first I noticed.  On Monday, my hometown paper had no mention of the Gulf of Mexico, BP, or what we’ve come to call its disastrous “spill,” though that word hardly catches the dimensions of what happened.  [...]

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What do Arabs really think about Iran?

by News Sources 08.12.2010

At Foreign Policy, Amjad Atallah writes: Ever since Iran’s revolution in 1979, Arab governments have been concerned about the possibility of the revolution being exported. The idea that millions of citizens of a state would engage in mass scale non-violent resistance against a U.S.-backed authoritarian government kept Arab leaders awake at night. The fear was [...]

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America and Iran: strikes, sanctions and scapegoats

by News Sources 08.12.2010

Gary Sick writes: For the pundits, there are only two questions about U.S.-Iran relations that are of any importance: (1) Will Israel and/or the United States attack Iran? and (2) will the new sanctions have enough bite to persuade Iran to change its nuclear policy? Despite all the printers ink spilled on these two issues, [...]

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You must do what we can’t, because if you don’t, we will

by Paul Woodward 08.11.2010

There are those who would have us believe that: [O]ne day next spring, the Israeli national-security adviser, Uzi Arad, and the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, will simultaneously telephone their counterparts at the White House and the Pentagon, to inform them that their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has just ordered roughly one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, [...]

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Stephan Salisbury: extremism at Ground Zero (again)

by TomDispatch 08.10.2010

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com Hand it to Muslim terrorists, at least when it comes to truly long-term planning and the Fourteenth Amendment — according to Texas Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert.  On the floor of the House of Representatives, he recently offered the following explanation for his desire to change that amendment, which makes anyone born in [...]

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The Israeli bastion of fear

by Paul Woodward 08.10.2010

The prefix anti- has become tarnished — no longer the signal of vital dissent. To be anti-war is to be dismissed as belonging to an ineffectual movement that paraded its political impotence until the marching lost all conviction and withered away. To be anti-American or anti-Israel is to be condemned as an enemy of civilization. [...]

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Remembering Tony Judt: 1948-2010

by Paul Woodward 08.09.2010

“The problem with Israel, in short, is not — as is sometimes suggested — that it is a European ‘enclave’ in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international [...]

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America’s wars of indifference

by Paul Woodward 08.09.2010

David Bromwich writes: Something is rotten in our democracy. Like a family where everything goes wrong and nobody says a word, we suffer a load of unasked questions that have under them still more questions. Do Americans always need a war? That is a first question. It did not seem so before 2001. And the [...]

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What happened before we left Afghanistan

by Paul Woodward 08.08.2010

“What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan” predicts the latest Time magazine cover, yet Time has not mastered a new art — taking photographs of the future. The image reflects what has happened under our watch and rather than representing the dreadful fate for Afghan women should the US and its allies prematurely relinquish control, it [...]

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Tom Engelhardt: Whose hands? Whose blood?

by TomDispatch 08.08.2010

Killing civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq By Tom Engelhardt Consider the following statement offered by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news conference last week.  He was discussing Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks as well as the person who has taken responsibility for the vast, still ongoing Afghan War document dump at that [...]

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Bill McKibben: a wilted Senate on a heating planet

by TomDispatch 08.08.2010

Where are they now?  Last winter, when record snowstorms brought life in the northeast corridor to a halt, Virginia Republicans launched a web ad, “12 inches of global warming,” and the family of Oklahoma senator and global warming “skeptic” Jim Inhofe built an igloo on the national mall, labeling it “Al Gore’s new home.”  Now, as Xtreme [...]

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New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s remarks on the proposed mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan

by Paul Woodward 08.07.2010

On Tuesday August 3 2010, Mayor Michael Bloomberg joined NYC City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and religious leaders from across New York City at an event on Governor’s Island. He spoke about the importance of religious freedom and the great tradition of tolerance and diversity that has characterized New York City since its founding. “We [...]

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Shimon Peres — king of bombast

by Paul Woodward 08.06.2010

“You write history — I have to make history,” Shimon Peres says at the end of an interview with the Israeli historian Benny Morris. At times in the interview the Israeli president almost sounds deranged. The main reason for war was that people earned their livelihood from land. People wanted either to defend their land [...]

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Iran targeted in cyber attack

by Paul Woodward 08.05.2010

Last September, Reuters reported: “Israel has been developing “cyber-war” capabilities that could disrupt Iranian industrial and military control systems. Few doubt that covert action, by Mossad agents on the ground, also features in tactics against Iran. An advantage of sabotage over an air strike may be deniability.” Now it seems, such an attack may have [...]

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U.S. military cyberwar: What’s off-limits?

by Paul Woodward 08.05.2010

CNET reports: The United States should decide on rules for attacking other nations’ networks in advance of an actual cyberwar, which could include an international agreement not to disable banks and electrical grids, the former head of the CIA and National Security Agency said Thursday. Michael Hayden, who was the principal deputy director of national [...]

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Looking back at torture

by Paul Woodward 08.04.2010

President Obama has so far refused to look back at the previous administration’s use of torture, but David Cole says: “on this issue, we cannot move forward without looking back. Unless we acknowledge that what the United States did was not just a bad idea, but illegal, we risk treating torture as simply another policy [...]

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Tree that sparked deadly border clash on Israeli side, says UN

by Paul Woodward 08.04.2010

My reference yesterday to an Israeli soldier having been on the Lebanese side of the Israel-Lebanon border turns out to have been incorrect. The Guardian reports: The tree that sparked a deadly confrontation between Israeli and Lebanese troops along the tense border between the two countries was on Israeli territory, the UN has said. Five [...]

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Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s speech delivered in Lebanon today

by News Sources 08.03.2010

The following speech by the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah was delivered today via video feed in front of a large crowd in Beirut. The translation provided below came in tweets (hence the format below) from Roqayah at iRevolt who did instant translating and tweeting while watching the broadcast. We are celebrating our victory over the [...]

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Israeli provocation on Lebanese border could trigger new war

by Paul Woodward 08.03.2010

Update below Border clashes between Israeli and Lebanese troops have left three Lebanese soldiers and a journalist dead. Lebanon’s Hezbollah TV, Al Manar, reports one high-ranking Israeli officer has been killed but this has not been confirmed by the Lebanese army or UN troops stationed in southern Lebanon. As the photo above makes clear, this [...]

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Drums of war: Israel and the “axis of resistance”

by News Sources 08.02.2010

In a new report, the International Crisis Group warns that the situation in the Levant, four years after the last war between Israel and Hezbollah, is exceptionally quiet and uniquely dangerous. Of all the explanations why calm has prevailed in the Israeli-Lebanese arena since the end of the 2006 war, the principal one also should [...]

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