International human rights groups are raising new questions about US counterinsurgency tactics in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In a letter sent to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld late last week, London-based Amnesty International asked whether the US military has adopted...
Four former heads of Israeli security, speaking in Israel, have warned the government that failure to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians will lead to catastrophe. These men are not some starry-eyed peaceniks. They are all former heads of Shin Bet, Israel's...
Washington is just full of "confidential" memoranda that, somehow, get published in the newspapers; they waft down the boulevards of the Imperial City like snowflakes in a storm, until the city is knee-deep in them. There was Rummy's supposedly super-secret missive...
Congress is poised to approve new legislation that amounts to the first substantive expansion of the controversial USA Patriot Act since it was approved just after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Acting at the Bush administration's...
The neocons, we are told by the Telegraph, are "unfazed despite war in Iraq," as the headline put it. The occasion for this reassuring news was an interview with the combative Dark Prince of the neoconservatives, Richard Perle, who complained about all the nasty...
Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media's coverage of upwards of 30,000 people marching in Miami in protest against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) decontextualizes the act of protest itself. To the average person watching Wolf Blitzer hem and haw over the...
The naming of an officer accused of longstanding ties to right-wing paramilitary forces as Colombia's new armed forces commander is a "slap in the face" of the US administration, which has pressed Bogotá to improve its human rights record, says...
Balkan Express I have been reading the Balkan Express for a long time and it has been difficult to watch the downward spiral of the Balkans along with the lives and liberties of its Slavic peoples. History has shown that a nation can only extricate itself from under...
"Par for the course," announced the AFP headline on Sunday, October 16, as the third Serbian presidential election in a year headed to inevitable failure. By the time the polls closed, less than 40% of voters bothered to cast a ballot for either of the two major and...
p align="left">This week's blockbuster leak of a secret memorandum from a senior Pentagon official to the Senate Intelligence Committee has spurred speculation that neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration are on the defensive and growing more desperate. Both...
