December 2010

Australia does not see Iran as “rogue state”; fears Israel could trigger nuclear war

by News Sources 12.13.2010

Australia’s The Age, reports Australia’s intelligence agencies fear that Israel may launch military strikes against Iran and Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear capabilities could draw the US and Australia into a potential nuclear war in the Middle East. Australia’s peak intelligence agency has also privately undercut the hardline stance towards Tehran of the US, Israeli and [...]

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America’s alliances with Central Asia’s despots

by News Sources 12.13.2010

The Guardian reports: The post-Soviet state of Uzbekistan is a nightmarish world of “rampant corruption”, organised crime, forced labour in the cotton fields, and torture, according to the leaked cables. But the secret dispatches released by WikiLeaks reveal that the US tries to keep President Islam Karimov sweet because he allows a crucial US military [...]

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PEN International statement on WikiLeaks

by News Sources 12.13.2010

International PEN, the worldwide association of writers, has released a statement in support of WikiLeaks: PEN International champions the essential role played by freedom of expression in healthy societies and the rights of citizens to transparency, information and knowledge. The Wikileaks issue marks a significant turning point in the evolution of the media and the [...]

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Lewis Lapham: sweet celebrity

by TomDispatch 12.13.2010

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com Let’s consider for a moment the fates of two men who took unique paths in military life and whose careers were once intertwined: General David Petraeus, now our Afghan War commander, and his former subordinate General Stanley McChrystal, our former Afghan War commander before he became the first general since [...]

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The end of hypocrisy

by Paul Woodward 12.12.2010

Carne Ross has provided one of the most concise and cogent analyses of the impact of the WikiLeaks cables release and concludes that the challenge this event has thrown up can only be met with one solution: “that governments must close the divide between what they say, and what they do.” A knee-jerk response to [...]

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Talk to terrorists

by News Sources 12.12.2010

Thanassis Cambanis writes: Ronald Reagan framed the debate over whether to talk to terrorists in terms that still dominate the debate today. “America will never make concessions to terrorists. To do so would only invite more terrorism,” Reagan said in 1985. “Once we head down that path there would be no end to it, no [...]

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‘Our lives became something we’d never dreamt’: The former Israeli soldiers who have testified against army abuses

by News Sources 12.12.2010

Donald Macintyre reports: For anyone who has covered Israel, the West Bank and Gaza over the past few years, reading Occupation of the Territories, the new book from the Israeli ex-soldiers organisation Breaking the Silence, can be an eerily evocative experience. A conscript from the Givati Brigade, for example, describes how troops in the company [...]

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Republicans who excused extremism in the name of victory have unleashed a monster

by News Sources 12.12.2010

Christopher Hitchens writes: It is often in the excuses and in the apologies that one finds the real offense. Looking back on the domestic political “surge” which the populist right has been celebrating since last month, I found myself most dispirited by the manner in which the more sophisticated conservatives attempted to conjure the nasty [...]

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Embedded with the Taliban

by Paul Woodward 12.12.2010

For an American cable news organization to embed reporters with the Taliban would be a bold move. CNN isn’t bold. But on Saturday evening it took the moderately risky move of airing a Norwegian journalist’s film of life with Taliban fighters. “Some people might see this and think that you are trying to humanize this [...]

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Radical jihadism is not a mental disorder

by News Sources 12.12.2010

Stephen N. Xenakis warns that the US government is sliding in the direction of the Soviet Union when it uses psychiatrists, willing to spout pseudoscience for the purpose of identifying “enemies of the state.” The case of Omar Khadr was the first war crimes prosecution of the Obama administration, and it could set a dangerous [...]

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America: the panoptic shiver

by News Sources 12.12.2010

At Open Democracy, Paul Rogers writes: Among the most compelling nuggets of information contained in the batch of United States diplomatic documents released by WikiLeaks and published in leading international newspapers is the list of installations in more than fifty countries which the state department in Washington deems to be a US security concern. Some [...]

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Personal Democracy Forum: A symposium on WikiLeaks and internet freedom

by News Sources 12.12.2010

Watch live streaming video from pdfleaks at livestream.com Watch live streaming video from pdfleaks at livestream.com Share

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How to spot a terrorist

by Paul Woodward 12.11.2010

Eric Holder went to California to provide an update on the FBI’s terrorist training program. What he has yet to acknowledge is this: if the FBI can’t catch “terrorists” without first providing them with fake bombs, maybe the guys they’re catching aren’t really terrorists. Doesn’t the criminal process attach as much importance to means as [...]

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Whose side is Obama on?

by News Sources 12.11.2010

James Galbraith, speaking at the ADA Education Fund’s Post-election Conference at the Harvard Kennedy School, said: I want to raise a hard question — a question on which Americans are divided. It seems to me, though, we will get nowhere unless we realize where we are, what has actually happened, and what the future most [...]

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WikiLeaks and the Espionage Act

by News Sources 12.11.2010

WL Central reports: Today, Jennifer Robinson, one of the lawyers for Julian Assange, told The Guardian that the US government may be about to press charges against Julian Assange under the Espionage Act. She said that the legal team had heard from “several different US lawyers rumours that an indictment was on its way or [...]

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A message from Israeli military prison on International Human Rights Day

by News Sources 12.11.2010

Majida Abu Rahmah writes: A year ago tonight, on International Human Rights Day, our apartment in Ramallah was broken into by the Israeli military in the middle of the night and I was torn away from my wife Majida, my daughters Luma and Layan, and my son Laith, who at the time was only nine [...]

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Israel faces tougher line from EU after former heads call for Palestinian state

by News Sources 12.11.2010

The Guardian reports: Twenty-six European grandees have urged the EU to adopt a tougher stance towards Israel including taking “concrete measures” and exacting “consequences” over continued settlement building on occupied land, which they say is illegal under international law. The former EU leaders said that in the face of “the ongoing deterioration of the situation [...]

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The age of political apathy is ending

by Paul Woodward 12.10.2010

“Off with their heads,” shouted demonstrators crowding round the Rolls Royce carrying Prince Charles and his wife Camilla to a West End theater last night. Even if he didn’t fear for his life, Britain’s heir to the throne was reminded of the fate of his namesake, Charles I, last time Britons violently upturned the established [...]

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Case against Assange begins to unravel

by Paul Woodward 12.10.2010

As much as the mainstream media has willingly promoted the narrative of Julian Assange as a bad-boy rock-star type figure who has innocent groupies throwing themselves at his feet, the fact is, a rebellious enterprise such as WikiLeaks naturally attracts individuals who themselves have a rebellious independent spirit. It would seem likely that this would [...]

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A cyber shot heard round the world

by News Sources 12.10.2010

When the stalwart pillar of the establishment, the New York Times, publishes a serious report on Anonymous, it’s fitting to conclude — as does John Perry Barlow from the Electronic Frontier Foundation– that the group has indeed fired a “shot heard round the world.” They got their start years ago as cyberpranksters, an online community [...]

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From Judith Miller to Julian Assange

by News Sources 12.10.2010

Jay Rozen says: “Our press has never come to terms with the ways in which it got itself on the wrong side of secrecy as the national security state swelled in size after September 11th.” Noting that the New York Times did eventually look back at its own role in the build-up to the war [...]

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Iranians want nuclear arms, US survey finds

by News Sources 12.10.2010

Agence France Presse reports: Many Iranians are worried about international nuclear sanctions but also want the country to have atomic weapons, according to a survey by a US institute revealed Wednesday. The poll, carried out by Charney Research for the International Peace Institute, a New York-based think tank, also indicated that most Iranians voted for [...]

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Israel progresses down the path to isolation

by News Sources 12.09.2010

Peter Beinart facetiously congratulates Benjamin Netanyahu now that he’s thwarted President Obama’s Middle East peace efforts. Now all you have to worry about is…Argentina. You see, Argentina just recognized a Palestinian state on 1967 borders. Brazil did so days earlier. Uruguay and Paraguay are expected to follow suit, and then Bolivia and Ecuador. Oh, and [...]

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Putin and Lula express support for Assange

by News Sources 12.09.2010

Agence France Presse reports: Vladimir Putin on Thursday led a growing band of international leaders voicing support for WikiLeaks’ boss Julian Assange, describing his detention in Britain as “undemocratic”. The Russian prime minister’s broadside came as hackers escalated their cyber war on opponents of the whistleblower website, setting their sights on Amazon.com. “Why was Mr. [...]

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