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 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 [...]
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 Ruth Conniff | If the all-too-familiar sight of a slightly paunchy Joe Biden jogging to the podium, his white comb-over waving gently in the breeze (think “energy!”) to accept the job as Barack Obama’s Vice Presidential pick wasn’t enough to give you pause, there was the Bidenesque speech that followed. The “change” campaign is [...]
By Nick Juliano | New documents from within the Bush administration and US intelligence community during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq reveal that the White House began assembling a case for war before it had compiled the intel that ostensibly formed the basis of that case.
A new report on the documents from George [...]
Barack Obama has chosen Joe Biden as his running mate. It’s an interesting choice, given that Obama is running a change campaign and Biden has been a Washington fixture for decades. Also because the two ran against each other in the primary, during which Biden famously had to apologize for unfortunate comments about his rival.
The [...]
(IPS) | If John McCain is elected the next U.S. president, wounded veterans could be in for a world of hurt.
On the campaign trail, the Republican’s presumptive nominee has talked of a new mission for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and argued that veterans with non-combat medical problems should be given vouchers to receive [...]
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 [...]
House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) issued letters of inquiry Wednesday to Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, regarding a forged letter linking Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks.
The Michigan Democrat also sent letters to senior former Bush intelligence officials, including Robert Richer, former CIA Deputy Director of Clandestine Operations, who [...]
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 [...]
By Daniel Soar | For a moment in the late 1990s, it looked as though mobile phones might make us free. You could work in the park, be available when you wanted to be, choose who you answered to. You could be anywhere while you did anything. If location was mentioned it was gratuitous chatter [...]
By Ellen Nakashima | The federal government has been using its system of border checkpoints to greatly expand a database on travelers entering the country by collecting information on all U.S. citizens crossing by land, compiling data that will be stored for 15 years and may be used in criminal and intelligence investigations.
Officials say the Border [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
ISLAMABAD (IPS) | Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf resigned from office on Monday ending weeks of speculation over whether he would quit or face impeachment on charges of illegally seizing power by a parliament elected in February and dominated by political parties opposed to him.
Musharraf, who grabbed power in a bloodless military coup in October 1999, was [...]
Some 190,000 private personnel were working in the Iraq theater as of early this year, a new report says.
By Peter Grier | Washington - The American military has depended on private contractors since sutlers sold paper, bacon, sugar, and other small luxuries to Continental Army troops during the Revolutionary War.
But the scale of the use [...]
CRAWFORD, Texas - The United States on Sunday accused Russia of stalling its military pullback in Georgia, but the Bush administration is not rushing to repudiate Moscow for its actions.
The White House is struggling to figure out the best way to penalize Russia. It doesn’t want to deeply damage existing cooperation on many fronts or [...]
By Kevin Carey | On November 16, 2005, Willie “Bo” Mitchell and three co-defendants — Shelton “Little Rock” Harris, Shelly “Wayne” Martin, and Shawn Earl Gardner — appeared for a hearing in the modern federal courthouse in downtown Baltimore, Maryland. The four African American men were facing federal charges of racketeering, weapons possession, drug dealing, and [...]
By Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnson | The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.
The proposed changes would revise the federal government’s rules [...]
SchNews | Despite the Olympics, you had probably noticed there’s another war on, this time in the mountainous region of the Caucuses, in a previously little mentioned place called South Ossetia.
Whether or not Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili went it alone, or if he was given a nod and a wink from the crazies in the [...]
guardian.co.uk | The Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, has signed a ceasefire pact to end hostilities in Georgia.
The deal calls for Russian troops to pull back from Georgia but also grants them limited patrols inside the country.
The Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, reluctantly signed the plan yesterday while accusing the Russians of being “evil” and “21st century [...]
The road to the seat of power in the White House is not easy, and certainly not cheap.
This year’s US presidential race is on track to be the most expensive in history. Al Jazeera’s senior Washington correspondent Rob Reynolds discovers there are some unconventional methods being used to finance the campaigns.
Bayh doesn’t have a single significant accomplishment to his name — a miraculous achievement, even by Washington’s do-nothing standards.
Bayh doesn’t have a single significant accomplishment to his name — a miraculous achievement, even by Washington’s do-nothing standards.
By Barrie Collins - Spiked | Last week, the Rwandan government published the findings of its commission of inquiry into the role France played in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. It found French diplomats, military leaders and politicians – including former president François Mitterand – complicit in the genocide.
Considering that the current Rwandan leadership has vilified [...]
Tom LoBianco | Antiwar activists who were targeted by an undercover state police operation from 2005 to 2006 will ask state investigators Tuesday to expand their probe to learn whether other law enforcement agencies took part in the spying.
Members of Pledge of Resistance Baltimore plan to rally in front of the Maryland [...]
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