Ms. Tantalus’ Choice

Tantalus is punished by the gods for reasons that are not entirely clear. He is hungry and thirsty, but the water in which he stands recedes when he bends down to drink from it, and the fruit above his head continually evades his hand. Tzipi Livni is now undergoing a...

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Whose Military Is It Anyway?

According to the New York Times, suicides in the U.S. Army this January alone could total as many as 24. (For January 2008, the number was five.) If so, that would not only be the highest monthly total since the Army started keeping such figures in 1980, but more...

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Lawsuit Sheds More Light on Terror War Abuses

Three human rights groups have released documents that they say reveal close cooperation between the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in rendering terrorism suspects to secret prisons, creating "ghost prisoners" by...

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Battling Christian Terrorists

Africa was always the continent (one of the few) that even the usually interventionist U.S. national security analysts deemed as non-strategic to U.S. interests.  Not anymore. The Pentagon's new Africa Command bureaucracy, which was created largely to defend oil...

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Intel Estimate Muddied Iran’s Nuclear Intent

President Barack Obama and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair did not appear to be on the same page this week when they talked about Iran's nuclear intentions. Obama referred in his news conference to Iran's "development of a nuclear weapon or their...

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Tenet’s Greatest Hit a Miss

In 1991, when inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency were allowed back into Iraq – after United Nations forces ejected the Iraqi invaders from Kuwait and Saddam Hussein had agreed to comply with certain UN Security Council resolutions – they...

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The Tigris Too Tells the Story

BAGHDAD - There is less water now in the Tigris, and it is less clean. The river has fewer fish, and rising fuel and other costs mean they are more costly to catch. It's not, as Hamza Majit finds, a good time to be a fisher. "It's getting worse everyday,"...

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