The Final Assault

When in May 2005 the Bush apparatchiks officially adopted the Clinton policy towards the Balkans (until then, they merely allowed it to continue out of inertia), predictions were rife that independence for the occupied Serbian province of Kosovo would be just around...

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Are Americans Really ‘Better Than That’?

A boyish, inquisitive face with an innocent look peered out from the Washington Post's lead story yesterday on torture. It was well groomed, pink-shirted John Kiriakou, a CIA interrogator who could just as easily pass for the local youth minister. The report by the...

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Antiwar Left Should Look Beyond Democrats

The left wing of the antiwar movement has some very serious problems, mainly our inability to recognize that the antiwar sentiment in the United States is resonating far beyond the confines of the so-called "left." We cannot step back and effectively analyze the...

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US Jews Tilt Rightwards on Israel

US Jews appear to have become more opposed both to Israel's making key concessions in renewed peace talks with Palestinians and to the US carrying out a military attack against Iran's nuclear facilities, according to the latest in an annual series of surveys of Jewish...

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On the Torturable and the Untorturable

In Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, reporter Siobhan Gorman offered a striking little portrait of José A. Rodriguez, who, in 2005, as chief of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, ordered the destruction of those "hundreds of hours" of CIA videotapes of...

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Is Tom Lantos’ Seat in Jeopardy?

Tom Lantos, a Democrat who has represented San Mateo in the U.S. House of Representatives for 13 terms, plans to run for reelection in 2008. Budapest-born Lantos, who came to the United States as a young man, may face a primary challenge from popular former state Sen....

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The Israel Lobby
and the War Party

How many times have we read some variation on the following lede? "Israeli armored forces backed by aircraft thrust into the southern Gaza Strip today, killing four Palestinians a day before Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were to begin laying the groundwork...

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Bush’s Surreal Iran Policy

According to the recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) "Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities," [.pdf] a key judgment of the 16 members of the U.S. intelligence community is that they "judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran...

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