Hebron is again in the headlines. More than almost any other place, this divided city represents the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a nutshell. Occupied by Israel in 1967, the Palestinian town saw its very heart taken over by Israeli settlers, whose presence there is illegal according to international law but supported by all Israeli governments. For …
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UNITED NATIONS – Amid charges of waste, fraud, and malfeasance in its multi-billion-dollar peacekeeping operations, the United Nations has suspended one contractor and eight staff members pending further investigations into potential wrongdoing. The focus of the investigation is procurement, which, according to one UN source, could emerge as a major financial scandal in the history …
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To avoid the failure of its mission in Iraq, the George W. Bush administration has been driven to seek the help of two major enemies – the Sunni insurgents and the government of Iran – but both initiatives have failed to make progress because officials were not given any real negotiating authority. U.S. officials in …
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Although Iranian and EU officials have recently agreed to resume talks on Iran’s nuclear activities, there is little optimism that such talks will lead to any breakthrough in the existing deadlock over Iran’s nuclear program. As senior Iranian diplomats and nuclear negotiators have remarked, Iran is determined to continue work on the nuclear fuel cycle …
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http://www.independent.org/tii/antiwar/e060117.html
In President Bush’s first State of the Union message, he essentially accused North Korea, Iran, and Iraq of having clandestine nuke programs: “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. “I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand …
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Dictatorships seldom appear full-fledged but emerge piecemeal. When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon with one Roman legion he broke the tradition that protected the civilian government from victorious generals and launched the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. Fearing that Caesar would become a king, the Senate assassinated him. From the civil …
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The neocons have insisted for years that the first shots of what they call “World War IV” have already been fired, and we are in for a new cold war (the previous one was WWIII) that is bound to turn hot. Now Niall Ferguson, the British exponent of a new American Empire, has come up …
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With Arkan Hamed BAGHDAD – What should have been a joyous four-day Islamic holiday for Eid al-Adha, which Iraqis began to celebrate Jan. 10, has only highlighted the suffering under U.S. occupation. The feast of sacrifice, which begins on the tenth day of the Islamic month of Dhul Hijja, is celebrated as a commemoration of …
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In April 2005, I posted a dispatch in which I claimed that “a senior official in one of our intelligence agencies” had slipped me an unpublished manuscript by “the president.” I added that I believed it genuine and had done my best to vet it. My source, I mentioned, had told me that the book …
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