Editor’s comments

News updates

by Paul Woodward 07.12.2011

I’ll be off-line for the next few days and so there won’t be regular news updates until late Friday. But in the meantime I have scheduled a lot of interesting feature articles which will appear here over this period. — PW

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Libya’s armed protest movement at the edge of an abyss

by Paul Woodward 03.13.2011

As some commentators solemnly warn about the dangers of a backlash if the Arab democratic revolution was to become poisoned by American involvement in a no-fly zone over Libya, they fail to note a rising chorus inside Libya: anger towards the United States because of its reluctance to become involved. There’s stunning paradox here. Three [...]

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Anti-government protests continue in Bahrain

by News Sources 02.21.2011

The Washington Post reports: Saudi Arabia said Sunday that it stands ready “with all its capabilities” to shore up Bahrain’s ruling royal family if a standoff with the Shiite-led opposition is not resolved soon, underscoring the kingdom’s deep concern about its neighbor’s ongoing political crisis. Sunni-led Saudi Arabia props up Bahrain’s al-Khalifa family with cash [...]

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US-Israeli interdependence?

by Paul Woodward 02.15.2011

Associated Press reports: The top U.S. military officer says the relationship between the American and Israeli militaries is especially relevant while Mideast nations are steeped in unrest. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, discussed the instability in Egypt with Israeli President Shimon Peres on Monday. He said the American-Israeli alliance [...]

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America, welcome to the era of Arab democracy

by News Sources 02.13.2011

Amjad Atallah and Daniel Levy write: The stark realization slowly dawning on Washington is that the United States cannot be on the right side of Arab democracy if it is on the wrong side of Palestinian freedom. Israel’s security and peace treaties are certainly compatible with a recalibrated American policy in the region, but not [...]

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Time for the United States to stop poisoning the Middle East

by Paul Woodward 02.08.2011

To assert that the United States has been poisoning the Middle East for decades might sound like too strong language to the ears of many Americans. Yet what kind of effect can we expect from the long-standing practice of supporting rulers who habitually torture their own people, other than a poisonous effect? Much as we [...]

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America’s feudal friends

by Paul Woodward 02.07.2011

As the saying goes, a man is known by the company he keeps. President Obama’s choice of Frank Wisner as his special envoy to Cairo shows that corruption has become so deeply institutionalized in Washington that it cannot be exposed — it is so commonplace, so much regarded as an inherent dimension of politics that [...]

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Slavoj Zizek and Tariq Ramadan on the future of Egyptian politics

by Paul Woodward 02.05.2011

Many American academics and pundits from thinktankland should study the way Slavoj Žižek expresses himself. Passionate, emphatic, uninhibited, eccentric, and humorous — above all, a man who knows what it means to speak your mind. This is a display that shows that deep analysis does not need the protection of cover-your-ass-caveats or manicured sobriety. It [...]

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Palestine Papers can’t slow down a stationary peace process

by Paul Woodward 01.25.2011

Jerusalem Post: The US State Department acknowledged Monday that the “Palestine Papers,” released by Al-Jazeera, complicated American efforts to forge an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. But it said it wouldn’t slow the Obama administration’s work toward that goal. George Mitchell can be as busy as a hamster in a treadmill without actually getting anywhere. Still, the [...]

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Turkey’s dynamic role in the Middle East

by Paul Woodward 01.22.2011

James Traub writes: In the fall of 2009, relations between Serbia and Bosnia — never easy since the savage civil war of the 1990s — were slipping toward outright hostility. Western mediation efforts had failed. Ahmet Davutoglu, the foreign minister of Turkey, offered to step in. It was a complicated role for Turkey, not least [...]

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How the Obama administration hyped the WikiLeaks threat

by Paul Woodward 01.20.2011

Glenn Greenwald writes (and my comments follow): To say that the Obama administration’s campaign against WikiLeaks has been based on wildly exaggerated and even false claims is to understate the case. But now, there is evidence that Obama officials have been knowingly lying in public about these matters. The long-time Newsweek reporter Mark Hosenball — [...]

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Self-fulfilling prophecy: Dennis Ross doesn’t think anything can get accomplished

by News Sources 01.20.2011

Ali Gharib lays out the multiplicity of reasons why Dennis Ross — “a three-time-loser on Israeli-Palestinian peace-making” — lacks the competence for any role in the Middle East. I was struck by an article by Nathan Guttman in the legendary Jewish Daily Forward about Dennis Ross and George Mitchell jockeying for the position of Obama [...]

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Will Tunisia be a turning point for Arab democracy?

by News Sources 01.15.2011

Michael Hanna writes: For observers throughout the Arab world, the significance of the Tunisian uprising is near-impossible to understate. During this era of retrenchment by aging descendants of revolutionary regimes, the prospect of democratic change had long-ago vanished as a believable possibility. The closest point of reference to the civil unrest in Tunisia is the [...]

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How propaganda poisons the mind – and our discourse

by News Sources 01.13.2011

Glenn Greenwald writes: Last week, on January 3, The Guardian published a scathing Op-Ed by James Richardson blaming WikiLeaks for endangering the life of Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the democratic opposition in Zimbabwe. Richardson — a GOP operative, contributor to RedState.com, and a for-hire corporate spokesman — pointed to a cable published by WikiLeaks [...]

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U.S. subpoenas Twitter over WikiLeaks supporters

by News Sources 01.09.2011

The New York Times reports: Prosecutors investigating the disclosure of thousands of classified government documents by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks have gone to court to demand the Twitter account activity of several people linked to the organization, including its founder, Julian Assange, according to the group and a copy of a subpoena made public late [...]

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Combined Systems Inc’s lethal products

by Paul Woodward 01.04.2011

Following the death of Jawaher Abu Rahmah, four American peace activist groups have written to the US manufacturer that supplies the Israeli military with CS gas products. The letter states: As US groups committed to justice and peace, we are writing to ask that Combined Systems Inc. cease providing CSI equipment to the Israeli government [...]

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‘Disappeared’ Pakistanis — innocent and guilty alike — have fallen into a legal black hole

by Paul Woodward 12.31.2010

Without a single reference to President Obama’s drone war in Pakistan, extrajudicial detention of prisoners at Guantanamo, the torture of suspected terrorists, CIA-run secret prisons, rendition, presidential authorization to assassinate US citizens, or the United States’ long history of supporting governments that use their power to suppress political dissent by making their opponents “disappear,” the [...]

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When Americans stop being killed in Iraq it stops being called a war

by Paul Woodward 12.30.2010

Just as the State Department defines “terrorism” in terms of threats to American lives and threats to America’s national security, the war in Iraq is ceasing to be a “war” because fewer and fewer Americans are dying — as though the only blood that supports life is American blood; as though life itself only truly [...]

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State Dept spokesman P J Crowley is a liar

by Paul Woodward 12.27.2010

Richard Silverstein writes: On February 25, 2010, State Department spokesperson Philip Crowley lied when he told a press conference that he wasn’t aware of any request from Dubai for assistance in tracking the Mossad killers of Mahmoud al-Mabouh. To those who say that Wikileaks hasn’t told us anything we didn’t already know–think again. Wikileaks has [...]

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If journalism doesn’t embrace WikiLeaks, journalism is signing its own death sentence

by Paul Woodward 12.24.2010

Mathew Ingram writes: While the U.S. government tries to determine whether what WikiLeaks and front-man Julian Assange have done qualifies as espionage, media theorists and critics alike continue to debate whether releasing those classified diplomatic cables qualifies as journalism. It’s more than just an academic question — if it is journalism in some sense, then [...]

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The truth that the CIA is desperate to conceal

by Paul Woodward 12.24.2010

The New York Times reports: A seven-year effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to hide its relationship with a Swiss family who once acted as moles inside the world’s most successful atomic black market hit a turning point on Thursday when a Swiss magistrate recommended charging the men with trafficking in technology and information for [...]

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The American Surveillance State

by News Sources 12.21.2010

Glenn Greenwald writes: One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is its fixation on hiding everything it does behind a wall of secrecy while simultaneously monitoring, invading and collecting files on everything its citizenry does. Based on the Francis Bacon aphorism that “knowledge is power,” this is the extreme imbalance that renders the ruling [...]

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Outsourced war in Afghanistan wins only a thin slice of America’s attention

by News Sources 12.21.2010

The New York Times reports: The grueling war [in Afghanistan], where a day rarely goes by without an allied casualty, is like a faint heartbeat, accounting for just 4 percent of the nation’s news coverage in major outlets through early December, according to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an arm of [...]

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Who gets to feed from the trough of classified information?

by News Sources 12.16.2010

Robert Naiman points out that the only reason we know that President Obama’s Afghan “progress” report is at variance with the reports coming from the intelligence community, is thanks to classified information being made public — without being declassified. [T]he reason that we know that the collective assessments of the 16 US intelligence agencies give [...]

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