|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 . '/' . substr('9780345804372',-6,3) . '/' . '9780345804372' . '.jpg'; ?>)
By Robert Reich
$9.99
By Jabari Asim
$5.89
$22
|
|
|
|
|
Tehran’s move was apparently unprecedented in the history of the country, and the nation’s supreme religious leader declared that Iran will not give up its nuclear technology.
Check out Time’s Joe Klein on how America’s disastrous foreign policy has led to an emboldened Iran.
|
|
By Robert Scheer — Truthdig’s editor in chief argues that President Bush could defuse the nuclear standoff with North Korea by coddling its attention-starved leader—similar to what Nixon did with China. “Hell, Bush might even empathize with Kim’s desire to escape from the shadow of a father from whom he inherited his crown.”
|
Blofeld: swapmeetdave.com; Jong-Il: dictatorofthemonth.com
|
By Andy Borowitz — “The question ‘What does Kim Jong-Il really want?’ was definitively answered today when the mercurial North Korean dictator offered to abandon his nuclear weapons program in exchange for the role of the villain in the new James Bond film.”
|
From mda.mil
|
By Tad Daley — The United States is apparently considering the use of nuclear weapons to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. How can we contemplate nuking people who might nuke people to show that nuking people is wrong? A veteran nuclear weapons expert at Physicians for Social Responsibility unpacks the apocalyptic irony.
|
|
Stephen Hadley, Bush’s national security advisor, told reporters about North Korea’s missile launch, “Obviously, it is a bit of an effort to get attention, perhaps because so much attention has been focused on the Iranians.”
This reminds us of a classic Andy Borowitz article a few years back that said something to the effect of “Kim Jong Il Wants to Know What It Will Take for America to Bomb His Country and Put It on the Map.” Can anyone find that link?
|
|
The investigative journalist par excellence tells CNN that many higher-ups in the Pentagon have grave concerns about the White House’s military designs in Iran.
|
|
A brutal dictator in North Korea threatens our country with an “annihilating strike and a nuclear war” in response to America’s rhetoric over N. Korea’s possible missile launch (which was probably a hoax anyway).
Keep in mind that Sen. Orrin Hatch said that passing the flag-burning amendment was “the most important thing the Senate could be doing.” Good to know the Republicans really have their eye on the ball.
|
|
The inestimable Seymour Hersh delivers another can’t-miss update on Bush & Co.‘s plans to strike Iran. Hersh points out that even more so than about Iraq, we are clueless about Iran’s capabilities, and many military planners are seething that the White House is taking Iran’s nuclear capabilites for granted.
Summarized version of article
Full-text version
|
|
The six-nation incentive package aimed at halting Iran’s uraniam enrichment appears to have some purchase in Tehran. But don’t start celebrating. The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei again vowed that Iran would never back down on its nuclear program.
This is also bad news for Cheney and Rumsfeld: The appearance of diplomatic progress will make a future U.S. invasion all the tougher to justify.
|
|
In a 1980 interview between George H.W. Bush and then-L.A. Times reporter Robert Scheer, Bush revealed his belief in a winnable nuclear war—which many observers think lost him the Republican nomination to Ronald Reagan. Check out this interview and many more in Scheer’s new book “Playing President.”
|
From Vanity Fair
|
Vanity Fair’s Craig Unger reports that the Italian Secret Service likely concocted the Saddam-Niger forgery to bolster Bush’s case for war. The article raises questions about the involvement of a prominent White House-connected neocon in the “black ops” campaign.
|
AP
|
By Robert Scheer — Five of the largest U.S. newspapers shirked their journalistic responsibility by covering up the government’s outrageous smear campaign against Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee.
|
|
Iran has rejected an offer by America and five other world powers to extend a series of rewards in exchange for Iran’s abandonment of its nuclear program.
|
Mike Luckovich
|
Even though the U.S. and five other countries have offered Iran a series of rewards for giving up its nuclear program, Bush and Cheney have given the world ample reason to be skeptical that the White House has any intention of settling this issue diplomatically. (And we’re not alone in this sentiment.)
|
|
That’s the provocative question posed by this N.Y. Times article. “It became obvious to Mr. Bush that he could not ... consider military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites unless he first showed a willingness to engage Iran’s leadership directly over its nuclear program and exhaust every nonmilitary option.”
Has a decision to hit Iran already been made? Are we seeing a charade like the one before the Iraq war?
|
AP Photo / Mehr News, Sajjad Safari
|
Sec. of State Rice said America will join Europe in direct talks if Iran suspends its programs to enrich uranium and reprocess spent nuclear fuel. It’s a dramatic about-face, and comes a mere three weeks after the Iranian president sent a personal letter to Bush—the first direct communication between the two countries in over 20 years.
|
|
Iranian officials are furiously working diplomatic back channeles to open a dialogue with the U.S. (Apparently the Iranian’s president’s 18-page letter to Bush opened the floodgates.)
The significance of this? For 25 years Iran has enforced a taboo against making overtures to “The Great Satan.”
|
|
The government will detonate a massive amount of conventional explosives to figure out the math on a tactical nuclear weapon—perhaps to be used on Iran, warns Air America host Randi Rhodes.
|
|
By Robert Scheer — “A once swaggering president, who so convincingly wielded a bullhorn and modeled a flight suit, now has assumed the pretzel pose of a supplicant attempting to cajole our old enemy in Tehran into dropping its nuclear ambitions while simultaneously initiating talks with Iran aimed at bailing us out in Iraq.”
|
From www.cjd.cc
|
The pontiff used his first Easter message to ask for “an honorable solution” via “honest and serious negotiations.” He also affirmed Israel’s right to exist.
Somehow we suspect those wishes won’t have much of an impact on the Holocaust-denying president of Iran.
|
|
The man who helped found the environmental aid organization argues that nuclear power—once his sworn enemy—is now the planet’s only hope for slowing global warming.
|
|
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has told Bush that the UK will not offer any support to strike Iran, regardless of whether there is a U.N. mandate to do so, according to The Scotsman newspaper.
|
|
By Andy Borowitz — The political satirist reports on Rumsfeld’s plan to punish the government of Iran for its nuclear ambitions by sending the one troop to Tehran.
|
|
Forty-eight percent support striking Iran if it continues down its nuclear course, but a majority do not trust the president to make the “right decision,” according to an L.A. Times-Bloomberg poll.
|
From crooksandliars.com
|
Colin Powell’s controversial claim (made to Truthdig Editor Robert Scheer) that he never believed Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat has renewed the debate about Powell’s culpability in the Iraq debacle. Check out Vanity Fair’s Chris Hitchens and Newsweek’s Evan Thomas discussing the issue on “Hardball” or read Jane Hamsher’s take at Firedoglake.
|
|
By Robert Scheer — Colin Powell told me that he and his department’s top experts never believed that Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat, but that the president followed the misleading advice of Vice President Dick Cheney and the CIA in making the claim.
|
|
Contrary to the official “diplomatic solution” line, Seymour Hersh reports that Washington is stepping up plans for a possible airstrike on Iran. According to Reuters, Hersh’s story in the April 17 issue of The New Yorker reports that a former senior defense official said the planning was, in Hersh’s words, “based on the belief that a bombing campaign against Iran would humiliate the leadership and lead the Iranian public to overthrow it.” The ex-official reportedly added that he was shocked to hear the strategy.
|
|
Former intelligence officer and United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter cuts through a recent L.A. Times story which claimed that “Iran could manufacture enough highly enriched uranium to build a bomb within three years.” He provides a rather technical, but extremely convincing, argument for why it is unlikely that Iran could pose a nuclear threat anytime soon. (video: h/t Crooks and Liars)
|
|
Karl Rove kept the public from knowing before the 2004 election that Bush had been apprised “directly and repeatedly” that Saddam’s infamous aluminum tubes might have been for conventional—not nuclear—weapons.
|
|
The pretense has been shattered. The U.S. is explicitly accusing Iran of supplying money and training to anti-U.S. fighters in Iraq.
|
From pravda.ru
|
As part of Bush & Co.‘s campaign to turn Iran into the next imminent threat, Condoleezza Rice calls Tehran a “central banker for terrorism.”
So, just to get this straight: Iran is the new Iraq, which was the new Afghanistan, which was the new Russia?
|
Karen Spector
|
By Juan Cole — Truthdig’s Middle Eastern affairs expert argues that the Iranian nuclear issue “has not reached the point of crisis, and therefore other motivations must be sought for the Bush administration’s breathless rhetoric.”
UPDATE: Cole says that Bush’s recent linking of Iran to Iraqi roadside bombs is “wholly implausible.”
|
|
By Andy Borowitz — Andy takes a satirical look into the Axis of Evil and finds that its leaders occasionally enjoy a good round of trash-talking.
|
|
Tehran ratchets up the war of words with the U.S. over American-led action to bring Iran before the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions against its nuclear program.
We’re being threatened by the country Bush didn’t invade and whose surrogates we put in power in Iraq.
|
|
Dwayne Powell —
|
|
Bush’s historic deal with India will shield some Indian nuclear plants from international inspections. A proliferation expert tells the N.Y. Times that this will allow India to “amass as many nuclear weapons as it wants. This is Santa Claus negotiating.”
|
|
The L.A. Times charts how America’s war in Iraq has made Iran the dominant power in the region, with a stronger nuclear program, strengthened ties to Hamas and a burgeoning core of anti-U.S. Shiites.
Posted on Feb 21, 2006
READ MORE 
|
|
Tony Blankley —
As I understand the profound concern of the ever-alert White House reporters, they smell a constitutional crisis because the shooting party failed to alert the media of the accidental shooting down in Corpus Christi, Texas.
|
From moviereporter.net
|
China is set to plumb Iranian oil fields in a $100-billion deal, complicating U.S. efforts to isolate Tehran and providing Iran more money to pursue its nuclear ambitions.
Can someone please call Stephen Gaghan to figure this one out for us? Or maybe this is a case for Truthdig’s Orville Schell, who knows a thing or two about China?
|
|
The progressive European enclave has set a 15-year limit on its switch to renewable energy. | story
Hey, they won’t even have to get on a plane to collect their Nobel Prize!
Posted on Feb 8, 2006
READ MORE
|
|
We agree with Arianna and the Washington Post on their incredulity about Bush’s plan to wean the U.S. off oil.
|
|
In his first-ever interview with a Western publication, Iran’s foreign minister vows immediate retaliation over a move to refer his nation’s nuclear weapons activities to the United Nations Security Council. | story
Well, at least we can count on the support of the newly pro-West Iraqi government to back us up if things get messy next-door. Oh, wait….
Posted on Feb 2, 2006
READ MORE
|
View the most popular tags overall?
|
|
Quelle Surprise! Haiti on the Mend
Newsletter 
Like Us
Follow Us
Get Our Feed
