KIRKUK – Whatever the circumstances, Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena is free at last. But questions remain at what price. Her release has been clouded over by the death of the Italian intelligence agent who freed her from kidnappers. He was killed on the road...
Human rights groups and some senators are expressing growing frustration over the Pentagon's failure to hold senior officers or civilian leaders accountable for widespread abuses by U.S. forces against detainees in Washington's "war on terror." The latest...
President Bush has nominated John Bolton – currently undersecretary of state – to be ambassador to the United Nations, a presidential appointment that requires Senate confirmation. Will examining Senators focus on what they expect Bolton to accomplish in...
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a major advocacy group, has filed the first challenge to "rendition," known by critics as "outsourcing torture," a practice used by U.S. intelligence agencies to deliver detainees to prisons in countries...
In The Image, Daniel Boorstin's ground-breaking and magisterial study of the rise of the modern media and the public relations profession, the renowned historian coined the term "pseudo-event." He was referring to a "happening" that is designed to...
We had just finished a meal of lamb, rice and tabbouleh. My host, an intellectual and fluent in several languages, was talking about the Middle East. He was a Kurd and Syrian. "A French general put his foot on the grave of Saladin and said, 'Saladin, we have...
CANBERRA, Mar 10 (IPS) – The father of the only Australian prisoner held in the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba has renewed his plea that his son be brought home to face any charges following the return by the U.S. government of three French men to Paris this week....
The Syrian government must put an immediate end to human rights abuses against Syrian Kurds, Amnesty International said in a report published Thursday on the eve of the anniversary of the Qamishli clashes. More than 30 Kurds were killed in clashes that spread from a...
Throughout much of the Cold War, people feared above all else a global hot war, the third great one in a century of devastating world wars; and we crept up to it more than once – most desperately, there can be no doubt, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in...
An institutional climate of "Islamophobia" and wariness among many U.S. Arabs and Muslims of the federal government are proving to be substantial barriers to recruiting Arabic speakers into the United States' counterterrorism agencies, observers say....
