No Manchurian candidate
By Roger Cohen, International Herald Tribune, February 10, 2008
I believe Barack Obama is a strong but not uncritical supporter of Israel. That is what the Middle East needs from an American leader: the balance implied by a two-state solution.

Yet it’s a tough position for Obama to hold in this presidential campaign because his Jewish credentials are under intense scrutiny.
[…]
Jews should get over the scaremongering: Obama is no Manchurian. Nor is he blind to the fact that backing Israel is not enough if the backing gives carte blanche for the subjugation of another people.

Behind Obama and Clinton
By Stephen Zunes, Foreign Policy in Focus, February 4, 2008
Voters on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are rightly disappointed by the similarity of the foreign policy positions of the two remaining Democratic Party presidential candidates, Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama. However, there are still some real discernable differences to be taken into account. Indeed, given the power the United States has in the world, even minimal differences in policies can have a major difference in the lives of millions of people.

Clinton wins tacit support of Israeli establishment
Among mainstream Israeli commentators, there is little argument that the outgoing Republican Administration, with its invasion of Iraq, war against terrorism and strong line against Iran, has been the closest yet to Israel’s own world view.

Yet although the race to succeed Mr Bush has narrowed to a choice between John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the Republican candidate is not the one the Israeli establishment would most like to see in the White House.

That unofficial honour goes to Senator Clinton, who Palestinians accuse of taking an increasingly one-sided approach to the Middle East conflict. Visiting the region in 2005 as senator for New York, Senator Clinton shunned the Palestinians completely, meeting only Israeli leaders and hearing and expressing only Israeli positions. She particularly galled Palestinians by enthusiastically backing the 700-kilometre complex of walls and fences that Israel is building inside the West Bank.

Barack Obama makes his case
Asked what he thinks is the biggest difference between himself and Senator Hillary Clinton, Obama told Kroft, “I think Senator Clinton is smart and can be an effective advocate. But I think that the biggest difference is that Senator Clinton accepts the rules of the game as they are set up. She accepts money from PACs and lobbyists. I don’t accept that politics has to be driven by those special interests and lobbyists.”

For Clinton, Ohio and Texas emerge as key states to win
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and her advisers increasingly believe that, after a series of losses, she has been boxed into a must-win position in the Ohio and Texas primaries on March 4, and she has begun reassuring anxious donors and superdelegates that the nomination is not slipping away from her, aides said on Monday.

Mrs. Clinton held a buck-up-the-troops conference call on Monday with donors, superdelegates and other supporters; several said afterward that she had sounded tired and a little down, but determined about Ohio and Texas.

Israel’s secret success
By Daniel Gavron, New York Times, February 11, 2008
If we cannot summon the determination it would take for a complete pullback, might the world, led by the United States, try to force us to withdraw? It might, but it probably won’t, so we are most likely looking at some sort of single state, bi-national state or confederation. What matters is that we are acting from a position of strength, and we ought to be investing our energy and creativity in working out a long-term solution with the Palestinians that will be acceptable to both of us.

What we should not be doing is what we are doing now: besieging and blacking out Gaza, killing and arresting dozens of Palestinians in the occupied territories every month, and constructing walls and fences between us and our neighbors.

The most recent suicide bombing in southern Israel has predictably prompted calls for a new barrier along our 145-mile Egyptian border. This is unreasonable. Walls, as recent events have shown, can be breached. Palestinian terrorism against civilians has decreased over the past years, even though the barrier separating Israel and the West Bank has many large gaps. It is illogical to suppose that this incomplete wall is the factor that has reduced terrorism.

Israeli minister: We should level Gaza neighborhoods
Tempers heated Sunday as cabinet ministers discussed the ongoing Qassam fire on Sderot and the situation in Gaza.

Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit suggested obliterating a Gaza neighborhood in response to Saturday’s Qassam fire on Sderot, saying “any other country would have already gone in and level the area, which is exactly what I thing the IDF should do – decide on a neighborhood in Gaza and level it.”

IDF to step up Gaza assassinations
The Israel Defense Forces and the Shin Bet internal security service are preparing to step up assassinations against key Hamas figures in the Gaza Strip in response to the continued Qassam rocket attacks against Sderot. The renewed campaign of targeted killings is not likely, at this stage, to include members of the Hamas political leadership.

Hamas leaders go into hiding as Israel plans targeted killings
Leaders of the ruling Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip have scaled back their public appearances and stepped up other security measures, fearing Israeli assassination attempts in response to a wave of Palestinian rocket attacks on southern Israel, Hamas officials said Monday.

New Hamas tactic: Bomb Israel into a truce
The message: henceforth, every Israeli operation will result in a similar response. Hamas is hoping that Israel will agree, after repeated bombing of Sderot, to a tahdiye (calm) in the territories, and even believe they can bring about an end to the arrests that the IDF is carrying out in the West Bank.

Behind the Hamas decision lies the assumption that the Israeli leadership is wary of a large-scale ground operation. This is based on the traumatic experience of the Second Lebanon War and Israeli concern that it may suffer heavy casualties. Senior officials in the Islamic organization believe that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is too concerned with his political future to risk initiating a broad IDF operation in the Strip.

Gates endorses pause in Iraq troop withdrawals
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Monday publicly endorsed the concept of holding steady the troop levels in Iraq, at least temporarily, after the departure this summer of five extra combat brigades sent last year as part of “the surge.”

America’s failure in Afghanistan
US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has been putting pressure on Germany to up its commitment to the NATO mission in Afghanistan. But some in Germany say it is America’s violence, not Berlin’s reluctance, that is the problem.

Flawed by design
By Fred Kaplan, Slate, February 8, 2008
…most of the NATO nations agreed to send troops on the premise that they’d be engaged in peacekeeping, not warfighting.

Then, in the spring of 2006, the Taliban threw a wrench in the works by staging offensives throughout southern Afghanistan—a huge area, about the size of Germany—after four years of relative calm. (Actually, they’d been infiltrating the region all this time; they resumed their offensives only to resist the returning Western troops.)

The alliance isn’t “evolving into a two-tiered alliance,” as Gates said. When it comes to Afghanistan, it’s been that kind of alliance from the start. As the fighting has grown fiercer, the inadequacies of this crazy quilt have become clearer.

NATO at twilight
By Andrew J. Bacevich, Los Angeles Times, February 11, 2008
NATO is no longer a fighting organization. Keeping the Americans in, the Germans down and the Russians out no longer demands the sort of exertion that was required half a century ago. If the alliance retains any value, it is as an institution for consolidating European integration and prosperity.

No amount of browbeating by the United States is going to change that. The Bush administration is kidding itself if it expects Europeans to save the day in Afghanistan. To think of NATO as a great alliance makes about as much sense as thinking of Pittsburgh as the Steel City or of Detroit as the car capital of the world. It’s sheer nostalgia.

Welcome to Cyberwar Country, USA
When a reporter enters the Air Force office of William Lord, a smile comes quickly to the two-star general’s face as he darts from behind his immaculate desk to shake hands. Then, as an afterthought, he steps back and shuts his laptop as though holstering a sidearm.

Lord, boyish and enthusiastic, is a new kind of Air Force warrior — the provisional chief of the service’s first new major command since the early 1990s, the Cyber Command. With thousands of posts and enough bandwidth to choke a horse, the Cyber Command is dedicated to the proposition that the next war will be fought in the electromagnetic spectrum, and that computers are military weapons. In a windowless building across the base, Lord’s cyber warriors are already perched 24 hours a day before banks of monitors, scanning Air Force networks for signs of hostile incursion.

Musharraf’s approval rating plummets
A week before Pakistanis vote in parliamentary elections, President Pervez Musharraf’s popularity has hit an all-time low and opposition parties seem capable of a landslide victory that could jeopardize his efforts to cling to power, according to a poll to be released Monday.

The next president should open up the Bush Administration’s record
By Steven Aftergood, Nieman Watchdog, February 7, 2008
In 2005, then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey told colleagues at the Justice Department that they would be “ashamed” when a legal memorandum on forceful interrogation of prisoners eventually became public. In fact, however, disclosure of such secret Bush Administration documents may be the only way to begin to overcome the palpable shame that is already felt by many Americans at the thought that their government has engaged in abusive interrogations, secret renditions or unchecked surveillance.

The next President will have the authority to declassify and disclose any and all records that reflect the activities of executive branch agencies. Although internal White House records that document the activities of the outgoing President and his personal advisers will be exempt from disclosure for a dozen years or so, every Bush Administration decision that was actually translated into policy will have left a documentary trail in one or more of the agencies, and all such records could be disclosed at the discretion of the next President.

“Something is happening” — Obama’s movement for change
By James Zogby, Huffington Post, February 8, 2008
Profound transformative change, like that ushered in by the New Deal or created by the vision of the New Frontier/Great Society, can only come about because of the powerful demands of mass social movements that both pressure for change and create the conditions for its realization. When Barack Obama says, “We have been waiting for so long for the time when we could finally expect more from our politics, when we could give more of ourselves and feel truly invested in something bigger than a candidate or cause. This is it: We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the ones that we seek” – he is both empowering his supporters, and challenging them to become the instruments of radical transformation. And it has worked, at least so far.

Obama wins Maine, giving him 4 victories in weekend
Senator Barack Obama defeated Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Maine caucuses on Sunday, giving him his fourth victory this weekend as he headed into three more state contests on Tuesday.

Milton Viorst on Israel’s tragic predicament
By Milton Viorst, Truthdig, February 1, 2008
In opening his stunning memoir, “Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine,” David Shulman declares: “I am an Israeli. I live in Jerusalem. I have a story, not yet finished, to tell.” It is a very sad story, of a society gone astray with power, and of decent Israelis in despair over the failure of their efforts to save it from itself. The story, as Shulman says, is not yet over, but he asks whether its end is not already determined. Is tragedy inevitable? Can Israel right its course to achieve its once glowing promise as a refuge and as a nation?

Shulman’s memoir is not unique in raising these questions. Two recent books share his foreboding: “Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007,” a careful work of scholarship by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, and “Toward an Open Tomb: The Crisis of Israeli Society,” a stinging essay by Michel Warschawski. Shulman and Zertal are college professors, Eldar is a journalist, Warschawski is a peace activist. All are Israeli Jews. Whatever the stylistic differences of their books, they are equally unforgiving of Israel for placing its future in stark jeopardy.

The Gaza Strip blockade could seriously harm Israel’s economy
In 2006, for example, total Israeli exports to the 60 million or so residents of France stood at slightly more than $1 billion. Israeli exports to the same amount of people in Italy stood at just below $1 billion. Very fine statistics. But total exports to both of these countries, which rank among the eight richest countries in the world, are equal to Israel’s exports to the 3.5 million people of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. This is more than 6 percent of all Israeli exports, excluding diamonds. Despite all the intifadas, the Palestinian Authority is the second biggest customer of Israeli exports, after the United States.

Iraq’s tidal wave of misery
By Michael Schwartz, TomDispatch, February 10, 2008
A tidal wave of misery is engulfing Iraq — and it isn’t the usual violence that Americans are accustomed to hearing about and tuning out. To be sure, it’s rooted in that violence, but this tsunami of misery is social and economic in nature. It dislodges people from their jobs, sweeps them from their homes, tears them from their material possessions, and carries them off from families and communities. It leaves them stranded in hostile towns or foreign countries, with no anchor to resist the moment when the next wave of displacement sweeps over them.

The victims of this human tsunami are called refugees if they wash ashore outside the country or IDPs (“internally displaced persons”) if their landing place is within Iraq’s borders. Either way, they are normally left with no permanent housing, no reliable livelihood, no community support, and no government aid. All the normal social props that support human lives are removed, replaced with…nothing.

Standoff in an Iraqi province
By Garrett Therolf, Los Angeles Times, February 10, 2008
A potential security crisis loomed Saturday in troubled Diyala province as significant numbers of a U.S.-funded force of Sunni fighters left their posts, demanding the ouster of the provincial police chief.

“You can imagine what danger will face the region in the next days,” said Abu Talib, commander of 2,000 to 3,000 so-called Sons of Iraq fighters. His men, many of them former insurgents, turned against the militant group Al Qaeda in Iraq last year under the Awakening banner.

Memo blasts State Dept. Iraq effort
In a confidential memo, a long-time Republican operative who has served in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad for the past year says the State Department’s efforts in Iraq are so poorly managed they “would be considered willfully negligent if not criminal” if done in the private sector.

‘An intolerable fraud’
Editoral, New York Times, February 8, 2008
An envelope arrived in our office the other day. It had the bulky, tawdry look of junk mail: pink and lavender Easter eggs, a plastic address window and a photo of a young man in fatigue shorts using crutches to stand on his only leg. “Thousands of severely wounded troops are suffering,” it read. “Will you help them this Easter?”

It was a plea for money from the Coalition to Salute America’s Heroes, one of the worst private charities — but hardly the only — that have been shamefully milking easy cash from the suffering and heartache caused by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

U.S. loses prison camp records of bin Laden’s driver
The U.S. military has lost a year’s worth of records describing the Guantanamo interrogation and confinement of Osama bin Laden’s driver, a prosecutor said at the Yemeni captive’s war court hearing on Thursday.

Lawyers for the driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, asked for the records to support their argument that prolonged isolation and harassment at the Guantanamo prison have mentally impaired him and compromised his ability to aid in his defense on war crimes charges.

“All known records have been produced with the exception of the 2002 Gitmo records,” one of the prosecutors, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Timothy Stone, told the court. “They can’t find it.”

Truth or terrorism? The real story behind five years of high alerts
The Bush administration has never shied from playing the fear card to distract the American public from scandal or goad them into supporting a deeply flawed foreign policy. Here a history of the administration’s most-dubious terror alerts — including three consecutive Memorial Day scare-a-thons — all of which proved far less terrifying than the screamer headlines they inspired.

Saudi royal Prince Bandar Bin Sultan’s assets frozen
Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the former Saudi Arabian ambassador to America, has been hit by a court order in effect freezing some of his US assets, as part of a class-action lawsuit over bribery allegations at British defence giant BAE Systems.

Don’t believe myths about sharia law
By Jason Burke, The Observer, February 10, 2008
The women had no doubt. Educated, young, articulate, they had one aim: to turn their country into a real Islamic state, run according to their interpretation of Islamic law, the shariat. Only then, they said, would they be protected from the chaos and violence of the modern world. Only then would there be an end to corruption and misgovernment. Only then would the country assume its true place as a Muslim nation.

The women were speaking in Rawalpindi, the crowded northern Pakistani city. All members of an Islamist party, they believed that the current system in Pakistan, where a secular legal system co-exists uncomfortably with a religious one, was doomed to failure. The coming of shariat was, they told me, inevitable.

Sharia sensibilities
By Ayesha Khan, The Guardian, February 11, 2008
The blizzard of controversy that has attended the Archbishop of Canterbury’s remarks about the “inevitability” of parts of Islamic law being introduced in Britain has thrown a rare spotlight on this country’s existing sharia councils.

The erroneous caricature of sharia as synonymous with stoning or flogging is a million miles from the reality in Britain. The councils’ judgments have no statutory basis in law, with participants abiding by rulings voluntarily, and the vast majority of cases concern relatively unremarkable divorce applications.

Injury from blast killed Bhutto, report says
Investigators from Scotland Yard have concluded that Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistani opposition leader, died after hitting her head as she was tossed by the force of a suicide blast, not from an assassin’s bullet, officials who have been briefed on the inquiry said Thursday. …

It is unclear how the Scotland Yard investigators reached such conclusive findings absent autopsy results or other potentially important evidence that was washed away by cleanup crews in the immediate aftermath of the blast, which also killed more than 20 other people.

Secret talks led to Pakistan cease-fire
Two Pakistani officials said Thursday that their government held secret talks with Taliban fighters and tribal elders near the Afghan border before a cease-fire just announced by the militants. …

Tehrik-e-Taliban is led by Baitullah Mehsud, an al-Qaida-linked commander based in South Waziristan whom Musharraf’s government has blamed for a series of suicide attacks across Pakistan, including the Dec. 27 assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

CIA destroyed tapes as judge sought interrogation data
At the time that the Central Intelligence Agency destroyed videotapes of the interrogations of operatives of Al Qaeda, a federal judge was still seeking information from Bush administration lawyers about the interrogation of one of those operatives, Abu Zubaydah, according to court documents made public on Wednesday.

The court documents, filed in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, appear to contradict a statement last December by Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, that when the tapes were destroyed in November 2005 they had no relevance to any court proceeding, including Mr. Moussaoui’s criminal trial.

It was already known that the judge in the case, Leonie M. Brinkema, had not been told about the existence or destruction of the videos. But the newly disclosed court documents, which had been classified as secret, showed the judge had still been actively seeking information about Mr. Zubaydah’s interrogation as late as Nov. 29, 2005.

New charges of Gitmo torture
Khan’s lawyers are armed with more than 500 pages of top-secret notes taken during recent sessions with their client at Guantanamo; they will use the material to describe his interrogation and detention to the Intelligence Committee. Though details are highly classified, his lawyers claim that he and others were tortured and videotaped, charges that Hayden and other CIA officials deny. On Feb. 5, Hayden admitted to Congress that the CIA had used waterboarding on Khaled Sheik Mohammed and two others. The CIA continues to assert that it does not engage in torture.

Mosul situation veers from ‘Baghdad model’
The battle for Mosul that will play out in the coming weeks and months could be a very different struggle than the successful U.S. campaigns against al-Qaeda militants in Baghdad and elsewhere.

Baghdad and much of Iraq are slowly coming under the control of U.S. and Iraqi forces. This city of 1.8 million people remains an urban stronghold for al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Obama: The shock of the red
By Timothy Egan, New York Times, February 6, 2008
Take a look at what happened on Tuesday in the nearly all-white counties of Idaho, a place where the Aryan Nations once placed a boot print of hate — “the international headquarters of the white race,” as they called it.

The neo-Nazis are long gone. But in Kootenai County, where the extremists were holed up for several decades, a record number of Democrats trudged through heavy snow on Super Duper Tuesday to help pick the next president. Guess what: Senator Barack Obama took 81 percent of Kootenai County caucus voters, matching his landslide across the state. He won all but a single county.

Manufacturer in $2 million acord wth U.S. on deficient Kevlar in military helmets
A North Dakota manufacturer has agreed to pay $2 million to settle a suit saying it had repeatedly shortchanged the armor in up to 2.2 million helmets for the military, including those for the first troops sent to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Twelve days before the settlement with the Justice Department was announced, the company, Sioux Manufacturing of Fort Totten, was given a new contract of up to $74 million to make more armor for helmets to replace the old ones, which were made from the late 1980s to last year.

Veterans not entitled to mental health care, U.S. lawyers argue
Veterans have no legal right to specific types of medical care, the Bush administration argues in a lawsuit accusing the government of illegally denying mental health treatment to some troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The arguments, filed Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco, strike at the heart of a lawsuit filed on behalf of veterans that claims the health care system for returning troops provides little recourse when the government rejects their medical claims.

Sex asault sit v. Halliburton klled
A mother of five who says she was sexually harassed and assaulted while working for Halliburton/KBR in Iraq is headed for a secretive arbitration process rather than being able to present her case in open court.

A judge in Texas has ruled that Tracy Barker’s case will be heard in arbitration, according to the terms of her initial employment contract.

The CIA operation that should have prevented the Iraq war
When Saad Tawfiq watched Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations on February 5 2003 he shed bitter tears as he realised he had risked his life and those of his loved ones for nothing.

As one of Saddam Hussein’s most gifted engineers, Tawfiq knew that the Iraqi dictator had shut down his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes in 1995 — and he had told his handlers in US intelligence just that.

And yet here was the then US secretary of state — Tawfiq’s television was able to received international news through a link pirated from Saddam’s spies next door — waving a vial of white powder and telling the UN Security Council a story about Iraqi germ labs.

Clarity sught on electronics searches
Nabila Mango, a therapist and a U.S. citizen who has lived in the country since 1965, had just flown in from Jordan last December when, she said, she was detained at customs and her cellphone was taken from her purse. Her daughter, waiting outside San Francisco International Airport, tried repeatedly to call her during the hour and a half she was questioned. But after her phone was returned, Mango saw that records of her daughter’s calls had been erased.

A few months earlier in the same airport, a tech engineer returning from a business trip to London objected when a federal agent asked him to type his password into his laptop computer. “This laptop doesn’t belong to me,” he remembers protesting. “It belongs to my company.” Eventually, he agreed to log on and stood by as the officer copied the Web sites he had visited, said the engineer, a U.S. citizen who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of calling attention to himself.

In my view: Iraqi blogger
By Raed Jarrar, Al Jazeera, February 3, 2008
When I first immigrated to the US in 2005, I was interested in foreign policy issues and spent most of my time working to end the occupation of Iraq and stop the blind support and unlimited aid to Israel.

Then I had a life-changing incident in 2006, when I was stopped at an airport in New York and prevented from boarding to my airplane because my T-shirt had the words “we will not be silent” in both Arabic and English printed on it.

A TSA [transportation security officer] told me that coming to a US airport with Arabic words on my T-shirt was equivalent to visiting a bank while wearing a shirt that read “I’m a robber”.

Time runs out for an Afghan held by the U.S.
By Carlotta Gall and Andy Worthington, New York Times, February 5, 2008

Abdul Razzaq Hekmati was regarded here as a war hero, famous for his resistance to the Russian occupation in the 1980s and later for a daring prison break he organized for three opponents of the Taliban government in 1999.

But in 2003, Mr. Hekmati was arrested by American forces in southern Afghanistan when, senior Afghan officials here contend, he was falsely accused by his enemies of being a Taliban commander himself. For the next five years he was held at the American military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he died of cancer on Dec. 30.

The fate of Mr. Hekmati, the first detainee to die of natural causes at Guantánamo, who fruitlessly recounted his story several times to American officials, demonstrates the enduring problems of the tribunals at Guantánamo, say Afghan officials and others who knew him.

Afghan officials, and some Americans, complain that detainees are effectively thwarted from calling witnesses in their defense, and that the Afghan government is never consulted on the detention cases, even when it may be able to help. Mr. Hekmati’s case, officials who knew him said, shows that sometimes the Americans do not seem to know whom they are holding. Meanwhile, detainees wait for years with no resolution to their cases.

U.S. says no one too young for Guantanamo court
By Jane Sutton, Reuters, February 4, 2008

If the U.S. Congress intended to try children as war criminals, it would have explicitly authorized that in the 2006 law that serves as a framework for the Guantanamo court, Kuebler said.

But a U.S. Department of Justice attorney, arguing for the prosecution, said that if Congress intended to exclude juveniles from the Guantanamo war court, it would have explicitly written that, because lawmakers knew Khadr could face charges. Instead, Congress wrote the law using the term “person,” which legally refers to “anyone born alive,” Justice Department attorney Andy Oldham said.

In the dark hole of a Pakistani prison
By Tim Johnson, McClatchy, February 4, 2008

A citizen is hauled away by security forces one day. His family grows desperate. The state won’t say where he is being held – or even if he is being held.

It’s got the whiff of Guantanamo, right? It does, but this time it’s an American who is being held, and the dank, windowless cell is in Pakistan.

The victim is Dr. Safdar Sarki, a Pakistani-American physician. It is now known that he’s being held in a prison in Zhob, a Pakistani backwater, and suffers from severe medical problems caused by beatings and shacklings.

Review: The Commission – The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Commission
By Even Thomas, New York Times, February 4, 2008

The official ineptitude uncovered by the commission is shocking. Dubbed “Kinda-Lies-a-Lot” by the Jersey Girls, Ms. Rice comes across as almost clueless about the terrorist threat. “Whatever her job title, Rice seemed uninterested in actually advising the president,” Mr. Shenon writes. “Instead, she wanted to be his closest confidante — specifically on foreign policy — and to simply translate his words into action.”

The C.I.A. has some inkling that Osama bin Laden is stirring to strike the United States, but for many crucial months fails to tell the F.B.I. that two terrorists (who later turned out to be 9/11 hijackers) are actually in the United States. The popular image of the C.I.A. as dashing and all-knowing is for the movies only. After much dickering with the White House, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, the mild-mannered patrician who succeeded Mr. Kissinger as commission chairman, is allowed to read pre-9/11 copies of the President’s Daily Brief, the C.I.A.’s digest of its most important secrets. “He found himself terrified by what he was reading, really terrified,” Mr. Shenon writes. “There was almost nothing in them.”

Of the briefings, Mr. Kean said, “They were garbage,” adding, “There really was nothing there — nothing, nothing.”

The lights have been turned off
ByGideon Levy, Haaretz, February 4, 2008

One after another, the final lights are being turned off, and a moral gloom is falling upon us as we stand at the edge of an abyss. Just last week, three more lights were turned off. The Winograd Report did not come out clearly against the fact that Israel embarked on a pointless war; the Supreme Court authorized collective punishment and the attorney general concluded that the killing of 12 Israeli citizens and someone from the territories by the police does not warrant a trial. The final keepers of order, the lighthouses of justice and law, are reconciling themselves with the most serious injustices of the institutions of authority and no one so much as utters a word about it. The upsetting and depressing crop of a single week has drawn the moral portrait of the country.

As expected, the Winograd Committee became irrelevant. It avoided dealing with the first question that should have been on its agenda: Was there any justification for embarking on the war? A committee that says nothing about a country that declares war on its neighbor, kills a thousand of its citizens, causes mass destruction, makes use of horrific munitions and continues to kill dozens of innocents to this day – is a derelict committee.

Hamas claims responsibility for blast
By Isabel Kershner, New York Times, February 6, 2008
Israel appeared to face a heightened threat from Palestinian suicide bombings on Tuesday after the military wing of Hamas officially claimed responsibility for a lethal blast the day before at a shopping center in the southern town of Dimona.

The claim by the Qassam Brigades wing of Hamas, the militant Islamic group, signaled a possible end to its self-imposed moratorium on such attacks that had lasted more than three years.

Hamas said its bombers came from the city of Hebron in the southern West Bank, contradicting earlier accounts that the Dimona bombers were from Gaza. But Israeli officials also expressed concern that potential attackers may be making their way into the country from the Egyptian Sinai, taking advantage of a recent 11-day breach of the border between Gaza and Egypt. Egyptian forces resealed the border on Sunday.

Sunni vs Shia: the real bloody battle for Baghdad
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, February 5, 2008

A teenage boy was arrested recently for the attempted rape of a girl his own age in a school in west Baghdad. He admitted he had chosen the particular girl as his victim “because I knew she was a Sunni and nobody would protect her”. The boy was mistaken in his belief that he was beyond the law, mainly because the girl’s uncle was a senior officer in the army. But his words explain why Iraq’s Sunni minority feel so vulnerable since they lost power to the Shia majority when Saddam Hussein was overthrown five years ago.

Reconciliation between Sunni and Shia, seen by the US as essential for political progress in Iraq, is not happening. The difficulty in introducing measures to conciliate members of the old regime is illustrated by the way in which a new law, originally designed to ease the path of former Baath party members into government jobs will, in practice, intensify the purge against them.

The framers of the law wanted Baathists to be able to get their jobs back in the Iraqi military, security services and elsewhere. But the Iraqi parliament has a Shia majority, and the legislation signed into law last Sunday will make it more difficult for the former Baathists to work for the government.

Leak on cross-border chases from Iraq
American military forces in Iraq were authorized to pursue former members of Saddam Hussein’s government and terrorists across Iraq’s borders into Iran and Syria, according to a classified 2005 document that has been made public by an independent Web site. The document, which was disclosed by the organization Wikileaks and which American officials said appeared authentic, outlined the rules of engagement for the American division that was based in Baghdad and central Iraq that year.

In Iraq, three wars engage U.S.
Three separate but related wars are being waged in this country now, and the third one, against Shiite extremists, is the most worrisome, according to the commander and senior staff of the U.S. Army division patrolling Baghdad.

Libyans advance in Al Qaeda network
The death of Abu Laith al Libi, a Libyan Al Qaeda chief, has cast a spotlight on the rise of Libyan militants in a network dominated by Egyptians and Saudis, Western anti-terrorism investigators say. Al Libi was killed last week in an American missile strike on a hide-out in Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan, officials say. In addition to overseeing a paramilitary campaign in Afghanistan, Al Libi had become a top figure in a propaganda barrage on the Internet, according to experts.

Al-Qaeda commander moved freely in Pakistan
A Libyan al-Qaeda commander who was killed last week in northwestern Pakistan had lived there for years and, despite a $200,000 U.S. bounty on his head, felt secure enough to meet officials and visit hospitals, according to officials and residents of this city.

Insurgencies spread in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Islamic insurgents are expanding their numbers and reach in Afghanistan and Pakistan, spreading violence and disarray over a vast cross-border zone where al Qaida has rebuilt the sanctuary it lost when the United States invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. There is little in the short term that the Bush administration or its allies can do to halt the bloodshed, which is spreading toward Pakistan’s heartland and threatening to destabilize the U.S.-backed governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Turkish jets bomb northern Iraq
Turkish fighter jets bombed targets in northern Iraq on Monday, the Turkish military said, the fifth major strike against Kurdish rebels this year. In a statement posted on its Web site, the Turkish military said it had struck 70 targets in the Avashin and Harkuk districts in a 12-hour bombing run that began at 3 a.m. The military did not give details on damage or deaths.

Bomber shot dead during suicide attack in town housing nuclear reactor
Police in Israel shot and killed a Palestinian suicide bomber yesterday after he and an accomplice launched the first suicide bomb attack inside Israel for more than a year, killing a woman and injuring 11 other people in an explosion at a shopping centre in the town of Dimona. Both bombers wore explosive belts packed with ball bearings but only one detonated. After the first bomber detonated his explosives the second bomber, whose belt failed to go off, survived for several minutes, as witnesseses tried to help him. When they discovered he was wearing an explosive belt an Israeli police officer fired several shots into his body and then shot him in the head.