November 2010

Tom Engelhardt: The United States of Fear

by TomDispatch 11.30.2010

The national security state cops a feel By Tom Engelhardt It’s finally coming into focus, and it’s not even a difficult equation to grasp.  It goes like this: take a country in the grips of an expanding national security state and sooner or later your “safety” will mean your humiliation, your degradation.  And by the [...]

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WikiLeaks exposes Obama’s willingness to engage Iran as disingenuous

by News Sources 11.30.2010

Christian Science Monitor reports: WikiLeaks revelations that American officials were planning to raise pressure on Iran with more sanctions and a missile defense shield – even while President Obama was making high-profile public overtures to Iran – are being seen in Tehran as validation of deep skepticism from the start about Obama’s effort. Iranians and [...]

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WikiLeaks row: China wants Korean reunification, officials confirm

by News Sources 11.30.2010

The Guardian reports: China supports the “independent and peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula” and cannot afford to give the North Korean regime the impression it has a blank cheque to act any way it wants, Chinese officials based in Europe said today. The officials, who asked not to be identified, spoke after the Guardian [...]

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WikiLeaks: good for Israel

by Paul Woodward 11.30.2010

I didn’t come up with the headline — it’s from Israel’s pro-settler Arutz Sheva news network. And as their report makes clear, this favorable review of what has been described as a diplomatic 9/11, reflects the views of the Israeli government. Just as Benjamin Netanyahu on September 11, 2001, said the attacks were a “good [...]

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Wikileaks on Israel, Iraq and the Iranian specter

by News Sources 11.30.2010

Juan Cole writes: A 2007 cable from then US ambassador to Israel to Secretary of State Condi Rice shows a) that the Israeli leadership did not want the US to withdraw from Iraq and b) that Israeli politicians think that even if Iran never used a nuclear weapon, just for it to have one would [...]

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WikiLeaks v the imperial presidency’s poodle

by News Sources 11.30.2010

Pratap Chatterjee writes: Anticipating Sunday’s release of classified US embassy cables, Harold Koh, the top lawyer to the US state department, fired off a letter to Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, on Saturday morning accusing him of having “endangered the lives of countless individuals”. Thus Koh pre-emptively made himself the figurehead for the US [...]

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How China lost patience with North Korea

by News Sources 11.29.2010

The Guardian reports: China’s willingness to accept Korean reunification, revealed in private conversations between senior Communist party officials and US and South Korean diplomats, reflects Beijing’s deep, previously concealed exasperation with its wayward ally North Korea. But the leaked US diplomatic cables suggest there is no consensus on how to proceed towards this goal, with [...]

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Wikileaks, Israel and assassins in Iran

by Paul Woodward 11.29.2010

With only 220 out of 251,287 cables released so far, who knows what surprises lie ahead, but it seems striking and noteworthy that Israel has managed to be the subject of so little attention. Considering the tensions between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government that have been so widely reported, it’s strange that in [...]

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Wikileaks fallout in the Middle East

by News Sources 11.29.2010

With one of the most significant revelations from Cablegate being the enthusiasm several Arab leaders express in favor of military strikes against Iran, it will be interesting to see what if any are the repercussions. Marc Lynch writes: The Arab media thus far is clearly struggling to figure out how to report them, something I’ll [...]

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One of Egypt’s most enthusiastic voters in Sunday’s election

by News Sources 11.29.2010

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Wikileaks reveal Palestinian Authority’s complicity in the war on Gaza

by Paul Woodward 11.29.2010

“Israel is not the center of international attention,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asserted shortly before the Wikileaks released a cache of 250,000 American diplomatic cables. If he was confident that that was the case, why would Bibi draw attention to the fact? Perhaps because he knew that some of the leaks would serve his interests [...]

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Transparency will be the first casualty of the latest WikiLeaks revelations

by News Sources 11.28.2010

Christopher Dickey writes: The first and most lasting casualty of this massive avalanche of documents classified “confidential,” “secret” and “noforn” (not for foreign governments to see) is going to be precisely the “transparency” that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says he advocates. “Transparent government tends to produce just government,” he opined in July after an earlier [...]

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US diplomats spied on UN leadership

by News Sources 11.28.2010

The Guardian reports: Washington is running a secret intelligence campaign targeted at the leadership of the United Nations, including the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon and the permanent security council representatives from China, Russia, France and the UK. A classified directive which appears to blur the line between diplomacy and spying was issued to US diplomats [...]

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The FBI successfully thwarts its own terrorist plot

by News Sources 11.28.2010

Glenn Greenwald writes: The FBI is obviously quite pleased with itself over its arrest of a 19-year-old Somali-American, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, who — with months of encouragement, support and money from the FBI’s own undercover agents — allegedly attempted to detonate a bomb at a crowded Christmas event in Portland, Oregon. Media accounts are almost [...]

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Anarchism without anarchism: searching for progressive politics

by News Sources 11.28.2010

Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and now 80, demonstrates it’s never too late in life to start a blog. In his latest post, he says “I wanted to introduce a perspective about progressive politics, and citizen engagement, at a time of fallen hopes.” Recent explorations of the anarchist heritage are [...]

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Maliki confirms US troops must leave Iraq by end of 2011

by News Sources 11.28.2010

The Associated Press reports: Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Saturday that an agreement requiring U.S. troops to leave by the end of 2011 will stand because Iraqi forces are capable of taking care of the country’s security. The comments are his first on the subject since being tasked with forming a new government after nearly [...]

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Israel to build internment camp for African refugees

by News Sources 11.28.2010

Al Jazeera reports that Israel’s cabinet has voted to create a detention center in the Negev desert to house thousands of illegal immigrants who arrive each year, mostly from Africa. Israeli officials have not said how many migrants already in Israel would be sent to the facility, which is expected to be built at or [...]

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North Korea’s military-first paradigm

by News Sources 11.27.2010

In a presentation to the World Affairs Council in San Francisco earlier this year, BR Myers spoke about the way North Koreans think of themselves and how their image of their own racial purity shapes their view of the world. While Kim Il-sung’s legitimacy had rested on two pillars: economic success and military strength, Kim [...]

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How to talk to the Taliban

by News Sources 11.27.2010

The intrepid Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, in his most recent series of reports from Afghanistan, describes his meeting with Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, who spent three years from 2002 in Guantánamo and who, until July this year, was on the UN list of known terrorists. Zaeef is now a prolific writer and [...]

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The dominant culture is killing the planet

by News Sources 11.27.2010

Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef and poet-philosopher of the ecological movement, Derrick Jensen on Democracy Now! Share

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America the material

by News Sources 11.27.2010

At truthdig, Nomi Prins reviews A Question of Values, by Morris Berman: A Question of Values is an alternately sobering and inspiring collection of essays by noted historian and cultural critic Morris Berman. Berman pulls no punches in laying bare the truths about who we are, not just as a nation, but also as individuals [...]

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Nature doesn’t do bailouts

by News Sources 11.27.2010

Johann Hari writes: Why are the world’s governments bothering? Why are they jetting to Cancun next week to discuss what to do now about global warming? The vogue has passed. The fad has faded. Global warming is yesterday’s apocalypse. Didn’t somebody leak an email that showed it was all made up? Doesn’t it sometimes snow [...]

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Obama’s national security state

by News Sources 11.26.2010

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and adjunct professor of law at Columbia University Law School, interviewed by International Socialist Revew: ISR: Let’s start with the Obama administration’s policies on habeas corpus and on torture. As a presidential candidate, Obama said he would close Guantánamo, said he believed in habeas corpus [...]

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The misunderestimation of Sarah Palin

by News Sources 11.26.2010

In The Nation, Melissa Harris-Perry writes: I assigned Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue in my course on women in contemporary US media and politics. I spent the week walking around town, riding the train and dashing through airports with the book tucked under my arm. “Isn’t she awesome?” gushed a waitress in a New Jersey restaurant. [...]

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