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Hamas says negotiations have already failed

September 2, 2010

If the political purpose behind this week’s attacks on Israeli settlers in the West Bank is still hard to decipher, it seems the message they sent out was directed more to Palestinians in the West Bank than to the parties currently gathered in Washington.
Nicolas Pelham considers Hamas’ resilience as a political force and notes that [...]

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The fountainhead of global strife

September 2, 2010

If the Obama administration had been as visionary as Obamamania promised it might be, Chas Freeman might not have merely been briefly offered the post of chair of the National Intelligence Council; he could have become a fine Secretary of State. Instead, the Israel lobby made sure he gained no position at all, but by [...]

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Terrorism is like advertising — it short-circuits the rational mind

September 1, 2010

Update below
If there’s just one lesson we can draw from the last decade it is this: utter the word “terrorism” and thought grinds to a halt, perceptions become blinkered and the power of human intelligence is suddenly put on hold.
Consider the attack near Hebron in the West Bank yesterday in which four Israelis were gunned [...]

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Hamas: “Anyone who is awaiting change from the West today will not get any change”

September 1, 2010

On the eve of US-brokered Palestinian-Israeli peace talks which begin on Thursday, Sharmine Narwani went to Damascus to interview the Hamas political bureau chief, Khaled Meshaal.
Sharmine Narwani: There is debate about whether Hamas accepts the premise of a two-state solution — your language seems often vague and heavily nuanced. I want to ask if you [...]

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Treatment for PTSD may be killing veterans

August 31, 2010

Associated Press reports:
Andrew White returned from a nine-month tour in Iraq beset with signs of post-traumatic stress disorder: insomnia, nightmares, constant restlessness. Doctors tried to ease his symptoms using three psychiatric drugs, including a potent anti-psychotic called Seroquel.
Thousands of soldiers suffering from PTSD have received the same medication over the last nine years, helping to [...]

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Mosque opponents help the Taliban

August 30, 2010

Newsweek reports:
Taliban officials know it’s sacrilegious to hope a mosque will not be built, but that’s exactly what they’re wishing for: the success of the fiery campaign to block the proposed Islamic cultural center and prayer room near the site of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan. “By preventing this mosque from being built, America [...]

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Al-Qaida in Yemen: Poverty, corruption and an army of jihadis willing to fight

August 30, 2010

In a two-part series, The Guardian’s intrepid Ghaith Abdul-Ahad reports from Yemen:
With its conservative Islam, ragged mountains, unruly tribes and problems of illiteracy, unemployment and extreme poverty, Yemen has been dubbed the new Afghanistan by security experts.
The Guardian spent two months in the country, travelling to the tribal regions of Abyan and Shabwa, where al-Qaida [...]

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CIA making secret payments to members of Karzai administration

August 28, 2010

The Washington Post reports:
The CIA is making secret payments to multiple members of President Hamid Karzai’s administration, in part to maintain sources of information in a government in which the Afghan leader is often seen as having a limited grasp of developments, according to current and former U.S. officials.
The payments are long-standing in many cases [...]

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The 9/11 hijackers now defending Ground Zero

August 27, 2010

The opponents of Park51, the so-called “Ground Zero mosque,” have decided that the litmus test for identifying “good Muslims” is to ask them whether they regard Hamas as a terrorist organization.
Andy McCarthy, one of the lead knights in the crusade to stop “the Islamization of America,” strikes the latest blow — this time against a [...]

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Wikileaks — short on intelligence

August 26, 2010

Maybe Wikileaks has come to the cynical conclusion that in the contemporary media environment the headline is more important than the story.
CIA Red Cell Memorandum on United States “exporting terrorism”
That sounds like damning material. Plans to insert US-trained terrorists into Iran or Venezuela perhaps? Is Wikileaks exposing yet more dirty secrets from the CIA’s ugly [...]

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CIA wants to cover up US war crimes in Yemen

August 25, 2010

A missile strike on December 17 in Yemen last year that killed 41 people including 21 children and 14 women was most likely the result of a US cruise missile strike — an opening shot in a US military campaign that began without notice and has never been officially confirmed.
Amnesty International says it has obtained [...]

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How Pakistan shut down Afghan-Taliban peace talks

August 25, 2010

In the New York Times, Dexter Filkins reports:
When American and Pakistani agents captured Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s operational commander, in the chaotic port city of Karachi last January, both countries hailed the arrest as a breakthrough in their often difficult partnership in fighting terrorism.
But the arrest of Mr. Baradar, the second-ranking Taliban leader after [...]

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Iran enhances its capacity to shut down the global oil supply

August 23, 2010

The lesson of the famous Millennium 2002 Challenge was that a cumbersome military machine that over-invests in high tech weaponry is vulnerable to swarming attacks. In the $250 million war game such an attack resulted in most of the US fleet being sunk within hours.
With the development of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — the [...]

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