Message from Journalist Robert Parry Building a truthful historical narrative may seem abstract but has powerful implications and needs your support, says Robert Parry.
Obama Should Read WikiLeaks Docs Before re-upping his Afghan strategy, President Obama might first read WikiLeaks' evidence on the folly, advises Ray McGovern. January 3, 2011
The Danger of Pro-Israel Extremism The hasty demonizing of Israeli critics as “anti-Semites” has hurt hopes for peace in the Middle East, writes Lawrence Davidson. January 2, 2011
Birth of Pakistan's Islamic Extremism While helping the CIA fight Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Pakistan adopted Islamic extremism, notes Alvaro Vargas Llosa. December 31, 2010
Pakistan: An elite police commando from the provincial police force who was assigned as a bodyguard for the governor of Punjab Province murdered the governor today in Islamabad. The commando dropped his weapon and surrendered to the police, bragging that he was proud he killed a blasphemer. With that, Pakistan's political crisis deepened.
Officer won't sign order for troop indoctrination, asks to be relieved of command over repeal of ‘gay' ban in military
Worldnet.com,Posted: December 24, 2010
An Army lieutenant colonel has asked to be relieved of command rather than order his troops to go through pro-homosexual indoctrination following the repeal of the policy, which required homosexuals to keep silent about their sexual preference.
This year will see the 10th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan and, according to current plans, the beginning of British troop withdrawal. A decade into the military campaign, there is no longer even discussion of winning. The initial objective to release the country from the despotic grip of the Taliban and prevent its use as a safe haven for al-Qaida was achieved within months. Since then, it has only ever become harder to discern what victory might look like.
There is some clarity on what would count as defeat. If Nato withdrawal leads to the total collapse of Hamid Karzai's government and a return to Taliban rule, there would be no disguising the humiliation to western powers, nor the increased security threat from jihadi terrorism. Not that President Karzai is an attractive ruler. His administration is corrupt and repressive.
In downtown Detroit, the streets are lined with abandoned hotels and swimming pools, ruined movie houses and schools, all evidence of the motor city's painful decline. The photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre capture what remains of a once-great city – and hint at the wider story of post-industrial America
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Cumulatively, the photographs are a powerful and disturbing testament to the glory and the destructive cost of American capitalism: the centre of a once-thriving metropolis in the most powerful nation on earth has become a ghost town of decaying buildings and streets. There is a formal beauty here too, though, reminiscent of Robert Polidori's images of post-hurricane Katrina New Orleans. “It seems like Detroit has just been left to die,” says Marchand, “Many times we would enter huge art deco buildings with once-beautiful chandeliers, ornate columns and extraordinary frescoes, and everything was crumbling and covered in dust, and the sense that you had entered a lost world was almost overwhelming. In a very real way, Detroit is a lost world – or at least a lost city where the magnificence of its past is everywhere evident.”
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The Ruins of Detroit tells the city's story so far in one starkly beautiful photograph after another, all of which add up to nothing less than an end-of-empire narrative. Or as Sugrue puts it: “The abandoned factories, the eerily vacant schools, the rotting houses, and gutted skyscrapers that Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre chronicle are the artefacts of Detroit's astonishing rise as a global capital of capitalism and its even more extraordinary descent into ruin, a place where the boundaries between the American dream and the American nightmare, between prosperity and poverty, between the permanent and the ephemeral are powerfully and painfully visible. No place epitomises the creative and destructive forces of modernity more than Detroit, past and present.”
A federal judge on Tuesday awarded $20,400 each to two American lawyers
illegally wiretapped by the George W. Bush administration, and granted
their counsel $2.5 million for the costs litigating the case for more than
four years.
It was the first and likely only lawsuit in which there was a ruling
against the former administration’s secret National Security Agency
surveillance program adopted in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terror
attacks.
In Wash Post article on CIA's Wikileaks TF, passed u/s/c, the following quote closes the piece, “the former high-ranking CIA officer said. “Nobody could carry out enough paper to do what WikiLeaks has done.”” Not sure that's true. Open source reporting not long after his trial indicated that Pollard hand carried tremendous volumes of paper documents out of his office to the Israelis; if memory serves, it amounted to hundreds of cubic feet. Volume was so great that the Israelis set up a safesite equipped with a copying machine of significant capability so that they could quickly copy Pollard's offerings and let him carry them back to the office.
JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel will officially and publicly appeal to President Obama in the coming days for the release of Jonathan Jay Pollard, the American serving a life term in a North Carolina prison for spying for Israel, Mr. Netanyahu’s office announced Tuesday.
Phi Beta Iota: The facts are clear. Pollard approached other governments before he approached Israel. His elevation into a national hero to be brought home to accolades is perfectly consistent with what every Jewish male cutting a swath through Christian girls accepts as his mantra: “Chiksas don't count.” Evidently the crew and families of the USS Liberty don't count either. We strongly support the US Intelligence Community's view that Pollard is a traitor and should die in prison. We also strongly support the need to for a comprehensive review of how every US taxpayer dollar is spent in the Middle East, with the objective of ending military support to dictators and financial support to Israel. Creating a regional water and educational trust makes more sense to us. At the same time, the fact is that at least three quarters of what we have classified should not be classified, and we are out of touch with unclassified reality across all ten high-level threats. We need to heal ourselves before we attempt to heal others, Pollard is an excellent case study of how out of touch both Israel and the White House are with reality.
