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:

Is the US really bringing stability to Baghdad?
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, February 15, 2008
… any true assessment of the happiness or misery of Iraqis must use a less crude index than the number of dead and injured. It must ask if people have been driven from their houses, and if they can return. It must say whether they have a job and, if they do not, whether they stand a chance of getting one. It has to explain why so few of the 3.2 million people who are refugees in Syria and Jordan, or inside Iraq, are coming back.

In a first, Ahmadinejad to visit Iraq next month
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will travel to Iraq next month in the first such visit by a leader of the Islamic Republic, Iraqi officials said Thursday, adding that Iran had postponed a fourth round of talks with the United States to discuss Iraq’s security.

Invited by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, Ahmadinejad is scheduled to arrive March 2 for a visit of two to three days to discuss bilateral relations, the officials said. He will also meet with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The two neighbors fought an intense eight-year conflict in the 1980s during the rule of Saddam Hussein. But the ascent of a Shiite-dominated government in Iraq after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion ushered in a new era of friendship with overwhelmingly Shiite Iran.

The door to Iraq’s oil opens
By M K Bhadrakumar, Asia Times, February 16, 2008
The cynosure of Western eyes at the meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, commonly known as OPEC, in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, last December 5 was an unexpected personality – Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani.
But that wasn’t a chance occurrence. By the time OPEC gathered in Vienna six weeks later, it was beyond doubt that Shahristani was on the way to becoming a celebrity in the West.

Shahristani is “a rare thing” in politics, to quote Toby Lodge, the well-known scholar on Iraq at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London – “not too religious, not too political, not too secular, not too pro-American Shi’ite who [Grand Ayatollah Ali] Sistani would talk to”.

But for the ease with which Shahristani traversed in his later years the dividing line that separates religiosity and idealism from worldliness and pragmatism, Shahristani would have become a cult figure for human-rights activists, given his extraordinary background as a top nuclear scientist who turned a stubborn dissident, and then a reckless jail breaker from Saddam Hussein’s Abu Ghraib prison where he was tortured and tucked away in solitary confinement for an impossibly long 10 years till 1991.

Hezbollah chief warns Israel of wide war
Hezbollah’s leader threatened Thursday to strike Israel anywhere in the world in retaliation for what he said was its role in assassinating Imad Mughniyah, a Hezbollah commander blamed by the United States and Israel for killing hundreds in bombings, kidnappings and hijackings over a quarter-century.

In a video speech broadcast to thousands of mourners in a spare but sprawling tent in southern Beirut, Hasan Nasrallah said that because Israel had struck beyond what he called the “traditional battlefield” of Lebanon and Israel, it risked a borderless war with the Shiite Muslim group. Israel has denied involvement in the car bombing Tuesday that killed the 45-year-old Mughniyah in a tony neighborhood of Damascus, the Syrian capital.

“You have crossed the borders,” he said in the speech, which was vehement even by Nasrallah’s fiery standards. “Zionists, if you want this type of open war, then let it be, and let the whole world hear: We, like all other people, have a sacred right to defend ourselves, and everything we can do to defend ourselves, we will do.”

Top Pakistan lawyer in vote rigging tape row
Worries about vote rigging in Monday’s general election in Pakistan deepened yesterday when Human Rights Watch released an audio tape in which the government’s top lawyer allegedly predicts the vote will be “massively rigged”.

The recording, which was posted on the internet, features a voice identified as the attorney general, Abdul Malik Qayyum, advising a friend about which party to approach for a nomination in the parliamentary election.

“They will massively rig to get their own people to win. If you can get a ticket from these guys, take it,” he said in apparent reference to President Pervez Musharraf’s ruling party.

Where feudalism lives on
By Dilip Hiro, The Guardian, February 15, 2008
The main contest in the Pakistani general election on February 18 is seemingly between the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), led by late Benazir Bhutto’s husband, Asif Zardari; the pro-Musharraf Pakistan Muslim League-Q (“Q” for “Qaid-e Azam”, the honorific for the state’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah); and the opposition Pakistan Muslim League-N (“N” for Nawaz Sharif, former prime minister).

But no matter which party wins most seats and governs alone or in coalition, and which becomes the opposition, the privileges of feudal lords dominating the overwhelmingly rural society will remain intact.

The roots of feudal dominance lie in history. The Pakistan Muslim League, the parent of its present two versions, is the descendant of the All India Muslim League (AIML). Formed in 1906 to promote loyalty to the British Crown while advancing Muslim interests, the AIML was led by Muslim grandees and feudal lords. It was not until 1940 that it demanded partition of the Indian sub-continent, with Muslim majority areas constituting independent states. Unlike the anti-imperialist Indian National Congress, it lacked an economic programme favouring small and landless peasants, and trade unions for industrial workers.

How ‘inevitable’ got outmaneuvered
By E.J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post, February 15, 2008
What happened to Hillary Clinton?

Last fall, she was the “inevitable” nominee whose “machine” would raise scads of cash and push her to an early victory. She demonstrated poise and knowledge in debates, and party leaders lined up behind her, fearful of missing her fast-moving train.

But this narrative was flawed from the beginning. Her campaign has suffered from profound organizational failures, small mistakes that took on larger import and miscalculations that have put her in a position where to survive, she must defeat Barack Obama in both Texas and Ohio next month.

McCain calls for Obama to use public financing
Hammering Senator Barack Obama for a fourth straight day, Senator John McCain said here on Friday that he expects Senator Obama to abide by his pledge use public financing for his general election if Mr. McCain does so as well.

“It was very clear to me that Senator Obama had agreed to having public financing of the general election campaign if I did the same thing,” he said after a town hall meeting here. “I made the commitment to the American people that if I was the nominee of my party, I would go the route of public financing. I expect Senator Obama to keep his word to the American people as well.”

Asked if he would use public financing even if Mr. Obama did not, he said: “If Senator Obama goes back on his commitment to the American people, then obviously we have to rethink our position. Our whole agreement was we would take public financing if he made that commitment as well. And he signed a piece of paper, I’m told, that made that commitment.”

Barack Obama’s secret weapon plots a new course for election victory
Steve Hildebrand describes himself as a “big fat goof” who is scared of flying. But, as the chief author of Barack Obama’s grassroots strategy, he is helping to rewrite America’s campaign rulebook.

While Hillary Clinton has won most of the key contests that she has made a priority, Mr Obama is leading the race for delegates because he has picked up most of the other states. “We have competed in large and small states — primaries and caucuses — and not let any state go by,” Mr Hildebrand explains in an interview with The Times. “It’s beyond me why the Clinton campaign did not do the same.”

When we torture
By Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, February 14, 2008
The most famous journalist you may never have heard of is Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman who is on a hunger strike to protest abuse during more than six years in a Kafkaesque prison system.

Mr. Hajj’s fortitude has turned him into a household name in the Arab world, and his story is sowing anger at the authorities holding him without trial.

That’s us. Mr. Hajj is one of our forgotten prisoners in Guantánamo Bay.

If the Bush administration appointed an Under Secretary of State for Antagonizing the Islamic World, with advice from a Blue Ribbon Commission for Sullying America’s Image, it couldn’t have done a more systematic job of discrediting our reputation around the globe. Instead of using American political capital to push for peace in the Middle East or Darfur, it is using it to force-feed Mr. Hajj.

US official admits waterboarding presently illegal
A senior official in the Bush justice department said for the first time today that the controversial interrogation tactic is currently illegal.

The waterboarding remarks by Stephen Bradbury, head of the justice department office of legal counsel, caused a stir in America because they go further than more uncertain opinions on the legality of the tactic voiced by the CIA director and attorney general.

London bombs justify ‘torture’, says Bush
President George Bush cited the London July 7 bombings in an interview broadcast last night to justify his support for waterboarding, an interrogation technique widely regarded as torture.

In an interview with the BBC he said information obtained from alleged terrorists helped save lives, and the families of the July 7 victims would understand that. Bush said waterboarding, which simulates drowning, was not torture and is threatening to veto a congressional bill that would ban it.

Duet in Damascus – is it déja vu?
By Amir Mizroch, Jerusalem Post, February 14, 2008
Duet in Beirut by former Mossad operative Mishka Ben-David is a work of fiction, but owes its wealth of detail to the author’s intelligence experience. Published in Hebrew six years ago, it describes a Mossad hit team traveling to Beirut, stalking the head of Hizbullah’s foreign terror department and assassinating him in a car bombing. Perhaps unfortunately for Mughniyeh, it was not translated into Arabic; had he read it, he might have taken greater precautions.

Ben-David said Wednesday that he had modeled his terror overlord, “Abu Khaled,” on two men: Hamas political bureau head Khaled Mashaal, and Mughniyeh, long Hizbullah’s chief of foreign terror operations.

While Ben-David is careful to say that Israel may not have been behind Mughniyeh’s killing, he does detail several examples of how the planned killing of the fictional Abu Khaled might mirror the death of Mughniyeh.

Roiled Hezbollah chief throws down the gauntlet
By Zvi Bar’el, Haaretz, February 15, 2008
When Hassan Nasrallah quotes David Ben-Gurion to emphasize to Israel that “if it loses one war, it will collapse,” or the Winograd report to impress his supporters with the fact that Israel lost the fight against several thousand Hezbollah fighters, we can once more be impressed that he and his advisers follow what is going on in Israeli society far more closely than Israel follows developments in Lebanon. But Nasrallah also knows that sharp rhetoric and expert usage of language are no substitute for a plan of action.

He presented his plan Thursday in his speech by setting the rules for war against Israel: “If you want an open-ended war, it will be an open-ended war,” and he also explained what this would entail. Because Hezbollah blames Israel for the assassination of Imad Mughniyah, which it claims occured “outside the natural arena of the war” (in other words Syria and not in Lebanon), the organization considers it legitimate to use the same method and target Israel outside the “natural arena”: not directly on Israeli territory but against Israeli targets abroad. Thus, Nasrallah absolved himself of the rules he followed for years, according to which he was conducting a war of Lebanese liberation against Israeli occupation. Henceforth, he is adopting a war on behalf of the organization, not in the name of Lebanon, against Israel’s existence.

Iraq successes hang in the balance
By William M. Arkin, Washington Post, February 14, 2008
We have heard a lot in the past year about the Sunni Awakening movement in Al Anbar province in western Iraq, the development of a Concerned Local Citizens program (also known as the Sons of Iraq program) in Baghdad, and the unilateral cease-fire called by Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army Shia militias. These three developments have not only been key to American military gains, but they also are central to the possibility of successful civil society and the prospects for transitioning from the military mission. [Deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East affairs, Mark] Kimmitt frankly calls all of these developments in 2007 a “surprise.” They are also factors most outside of U.S. control.

“The success of the surge was not pre-ordained nor has the surge succeeded according to plan,” Kimmitt says. “No one last December had any ideas that we would see a Sunni Awakening movement, nobody knew that the … [Mahdi Army] would declare a ceasefire …”

Bush’s Iraq calculus
By David Ignatius, Washington Post, February 14, 2008
The last thing the Bush White House would want, you might think, would be to make the 2008 presidential election a referendum on the unpopular war in Iraq. The 2006 congressional elections were such a referendum, and the Republicans got hammered.

But President Bush, newly confident that his troop-surge strategy is working, is taking steps that are likely to guarantee another Iraq-driven election. He favors keeping a big U.S. force in Iraq through the November elections, probably close to the pre-surge level of 130,000 troops. That large presence will draw Democratic fire — and it will make the presidential contest all the more a test between a pro-war Republican nominee and an antiwar Democrat.

Iran postpones talks with U.S. on Iraq
American officials ratcheted up the accusations against Iran today as Tehran postponed another round of negotiations with the United States over security in Iraq.

The development came as the Iraqi government announced that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would arrive March 2 for a two-day visit, the first such trip by an Iranian leader since the two countries fought a devastating war in the 1980s that killed or injured an estimated 1 million people.

The United States and Iran, already locked in a dispute over Tehran’s nuclear program, have long traded blame for the bloodshed in Iraq. But U.S. officials softened their tone late last year, backing away from sweeping accusations that Iran is orchestrating the funding, training and equipping of Shiite Muslim militants who have battled U.S. soldiers here.

In a reversal, U.S. agrees to produce data pointing to Iran’s nuclear ambitions
The Bush administration has agreed to turn over to international inspectors intelligence data it has collected that it says proves Iran worked on developing a nuclear weapon until a little more than four years ago, according to American and foreign diplomats.

The decision reverses the United States’ longstanding refusal to share the data, citing the need to protect intelligence sources.

The administration acted as the International Atomic Energy Agency is scheduled to issue a report as early as next week on Iran’s past nuclear activities. Administration officials hope that the nuclear inspectors can now confront Iran with what the Americans believe is the strongest evidence that the Iranians had a nuclear program.

Anguish of the Stolen Generations
With torment still in his voice, Frank Byrne recalls the day six decades ago when he was taken from his mother and their community in Christmas Creek, Western Australia.

He was just five at the time, and his mother, Maudie Yooringun, had long feared the day that the government would come to seize him – and he would be “stolen”.

“The government came to Christmas Creek where we had a mud house and told me I was been taken away,” he said.

“My mum was completely ignored. She was not a human. That’s what they thought in those days. The government fella said: ‘I am your total guardian’.”

“You could see the sorrow in my mother’s eye. I could see the tears rolling down as she was driven away. I was held there by a couple of blokes as the truck went away.”

A week later Frank saw his mother again. But that was to be the last time he ever saw her alive.

Australia apology to Aborigines
The Australian government has made a formal apology for the past wrongs caused by successive governments on the indigenous Aboriginal population.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised in parliament to all Aborigines for laws and policies that “inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss”.

He singled out the “Stolen Generations” of thousands of children forcibly removed from their families.

When words aren’t enough
National Aboriginal Alliance spokesman Les Malezer last weekend said the apology was “not enough”. But even the alliance is prepared to defer compensation.

From a strategic angle, these indigenous leaders are fooling themselves or their constituents. If they were serious about compensation, the time to address it is at the same time as the apology. Blackfellas will get the words, the whitefellas will keep the money. And by Thursday the Stolen Generations and their apology will be over as a political issue.

*

The war against tolerance
Walid Shoebat, Kamal Saleem and Zachariah Anani are the three stooges of the Christian right. These self-described former Muslim terrorists are regularly trotted out at Christian colleges—a few days ago they were at the Air Force Academy—to spew racist filth about Islam on behalf of groups such as Focus on the Family. It is a clever tactic. Curly, Larry and Mo, who all say they are born-again Christians, engage in hate speech and assure us it comes from personal experience. They tell their audiences that the only way to deal with one-fifth of the world’s population is by converting or eradicating all Muslims. Their cant is broadcast regularly on Fox News, including the Bill O’Reilly and Neil Cavuto shows, as well as on numerous Christian radio and television programs. Shoebat, who has written a book called “Why We Want to Kill You,” promises in his lectures to explain the numerous similarities between radical Muslims and the Nazis, how “Muslim terrorists” invaded America 30 years ago and how “perseverance, recruitment and hate” have fueled attacks by Muslims.

Israel embassies on high alert following Mughniyah killing
Israel’s security services have issued orders to its embassies and delegations abroad to be on high alert following the assassination of Hezbollah terror leader Imad Mughniyah on Wednesday, anticipating the possibility that Hezbollah will try to carry out a major attack against Israeli or Jewish targets worldwide in response to the killing.

Whoever killed Mughniyah showed impressive capabilities
In the case of the killing of Mughniyah we can draw two opposing conclusions. One is that the killing created shock and awe in Hezbollah and damaged its self-confidence. There is no doubt that the killing sent an unequivocal message to Nasrallah that maybe he should lower his profile of arrogance and self-confidence.
[…]
The second conclusion is that in the long run Hezbollah will clearly recover from the killing and return to functioning normally as a political movement with its own militia that has an organization for carrying out terror attacks.

Israel plans to build in East Jerusalem
Israel on Tuesday unveiled plans to build 1,120 apartments for Jews in East Jerusalem, a move Palestinians called a setback for U.S.-backed peace negotiations.

The announcement by Housing Minister Zeev Boim appeared to be aimed at placating the Shas religious party, which had vowed to quit the coalition government if it conceded anything to the Palestinians on Jerusalem.

Arab states plan TV crackdown
In a collective effort to curb satellite channels such as al-Jazeera, Arab states have adopted a charter that authorises individual countries to penalise media organisations deemed to have offended political and religious leaders or to have damaged social harmony and national unity.

Only Qatar, home to al-Jazeera, refused to endorse the document citing the need to study it further to ascertain that it did not ­conflict with its legislation.

Muqtada, the man who would be ayatollah
As a political and military force, Iraq’s Shi’ite Sadrist movement has undergone a number of radical transformations since 2003, when its leader Muqtada al-Sadr surprisingly emerged as a leading political figure. Muqtada’s recent decision to continue with his seminary studies and graduate as an ayatollah at the conservative seminary school of Najaf underpins a major change in the movement’s structure that could have serious repercussions for the future of Iraq.

Against the backdrop of changing political alliances between Kurds and Sunnis, Muqtada is transforming his movement into a new political phenomenon with implications for the country’s political structure and security dynamics. The consequences are also immense for Shi’ite Iraq, posing serious challenges to the conservative clerical establishment in Najaf.

Muqtada’s attempt to become an ayatollah follows his earlier call to suspend operations by his militia, the Jaish al-Mahdi (The Mahdi Army, or JaM) in the summer of 2007. Together with his decision to study in Najaf, this has marked a decisive new beginning in the organizational structure and leadership dynamics of the Mahdi militia.

McCain votes against waterboarding ban
Today, the Senate brought the Intelligence Authorization Bill to the floor, which contained a provision from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) establishing one interrogation standard across the government. The bill requires the intelligence community to abide by the same standards as articulated in the Army Field Manual and bans waterboarding.

Just hours ago, the Senate voted in favor of the bill, 51-45.

Earlier today, ThinkProgress noted that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), a former prisoner of war, has spoken strongly in favor of implementing the Army Field Manual standard. When confronted today with the decision of whether to stick with his conscience or cave to the right wing, McCain chose to ditch his principles and instead vote to preserve waterboarding.

Senate passes interrogation ban
The Senate voted 51 to 45 on Wednesday afternoon to ban waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods used by the Central Intelligence Agency against high-level terrorism suspects.

Senate Republicans generally opposed the bill, but several of them also did not want to cast a vote that could be construed as supporting torture, and so were relying on President Bush to make good on a threat to veto legislation limiting C.I.A. interrogation techniques.

The prohibition of harsh interrogation techniques is part of a wider intelligence authorization bill and would restrict all American interrogators to techniques allowed in the Army Field Manual, which bars the use of physical force.

In tribal Pakistan, religious parties are foundering
Senator Asfandyar Wali, the leader of an opposition party, the Awami National Party, is campaigning for the elections next week from the safety of his bed, under a quilt and propped up on bolsters for his bad back at his country home outside Peshawar.

Ill health aside, Mr. Wali is staying home because suicide bombers are seeking to kill him, his party has been warned by high-level government officials. There have been two bomb attacks on his party’s election gatherings in the last week. Two candidates have been killed, one in a suicide bombing and one in a shooting in Karachi.

Yet despite the attacks and the limited campaigning, his party is expected to do well in the parliamentary elections on Monday. The religious parties that for the last five years have governed the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan Province, which border Afghanistan and the tribal areas, are foundering.

Senate passes bill to expand U.S. spying powers
After more than a year of heated political wrangling, the Senate handed the White House a major victory Tuesday by voting to broaden the government’s spy powers after giving legal protection to phone companies that cooperated in President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program.

Amnesty Day for Bush and lawbreaking telecoms
(Glenn Greenwald) — [The Senate bill] has two simple purposes: (1) to render retroactively legal the President’s illegal spying program by legalizing its crux: warrantless eavesdropping on Americans, and (2) to stifle forever the sole remaining avenue for finding out what the Government did and obtaining a judicial ruling as to its legality: namely, the lawsuits brought against the co-conspiring telecoms. In other words, the only steps taken by our political class upon exposure by the NYT of this profound lawbreaking is to endorse it all and then suppress any and all efforts to investigate it and subject it to the rule of law.

U.S. Jewish leader worried by thrust of White House campaigns
The head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Malcolm Hoenlein, expressed concern Tuesday regarding the atmosphere that has surrounded Democratic Senator Barack Obama’s campaign for president, while making it clear he has no problem with Obama himself.

“All the talk about change, but without defining what that change should be is an opening for all kind of mischief,” Hoenlein said at a press conference in Jerusalem. Obama has made change a central theme in his campaign.

The blind giant of the Middle East
(David Grossman) — More and more it looks as if the things that set Israel going at its birth have lost their potency — its concept and its daring, its confidence in its purpose and values, its desire to create a country that would not only be a refuge for the Jewish people, but that would also transform Jewish existence into a modern civil state. Now, 60 years after Israel was founded, it must find new substance that will fuel its way forward. Without re-creating itself, it will not be able to stay in motion. Too many things, outside and inside, will hinder it. The time will come when Israel will not have the strength to overcome them.

Palestinian revenge was inevitable
(Ahmed Yousef) — Last week’s bombing in Dimona was the first martyrdom operation committed by Hamas in more than five years. For some time, we have been warning the world that the relentless pressure on our people would eventually tell. In the last two months, more than a hundred people have been killed by the Israeli occupation forces in the Gaza Strip, including many civilians, women and children.

Thirty people have died in the last month for lack of medical care brought on by the embargo. Only two weeks ago, we saw the appalling sight of over 40 women and children seriously injured when an Israeli F-16 dropped an enormous bomb in the middle of the densely populated Gaza City, a few meters from a wedding party. This kind of atrocity, piled onto the daily death toll, has finally tested the patience of Palestinians, and after lengthy restraint, revenge was inevitable.

To many in Israel and the West, this act of resistance will be judged in isolation. They will no doubt say that it justifies the inhumane embargo on the people of Gaza and the arrests of more than 500 people and daily torture of innocents in the West Bank by both Israelis and the puppet government imposed on us by the U.S.. What they seem to forget is that just in the last two years, 2,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military action and thousands more injured. The cold-blooded fact is that the ratio of Palestinian deaths to Israelis is now over 40 to 1.

Palestinian questions peace progress
The U.S.-backed Palestinian prime minister said Monday that time is running short to demonstrate progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks President Bush launched to fanfare last fall.

“Unless there is tangible progress in the period immediately ahead” on a list of pledges made by Israel, “I think, honestly, it would require that we begin to really call this for what it is,” Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said.

Focus of detainee trial is likely to suit Bush
Harsh interrogations and Guantánamo Bay, secret prisons and warrantless eavesdropping, the war against Al Qaeda and the one in Iraq. On issue after issue, President Bush has showed little indication that he will shrink from the most controversial decisions of his tenure.

With the decision to charge six Guantánamo detainees with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and to seek the death penalty for the crimes, many of those issues will now be back in the spotlight. In an election year, that appears to be exactly where Mr. Bush wants the focus to be.

Asia’s hidden arms race
(John Feffer) — While in the news sunshine prevails, in the shadows an already massive regional arms race is threatening to shift into overdrive. Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, five of the six countries involved in the Six Party Talks have increased their military spending by 50% or more. The sixth, Japan, has maintained a steady, if sizeable military budget while nonetheless aspiring to keep pace. Every country in the region is now eagerly investing staggering amounts of money in new weapons systems and new offensive capabilities.

The arms race in Northeast Asia undercuts all talk of peace in the region. It also sustains a growing global military-industrial complex. Northeast Asia is where four of the world’s largest militaries — those of the United States, China, Russia, and Japan — confront each other. Together, the countries participating in the Six Party Talks account for approximately 65% of world military expenditures, with the United States responsible for roughly half the global total.

Here is the real news that should hit the front pages of papers today: Wars grip Iraq, Afghanistan, and large swathes of Africa, but the heart of the global military-industrial complex lies in Northeast Asia. Any attempt to drive a stake through this potentially destabilizing monster must start with the militaries that face one another there.

The law on the powers of governorates
(Reidar Visser) — Whenever Iraqi politics becomes difficult to classify according to the ethno-sectarian mindset preferred by most Western commentators, interest in what is going on in Baghdad seems to dwindle. Little wonder, then, that for the past few weeks, somewhat esoteric news items (like a visit to Iraq by Angelina Jolie) have dominated press reports from Iraq. The two truly significant developments during the past month have received less coverage: the attempts to agree on a general budget, as well as efforts to pass a law on the powers of governorates nor organised in a [federal] region.

America’s green policy vacuum
It’s been a year since Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth packed theaters and won an Oscar. And a good year it has been for the green movement. Venture capital firms poured a record $2.6 billion into clean tech startups in the first three quarters of 2007. Meanwhile, the green buzz has only grown louder. This year, green building construction starts are projected to reach $12 billion. And both Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama have made a greener economy a key plank in their Presidential campaigns.

It’s enough to make you believe an optimistic report that estimates the green economy could produce as many as 40 million jobs and $4.53 trillion in annual revenue by 2030. To put those numbers in perspective, consider this: In 2006, according to a November report commissioned by the American Solar Energy Society (hardly a disinterested body), companies in renewable energy and energy efficiency industries accounted for 8.5 million jobs and generated $970 billion in revenues. The report based that scenario on “aggressive, sustained public policies at the federal and state level during the next two decades.” (It also included growth scenarios based on current government spending levels and on a moderate increase.)

Despite the undeniable green momentum, a $4 trillion-plus U.S. green economy is far from likely—even in 22 years—because there simply is no “aggressive, sustained” federal policy. The federal government has failed to create and adequately fund the programs that would make the U.S. a world leader. And that’s what the government should be trying to do, for reasons that go far beyond rising carbon levels. The U.S. risks falling way behind other countries in the development of green technologies. On its current course, this country could trade oil dependence for reliance on alternative energy products built by other nations already far ahead of it.

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.

U.S. troops allegedly killed detainees
U.S. Army officials are investigating allegations that American soldiers killed several detainees after they were captured on a battlefield in southwest Baghdad last year, officials said Tuesday.

Israeli court upholds Gaza sanctions
The Israeli Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the government’s decision to slash fuel and electricity supplies to the Gaza Strip. Israeli human rights groups had challenged the sanctions, which Israel says are aimed at halting ongoing rocket fire by Gaza militants. Palestinian officials say the cutbacks have harmed Gaza’s already impoverished residents by causing power shortages and crippling crucial utilities.

Winograd panel ‘shocked’ by IDF performance in war
“Complete shock.” That is how friends of retired generals Menachem Einan and Chaim Nadel, two members of the Winograd war probe commission, described the generals’ reaction to the Israel Defense Forces’ performance during the Second Lebanon War.

Ahmadinejad tells West: Accept Israel’s ‘imminent collapse’
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called on the West Wednesday to acknowledge Israel’s “imminent collapse.” Speaking to a crowd on a visit to the southern port of Bushehr, where Iran’s first light-water nuclear power plant is being built by Russia, Ahmadinejad further incited his listeners to “stop supporting the Zionists, as [their] regime reached its final stage.”

U.S. to press NATO for more troops for Afghanistan
The Pentagon said on Tuesday it will press NATO’s European members to send more troops to Afghanistan’s violent south in response to a call from Canada for reinforcements, but Washington will not boost its force there.

Canadian PM refuses to discuss detainees as controversy rages
Prime Minister Stephen Harper is refusing to say how Canada is handling detainees in Afghanistan amid fresh controversy over the issue. Harper says detainees are a matter of national security and he will not discuss how many Afghan prisoners there are — or where they are.

Abbas, Hamas due in Cairo for talks on Gaza border
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah and a delegation from the rival Hamas faction are due in Cairo for talks Wednesday on the future of Gaza’s border with Egypt. The factions are likely to meet separately with Egyptian officials. Mr. Abbas has refused to speak with Hamas until it gives up control of the Gaza Strip.

Guilty pleas over soldier beheading plot
Four men today pleaded guilty to offences linked to a plot to kidnap and murder a Muslim member of the British armed forces and supply equipment to terrorists. Earlier this month, Parviz Khan, the 37-year-old ringleader of the group, admitted a series of charges including the beheading plot, Leicester crown court heard today.