Updated at 8:54 p.m. EDT, May 25, 2010
Gunmen at a Baghdad gold market staged a bold robbery that left over a dozen merchants and bystanders dead. At least 19 Iraqis were killed and 20 more were wounded in that attack and other violence across Baghdad and northern Iraq. Meanwhile, Army Lt. Gen. Lloyd Austin III has been tapped to lead U.S. forces in Iraq.
read moreUS Towns Open Doors to Cleared Gitmo Prisoners
As Congress stiffens its resistance to moving any Guantánamo prisoners anywhere near the continental U.S., some communities are putting out the welcome mat. Through an organization called No More Guantánamos, two New England towns have voted to welcome...
McChrystal Strategy Shifts to Raids – and Wali Karzai
Gen. Stanley McChrystal's team once talked openly about the need to remove Ahmed Wali Karzai, Afghan President Hamid Karzai's brother and the most powerful man in Kandahar, from power. Last October, as reports of Wali Karzai's role in the opium trade were circulating,...
Compulsory Armageddon
The April 20 Macondo blowout in the Gulf of Mexico is a gift from British Petroleum that keeps on giving: 11 human lives lost, 2,940,000 gallons of oil daily, a 2,500-square-mile oil slick, underwater plumes 10 miles across, softball-size tar balls washing up on...
US Funds Apartheid Roads on West Bank
RAMALLAH - The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is helping Israel to construct an apartheid road infrastructure in the occupied Palestinian West Bank by financing nearly a quarter of the segregated road system primarily for the benefit of...
How Dare They Make a Deal With Iran?
“I think this announcement is as convincing an answer to the efforts undertaken in Tehran over the last few days as any we could provide,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on START (strategic arms reduction...
More Blank Checks to the Military-Industrial Complex
Click here to listen to this speech. Congress, with its insatiable appetite for spending, is set to pass yet another “supplemental” appropriations bill in the next two weeks. So-called supplemental bills allow Congress to spend beyond even the 13 annual appropriations...
Bull From the China Shop
As counterinsurgency (COIN) marches into the expanding ranks of failed U.S. military doctrines, the military-industrial-congressional complex casts about for a new raison d'être. Since manpower-centric, generational occupations of broken countries we can't fix...
Rand Paul Drinks Tea, Turns Into Hawk?
"When it is said that nothing, including a nuclear strike, is off the table on Iran, are those who say it not also threatening genocide?" - Rep. Ron Paul, May 22, 2007 “I don't think you take [nuclear weapons] off the table.” - Rand Paul on Iran, The O'Reilly Factor,...
House Kills Plan to Close Guantánamo
President Obama's hopes of closing Guantánamo, which were already gravely wounded by his inability to meet his self-imposed deadline of a year for the prison's closure, now appear to have been killed off by lawmakers in Congress. Although the House Armed...
