via Lobe Log
by Marsha B. Cohen
Today hundreds of buses packed with what organizers claim are about a thousand citizen advocates departed from various pick-up points in and around New York and New Jersey for Washington, DC. They represent NORPAC (not an acronym for anything), a much smaller, localized grassroots [...]
via Lobe Log
by Charles Davis
US President Barack Obama today condemned the Guantanamo Bay prison camp run by US President Barack Obama, channeling the moral outrage last heard on the 2008 campaign trail.
“The idea that we would still detain forever a group of individuals that have not been tried, that is contrary [...]
Jeremy Scahill, Blowback Reporter
by Tom Engelhardt
via Tom Dispatch
Chalmers Johnson’s book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was published in March 2000 — and just about no one noticed. Until then, blowback had been an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, which Johnson defined as “the unintended consequences of policies [...]
via Lobe Log
by Jasmin Ramsey
Two conversations are presently occurring in Washington about Iran. Hawks and hardliners are searching for new ways to force the Obama administration to tighten or impose further sanctions, and/or discussing when the US should strike the country. Meanwhile, doves and pragmatists have been pointing out the ineffectiveness of sanctions in [...]
via Lobe Log
by Henry Precht
Two US service members were killed and at least eight others injured Monday in an insider attack at a Special Forces site in Afghanistan. The Taliban asserted responsibility. This incident would seem to nullify President Hamid Karzai’s earlier charge that US and Taliban forces were colluding [...]
via Lobe Log
by Mitchell Plitnick
The 2013 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference wasn’t quite the same show of arrogant power that it usually is. There seems to have been a note of unusual concern among the 13,000 or so assembled activists. And those concerns echo some of [...]
via Lobe Log
by Marsha B. Cohen
Newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is scheduled to meet with Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Tuesday morning, March 5. There’s more to this meeting than one might infer from harrumphing members of the right who see this meeting as one more opportunity [...]
The Trillion-Dollar Concept That No One Can Define
by Mattea Kramer and Chris Hellman
via Tom Dispatch
Imagine a labyrinthine government department so bloated that few have any clear idea of just what its countless pieces do. Imagine that tens of billions of tax dollars are disappearing into it annually, black hole-style, since it can’t pass a [...]
via IPS News
Ending a long and controversial battle, the U.S. Senate Tuesday voted 58-41 to confirm former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel as President Barack Obama’s new secretary of defence.
The confirmation, which followed a more-lopsided 71-27 vote to end a Republican-led filibuster against the decorated Vietnam War veteran, broke mainly along party lines, [...]
by Gareth Porter
via IPS News
A review of Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett’s “Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran” (Metropolitan Books, 2013)
“Going to Tehran” arguably represents the most important work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus [...]
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- Explosives Shatter Lives in Kashmir
- Has Caribbean Diplomacy Lost Its Mojo?
- Nuclear Iran Unlikely to Tilt Regional Power Balance – Report
- Videla Dies in Prison – a Victory Against Impunity
- U.S.-Russia Nuclear Arsenals Cling to Bygone Era
- Film on Sexual Abuse Wins at Colombia-Venezuela Festival
