Human Rights Watch | This Wednesday, unless the UK foreign secretary takes rapid action, Britain’s High Court will hold a hearing to assess whether the UK government should be ordered to hand over secret documents to lawyers for a Guantanamo detainee. The detainee in question, Binyam Mohamed, faces possible charges of conspiracy and material support for [...]
A military operation that was said to target al-Qaeda has instead targeted Sunni Muslims, creating new sectarian tensions.
By PATRICK COCKBURN | The United States is moving towards ending its military control of Iraq by agreeing to withdraw combat troops from Iraqi cities and towns by June next year and from the rest of Iraq by 2011, according Iraqi and American negotiators.
The withdrawal of US troops to bases outside the cities, towns and [...]
By Richard Tyler | A London court has ruled that the British government must disclose information that could support the claim that torture was used to extract confessions from Binyam Mohamed, a former British resident who has been held in Guantánamo Bay since September 2004.
The ruling by the Judicial Review—a special court that considers the [...]
By Allan Woods | OTTAWA–Canadian soldiers could get training from a U.S. company closely linked to Blackwater USA, a private security firm implicated in the killings of hundreds of Iraqi civilians, if the Department of National Defence has its way.
The military gave notice this week of its intention to award an $850,000 contract for advanced [...]
By Glenn Greenwald | Writing in a New York Times blog yesterday, Clinton pollster Mark Penn hails the selection of Joe Biden as “a smart and successful choice” and says this:
From Al Gore on, the role of the vice president seems to have fundamentally changed. It used to be where the winner parked the loser or [...]
The Pentagon: Some-Things-Never-Change Department
Tomgram | What a difference four and a half years makes. When I first penned “The Wild Weapons of DARPA,” in March 2004, I was a new TomDispatch writer; the war in Iraq was not yet a year old; the war in Afghanistan had been bubbling for less than two and a half [...]
By Noah Shachtman | Iraq’s government and Sunni militias appear to be headed for a showdown. One of the things that just might keep a full-blown insurgency from erupting again, a leading expert in the region says, is a set of databases of fingerprints and irises, built by the U.S. military — and fed with [...]
By PAUL VON ZIELBAUER | In March or April 2007, three noncommissioned United States Army officers, including a first sergeant, a platoon sergeant and a senior medic, killed four Iraqi prisoners with pistol shots to the head as the men stood handcuffed and blindfolded beside a Baghdad canal, two of the soldiers said in sworn statements.
After [...]
Fascism’s principles are wafting in the air today, surreptitiously masquerading as something else, challenging everything we stand for.
By Laurence W. Britt | The cliché that people and nations learn from history is not only overused, but also overestimated; often we fail to learn from history, or draw the wrong conclusions. Sadly, historical amnesia is the [...]
By Stephen Lendman - RINF | For the West, everything changed but stayed the same, hard-wired and in place. Things just lay dormant in the shadows during the Yeltsin years, certain to reemerge once a more resolute Russian leader took over. If not Vladimir Putin, someone else little different.
Russia is back, proud and reassertive, and [...]
By Jacob G. Hornberger | If anyone still has any doubts about whether President Bush is exercising powers that any self-respecting dictator would relish, all he has to do is consider the military pact that Bush is entering into with Iraq. The pact involves the continued U.S. military occupation of Iraq as well as a [...]
By Rep. Ron Paul | We’ve heard how the value of the dollar affects gas prices – and indeed the price of everything. I was pleased that my request for a hearing on such was granted by the Financial Services committee and we were able to hear some very informative testimony. Certainly domestic policies, regarding [...]
PHOENIX - A federal judge on Wednesday permanently barred Arizona from using a state law to prosecute an online merchant who sells shirts that list names of thousands of troops killed in Iraq.
U.S. District Judge Neil Wake did not strike down the 2007 law against selling products that use of military casualties’ names without families’ [...]
Reuters - A British court ruled on Thursday that the government must disclose evidence to a defendant being held at Guantanamo Bay, a decision that carried with it implicit criticism of U.S. government detention policies.
In its ruling, the High Court said Britain’s Foreign Office must provide Binyam Mohamed, a British resident detained in Pakistan in [...]
By Alex Lantier | US media claims about Georgian democracy notwithstanding, a key factor in US backing for Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in his conflict with Russia has been the emergence of Georgia as a key transit country for oil and gas exports from the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea basin.
The August 7 outbreak of [...]
Yes, America’s economy is a war economy. Not a “manufacturing” economy. Not an “agricultural” economy. Nor a “service” economy. Not even a “consumer” economy.
By Paul B. Farrell | Seriously, I looked into your eyes, America, saw deep into your soul. So let’s get honest and officially call it “America’s Outrageous War Economy.” Admit it: we [...]
UCi | A team of UC Irvine scientists has been awarded a $4 million grant from the U.S. Army Research Office to study the neuroscientific and signal-processing foundations of synthetic telepathy.
The research could lead to a communication system that would benefit soldiers on the battlefield and paralysis and stroke patients, according to lead researcher Michael [...]
A group of 52 local activists today announced a $2 million settlement in their lawsuit against the City of New York. The activists were illegally arrested on April 7, 2003 while protesting against the Iraq war in front of a military contractor’s offices in midtown. The settlement in Kunstler et al v. New York City [...]
Corporate-government fraud has gotten a major boost ever since Iraq became the latest colony of the failing American Empire.
“Iraq is fast becoming one of the United States’ top customers for military sales,” reports USA Today in an article called “Iraqis buy billions in U.S. arms.”
http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/
2008-08-18-iraqtanks_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip
“Since January 2007, Iraq has spent $3.1 billion on U.S. weapons. [...]
(IPS) - Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s resignation Monday brings to an end an extraordinarily close relationship between Musharraf and the George W. Bush administration, in which Musharraf was lavished with political and economic benefits from the United States despite policies that were in sharp conflict with U.S. security interests.
It is well known that Bush repeatedly [...]
The use of torture by the US Government in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001 has come under increasing criticism.
In 1863 at the height of the US civil war, president Abraham Lincoln set the principles for interrogation of prisoners with a famous instruction “military necessity does not admit [...]
Werther | The first crisis over North Korea’s nuclear program arose in late 1994. It was obvious there was not much the United States could do to step in unilaterally and disarm the North Korean regime. Sanctions, the normally inevitable option short of war, had no meaning – the United States had no trade with [...]
Indictments for the killing of 17 Iraqis would likely be sought under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which would be unprecedented.
By Erika Niedowski | WASHINGTON // Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, effectively bade farewell yesterday to a critical ally in the US war on terrorism, Pervez Musharraf, and pledged US support to the new government in Pakistan and to bolstering the country’s democratic reforms.
Ms Rice called Mr Musharraf, who resigned rather than fight [...]
The Public Record | Four months before the United States invaded Iraq, the Department of Defense was secretly working with Vice President Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton Corp., on a secret deal that would give the world’s second largest oil services company total control over Iraq’s oil fields, according to interviews with Halliburton’s most senior executives.
Previously [...]
By James Bone | Six Blackwater Worldwide security guards have been notified that they could face prosecution in America for shooting dead 17 civilians in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square in an infamous incident that provoked fury in Iraq.
The Blackwater employees have reportedly been sent “target letters” by US prosecutors telling them that they could face charges [...]
Enterprising peace activists want a table at a careers fair, just like the military.
Among the interesting references to 9/11 that were released before 9/11 is a passport for ‘Neo’ in blockbuster film The Matrix (released in 1999) which expires ‘11 SEP 01.’
By Bob Egelko | After more than six years as a prisoner of the United States, former TV cameraman Sami al-Hajj is back at work with Al-Jazeera, the largest broadcaster in the Arab world, a thorn in the side of most Arab governments - and, by most indications, a target of deep hostility from the Bush [...]
Recent News