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Flickr / mar is sea Y (CC-BY-SA)
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By Amy Goodman — The White House is holding a gala dinner this week, honoring Iraq War veterans. Bradley Manning is an Iraq War vet who won’t be there.
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A mistake on Time magazine’s latest cover has opened a nationwide conversation about race and ethnicity; Rick Santorum belittles American public education, calling it an “anachronism”; is the U.S. finally done with Afghanistan? These discoveries and more after the jump.
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DoD
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By William Pfaff — No one yet in Washington seems fully to appreciate or acknowledge the failure, but failure it is.
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By Richard Reeves — If this was the last Republican debate, or the last important one, it was as entertaining and revealing as most of the previous 19. And scary.
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By Amy Goodman — “The president is wrong.” So says one of the newly appointed co-chairs of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.
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stripes.com
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It may seem quaint that a high-ranking Army officer with a career spanning some 27 years would look to Jimmy Stewart’s everyman hero in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” for inspiration in his own life, but it’s a darned good thing that Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis holds such old-fashioned ideals as truth-telling in high regard.
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U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Andy M. Kin
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By Amy Goodman — Eight youths, tending their flock of sheep in the snowy fields of Afghanistan, were exterminated last week by a NATO airstrike.
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By Eugene Robinson — Criticism of Mitt Romney for lacking a coherent message is grossly unfair. He has been forthright, consistent and even eloquent in pressing home his campaign’s central theme: Mitt Romney desperately wants to be president.
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U.S. Navy / MC2 Brooks B. Patton Jr.
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By William Pfaff — Stephen Hadley, a former official in ex-Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, said in Munich that Europe must spend more if it wants to be a global player. The Europeans regard the George W. Bush administration record, and now the Obama administration’s, and see the disastrous results of “global playing.”
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U.K.-based investigative reporters working with the Sunday Times have determined that “since Obama took office three years ago, between 282 and 535 civilians have been credibly reported as killed [by CIA drone attacks in Pakistan], including more than 60 children.”
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bbc.co.uk
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Claims made by NATO that Pakistan is in cahoots with the Afghan Taliban are tantamount to “old wine in an even older bottle,” according to Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar. However, this particular batch of wine represents thousands of mandatory conversations (read: interrogations) versus Khar’s official denial.
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DoD / MC1 Chad J. McNeeley
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By William Pfaff — Americans might do better to give up their China obsession and go back to their traditional vision of a European threat.
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By John Lasker — A PTSD victim looks for a day when the Army will reform the “boys’ club” atmosphere that makes women soldiers a target for discrimination, harassment and rape.
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U.S. Army (CC-BY)
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By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch —
When it came to rolling out a new 10-year plan for the future of the U.S. military recently, President Obama was at the top of his game.
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By Amy Goodman — Ten years ago, Omar Deghayes and Morris Davis would have struck anyone as an odd pair. While they have never met, they now share a profound connection, cemented through their time at the notorious U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
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AP / Brennan Linsley
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The indefinite detention center that has undermined American justice since the first prisoners arrived from Afghanistan 10 years ago Wednesday is still open for business in Cuba. (more)
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White House / Pete Souza
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By William Pfaff — The Afghan government’s order a week ago to the United States to close its prison at Bagram Air Base near Kabul, where it holds unidentified prisoners, came as a shock to Washington.
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AP / IRIB TV
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Another story has emerged to further make the headline-ready case that tensions are ratcheting up between Tehran and Washington, this time from the espionage department. On Monday, news hit the wires that an Iranian court had sentenced 28-year-old Amir Mirzaei Hekmati to death for allegedly spying for the CIA.
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RJ Matson, Cagle Cartoons, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch —
Posted on Jan 8, 2012
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By David Sirota — Here are 10 current words and phrases that my kid may never know because they might end up as relics of a lost vernacular, starting with “civil liberties.”
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AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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On Thursday, President Obama dropped in at the Pentagon to outline some sizable changes he’s making to America’s defense strategy in this last year of his first elected term. His plans will no doubt lay him open to criticism on the campaign trail, but at least it seems to make room for the possibility of focusing funds on the home front.
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Gage Skidmore (CC-BY-SA)
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By William Pfaff — The clear crossover vote-getter issue on which Ron Paul has differed from the rest of the candidate crowd is war: his hostility to the commitment of both Democratic and Republican administrations to prosecuting undeclared war in the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere.
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Wikimedia Commons/Central Intelligence Agency
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Members of al-Qaida, the Taliban and militant groups from Afghanistan and Pakistan met up twice late last year in an effort to combine forces against America’s diminished presence in Pakistan—one common target on which they might agree to focus.
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Occupy Des Moines protesters decide it’s high time to occupy the Democratic headquarters, and they won’t be the last; Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” gets more viewers than Fox News; and one of America’s most visible poets fell out of grace thanks to a racist poem. These discoveries and more after the jump.
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U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Nathanael Callon
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This colonialism thing ain’t what it used to be. Without spending the hundreds of billions of dollars and countless lives the United States has invested in the effort to determine Afghanistan’s future, the Chinese government managed to swoop in and walk away with as many as 87 million barrels of the country’s oil.
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U.S. Army
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On Oct. 3, 19-year-old U.S. Army Pvt. Danny Chen died of a gunshot wound to the head in southern Afghanistan. The Army initially called his death a suicide. The back story now involves eight of his fellow soldiers who allegedly subjected Chen to race-based hazing.
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Wikimedia Commons
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By William Pfaff — A week ago, the publisher of Harper’s Magazine wrote that President Barack Obama, through expedient political compromises, has lost the moral authority that an American president must command, and therefore has lost his right to a second presidential term.
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Bill Day, Cagle Cartoons —
Posted on Dec 18, 2011
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AP / Khalid Mohammed
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Defense Secretary Leon Panetta visited Baghdad on Thursday to preside over a ceremony in which the U.S. Forces-Iraq flag was retired, which means that America’s nine-year occupation of Iraq has ended—at least on paper.
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bbc.co.uk
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After an American drone was downed last week in Iran, the U.S. made the unrealistic request that Iranian authorities return the spy machine, and on Tuesday, that appeal was unsurprisingly rejected.
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bbc.co.uk
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Well, this is awkward. Iran’s state-run Press TV reported Thursday that a special Revolutionary Guard “electronic warfare unit” had gained remote control of a U.S. drone and landed it after it had flown more than 100 miles into Iranian airspace.
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cnn.com
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At least 63 people were killed in a series of bomb attacks in Afghanistan on Tuesday during ceremonies marking the Shiite holiday of Ashura in three different targeted locations, but the majority of the deaths occurred in Kabul. A Pakistani group claimed responsibility for this sudden and ominous outbreak of sectarian violence.
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Illustration by Mr. Fish
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By Chris Hedges — The Occupy movement is the force that will revitalize traditional Christianity in the United States or signal its moral, social and political irrelevance.
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RJ Matson, Cagle Cartoons, The St. Louis Post Dispatch —
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Preston Rhea (CC-BY-SA)
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By Barry Lando — For several years now the Pakistanis have found China a very willing and increasingly powerful counterweight to the Americans and their often strident political demands.
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AP / Mike Redwood
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Claiming retaliation for American aggression in Pakistan, al-Qaida said Thursday that it was holding a U.S. citizen, 70-year-old aid worker Warren Weinstein, in that country after capturing him in Lahore four months ago. Al-Qaida boss Ayman al-Zawahiri announced Weinstein’s capture in a video demanding that the U.S. ...
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On Saturday, NATO forces clashed with Pakistani troops near the Afghanistan border, and 24 Pakistani soldiers were reported killed in the airstrike. Those are the facts that both sides agree on, but as Salon’s Glenn Greenwald notes in this “Democracy Now!” interview that aired Monday ... (more)
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White House / Pete Souza
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By William Pfaff — One might think that a bitter Central Asian war in Afghanistan and an ambiguous commitment to Iraq would be enough for President Barack Obama to cope with.
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Wikimedia Commons
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The CIA has lost a foothold, and some measure of its critical anonymity, in Lebanon after some of the spy agency’s operatives were exposed in recent months. Last June, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah triumphantly announced that at least two agents had been nabbed within his organization’s ranks ... (more)
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NATO
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By William Pfaff — The enthusiasm that has been inspired in NATO circles by the organization’s success in overturning the Gadhafi regime in Libya provides a demonstration of how badly NATO still feels the need for a justification of its continued existence.
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Code Pink challenges Occupy movement “manarchists,” Oliver Stone talks history and Tariq Ali argues that President Obama is a continuation of President George W. Bush. Plus the winner of our protest song contest. Update: Full transcript.
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Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey (CC-BY)
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Code Pink challenges Occupy movement “manarchists,” Oliver Stone talks history and Tariq Ali argues that President Obama is a continuation of President George W. Bush. Plus the winner of our protest song contest.
Posted on Nov 3, 2011
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AP / Jay Finneburgh
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By Amy Goodman — U.S. veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are appearing more and more on the front lines—the front lines of the Occupy Wall Street protests, that is.
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James Vaughan (CC-BY-SA)
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By Richard Reeves — Looking at the newspapers this morning, I noticed that Tom Brokaw was making a speech in New York. It made me wonder if he was working on a sequel to his books on "The Greatest Generation." This one might be called "The Worst Generation." Us.
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U.S. State Department
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By William Pfaff — The United States simply does not know how to disentangle itself from this menacing situation.
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The Guardian's Data Blog
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Editors at The Guardian’s Data Blog have assembled an interactive report that maps the number of U.S. military members killed and wounded in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation New Dawn. (more)
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Rainer Hachfeld, Cagle Cartoons, Neues Deutschland, Germany —
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AP / Rodrigo Abd
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By Helen Redmond — The Forbes list of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women is an obscenely wealthy international sisterhood of politicians, celebrities and billionaires. This is an alternative.
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U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Angelita Lawrence
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By William Pfaff — The Gordian knot by which this American project is bound is the simultaneous conflict and collaboration of the United States and nuclear Pakistan.
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