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The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress
By Chris Hedges
$22.99
$13
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It’s getting ugly out there. With just a day to go before the much anticipated Pennsylvania primary, the Democrats are running a blitz of negative ads, like this one from Hillary Clinton that features a cameo from a certain bearded terrorist.
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By Joshua Holland, AlterNet —
What separates Jimmy Carter from the neocons, other than a Nobel Prize, is his genuine desire to negotiate a Middle East peace settlement, and that means talking to everyone.
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AP photo / Walter Petruska
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The State Department says it has twice asked Jimmy Carter not to meet with Hamas leaders, but the former president says he feels “quite at ease” in going ahead with a scheduled meeting because “Hamas will have to be included” if there is to be peace in the region.
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By Eugene Robinson — Quite a “defining moment” in Iraq, wasn’t it? At this rate, John McCain is going to be proved right: The war will last a century.
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By Robert Fisk — The Independent’s Robert Fisk looks back at five years of catastrophe in Iraq and is reminded of Winston Churchill’s depiction of Palestine as a “hell-disaster.”
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thewashingtonnote.com
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Five years, nearly 4,000 dead Americans, millions of killed or displaced Iraqi civilians and $500 billion later, George W. Bush still thinks the Iraq war was a good move. In remarks leaked on the eve of his speech marking the anniversary of the war, the president says the high costs “are necessary when we consider the cost of a strategic victory for our enemies in Iraq.”
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It was only a matter of time before Barack Obama would have to weigh in on the controversy surrounding the sermons of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose rhetorical flair sometimes verged on the incendiary.
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BGay.com
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Here’s a quiz: What’s the most potentially harmful phenomenon or issue threatening our nation? Our use of torture on suspected terrorists? Hawks in the White House? If you guessed either of those, according to Oklahoma Rep. Sally Kern, you’re wrong—homosexuality is America’s worst scourge. Guess who won’t be voting for Rep. Kern in her next bid for office?
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AP photo / Oded Balilty
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By Chris Hedges — War creates a world without empathy. Those who have empathy cannot, as did Palestinian gunman Alaa Hisham Abu Dheim, coldly murder students in a Jerusalem library. Those who have empathy cannot drop tons of iron fragmentation bombs on crowded Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza, killing more than 120 Palestinians in a week, of whom one in five were children and more than half were civilians.
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AP photo / Ahmad al-Rubaye, pool
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By Robert Scheer — President Bush has made his antagonism for Iran and its president well known, but in Iraq he has created a great ally for his enemy, as was clear from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s historic visit.
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AP photo / Hussein Malla
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By Scott Ritter — Imad Mughniyeh was once America’s most-wanted terrorist, and his crimes were truly abhorrent. But his assassination, Ritter argues, will only lead to more violence.
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By Marie Cocco — While Pakistan steals headlines, neighboring Afghanistan offers a more realistic opportunity to crack down on the incubation of terrorists—if only the United States and other interested governments are willing to think outside the box.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The boilerplate in a candidate’s speeches gets little attention because words used over and over never constitute “news.” But one of John McCain’s favorite lines—his declaration that “the transcendent challenge of the 21st century is radical Islamic extremists,” or, as he sometimes says it, “extremism”—could define the 2008 election.
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By Joe Conason — The same conservatives sending Barack Obama love notes over the airwaves are likely to smear him from every angle if he secures the nomination. Obama says he is ready. Let’s hope so.
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By Marie Cocco — The president and other fear mongers love to harangue Americans with the specter of terrorism when their pet projects (and our freedoms) are on the line, but when it comes to the basic programs that protect us from disaster, money talks louder than threats.
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The House of Representatives and Senate have now both signaled their disapproval of the CIA’s use of waterboarding by voting for a ban on any techniques but the 19 officially approved by the Army, but President Bush has already, in turn, signaled his intent to veto any legislation that would rule out harsh interrogation methods.
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Although some politicians and media pundits who lean toward the right of the political spectrum regard global warming as an overhyped pet issue that mostly gets liberals hot under the collar, New York City mayor and media baron Mike Bloomberg (who’s moved around quite a bit on said spectrum) suggests that it is potentially much worse than the threat of terrorism. He made the comment Monday at a U.N. climate change conference.
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thewashingtonnote.com
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Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the purported mastermind behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and five other detainees at Guantanamo Bay are facing official charges from the Pentagon that could result in the death penalty.
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AP photo / Carlos Osorio
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By Chris Hedges — 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.
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freedigitalphotos.net
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The skies won’t seem so friendly to Europeans looking to travel to the U.S. soon if President Bush’s list of new security demands is implemented despite the resistance and outrage it has sparked among EU officials, whose countrymen will encounter additional headaches if their leaders don’t get with Bush’s program.
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By Joe Conason — The revival of John McCain’s presidential candidacy, now expected to carry him through to his party’s nomination, can be interpreted as either proof of the judgment of Republican primary voters or evidence of the paucity of alternative choices.
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AP photo / Baz Ratner
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By Milton Viorst — Can decent Israelis, caught between complacency and conscience, save their beleaguered country from the corruptions of power, religious fanaticism and crippling hubris?
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By Elliot D. Cohen — It’s not enough for George W. Bush’s government to eavesdrop on phone calls, monitor financial transactions and sneak a peek at other people’s e-mails. Now the administration says it needs to monitor all Internet activity in the United States. That means you and everything you do online.
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By Amy Goodman — It’s the deadliest conflict since World War II. More than 5 million people have died in the past decade, yet it goes virtually unnoticed and unreported in the United States.
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AP photo / David Guttenfelder
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By Scott Ritter — Pervez Musharraf’s recent actions remind us, Ritter argues, that America’s special relationship with Pakistan serves neither country’s best interests.
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When Barack Obama first started running for the White House, Fox News tried to paint him with the terrorism brush. Rather than play games with the network, the Obama campaign simply blackballed Fox. Robert Greenwald’s “Fox Attacks” brings us up to date after Bill O’Reilly’s manhandling of an Obama staffer last weekend.
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By Amy Goodman — Benazir Bhutto and her supporters who died with her during the suicide attack Dec. 27 are the latest victims of decades of dangerous U.S. support for Pakistan’s military regime.
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By Amy Goodman — The kidnap and torture program of the Bush administration, with its secret CIA “black site” prisons and “torture taxi” flights on private jets, saw a little light of day this week.
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AP photo / Francois Mori
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By Barry Lando — For former “60 Minutes” producer Barry Lando, Moammar Gadhafi’s recent visit to France raised some important questions about the West’s attitudes toward tyrants. Just whom should we embrace and whom should we flatten with a bit of shock and awe?
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AP photo / Manuel Balce Ceneta
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By Robert Scheer — When the CIA destroyed those prisoner interrogation videotapes, was it also destroying the truth about 9/11? After all, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, the basic narrative of what happened on that day comes from the CIA’s account of what those prisoners told their torturers. And what about those congressional leaders, including Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi, who were briefed on the torture program as early as 2002?
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abcnews.com
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A bipartisan group of top lawmakers, including current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was briefed on the details of waterboarding and other interrogation techniques as early as 2002. According to several U.S. officials, over the course of roughly 30 private briefings only one objection to the practice was raised.
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AP photo / Lawrence Jackson
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By Scott Ritter — The former chief weapons inspector argues that the Bush administration isn’t going to let facts get in the way of its eagerly sought war with Iran. If there’s any hope of avoiding such a conflict, Ritter writes, Congress will have to rouse from its slumber and act, rather than continuing to wait for the White House to make the first move.
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masternewmedia.org
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James Harris and Josh Scheer —
“Spying Blind” author Amy Zegart gives Truthdig a status report on America’s intelligence agencies and explains why our intelligence system is so broken and why our democracy may be to blame.
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villagevoice.com
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Rudy Giuliani likes to pretend that he’s the world’s greatest terrorism fighter, but it turns out that his business empire has contracted with a Qatari sheik who once helped Khalid Sheikh Muhammad escape the FBI. The Village Voice has the goods.
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All but two of the nation’s 43 “fusion centers,” information-sharing offices set up after 9/11 to help uncover terrorist activity, have been distracted by local crime and other distinctly non-terrorist intrigue, according to a Government Accountability Office report obtained by the Associated Press. The problem, like so many facing our nation, apparently stems from the lack of funding and oversight by the Bush administration.
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foxnews.com
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Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani clearly shares a particular personality trait with President Bush: the kind of unassailable certainty that even evidence to the contrary can’t uproot. Take his position on the Iraq war, for example, which he still believes—even more so, now—was the right move for the U.S. to have made.
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Just in case anyone forgot that Rudy Giuliani was the mayor of New York on Sept. 11, 2001, or wondered why a former mayor thinks he’s qualified to be president, the candidate has developed something of a “9/11” tick. It turns out he might not be entirely conscious of it.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — “The war on terror” made me do it. That’s the excuse that works for George W. Bush to rationalize his assaults on the rule of law, from arbitrary arrest to torture. So why not try some war-on-terror obfuscation to bail out his president-dictator buddy over in Pakistan?
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By Joe Conason — In Rudolph Giuliani’s narrative of his own life, as confided to rapt Republican voters along the presidential primary trail, he has been fighting the lonely twilight struggle against “Islamic terrorism” since sometime in the 1970s.
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AP photo / Junji Kurokawa
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By Robert Scheer — Not to stoke any of the inane conspiracy theories running wild on the Internet, but if Osama bin Laden wasn’t on the payroll of Lockheed-Martin or some other large defense contractor, he deserves to have been. What a boondoggle 9/11 has been for the merchants of war, who this week announced yet another quarter of whopping profits made possible by George Bush’s pretending to fight terrorism by throwing money at outdated Cold War-style weapons systems.
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By Elliot D. Cohen — The “Last Days of Democracy” author warns that Congress is about to aid the Bush administration with its Orwellian plans by granting retroactive immunity to the telecommunications giants for helping the government spy on Americans.
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Original from archives.gov
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By Chris Hedges — A Dallas jury, a week ago, caused a mistrial in the government case against this country’s largest Islamic charity. The action raises a defiant fist on the sinking ship of American democracy.
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By Marie Cocco — The nominee for attorney general doesn’t know “what is involved” in waterboarding, and he appears to back Bush’s usurpation of power. Isn’t it time for the Democrats to grow some spine?
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politico.com
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Hillary Clinton may be the front-runner, but her campaign has been doing a bit of damage control in Iowa over the senator’s vote to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization, a move critics believe is a prelude to war with Iran. Clinton sent out a mass mailing explaining her vote and insisting that she opposes military action “without full Congressional approval.”
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news.bbc.co.uk
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More than a hundred Pakistanis were killed Thursday by two bomb blasts as a crowd of 200,000 gathered to witness the return of exiled former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Bhutto herself escaped unscathed and was rushed to her home.
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nydailynews.com
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A study of 7-to-11-year-old Brits found that the climate crisis and terrorism have added to the usual pressures of school and friendships to drive kids batty. Luckily, schools that engaged world-weary children with lessons and activities related to global catastrophe managed to alleviate some of the tension.
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israellobbybook.com
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The editor of the provocative new bestseller by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt asks the authors (pictured above) whether their book is good for the Jews and good for America.
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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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facebook.com
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By Chris Hedges — If you are a young Muslim American and head off to the Middle East for a spell in a fundamentalist “madrassa,” or religious school, Homeland Security will probably greet you at the airport when you return. But if you are an American Jew and you join hundreds of teenagers from Europe and Mexico for an eight-week training course run by the Israel Defense Forces, you can post your picture wearing an Israeli army uniform and holding an automatic weapon on MySpace.
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