September 2010

Preemptive strikes or preemptive revenge in Waziristan?

by Paul Woodward 09.30.2010

Newsweek reports: For weeks now, as missiles from American drones have snuffed out their leaders and terrorized their recruits in the remote mountains of Pakistan’s North Waziristan area, Al Qaeda fighters have kept their spirits up by telling each other they were about to have their revenge. “It’s like they’ve just been waiting for news, [...]

Read the full article →

Robert Wright’s bright idea

by Paul Woodward 09.30.2010

Robert Wright has discovered a third way to Middle East peace. There’s always something seductive about a third way — the way between extremes; the way free of dogma traversed by pragmatists with flexible minds. Wright’s third way breaks the impasse on the road to a two-state solution by co-opting the one-state solution as a [...]

Read the full article →

Obamanation by Lowkey

by News Sources 09.30.2010

Lowkey, a 24-year-old British musician, poet, playwright and political activist of English and Iraqi descent, in an interview on RT News, describes “Obamanation” by saying: It was an examination of America’s role in the world. The main purpose of the song was to draw the American people’s attention to the way in which they are [...]

Read the full article →

Iran’s blogfather: 19 years in jail for speaking his mind

by Paul Woodward 09.29.2010

For anyone blogging in the US or most other democratic countries, it’s easy to take freedom of speech for granted. The case of Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian-Canadian blogger who was just sentenced to 19 years in prison, is a salutary reminder of the dangers individuals face when simply voicing their thoughts in a country like [...]

Read the full article →

Does every disaster present an American diplomatic opportunity?

by Paul Woodward 09.29.2010

Did the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius really travel all the way to Pir Sabak, west of Islamabad in flood-devastated Pakistan, just to ask the villagers there what they think of America? When I arrived, villagers were erecting a big tent to serve as a mosque — even before they had built a school for their [...]

Read the full article →

Military overstretch means lives lost

by News Sources 09.29.2010

(Sebastian Errazuriz) Share

Read the full article →

Breaking the siege on Gaza

by News Sources 09.29.2010

The Viva Palestina Convoy 5 is now crossing Turkey. Follow it on Twitter. Share

Read the full article →

Israel adopts non-violence with tasers and insults to a Holocaust survivor

by Paul Woodward 09.28.2010

If many Israelis thought the approach of the Mavi Marmara flotilla looked like an imminent attack by a Turkish armada, a British-flagged catamaran carrying nine Jewish activists on their way to Gaza surely posed no threat to the Jewish state — or did it? The IDF couldn’t take any chances and so as the Irene [...]

Read the full article →

“Who did we get today?”

by Paul Woodward 09.28.2010

Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, reveals that the White House was so enamored with the CIA’s drone missile campaign in Pakistan, that chief of staff Rahm Emanuel would regularly call the CIA director, Leon Panetta, asking, “Who did we get today?” Emanuel may have been posing the question because, like President Obama, he shares [...]

Read the full article →

An interview with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal

by News Sources 09.28.2010

Sharmine Narwani interviews Hamas political bureau chief, Khaled Meshaal (part two): Palestinian resistance group Hamas has beaten some unusual odds to survive today: Israel’s unlawful siege of Gaza has crippled the coastal strip’s economy and left Hamas scrambling to govern a restless population living under increasingly desperate conditions. Its officials and members are targeted by [...]

Read the full article →

Andrew Bacevich: the Washington gossip machine

by TomDispatch 09.28.2010

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com We know the endpoint of the story: another bestseller for Bob Woodward, in this case about a president sandbagged by his own high command and administration officials at one another’s throats over an inherited war gone wrong.  But where did the story actually begin?  Well, here’s the strange thing: in [...]

Read the full article →

20 per cent of US soldiers returning from Iraq suffer from post traumatic stress disorder

by News Sources 09.28.2010

Channel 4 News (UK) reports: America’s decade long “war on terror” has been deployment heavy, with little time at home in between. That experience is translating into some worrying figures at America’s largest military base, Fort Hood, in Texas – home to 60,000 troops, one tenth of the US army. Channel 4 News was given [...]

Read the full article →

Dilip Hiro: the waning of America

by TomDispatch 09.27.2010

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com This has been the week of American decline at TomDispatch.  On Sunday, Michael Klare considered that decline in the context of the rise of China as an energy superpower.  I gave a muted cheer-and-a-half for it on Tuesday.  Today, Dilip Hiro, who has been following the subject for this site, lays out what our [...]

Read the full article →

Expanding secrecy and diminishing privacy in Obama’s America

by Paul Woodward 09.27.2010

The US government might not have enough evidence to issue an arrest warrant for a US citizen but it claims the right to kill such a person and to keep secret its reasons for doing so. The U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi is now on the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command capture-or-kill list of suspected [...]

Read the full article →

Iran confirms Stuxnet found at Bushehr nuclear power plant

by Paul Woodward 09.26.2010

An AFP report earlier today reveals that the Stuxnet malware has been found at Iran’s nuclear power plant at Bushehr. (All the blockquotes below are from the AFP report.) Iranian officials confirm that 30,000 industrial computers in Iran have been hit by Stuxnet yet deny that Bushehr was among those infected. That might be what [...]

Read the full article →

Bush White House security adviser: Israel likely source of cyber attack on Iran

by Paul Woodward 09.25.2010

(Updated below) In an interview on Bloomberg TV, Richard Falkenrath suggested that Israel is the most likely source of the Stuxnet malware which seems designed to cripple industrial facilities in Iran. Falkenrath is currently the Deputy Commissioner of Counter-Terrorism for the NYPD and held several positions in the George W Bush White House including Deputy [...]

Read the full article →

The Siddiqui sentence: 86 years for pointing a weapon

by Paul Woodward 09.24.2010

The details of a bizarre incident at an Afghan National Police facility in Ghazni, eastern Afghanistan, on July 18, 2008, are still in dispute. Even so, the woman at the center of the story will probably spend the rest of her life in jail. Without any evidence being produced that she had fired a shot [...]

Read the full article →

The myth of Israeli democracy

by News Sources 09.24.2010

Johann Hari interviews Gideon Levy: “the most hated man in Israel — and perhaps the most heroic.” Any conversation about the region is now dominated by a string of propaganda myths, [Levy] says, and perhaps the most basic is the belief that Israel is a democracy. “Today we have three kinds of people living under [...]

Read the full article →

Beyond the brink of a diplomatic fiasco

by Paul Woodward 09.24.2010

After coming away from a dinner hosted by American Jewish leaders for Mahmoud Abbas, Roger Cohen comes away “convinced the United States is on the brink of a diplomatic fiasco.” Less than a month after President Obama put the imprimatur of a White House ceremony on renewed Israeli-Palestinian talks, the negotiations are close to breakdown. [...]

Read the full article →

Stuxnet: the Trinity test of cyberwarfare

by Paul Woodward 09.23.2010

On August 5, I reported on the strong evidence that Iran had become the target of a state-sponsored cyber attack. At that point it was already understood that the Stuxnet computer worm was almost certainly targeting Iran since that was the location of 60% of the computer systems affected. Moreover, since the worm targets Siemens [...]

Read the full article →

What if peace talks “succeed?”

by News Sources 09.22.2010

At Al Shabaka, Nadia Hijab writes: Many commentators expect the direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians to fail. But there is a much worse scenario: What if they “succeed?” The United States appears determined to push for a framework agreement within a year and both Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas, President of [...]

Read the full article →

Terrorist group gets support from US Congress

by News Sources 09.22.2010

At Foreign Policy, Patrick Disney writes: It’s been over two months since the toughest Iran sanctions ever approved by Congress were signed into law, three months since the UN’s latest resolution, and 15 months since Iran’s post-election demonstrations began. Despite all of this, Iran’s clerical government is not crumbling, nor has Iran shown any sign [...]

Read the full article →

Toronto-based blogger faces execution in Iran

by News Sources 09.22.2010

The Toronto Star reports: The strange saga of a Toronto-based blogger jailed in Iran on propaganda charges took an alarming twist Tuesday after his supporters said prosecutors requested the death penalty. Hossein Derakhshan is known as the Iranian “blogfather” for launching the dissident Persian blogosphere — an act of defiance he committed from Toronto, where [...]

Read the full article →

Obama’s war of political necessity

by Paul Woodward 09.22.2010

Candor cost Gen Stanley McChrystal his job as US commander in Afghanistan, while President Obama was credited with a political masterstroke — replacing the general with a loose tongue with a general with a golden tongue. But maybe Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, would not be treated as a source of revelations if more [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries