The Gaza bombshell
By David Rose, Vanity Fair, April, 2008
Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.

Some sources call the scheme “Iran-contra 2.0,” recalling that Abrams was convicted (and later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress during the original Iran-contra scandal under President Reagan. There are echoes of other past misadventures as well: the C.I.A.’s 1953 ouster of an elected prime minister in Iran, which set the stage for the 1979 Islamic revolution there; the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which gave Fidel Castro an excuse to solidify his hold on Cuba; and the contemporary tragedy in Iraq.

Good morning, Hamas
By Uri Avnery, Rootless Cosmopolitan, March 2, 2008
But how can one reach a settlement with an organization that declares that it will never recognize Israel and whose charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state?

All this matter of “recognition” is nonsense, a pretext for avoiding a dialogue. We do not need “recognition” from anybody. When the United States started a dialogue with Vietnam, it did not demand to be recognized as an Anglo-Saxon, Christian and capitalist state.

If A signs an agreement with B, it means that A recognizes B. All the rest is hogwash.

And in the same matter: The fuss over the Hamas charter is reminiscent of the ruckus about the PLO charter, in its time. That was a quite unimportant document, which was used by our representatives for years as an excuse to refuse to talk with the PLO. Heaven and earth were moved to compel the PLO to annul it. Who remembers that today? The acts of today and tomorrow are important, the papers of yesterday are not.

Truce or bloodbath
By Azzam Tamimi, The Guardian, March 3, 2008
A recent poll published in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz suggested that 64% of Israelis favoured a negotiated truce with Hamas. But in the past few days, a military onslaught that has so far claimed more than a hundred Palestinian lives, mostly women and children, has made it clear that the Israeli leadership is not interested in any peaceful exit from the current predicament.

The Ha’aretz poll may point to a lack of confidence in the government’s ability to settle its problem with Gaza through the use of force, and vindicate those within the military and intelligence community who have been advising the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert to talk to Hamas. A truce as once proposed by Giora Eiland, who served as national security adviser to the former prime minister Ariel Sharon, would entail a reasonable exchange of prisoners and a lifting of sanctions in exchange for a cessation of all hostilities between the two sides. Hamas would, in principle, have agreed to negotiate a truce along these terms. But it seems that Olmert’s cabinet has not given up on the idea of bringing Hamas to its knees or finishing it off altogether.

Israel can either reoccupy Gaza or talk with Hamas; there’s no other way
By Nahum Barnea, Ynet, March 2, 2008
Just like Hizbullah did on the fourth day of the war in the north, Hamas is now asking, implicitly if not explicitly, for a ceasefire.

In Hamas’ view, it achieved everything it could get: It proved its stamina, the ability to launch rockets, and the ability to fight. The time has come to rehabilitate and rearm.

In July 2006, the government insisted on ignoring the requests for a ceasefire and continuing the fighting. That was a tragic mistake. Yet Lebanon is one thing and Gaza is another thing. Israel’s dilemma vis-à-vis Hamas is fundamentally different than the dilemma it was facing vis-à-vis Hizbullah.

The government of Israel has been postponing the decision on how to handle the Hamas regime in Gaza for eight and a half bloody months.

The time has come to decide.

Hamas wants lull in Gaza, but only on its own terms
By Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz, March 3, 2008
The prevailing opinion in the government and Israel Defense Forces leadership on Sunday was that Hamas wants to end the current round of fighting with Israel. The Palestinians, it is thought, have suffered a nearly intolerable amount of casualties this past week and are looking for a way out of the hostilities.

But it appears that Israel forgot to take into consideration Hamas’ military wing, whose operatives have continued to launch Qassam and Grad Katyusha rockets on the western and northern Negev.

Sunday’s fighting was indeed more limited than the blood-drenched violence on Saturday. But some 40 rockets in one day, in addition to >12 Palestinian fatalities, cannot be considered a return to normal. In principle, the Israeli view is logical: Hamas is indeed interested in a lull. But at least for the meantime, despite the pressure being exerted by the IDF, the organization is prepared to agree to a cessation of hostility only on its own terms – after it proves that it can withstand Israel’s steamroller.

The ‘laptop of mass destruction’
By Gareth Porter, Asia Times, March 4, 2008
The George W Bush administration has long pushed the “laptop documents” – 1,000 pages of technical documents supposedly from a stolen Iranian laptop – as hard evidence of Iranian intentions to build a nuclear weapon. Now charges based on those documents pose the only remaining obstacles to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declaring that Iran has resolved all unanswered questions about its nuclear program.

But those documents have also been regarded with great suspicion by US and foreign analysts. German officials identified the source of the laptop documents in November 2004 as the Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK), which along with its political arm, the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), is listed by the US State Department as a terrorist organization.

There are some indications, moreover, that the MEK obtained the documents not from an Iranian source but from Israel’s Mossad.

A solution for the US–Iran nuclear standoff
By William Luers, Thomas R. Pickering, and Jim Walsh, New York Review of Books, March 20, 2008
The recent National Intelligence Estimate’s conclusion that Tehran stopped its efforts to develop nuclear weapons in 2003, together with the significant drop in Iranian activity in Iraq, has created favorable conditions for the US to hold direct talks with Iran on its nuclear program. The Bush administration should act on this opportunity, if for no other reason than that its current position is growing weaker, and without such an initiative, Iran will continue its efforts to produce nuclear fuel that might, in the future, be used to build nuclear weapons.

Currently, Iran has approximately three thousand centrifuges, which it has used to produce small test batches of uranium that has been enriched to a low level (which cannot be used for nuclear weapons). Until now, Iranian engineers have not successfully operated a centrifuge cascade (a collection of centrifuges working together) at full capacity—which, as a practical matter, would be needed to enrich nuclear fuel to the level necessary either to establish an effective nuclear energy program or to manufacture nuclear weapons. But the Iranian government has declared its ambition to build more than 50,000 centrifuges, and recent reports also suggest that Tehran is testing a modified “P-2” centrifuge, a more advanced version of its existing centrifuge technology, which can produce a larger volume of enriched uranium.

We propose that Iran’s efforts to produce enriched uranium and other related nuclear activities be conducted on a multilateral basis, that is to say jointly managed and operated on Iranian soil by a consortium including Iran and other governments. This proposal provides a realistic, workable solution to the US–Iranian nuclear standoff. Turning Iran’s sensitive nuclear activities into a multinational program will reduce the risk of proliferation and create the basis for a broader discussion not only of our disagreements but of our common interests as well.

Speaking well and doing great
By Michael Kazin, Washington Post, March 2, 2008

Must a president be eloquent to be successful?

That question has sparked a heated quarrel between the campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. The senator from New York stresses “results, not rhetoric,” while her rival contends that a leader has to inspire Americans in order to produce “a new majority who can lead this nation out of a long political darkness.”

In politics as in poker, each candidate plays his or her strongest cards and suspects the opponent of bluffing. Yet the importance of this question shouldn’t be lost amid the clamor of a hard-fought campaign. Political oratory is an ancient craft. In the nearly 2,400 years since Plato defined rhetoric as “winning the soul through discourse,” effective speechmaking has been integral to the pursuit and the wielding of power. And the brief but contentious history of modern U.S. politics suggests that Obama has the better argument.

Barnstorming Obama plans to pick Republicans for cabinet
As Barack Obama enters the final stages of the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination, he is preparing to detach the core voters of John McCain, the likely Republican nominee, with the same ruthless determination with which he has peeled off Hillary Clinton’s supporters. The scene is set for a tussle between the two candidates for the support of some of the sharpest and most independent minds in politics. Obama is hoping to appoint cross-party figures to his cabinet such as Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator for Nebraska and an opponent of the Iraq war, and Richard Lugar, leader of the Republicans on the Senate foreign relations committee.

McCain channels his Inner Hillary
Frank Rich – What repeatedly goes unrecognized by all of Mr. Obama’s opponents is that his political Kryptonite is the patriotism he offers in lieu of theirs. His upbeat notion of a yes-we-can national mobilization for the common good, however saccharine, speaks to the pride and idealism of Americans who are bone-weary of a patriotism defined exclusively by flag lapel pins, the fear of terrorism and the prospect of perpetual war.

Islamophobia: ‘She wasn’t dressed right’
The Sept. 11 attacks, the Iraq war and suicide bombings worldwide have changed not only the way we live but the way we look at those around us, especially Muslims. “Islamophobia” has entered the American vernacular, and the anti-Muslim attitudes and prejudice it describes remain common. But what if you witnessed “Islamophobia” in action and saw someone being victimized because of someone else’s prejudices? What would you do?

How Hollywood learned to stop worrying and love the (ticking) bomb
Scott Horton – …one of the most pervasive memes of our modern political experience has been the notion of the “liberal media,” namely that key figures in broadcast and print media are more liberal than the average American, and that news and entertainment reflect their “liberal” bias. The torture issue provides an interesting opportunity to test this thesis. My view is that the Administration has had tremendous impact on coverage of the issue. It was able to transform well-settled media views. There are two aspects to this industry that I want to address today—first, news and second entertainment, though there is a rather nebulous middle ground of infotainment. But I want to come to a focus on the entertainment side, where the most serious issues exist.

A card-carrying civil libertarian
Jeffrey Rosen – If Barack Obama wins in November, we could have not only our first president who is an African-American, but also our first president who is a civil libertarian. Throughout his career, Mr. Obama has been more consistent than Hillary Clinton on issues from the Patriot Act to bans on flag burning. At the same time, he has reached out to Republicans and independents to build support for his views. Mrs. Clinton, by contrast, has embraced some of the instrumental tacking of Bill Clinton, whose presidency disappointed liberal and conservative civil libertarians on issue after issue.

One per cent of Americans now in jail
They used to call it the land of the free, but a new report shows that the United States is nowadays more a nation of the incarcerated. For the first time in history, more than 1 per cent of the US adult population is now behind bars. For minority populations, the rates of imprisonment are much higher.

Hizbullah slams deployment of US warships off coast
A US deployment of warships off the coast of Lebanon further sharpened tensions in the crisis-plagued country on Friday, as Hizbullah condemned the move and the Lebanese government said it did not ask for the ships to be sent. Hizbullah on Friday denounced Washington’s dispatch of the USS Cole and two other vessels to waters off Lebanon as military interference.

Hamas warns Israel not to invade Gaza
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh emerged from weeks of hiding Friday to warn Israeli officials against an anticipated large-scale offensive to uproot the militant Islamic group from the Gaza Strip. “I tell the leaders of the occupation: This round will end in terrible failure just like all the other rounds failed,” Haniyeh said at a mosque near his home in a Gaza City refugee camp.

Hamas’ next move will be to avenge Gaza deaths
It is a mistake for anyone in Israel to think that the high price that the Gaza Strip is paying will undermine Palestinian civilians’s support for the Hamas government. At least for the moment, the operation’s impact is the opposite. The Gaza residents who spoke Saturday with Haaretz expressed their absolute support for Hamas and its activities. Munir, a former officer in the Fatah security forces, is not a big fan of Hamas. But Saturday, after the killing of civilians in the IDF operation, he said: “All of Gaza has become Hamas. We will all fight Israel. If the IDF moves deep into the Gaza Strip, it should expect shooting from every home, even if it is populated [with civilians].”

Musharraf down but not out — and why
With his opponents openly asking him to step down and even some well-wishers suggesting a kind of ‘graceful exit’, President Musharraf may well be under tremendous pressure. Yet signals emanating from the president’s camp indicate that despite the heavy odds, he is determined not to throw in the towel — at least not in the initial few rounds.

Man acquitted in terror case faces deportation
The case of the “Liberty City Seven” stymied jurors. After a three-month trial late last year, they deadlocked on nearly all of the charges regarding the purported plot by several men to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. The one thing jurors could agree upon, however, was that one of the men, Lyglenson Lemorin, 33, was not guilty. “I was excited,” Lemorin said of his reaction on the December day that the verdict was announced. “I wanted to see my family.” Yet more than two months after his acquittal on charges of supporting terrorism, Lemorin remains incarcerated, and U.S. immigration officials are moving to deport him to Haiti, which he left more than 20 years ago. Officials are asking an administrative judge to order his deportation based on the same charges that the jury dismissed.

The three trillion dollar War: Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard economist Linda Bilmes on the true cost of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq
Democracy Now! interview.

Economist Stiglitz says Iraq war costs may reach $5 trillion
Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz, author of a new book that claims the Iraq war will cost the U.S. more than $3 trillion, said the final tally is likely to climb much higher than that. “It’s much more like five trillion,” Stiglitz said yesterday in an interview with Bloomberg Radio. “We were trying to make Americans understand how expensive this war was so we didn’t want to quibble about a dime here or a dime there.”

Why I have new hope for the Mideast
Robin Wright – New public voices, daring publications and noisy protests across two dozen countries are giving shape to a vigorous, if disjointed, search for alternatives to the autocratic regimes and imperious monarchies that have proved they’re out of sync with their people. Dissident judges in Cairo, rebel clerics in Tehran, satellite television station owners in Dubai, the first female parliamentary candidates in Kuwait, young techies in Jeddah, intrepid journalists in Beirut, and bold businessmen in Damascus are carving out new space for political action.

‘Harry’s War’: The ugly truth
Overwhelming firepower (the kind that Harry co-ordinates) cannot resolve the fact that the British campaign in Helmand is illogical; we are trying to fight our way to winning hearts and minds and losing the trust of the population in doing so. Scores of civilians have been killed by British ordnance in Helmand. In 2007, at least 6,000 people died in the conflict across Afghanistan, of which approximately 1,400 were civilians. At least 500 of these deaths were directly attributable to Nato forces, mostly in air strikes; 89 British troops have been killed and 329 injured. As General Sir Richard Dannatt has pointed out, we are there for the good of the Afghans, but at the moment we are having the reverse effect. The Taliban are resurgent. Funded by millions of dollars of opium money, they are responding to greater British troop numbers by increased use of suicide bombing tactics.

Poll: Most Israelis back direct talks with Hamas on Shalit
By Yossi Verter, Haaretz, February 27, 2008
Sixty-four percent of Israelis say the government must hold direct talks with the Hamas government in Gaza toward a cease-fire and the release of captive soldier Gilad Shalit. Less than one-third (28 percent) still opposes such talks.

The figures were obtained in a Haaretz-Dialog poll conducted Tuesday under the supervision of Professor Camil Fuchs of Tel Aviv University. According to the findings, Israelis are fed up with seven years of Qassam rockets falling on Sderot and the communities near Gaza, as well as the fact that Shalit has been held captive for more than a year and a half.

An increasing number of public figures, including senior officers in the Israel Defense Forces’ reserves, have expressed similar positions on talks with Hamas. It now appears that this opinion is gaining traction in the wider public, which until recently vehemently rejected such negotiations. The survey also showed that Likud voters are much more moderate than their Knesset representatives. About half (48 percent) support talks with Hamas.

Obama’s Ohio grilling
By Alec MacGillis, Washington Post, February , 2008
Obama on whether there should be negotiations with Hamas:
The answer is no. The answer is no and the distinction would be that Hamas is represented in the Palestinian legislature, or it was before the current rift, but they’re not the head of state. They are not a recognized government. So I think there is a distinction to be drawn there and a legitimate distinction to be drawn. Now again, going back to my experiences in Israel and the discussions I’ve had with security officials there, I think that there are communications between the Israeli government and Hamas that may be two or three degrees removed, but people know what Hamas is thinking and what’s going on, and the point is that with respect to Hamas, you can’t have a conversation with somebody who doesn’t think you should be on the other side of the table. At the point where they recognize Israel and its right to exist, at the point where they recognize that they are not going to be able to shove their worldview down the throats of others but are going to have to sit down and negotiate without resort to violence, then I think that will be a different circumstance. That’s not the circumstance that we’re in right now.

IDF kills 18 Palestinians in Gaza, W. Bank, including 5 children
Haaretz, February 28, 2008
Israeli security forces struck a range of targets in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on Thursday, killing a total of 18 Palestinians, including five children. Meanwhile, militants in Gaza continued to fire rockets at southern Israel, striking as far north as Ashkelon.

The deaths come a day after IDF troops killed 12 Palestinians and an Israeli was killed in a Qassam rocket strike on a college in Sderot. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed that Israel’s response to the deadly barrage of Qassam rockets would be particularly harsh.

After nightfall Thursday, two Palestinians were killed in an Israel Air Force missile strike on a truck in Gaza City, near Shifa Hospital.
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Early Thursday evening, an IAF helicopter attacked a police roadblock near the Gaza City home of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, in which Palestinian officials said one person was killed and four others were wounded.

Ahmadinejad under fire for ‘coarse slogans’ after Israel attack
By Siavosh Ghazi, AFP, February 27, 2008
A top Iranian cleric on Wednesday made a rare criticism of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s verbal attacks on Israel, saying a foreign policy of “coarse slogans” was not in the national interest.

Hassan Rowhani, a former top nuclear negotiator who still holds several influential positions, said Iran needed to show more flexibility and desire for dialogue in its dealings with the international community.

“Does foreign policy mean expressing coarse slogans and grandstanding?” Rowhani asked in a speech to a foreign policy conference in Tehran.

“This is not a foreign policy. We need to find an accommodating way to decrease the threats and assure the interests of the country.”

Sunni forces losing patience with U.S.
By Sudarsan Raghavan and Amit R. Paley, Washington Post, February 28, 2008
U.S.-backed Sunni volunteer forces, which have played a vital role in reducing violence in Iraq, are increasingly frustrated with the American military and the Iraqi government over what they see as a lack of recognition of their growing political clout and insufficient U.S. support.

Since Feb. 8, thousands of fighters in restive Diyala province have left their posts in order to pressure the government and its American backers to replace the province’s Shiite police chief. On Wednesday, their leaders warned that they would disband completely if their demands were not met. In Babil province, south of Baghdad, fighters have refused to man their checkpoints after U.S. soldiers killed several comrades in mid-February in circumstances that remain in dispute.

Some force leaders and ground commanders also reject a U.S.-initiated plan that they say offers too few Sunni fighters the opportunity to join Iraq’s army and police, and warn that low salaries and late payments are pushing experienced members to quit.

Islamists’ loss in Pakistan isn’t a U.S. win
By Laura King, Los Angeles Times, February 26, 2008
To many Pakistanis, the armed confrontation with Islamic radicals remains “America’s war,” one whose cost in blood has been borne by Pakistani troops with little perceived benefit to this country.

Pakistan’s role in President Bush’s “war on terrorism” was a significant factor in a separate outpouring of voter fury last week against President Pervez Musharraf, who is seen as far too willing to do the military bidding of the United States.

“Not wanting the Islamists to be in charge of governmental affairs is not the same thing as supporting a U.S.-backed war against the militants, not at all,” said Khalid Aziz, a former provincial chief secretary who is now a Peshawar-based analyst.

Washington reaches to Muslim rebels
By Romer S Sarmiento, Asia Times, February 28, 2008
United States ambassador to the Philippines Kristie Kenney has crossed the line between her government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the country’s largest armed Muslim rebel group which Washington had earlier considered including on its list of foreign terrorist groups along with the alleged al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf group.

Uniformed Moro rebels toting M-16 rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers welcomed Kenney and several high-ranking American officials on February 19 to an unannounced visit to the rebel group’s main Darapanan camp in Mindanao’s Shariff Kabunsuan province.

Kenney attended a closed-door meeting with MILF chieftain Al Haj Murad Ebrahim and other senior rebel members, which the US official later characterized as “a private visit”. Although Washington had previously sent government representatives to meet with MILF rebels, Kenney was the first US ambassador to meet the rebels for face-to-face talks.

It’s a scary world. Don’t campaign reporters care?
By Michael Signer, Washington Post, February 24, 2008
The last year has thrown a dizzying array of foreign policy challenges at the United States. We deployed an additional 30,000 troops to Iraq. Venezuela’s Hugo Ch¿vez and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blustered their way across the world stage. Russian President Vladimir Putin flirted with a new cold war with Washington. Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan.

And, of course, we all continue to live in the chilly shadow of 9/11.

You might imagine that such red-hot foreign policy issues, combined with a wide-open presidential election, would spark a journalistic fire so intense it would force candidates up into trees and out on limbs to defend their foreign policy positions.

But you’d be dreaming.

Battle company is out there
By Elizabeth Rubin, New York Times, February 24, 2008
I went to Afghanistan last fall with a question: Why, with all our technology, were we killing so many civilians in air strikes? As of September of last year, according to Human Rights Watch, NATO was causing alarmingly high numbers of civilian deaths — 350 by the coalition, compared with 438 by the insurgents. The sheer tonnage of metal raining down on Afghanistan was mind-boggling: a million pounds between January and September of 2007, compared with half a million in all of 2006.

After a few days, the first question sparked more: Was there a deeper problem in the counterinsurgency campaign? More than 100 American soldiers were killed last year, the highest rate since the invasion. Why were so many more American troops being killed? To find out, I spent much of the fall in the Korengal Valley and elsewhere in Kunar province alongside soldiers who were making life-and-death decisions almost every day — decisions that led to the deaths of soldiers and of civilians.

The myth of the surge
By Nir Rosen, Rolling Stone, March 6, 2008
It’s a cold, gray day in December, and I’m walking down Sixtieth Street in the Dora district of Baghdad, one of the most violent and fearsome of the city’s no-go zones. Devastated by five years of clashes between American forces, Shiite militias, Sunni resistance groups and Al Qaeda, much of Dora is now a ghost town. This is what “victory” looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through them, whistling eerily. House after house is deserted, bullet holes pockmarking their walls, their doors open and unguarded, many emptied of furniture. What few furnishings remain are covered by a thick layer of the fine dust that invades every space in Iraq. Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush’s much-heralded “surge,” Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. Apart from our footsteps, there is complete silence.

Obama’s brain trust taking shape
By Eli Lake, New York Sun, February 21, 2008
When it comes to foreign affairs, Senator Obama’s inner circle of advisers includes a Swahili-speaking Air Force general he met on a trip to Africa; a 30-year-old speechwriter who helped draft the final report from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, and President Clinton’s first national security adviser, who in 2005 converted to Judaism under the tutelage of the Navy’s chief Jewish chaplain.

Those advisers in order are Scott Gration, Ben Rhodes, and Anthony Lake. They are part of a nine-person team, in contact every day, often by e-mail. The team develops policy positions, clears language for use in comments to the press, and prepares the Democratic candidate who has won all the primaries since Super Tuesday for a dangerous world and a global war.

The audacity of hopelessness
By Frank Rich, New York Times, February 24, 2008
When people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended in the long dark shadow of Iraq.

It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.

The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.

Visiting the torture museum
By Karen J. Greenberg, TomDispatch, February 21, 2008
Sometimes a little stroll through history can have its uses. Take, as an example, the continuing debate over torture in post-9/11 America. Last week, Stephen Bradbury, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, testified before the House Judiciary Committee about waterboarding. In defending its use, Bradbury took a deep dive into the past. He claimed that the CIA’s waterboarding of at least three of its prisoners bore “no resemblance” to what torturers in the Spanish Inquisition had done when they used what was then called “the Water Torture.”

As part of his defense of the techniques used by the Bush administration to gain information, Bradbury went out of his way to play the historian, claiming that the water torture of yore differed from today’s American-style version in crucial ways. The waterboarding employed by interrogators during the infamous Spanish Inquisition, he insisted, “involved the forced consumption of a mass amount of water.” This led, he claimed, to the “lungs filling with water” to the point of “agony and death.” The CIA, on the other hand, employed “strict time limits,” “safeguards,” and “restrictions,” making it a far more controlled technique. As he put it: “[S]omething can be quite distressing or uncomfortable, even frightening, [but] if it doesn’t involve severe physical pain, and it doesn’t last very long, it may not constitute severe physical suffering” – and so would not qualify as torture. Bradbury summed up his historical case this way, “There’s been a lot of discussion in the public about historical uses of waterboarding,” but the “only thing in common is the use of water.”

Inside the mind of a Gitmo detainee
By Joseph Margulies and George Brent Mickum, Washington Post, February 23, 2008
As you read this, we expect to be in Guantanamo, meeting with the man President Bush mentions when he talks about the intelligence gained and the lives saved because of “enhanced” interrogation techniques. We represent Saudi-born Abu Zubaydah in a legal effort to force the administration to show why he is being detained. And this week, with our first meeting, we begin the laborious task of sifting fact from fantasy. Yet we worry it may already be too late.

The administration declares with certainty that Zubaydah is a “senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden” who “helped smuggle al-Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan.” Dan Coleman, a former FBI analyst who was on the team that reviewed Zubaydah’s background file, disagrees, describing him as “insane, certifiable” and saying he “knew very little about real operations, or strategy.” We do not presume to know the truth. So far, we know only what has been publicly reported. But we hope to uncover the facts and present them to those with the power to act upon them.

Justice probes authors of waterboarding memos
By Dan Eggen, Washington Post, February 23, 2008
An internal watchdog office at the Justice Department is investigating whether Bush administration lawyers violated professional standards by issuing legal opinions that authorized the CIA to use waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques, officials confirmed yesterday.

H. Marshall Jarrett, counsel for the Office of Professional Responsibility, wrote in a letter to Democratic lawmakers that his office is investigating the “circumstances surrounding” Justice opinions that established a legal basis for the CIA’s interrogation program, including a now-infamous memo from August 2002 that narrowly defined torture and was later rescinded by the department.

Hamas and Israel should sign a cease-fire agreement
By Gershon Baskin, Daily Star, February 22, 2008
During the past several months I conducted a series of talks with several Hamas leaders in Gaza who approached me to advocate a cease-fire agreement with the government of Israel. I told those leaders that I would not take such a step unless they could deliver a Hamas guarantee that all of the factions in Gaza would adhere to the cease-fire. I proposed that they either undertake a commitment to impose the cease-fire on all factions or secure the agreement of all of them to sign on. I was informed that at least five meetings with leaders of all factions took place at the home of the prime minister of the Hamas-led government, Ismail Haniyya. However, until recently neither was the agreement of all factions secured nor was there a clear decision by Hamas to impose a cease-fire.

Following the issuing of the draft cease-fire agreement by Froman and Amayreh, several Hamas leaders in Gaza told me that they were willing to accept all of the terms of the draft and to make sure that all of the factions in Gaza adhered to it as well. I suggested that a formal statement be issued by Haniyya in Gaza and by Khaled Meshaal in Damascus. Such a formal statement has not yet been issued.

Israeli mayor of bombarded border town offers to break ranks and talk to Hamas
By Toni O’Loughlin, The Guardian, February 23, 2008
The mayor of Sderot, an Israeli town repeatedly targeted by rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, says in order to save Israeli lives he is ready to talk to Hamas – despite the international ban on contact with the militant Palestinian organisation.

“I would say to Hamas, let’s have a ceasefire, let’s stop the rockets for the next 10 years and we will see what happens,” said Eli Moyal, the mayor, who is a member of the rightwing Likud party. “For me as a person the most important thing is life and I’m ready to do everything for that. I’m ready to talk to the devil.”

Defining victory downward
By Michael Kinsley, Washington Post, February 21, 2008
Why was President Bush’s decision more than a year ago to send another 30,000 troops to Iraq called “the surge”? I don’t know who invented this label, but the word “surge” evokes images of the sea: a wave that sweeps in, and then sweeps back out again. The second part was crucial. What made the surge different from your ordinary troop deployment was that it was temporary. In fact, the surge was presented as part of a larger plan for troop withdrawal.

It was also, implicitly, part of a deal between Bush and the majority of Americans, who want out. The deal was: just let me have a few more soldiers to get Baghdad under control, and then everybody, or almost everybody, can pack up and come home.

In other words: you have to increase the troops in order to reduce them. This is so perverse on its face that it begins to sound zen-like and brilliant, like something out of Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” And in General David Petraeus, the administration conjured up its own Sun Tzu, a brilliant military strategist.

The guilty pleasure of Fidel Castro
By Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, February 20, 2008
There’s been predictably little interesting discussion in the United States of Fidel Castro’s retirement as Cuba’s commandante en jefe, maximo etc. That’s because in the U.S. political mainstream, Cuba policy has for a generation been grotesquely disfigured by a collective kow-towing — yes, collective, it was that craven Mr. Clinton who signed into law the Draconian Helms-Burton act that made it infinitely more difficult for any U.S. president to actually lift the embargo, and the equally craven Mrs. Clinton appears to pandering to the same crowd — to the Cuban-American Ahmed Chalabi figures of Miami, still fantasizing about a day when they’ll regain their plantations and poor people of color will once again know their place. But let’s not for a moment forget the mirror-image of that view so common on the left, where Castro’s patent fear of his own people and reluctance to trust them to debate ideas and options (much less hold competitive elections that, in all probability, he’d have easily won) is strenuously rationalized on the basis of the CIA’s repeated efforts to kill him. (Sure, they repeatedly tried to kill Castro, and Washington might like to manipulate Cuba’s politics given half a chance, but those are not sound reasons to imprison economists or avoid discussing policy options even within the Communist Party.)

Seduced by Putin’s smile
By Jonathan Dimbleby, The Sunday Times, February 24, 2008
When I began what has been a journey of some 10,000 miles across Russia from Murmansk to Vladivostok, my lodestar was Winston Churchill’s aphorism about the Soviet Union being “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Having met hundreds of Russians of all types, I now think that there is no riddle, precious little mystery and almost nothing that is enigmatic about Putin’s Russia.

It has been an exhilarating and revelatory experience during which I have met some wonderful people and been on the receiving end of the warmest hospitality, but I have returned more aware than ever before that the Russian people are not like “us”. In a fundamental way they neither belong to the West nor share western values. While family life and social order are just as precious to them as to us, their concepts of justice and freedom have a quite different set of meanings from those to which we are accustomed. Their tormented history and the political culture this has nurtured set them sharply apart from, and frequently at odds with, mainstream western thought.

Putin’s iron grip on Russia suffocates opponents
By Clifford J. Levy, New York Times, February 24, 2008
Over the past eight years, in the name of reviving Russia after the tumult of the 1990s, Mr. Putin has waged an unforgiving campaign to clamp down on democracy and extend control over the government and large swaths of the economy. He has suppressed the independent news media, nationalized important industries, smothered the political opposition and readily deployed the security services to carry out the Kremlin’s wishes.

U.S. urges Pakistanis to keep Musharraf, despite election defeat
By Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy, February 20, 2008

The Bush administration is pressing the opposition leaders who defeated Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to allow the former general to retain his position, a move that Western diplomats and U.S. officials say could trigger the very turmoil the United States seeks to avoid.

U.S. officials, from President Bush on down, said this week that they think Musharraf, a longtime U.S. ally, should continue to play a role, despite his party’s rout in parliamentary elections Monday and his unpopularity in the volatile, nuclear-armed nation.

The U.S. is urging the Pakistani political leaders who won the elections to form a new government quickly and not press to reinstate the judges whom Musharraf ousted last year, Western diplomats and U.S. officials said Wednesday. If reinstated, the jurists likely would try to remove Musharraf from office.

Bush’s policy of hanging on to Musharraf has caused friction between the White House and the State Department, with some career diplomats and other specialists arguing that the administration is trying to buck the political tides in Pakistan, U.S. officials said.

The President is finished, he should copy Castro and quit
By Bronwen Maddox, The Times, February 20, 2008
To call President Musharraf a lame duck is an evasion; he is surely finished. As the results from the Pakistani elections on Monday come in, it is clear that he has almost no support in Parliament — and the few in his party who kept their seats are rushing to distance themselves from him. So is the Army, which he commanded until November and which underpinned his eight-year military rule.

Pakistan’s victors may lack strength to oust Musharraf
By Carlotta Gall, New York Times, February 21, 2008
This week’s election will leave President Pervez Musharraf weakened in his post, but continuing returns and haggling over the new government on Wednesday showed his opponents likely to fall short of the numbers needed to impeach him. The Pakistan Peoples Party, which won the most seats in the new Parliament, said it would not move against Mr. Musharraf if it could not muster the two-thirds majority needed to remove him or change the Constitution. “Musharraf is our problem,” said Ahmad Mukhtar, who successfully contested a seat against a powerful ally of Mr. Musharraf, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussein. “Today we don’t have the two-thirds majority. It is very difficult to talk about impeachment.”

U.S. payments to Pakistan face new scrutiny
By Robin Wright, Washington Post, February 21, 2008
Once a month, Pakistan’s Defense Ministry delivers 15 to 20 pages of spreadsheets to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad. They list costs for feeding, clothing, billeting and maintaining 80,000 to 100,000 Pakistani troops in the volatile tribal area along the Afghan border, in support of U.S. counterterrorism efforts. No receipts are attached. In response, the Defense Department has disbursed about $80 million monthly, or roughly $1 billion a year for the past six years, in one of the most generous U.S. military support programs worldwide. The U.S. aim has been to ensure that Pakistan remains the leading ally in combating extremism in South Asia. But vague accounting, disputed expenses and suspicions about overbilling have recently made these payments to Pakistan highly controversial — even within the U.S. government.

Islamic stronghold in Pakistan goes secular
By Mark Sappenfield, Christian Science Monitor, February 22, 2008
Hajji Ali Akbar wants his country to be governed by Islamic law. Yet in Monday’s elections in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), he and many others voted for a party that rejects religion in politics. It has led many to herald these elections as a victory for secular democracy and as a sign of the failure of Islamic parties’ governance. The religious parties that held 46 of the 96 provincial parliamentary seats won only nine this time. Moreover, they have been replaced by the secular Awami National Party (ANP).

Making Iraq disappear
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, February 20, 2008
Think of the top officials of the Bush administration as magicians when it comes to Iraq. Their top hats and tails may be worn and their act fraying, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Their latest “abracadabra,” the President’s “surge strategy” of 2007, has still worked like a charm. They waved their magic wands, paid off and armed a bunch of former Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists (about 80,000 “concerned citizens,” as the President likes to call them), and magically lowered “violence” in Iraq. Even more miraculously, they made a country that they had already turned into a cesspool and a slagheap — its capital now has a “lake” of sewage so large that it can be viewed “as a big black spot on Google Earth” — almost entirely disappear from view in the U.S.

Report: Barak warns Syria IDF planning Hezbollah op
Haaretz, February 21, 2008
Defense Minister Ehud Barak has warned Syria through Turkish mediation that the Israel Defense Forces is planning to escalate its military operations against Hezbollah and Hamas, the London-based daily Al-Hayyat reported on Thursday. On his visit to Turkey last week, Barak asked Turkish President Abdullah Ghoul to urge Syrian President Bashar Assad to adopt a different stance toward Hezbollah, according to Al-Hayyat.

Israel’s Mossad, out of the shadows
By Laura Rozen, Mother Jones, February 19, 2008
It’s fair to call Efraim Halevy—who served three Israeli prime ministers as chief of the Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence service—a hawk. He negotiated a covert peace deal with Jordan that preceded the countries’ public treaty in 1994. Nine years later, he resigned as head of Israel’s National Security Council over policy differences with then-prime minister Ariel Sharon. And when he left the Mossad, Halevy received the prestigious CIA Director’s Award from then-director George Tenet for his assistance to the U.S. intelligence service—the exact details of which Halevy cannot disclose.

Iran affirms its defiance on nuclear program
By Thomas Erdbrink, Washington Post, February 21, 2008
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Wednesday that Iran’s determination to continue its nuclear program had brought major powers “to their knees.”

Minority Rules
By Meline Toumani, New York Times, February 17, 2008
For the past two years, politicians all over southeastern Turkey, along with human rights advocates, journalists and other public figures, have been sued for instances of Kurdish-language usage so minor that they are often a matter of a few words: sending a greeting card with the words “happy new year” in Kurdish, for example, or saying “my dear sisters” in a speech at a political rally. Such lawsuits have become so common that in some cases the accused is simply fined for using the letters W, X or Q — present in the Kurdish but not the Turkish alphabet — in an official capacity.

Rigged trials at Gitmo
By Ross Tuttle, The Nation, February 20, 2008
Secret evidence. Denial of habeas corpus. Evidence obtained by waterboarding. Indefinite detention. The litany of complaints about the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay is long, disturbing and by now familiar. Nonetheless, a new wave of shock and criticism greeted the Pentagon’s announcement on February 11 that it was charging six Guantanamo detainees, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, with war crimes–and seeking the death penalty for all of them. Now, as the murky, quasi-legal staging of the Bush Administration’s military commissions unfolds, a key official has told The Nation that the trials have been rigged from the start. According to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantanamo’s military commissions, the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees to foreclose the possibility of acquittal.

Miliband admits US rendition flights stopped on UK soil
By Mark Tran, The Guardian, February 21, 2008
Britain acknowledged today for the first time that US planes on “extraordinary rendition” flights stopped on British soil twice. The admission came from the foreign secretary, David Miliband, who apologised to MPs for incorrect information given by his predecessor, Jack Straw, and the former prime minister Tony Blair.

CIA confirms rendition flights to Brits
By Pamela Hess, AP, February 21, 2008
CIA Director Michael Hayden acknowledged Thursday that two rendition flights carrying terror suspects refueled on British territory, despite repeated U.S. assurances that none of the secret flights since the Sept. 11 attacks had used British airspace or soil.

Stifling online speech
Editorial, New York Times, February 21, 2008
The rise of Internet journalism has opened a new front in the battle to protect free speech. A federal judge last week ordered the disabling of Wikileaks.org, a muckraking Web site. That stifles important speech and violates the First Amendment. It should be reversed, and Wikileaks should be allowed to resume operations.

Misguided judge pulls plug on Wikileaks
By Peter Scheer, Mercury News, February 21, 2008
Wikileaks.org, a whistle-blower Web site that enables the anonymous (and, in theory, untraceable) leaking of confidential government and corporate documents, has gone dark.

Although Wikileaks’ silencing was sought by anti-democratic governments worldwide – including China, whose censors work mightily to block all access to the site – Wikileak’s plug was pulled, ironically, by a federal judge in San Francisco.
[Except this is the Internet – you can still find Wikileaks uncensored here.]

Spy satellite blast, caught on tape
By Noah Shachtman, Wired, February 21, 2008
A Navy missile blasted a dying spy satellite just above the atmosphere late Wednesday night. Here’s the footage of the hit: