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By James Andrew Miller, Tom Shales
$14.91
By David Mamet
$13
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AP / Hadi Mizban
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On Tuesday, eight people were killed and many more wounded in a series of blasts in Baghdad’s Ameen neighborhood—just a day after 52 died and 250 were injured in explosions set off by al-Qaida, according to Iraqi officials.
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White House / David Bohrer
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What is so controversial about killing al-Qaida bigwigs and avoiding civilian casualties that the CIA would have to conceal such things from Congress? The usual anonymous officials have emerged to explain the secret CIA program Dick Cheney and the agency are supposed to have hidden, and something smells awfully fishy.
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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By Joe Conason — Defending their record in office these past eight years, figures from the last administration seem especially touchy on the subject of torture. Led by the former vice president, Dick Cheney, they have argued that there was no torture, preferring more vague and delicate terms such as “enhanced interrogation” or simply “the program.”
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Stanley Kutler — President Barack Obama dramatically changed course twice on May 13 when he announced he would not release photos of American military personnel “abusing” detainees, reversing the Pentagon’s statement on April 26 that it would comply with a court order—with the president’s own prompt and emphatic support for release.
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AP photo / Alex Brandon
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The official paper trail about torture has apparently caught up with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has claimed that she wasn’t aware of the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on suspected al-Qaida operatives—but it now seems that she may well have been among the first to know.
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AP photo / B.K. Bangash
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President Barack Obama and his Pakistani counterpart, Asif Ali Zardari, will have a lot to talk about when Zardari visits the White House on Wednesday, what with al-Qaida and the Taliban stirring up trouble of late and sparking concerns over the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
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President Obama’s NATO allies may have responded favorably to his call to ramp up the war effort in Afghanistan, but anti-war demonstrators near the French-German border made their opinions known with protests following the photo ops in Strasbourg, France, on Saturday.
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cbsnews.com
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On Sunday’s “Face the Nation,” President Obama did his best to convince CBS’ Bob Schieffer, and by extension the American people, that he knows what he’s doing in escalating U.S. military operations in Afghanistan—and that this won’t be his Vietnam.
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AP photo / Virginia Mayo
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Vice President Joe Biden held forth at a NATO meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, reinforcing President Barack Obama’s message from last weekend about a slight shift in foreign policy with regard to Afghanistan and urging NATO to be vigilant about the threat of attacks from extremist groups harbored by Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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AP photo / Mike Wintroath
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By Scott Ritter — The United States needs to contract the services of a U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan who is capable of visionary thinking, one who possesses the political courage to stand up to a president and a secretary of state and argue against bad policy. I do not believe Richard Holbrooke is such a man.
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Vice President Dick Cheney took a moment to reflect on his eight eventful years in office during a sit-down with ABC’s Jonathan Karl that aired earlier this week. Here’s the part where he owns his role in approving the use of what ABC called “hard-line tactics” against accused terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
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Pakistani officials have responded to the call, coming from India as well as the U.S., to take serious action against militant groups operating in their country. Pakistani forces launched widespread raids late Sunday and arrested Lashkar-e-Taiba commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, believed to be a ringleader behind the recent Mumbai attacks.
Posted on Dec 8, 2008
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AP photo / Xinhua, Xie Xiudong
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By Anand Gopal —
Who exactly are the Afghan insurgents? Every suicide attack and kidnapping is usually attributed to “the Taliban.” In reality, however, the insurgency is far from monolithic.
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U.S. Air Force / Tech. Sgt. Erik Gudmundson
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American airstrikes in Pakistan aren’t sitting so well with the locals. Pakistan PM Yousuf Raza Gilani summoned the U.S. ambassador for a refresher course in “sovereignty and territorial integrity” on Thursday. But according to The Washington Post, the two countries have a tacit agreement that the U.S. can keep bombing Pakistan if Pakistan can keep complaining about it.
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U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Aaron Allmon
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Since 2004, U.S. operatives have been crossing the borders of friends and foes alike in a secret global hunt for al-Qaida. According to a bombshell report in The New York Times, a dozen or so raids have been conducted in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere since Donald Rumsfeld issued a secret order with the backing of the president.
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Wikimedia Commons
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By Robert Fisk — In the dying days of the Bush administration, yet another presidential claim in the “war on terror” has been proved false by the withdrawal of the main charge against six Algerians held without trial for nearly seven years at Guantanamo prison camp.
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Flickr/Jim Gordon
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A key overlooked fact about the much-ballyhooed “surge is working” argument in Iraq is that the U.S. military actually paid some former insurgents $10 a day to help American troops keep the peace in parts of the country. But what happens when that setup changes in volatile regions like Anbar?
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chinadaily.net
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Last week’s air attack in Pakistan by American Special Ops forces represented the first of a three-part strategy by the Bush administration to ramp up the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other key al-Qaida players during the last weeks before the November elections, according to government sources contacted for this report by NPR.
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On the seventh anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Link TV’s Mosaic Intelligence Report takes stock and asks some key questions: Has President Bush’s “war on terror” made any progress? Has al-Qaida diminished or grown in strength?
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msnbc.msn.com
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Just before the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, al-Qaida has released a lengthy videotape featuring the group’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, providing updates about how the holy war is faring around the globe and laying into Iran for “cooperating with the Americans” and with the American-approved governments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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This week’s Mosaic Intelligence Report looks into al-Qaida’s apparent interest in Algeria, which is evidenced by two deadly car bombings near the country’s capital of Algiers. Why would Osama bin Laden turn his focus to Algeria?
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The end of the Bush presidency steadily approaches, and yet Osama bin Laden is still at large. Whatever is an outgoing administration to do? Well, how about a little legal sideshow starring bin Laden’s former chauffeur?
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AP photo / Evan Vucci
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President Bush had words of praise for Pakistan during his first meet-and-greet with Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani at the White House on Monday, a meeting in which the subject of the U.S. missile attack on the Pakistani-Afghan border mere hours before was not brought up by either party.
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Sen. Barack Obama was careful to praise U.S. troops in Iraq during Tuesday’s speech outlining his foreign policy strategies, while declaring that Iraq has been a costly distraction for America. “This war distracts us from every threat that we face and so many opportunities we could seize,” he said, before laying out his five goals “essential to making America safer.”
Posted on Jul 16, 2008
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AP photo / Al Behrman
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Sen. Barack Obama made a key speech on Tuesday in Washington, in which he asserted his position on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, offered a 16-month troop withdrawal timetable and outlined his plans for combating terrorism if he is elected president in November.
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AP photo /J im Cole
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By Bill Boyarsky — Politics is a cruel and disappointing business. This year, Democratic liberals gambled on a young man who offered hope and change. But after those wondrous primary days, they are furious over Sen. Barack Obama’s understandable effort to reach out to an electorate that is, and long has been, planted firmly in the middle of the road.
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“Democracy Now!” host Amy Goodman sat down with Truthdig Editor Robert Scheer on Friday to discuss his new book, “The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.” Watch as Scheer explains the metaphor behind the title, how the U.S. government spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined, and how some key players in Washington took 9/11 as a “license to steal.”
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Shane T. McCoy / U.S. Navy
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By Robert Scheer — Ah, yes, those torture confessions have proved so useful. That, at least, was the claim of our president in justifying one of the most egregious assaults ever on this nation’s commitment to the rule of law. But now comes news that charges have been dropped against the so-called Sept. 11 attacks’ 20th hijacker, one of dozens so identified, because the “evidence” he supplied under torture and later recanted is not credible enough to go to trial.
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By Robert Fisk — Another American humiliation. The Shia gunmen who drove past my apartment in west Beirut yesterday afternoon were hooting their horns, making V-signs, leaning out of the windows of SUVs with their rifles in the air, proving to the Muslims of the capital that the elected government of Lebanon has lost.
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The U.S. military carried out an overnight airstrike in Somalia, targeting the country’s primary al-Qaida cell—and by Thursday morning the man considered the group’s leader, Aden Hashi Ayro, was confirmed dead, along with 10 others.
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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By Robert Scheer — Are Americans unusually stupid or is it something our president put in the water? As millions surrender their homes and sacrifice other standards of our nation’s economic stability and reputation to the caprice of the Bush-Cheney imperium, a majority of voters tell pollsters that they might vote for a candidate who promises more of the same.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — That idiotic “what, me worry?” look just never leaves the man’s visage. Once again there was our president, presiding over disasters in part of his making and totally on his watch, grinning with an aplomb that suggested a serious disconnect between his worldview and existing reality.
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In one of the deadliest strikes in months, five U.S. soldiers were fatally injured by a suicide bomber Monday as they patrolled Baghdad’s Mansour district. Three other soldiers and an Iraqi translator were wounded in the blast but survived, according to the BBC.
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In what could shape up to be a general election preview, John McCain and Barack Obama have been trading barbs on Iraq. The two have been critical of each other in the past, though they’ve also professed mutual respect, but the tone of this exchange was a bit tougher, at least on Obama’s end.
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Former FBI interrogator Jack Cloonan spills the beans to Foreign Policy Magazine about the techniques he used on top al-Qaida operatives. Cloonan explains that the ticking-time-bomb scenario often used to rationalize torture is a myth and that waterboarding only motivates the enemy to get revenge—even if it takes a generation.
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The confirmation, delivered by CIA Director Michael Hayden on Tuesday, that the U.S. intelligence agency did indeed use the now-infamous severe interrogation technique of waterboarding on three major 9/11 suspects was given the green light by President Bush in a rare show of (relative) transparency.
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AP photo / K.M. Chaudary
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Although members of her Pakistan People’s Party remain skeptical, and although the late Benazir Bhutto herself might have disagreed, American and Pakistani intelligence officials believe that Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mahsud and his associates were behind the assassination of Bhutto in Rawalpindi last month.
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Well, let’s just say that this video footage of the fatal attack on Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto doesn’t help much when it comes to sorting out exactly what happened as her motorcade passed through the crowd at Ravalpindi on Thursday, but judge for yourself.
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Three car bombs ripped through the southern Iraqi province of Amarah on Wednesday, killing at least 46 and wounding 149, according to The Washington Post, which reported Thursday that the death toll was likely to climb.
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Funny how, in the wake of any national disaster these days, news analysts set about explaining the latest disaster according to their pet political interests. Take the recent California wildfires, for example, and watch what Jon Stewart discovers about different stations’ diverse interpretations of what the fires really mean.
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Boy, is al-Qaida ever busy these days! In addition to threatening U.S. troops in Iraq, running riot in the hinterlands of Pakistan and generally requiring huge amounts of money and the potential sacrifice of thousands of lives to thwart its infiltration on several fronts, al-Qaida might even be behind the wildfires currently plaguing Southern California, according to “Fox and Friends.”
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foreignpolicy.com
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The Washington Post has it on good authority that Pakistan is losing its war against Taliban and al-Qaida forces operating within its borders, due in no small part to Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s tenuous hold on power.
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Macleans.ca
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Chances are pretty darn slim that this is President Bush’s favorite cover model moment: Canadian magazine Maclean’s whipped up quite a provocative picture for its latest cover story, which makes the claim that “a desperate Washington is reaching out to the late dictator’s henchmen.”
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hindu.com
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A new audio recording attributed to Osama bin Laden has been released, in which the al-Qaida leader urges Pakistanis to revolt against President Pervez Musharraf (pictured) for ordering the raid on Islamabad’s radical Red Mosque in July.
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whitehouse.gov
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In this thought-provoking opinion piece from the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper, writer Correlli Barnett points out how, in waging his own brand of holy war, Bush (and, by extension, former British PM Tony Blair) failed to comprehend crucial lessons about war that historical examples have repeatedly borne out.
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whitehouse.gov
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In a preview of Thursday’s speech, President Bush lays out his “return on success” plan for bringing troops home (though the meaning of “success” is unclear), discusses the Iraqi government’s progress (and lack thereof) in meeting its goals, and insists that “the success of a free Iraq is critical” to America’s security.
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The newest video message from Osama bin Laden makes no threats, but calls for Americans to reject war and convert to Islam. This excerpt shows the al-Qaida chief bragging about his impact on Bush’s rhetoric and foreign policy.
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cbsnews.com
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The word on the street, also known as the news media, is that Osama bin Laden plans to mark the anniversary of 9/11 with one of his famous YouTube-caliber videos. Expect anti-American vitriol, terror alerts and long lines at the airport—as long as our government is still paying attention to these things, that is. Update: video released.
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smh.com.au
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A newly released internal CIA report lays the “ultimate blame” for a lack of strategy to combat al-Qaida before 9/11 on former Director George Tenet, who calls the charge “flat wrong.” Congress ordered the declassification of the scathing document, which was completed in 2005.
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Too Soon to Tell: The Case for Hope, Continued
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