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By Patrick Cockburn
$16.08
By Richard Rhodes
$20.00
$20
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By William Pfaff — Given the Western world’s obsession with al-Qaida, it’s remarkable that public discourse makes little mention of the fact that the terror group is going out of business.
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Flickr / Samory Santos
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By Marie Cocco — The challenge of our time is to re-create America as a middle-class nation. [This is Marie Cocco’s last column.]
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milwoman.com
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International efforts to expand Afghanistan’s security forces are being undermined by “spiraling increases” in violent deaths among the nation’s police officers as the eighth anniversary of the U.S. war approaches.
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DoD / MC1 Chad J. McNeeley
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By Stanley Kutler — During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly called for expanding the war in Afghanistan. Be careful what you wish for.
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AP / Lynne Sladky
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By Marie Cocco — With the arrest of Najbullah Zazi, the man allegedly behind the biggest terror plot since 9/11, the truth is clearer than ever: Law enforcement stops terrorism. Not secret island prisons.
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Flickr / Jaako
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The current national threat level is yellow, which, according to the Department of Homeland Security, means a “significant risk of terrorist attacks.” But it turns out the national threat level is almost always at yellow, defeating the whole purpose of a warning system that operates on a scale.
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CIA / JFK Presidential Library
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How about that Eric Holder? The Justice Department plans to make it harder for the government to hide behind “national security” in legal cases—a process that has been abused since a highly flawed Supreme Court decision first allowed wide latitude in such matters.
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California Emergency Management Agency
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By G.W. Schulz, California Watch —
Records show that communities across California had difficulty managing millions in anti-terrorism grants handed out by Congress after Sept. 11.
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Project on Government Oversight
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Much of the furor over the conduct of private embassy guards in Kabul appears preoccupied with what one whistle-blower describes as the “gay shit” rather than the exploitation of young Afghan women or the deteriorating security situation at the embassy. The latter, after all, was the major focus of the complaint that blew this story open.
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U.S. Navy / MC3 Joshua Cassatt
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By William Pfaff — The most important political question faced by a Japan led by the Democratic Party concerns the Japanese-American security relationship, which is both humiliating and exploitative.
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By William Pfaff — Instead of reading ecology and novels on his vacation, the president should read Charles de Gaulle, who ended the dreadful insurrection in Algeria. Obama and his advisers have a dramatic and ahistorical view of Afghanistan—that “There is no alternative to victory.”
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fresh.co.il
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The U.N. military commander in Sudan has announced that the war in Darfur—which has killed more than 300,000 people—is over. Three million Sudanese remain displaced as the conflict ostensibly shifts from full-blown war to mere “security issues.”
Posted on Aug 27, 2009
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By Joe Conason — Former Vice President Dick Cheney and his supporters love America so much they would transform it into Stalinist Russia.
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USMC / Cpl. Kristofer Atkinson
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By Patrick Cockburn — Don’t let the bombings fool you: The American military withdrawal stabilizes Iraq to a degree never admitted by protagonists of the original invasion.
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USAF / Tech. Sgt. Eric T. Sheler
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John Brennan has known controversy for his defense of torture and rendition, but the president’s top counterterrorism adviser has just condemned the Bush administration’s approach by declaring: “We cannot shoot ourselves out of this challenge.”
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By William Pfaff — The more wars you undertake abroad, the more places you intervene and the more bases you build around the world, the less secure you are.
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U.S. Navy
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By Col. Timothy R. Reese —
As the old saying goes, “guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” Since the signing of the 2009 Security Agreement, we are guests in Iraq, and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose.
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By William Pfaff — Since 2001, there has been no actual terrorist attack reported inside the United States, much less one involving al-Qaida. Plenty of people have been killed by fellow Americans, ordinarily in old-fashioned ways, during that period.
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By William Pfaff — For all America’s trouble, Iraq has turned out to be a sectarian, authoritarian ally of Iran with no interest in working with the U.S. The “new Vietnam” of Afghanistan, meanwhile, is turning out to be worse than Vietnam.
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By William Pfaff — There is new evidence that the Obama government is serious about halting Israel’s colonization of the Palestinian territories—and about imposing, rather than merely inviting, a two-state Middle East solution.
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By Amy Goodman — Nonviolent activists and Muslims are held in draconian conditions, while the man charged with killing Dr. George Tiller trumpets from jail the extreme anti-abortion movement’s campaign of intimidation, vandalism, arson and murder.
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Flickr / TheeErin
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In the last year, government investigators were able to take explosives into federal buildings, build bombs there and then waltz around unmolested.
The Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and State were all infiltrated, as well as the offices of two members of Congress.
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White House / Sharon Farmer
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Whatever their private discussions, the governing administrations of the United States and Israel are engaged in a public back and forth that ought to give one pause. It all started when Vice President Biden said “Israel can determine for itself” whether to bomb Iran.
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By Marie Cocco — As the media trumpets sound for the pullback of American troops from urban areas in Iraq, the essential lesson of our involvement must be recalled: Nothing about our entanglement in Iraq has ever been as it seemed.
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AP photo / Khampha Bouaphanh
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By Andrew Becker and Hugo Cabrera, CIR —
While the nation’s understaffed immigration courts strain under a backlog that has grown to more than 200,000 cases, thousands of new border agents have been hired and the number of government attorneys who argue for deportation has increased by 35 percent, pushing more cases onto an already overburdened system.
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U.S. Army / Sgt. 1st Class Alex Licea
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The Iraqi capital threw a party Monday as U.S. troops began pulling out of Iraqi cities. It’s the first step in the military’s withdrawal plan, which promises to bring U.S. forces home by 2011. But it will be some time before many of the 131,000 troops return to the U.S., and there’s virtually no accounting of the thousands of private contractors and mercenaries.
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AP photo / Dan Balilty
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By William Pfaff — The Obama administration’s confrontation with Israel over its colonies inside the Palestine territories began as a test of Prime Minister Netanyahu, who was elected in order to defy the U.S. How it will end is a mystery.
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By Marie Cocco — There are without a doubt links among the extremists who have opened fire in this spring of slaughter, but we tend to ignore the most obvious point: We have decided to let just about anyone have a gun.
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White House / David Bohrer / Archive
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Leon Panetta responds to the former vice president’s constant sniping in the latest New Yorker: “I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue. ... It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics.”
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Flickr / ivanx
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Here we go again. The Center for Public Integrity crunched the numbers and found that between 1998 and 2007, Defense Department personnel enjoyed “more than 22,000 trips worth at least $26 million, sponsored by an array of foreign governments, private companies and other groups which have business with the Pentagon.”
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Mr. Fish
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By Chris Hedges — We may thrill to Obama’s rhetoric, but very few of the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world are as deluded. They grasp that nothing so far has changed for Muslims in the Middle East under the Obama administration.
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Flickr / steve9567
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By Joe Conason — If right-wing broadcasters don’t want to be blamed when someone murders a person they have demonized repeatedly—as in the case of George Tiller, the doctor shot dead in his Wichita, Kan., church last Sunday—then they ought to moderate their rhetoric.
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USAF / Staff Sgt. Bradley A. Lail
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By Fred Branfman — Gen. David Petraeus has proven the rule that past military victories do not guarantee future success. The general has made a mess of Afghanistan and Pakistan, yet he remains dangerously popular.
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aljazeera.net
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Tensions have been mounting between the U.S. and its usual BFF, Israel. President Obama’s demand for an end to the construction of settlements in the West Bank was rejected by Israel earlier this week. Obama has responded by suggesting that Israel’s intransigence endangers U.S. security.
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By William Pfaff — The basic question is whether the United States wishes to treat Russia as a permanent enemy, even if it is not. The result of treating states as enemies is that sooner or later they become them.
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By Amy Goodman — The economy is a shambles, unemployment is soaring, the auto industry is collapsing. But profits are higher than ever at oil companies Chevron and Shell.
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By Eugene Robinson — Which reality do you inhabit, Obama World or Cheney World? If it’s the latter, remember that storm clouds are always gathering. Don’t forget your umbrella.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — President Obama wants to build a new liberal majority and to do it he’s trying to charm everyone left of Rush Limbaugh. That strategy has led to some awkward moments.
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By William Pfaff — The calls for an independent commission to investigate torture usually argue that a congressional investigation, or a Justice Department criminal investigation, would become so politicized as to be hopelessly compromised. I am not sure this is true.
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White House / David Bohrer
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Ever the fan of cherry-picking, former Vice President Dick Cheney has called for the declassification of select intelligence he claims would polish his torture legacy. Whistle-blower extraordinaire Joe Wilson says the “most secretive individual in American politics” shouldn’t stop there—why not air all of the Bush administration’s dirty laundry once and for all?
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Harald Dettenborn
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Rep. Jane Harman agreed to go to bat for two AIPAC officials accused of espionage, in exchange for which an Israeli spy would try to get her appointed to chair the House Intelligence Committee, according to Congressional Quarterly. The NSA reportedly captured an exchange between Harman and the spy, during which the congresswoman allegedly said, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”
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AP photo / Ahn Young-joon
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By Scott Ritter — North Korea has come under strong international criticism and sanctions for its missile launch, but as a signatory to the 1966 Outer Space Treaty, it is legally permitted to pursue space launch activity. Besides, where is the pandemonium when Japan, Pakistan, Israel, India, Russia and the U.S. refine, test and launch their own ballistic missiles?
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By William Pfaff — American foreign policy is based not on what we can do, but what Washington wants to do, hence the blunders of Korea, Vietnam and even the Cold War, which the Soviets were kind enough to lose. Even now, the new president is extending the “Long War” on a still more ambitious scale.
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By William Pfaff — If Obama is successful in reducing our nuclear stockpile, it could make a monumental difference to the world’s security. Nuclear arms proliferation will never be stopped so long as the U.S. insists on maintaining a privileged position of global nuclear domination.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Marie Cocco — Indefinite and secret detention at the U.S. air base in Bagram, Afghanistan, was a fundamental breach of justice and morality when the Bush administration did it. It is made worse by the stench of hypocrisy when the Obama administration does it.
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Flickr / saragoldsmith
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Hollywood has given us many a laptop-wielding hacker who causes explosions, blackouts and mayhem with a few malicious keystrokes, but such scenarios may not be confined to preposterous action flicks anymore. The Wall Street Journal reports that cyberspies from China and Russia have infiltrated the U.S. electrical grid, mapped it and left a little something behind.
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Flickr / freezelight
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The BBC reports on some alarming numbers coming out of Redmond: “More than 97% of all e-mails sent over the net are unwanted, according to a Microsoft security report. The e-mails are dominated by spam adverts for drugs, and general product pitches and often have malicious attachments.”
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By William Pfaff — President Obama appears to have fallen for the oldest false dichotomy in the Pentagon repertoire, and the easiest one to sell to the American public. It goes like this: The world is divided between the Evil Folks and the Good. The Good Folks, being what they are, are naturally pro-American, once they get to know us.
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AP photo / Lee Jin-man
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The U.N. Security Council held an emergency meeting following what North Korea described as a satellite launch but what the U.S. and South Korea said was actually a long-range missile test. The U.S., the European Union, Japan and South Korea have all weighed in with varying degrees of concern, while China and Russia have urged calm and restraint.
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By David Sirota — Finally, after America has frittered away billions of taxpayer dollars arming Latin American death squads and incarcerating more of its own citizens on nonviolent drug charges than any other industrialized nation, the government is starting to re-evaluate federal narcotics policy.
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Too Soon to Tell: The Case for Hope, Continued
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