The tandem un-negotiated cease-fires that Israel and Hamas announced Jan. 18 across the Gaza-Israel front line remain fragile. Local and international efforts to consolidate the truce have stalled, and officials and analysts around the world warn of a high risk of...
Hamas Is Not Going Away
RAMALLAH – Despite intensive efforts by Israel, the international community and a number of Arab leaders to weaken and destroy Hamas through economic, punitive and military action, the Islamist organization continues to be a force to reckon with. Hamas won free...
Abolish Civilian Control Over Nukes?
Well, it appears that one of the first things the Obama-Biden Office of Management and Budget has done is to instruct the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to jointly "assess the costs and benefits of transferring budget and management" of...
Misreading the Iraqi Election Results
Now that their nemesis, George W. Bush, has left office, the mainstream media can be unbridled in their optimism about the future of Iraq. After 9/11, they chose to allow themselves to be duped by the Bush administration's fairly lame reasons for the clearly unrelated...
The Rewriting, Un-rewriting and Re-rewriting of History
In the "Rejectionism and Accommodation" chapter of Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel & The Palestinians, Noam Chomsky recounts how Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's 1971 peace initiative has been effaced from history. Sadat's offer of "a...
Panetta Too Deferential to Congress
"I am a creature of Congress," said Leon Panetta with a broad smile, which was returned by equally wide smiles from members of the Senate intelligence committee meeting yesterday to consider his nomination to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency. I...
Friday: 7 Iraqis Killed, 5 Wounded
Updated at 10:10 p.m. EST Feb. 6, 2009At least seven Iraqis were killed and five more were wounded, as U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited Iraq. No Coalition deaths were announced, but the U.S. army reported a spike in suicide deaths last month; however, the...
Iran: The More Things Change…
HONOLULU, Hawai'i, Feb 5 (IPS) - "We are not satisfied with [U.S. President Barack] Obama's actions since they have not been in line with claims of change - although we are not without hope either." These words, uttered Monday in a press conference by Iran's...
The Children of Guantánamo
Legal experts and human rights advocates are challenging the public to remember Guantánamo's "child soldiers" when the detainees there are characterized as "the worst of the worst." Since the iconic detention center in Cuba opened in 2002, some 22...
No Unemployment Among Iraq’s Gravediggers
BAGHDAD - Amidst the soaring unemployment in Iraq, the gravediggers have been busy. So busy that officials have no record of the number of graves dug; of the real death toll, that is. "I've been working here four years," a gravedigger who gave his name as Ali told IPS...