Call Hamid Karzai’s Bluff

The ever-mercurial Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, recently called a council of the nation’s tribal elders (a loya jirga) to ratify a bilateral security agreement reached with the United States governing the up to 12,000 U.S. forces that would be left in that...

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Drone Killings Show Numbers, Not Bodies

More than 300 U.S. drone attacks have killed 2,160 militants and 67 civilians in Pakistan since 2008, according to Pakistani defense ministry data. But people living in the affected areas are now questioning these figures, asking why they never get to know the names...

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Free Expression Another Casualty of Sanctions

Aliakbar Salehi is a former member of the Iranian parliament and an Internet freedom and human rights advocate now living in Washington, DC. In 2006, he was arrested and jailed by the Iranian government for urging human rights reforms. But the authorities are not the...

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How the CIA Bungled the War on Terror

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Call it the Jason Bourne strategy. Think of it as the CIA’s plunge into Hollywood – or into the absurd.  As recent revelations have made clear, that Agency’s moves couldn’t be have been more far-fetched or more...

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A President Who Should ‘Live In Infamy’

Washington lies: how many times must Americans rediscover this home truth? The revelations provided to us by Edward Snowden are just the latest in a long series of whistleblower acts of bravery that have exposed the crimes of our Wise Leaders. From "Deep...

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