Whenever any US official says that Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program is destabilizing the Middle East by posing a proliferation problem, I wince. A civilian enrichment program is not a proliferation issue, since only the construction of a nuclear warhead would violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The NPT explicitly allows countries to close the fuel […]
Karzai Wishes he had Joined Taliban
Rajiv Chandrasekaran of WaPo gets the scoop. His sources say that at a high level meeting in October, Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Karl Eickenberry pressed President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan to reconsider his decision to toss private security firms out of his country. Karzai exploded, called the US one of three enemies faced by […]
Former CIA Official Ray McGovern Defends Assange
Former high-ranking CIA official Ray McGovern denounces smear campaign against Julian Assange of Wikileaks
Fareed Zakaria Destroys Beck on Lunatic Islamophobia
On his indispensable television news magazine, GPS, Fareed Zakaria demolishes Glenn Beck’s mind-numbingly stupid assertion that ten percent of Muslims are terrorists. Zakaria’s courage in standing up to the hate-mongers should not be underestimated, and he is among those few now standing in the way of a Rupert Murdoch plot to foment physical attacks of […]
Enormous Truck Bomb Kills 6 US Troops in Afghanistan as Constitutional Crisis Looms
The NYT reports that the Taliban deployed a massive truck bomb against a joint US-Afghan National Army forward operating base in the Arghandab river valley north of Qandahar, killing 6 US soldiers, injuring a handful of others, and wounding as many as 11 Afghanistan National Army troops. The soldiers who were killed were inside a […]
Visser: Spin-Doctors and the Changing Nature of Imperial Power in Iraq
Reidar Visser writes in a guest column for Informed Comment: Treaties, Acronyms and Spin-Doctors: The Changing Nature of Imperial Power in Iraq In the 1920s, during the early days of the Iraqi monarchy, a major bone of contention between King Faisal I and Britain concerned the definition of their bilateral relations. King Faisal objected strongly […]
Cardinal Ratzinger Moderated Opposition to Turkey Joining Europe on Becoming Pope: Wikileaks
The Guardian reports on wikileaks cables regarding the position of the Catholic Church on Europe’s Christian character and its unease with Turkey joining the EU. (the cable is here.) The problem is that, while the article on this matter is clear and largely accurate, the headline: “Pope wanted Muslim Turkey kept out of EU” is […]
Mubarak: W. Naive, controlled by Subordinates
We now have the full text of the May 19, 2009 cable giving background in preparation for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s visit to President Obama at the White House. This is the one where he said Iraq basically needs strong man rule. But the cable is full of other insights: 1. Mubarak boycotted the Bush […]
Paul Defends Wikileaks: Neocons Don’t Like Losing Grip on Empire
Rep. Ron Paul defends Wikileaks on the House Floor:
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