President Bush has nominated John Bolton – currently undersecretary of state – to be ambassador to the United Nations, a presidential appointment that requires Senate confirmation. Will examining Senators focus on what they expect Bolton to accomplish in...
‘Bring My Son Home,’ Pleads Guantanamo Bay Detainee’s Father
CANBERRA, Mar 10 (IPS) The father of the only Australian prisoner held in the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba has renewed his plea that his son be brought home to face any charges following the return by the U.S. government of three French men to Paris this week....
Torture and Oppression of Kurds in Syria
The Syrian government must put an immediate end to human rights abuses against Syrian Kurds, Amnesty International said in a report published Thursday on the eve of the anniversary of the Qamishli clashes. More than 30 Kurds were killed in clashes that spread from a...
Which War Is This Again?
Throughout much of the Cold War, people feared above all else a global hot war, the third great one in a century of devastating world wars; and we crept up to it more than once most desperately, there can be no doubt, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in...
Distrust Festers Between US Muslims, Intel Agencies
An institutional climate of "Islamophobia" and wariness among many U.S. Arabs and Muslims of the federal government are proving to be substantial barriers to recruiting Arabic speakers into the United States' counterterrorism agencies, observers say....
MoveOn.org Makes Peace With War
Sadly, it has come to this. Two years after the invasion of Iraq, the online powerhouse MoveOn.org which built most of its member base with a strong antiwar message is not pushing for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. With a network of more than 3...
The Wonderful Wizard
of Washington
The news that the American government fabricated the story of Saddam Hussein's capture that he wasn't found hiding in a hole, that he did fight back, and that one Marine was killed during the encounter may or may not be true, but the former wouldn't...
Parsing the President
President Bush was uncharacteristically slow to take credit, in his speech this week at the National Defense University, for what appear to be democratic-like changes in the Middle East. This might have been in part because if you're just counting numbers, which to...
The Haradinaj Affair
Kosovo "Prime Minister" Indicted Three months after he was appointed "prime minister" in the "provisional government" of the occupied Serbian province of Kosovo, Ramush Haradinaj has stepped down and surrendered to the Hague Inquisition. He did so after receiving a...
Lebanon and the Avaricious Superpower
Many years ago, I read a book called The Quiet American by Graham Greene. Its central character is a high-minded, naive young American operative in Vietnam. He has no idea about the complexities of that country but is determined to right its wrongs and create order....


