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COMMENTARY: Rumsfeld acknowledges US has no 'coherent approach' to terrorism |
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Written by Donna Quexada
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Saturday, 26 June 2004 |
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made a startling admission in Singapore on June 5. Speaking of the problem of terrorism, he said: "It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this." So why not? What has the secretary of defense been doing for two years? ... |
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 26 June 2004 )
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COMMENTARY: 'Bush & Co. have turned the language of lying into a fine art' (Robert Scheer) |
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Written by Jerry Gwizdka
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Saturday, 26 June 2004 |
The editors of the New York Times expressed astonishment a week ago
at the administration's "capacity for denial." Perhaps Robert
Scheer's column will enlighten them. The syndicated columnist explains what's
going on: "It's the Big Lie technique -- never flinch in the face of truth.
That's why Bush will never admit that he got it wrong when he told the nation on
the eve of going to war: 'Iraq has sent bomb-making and document forgery experts
to work with Al Qaeda. Iraq has also provided Al Qaeda with chemical and
biological weapons training' "... |
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 26 June 2004 )
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NEWS & ANALYSIS: Oil and the atrocities in Sudan |
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Written by Randy Talbot
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Saturday, 26 June 2004 |
The New York Times reported on Friday, June 25, that U.S. Secretary
of State Colin Powell and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan would travel to
Sudan next week "in an effort to compel the government there to end the
'catastrophe' facing its people."[1] -- As usual in mainstream media reports,
the problem in Sudan was presented as one caused by ethnic conflict: Arab
militias are evicting and killing Black Muslims. But the Times offered no
suggestion of why this might be occurring. -- Six months ago, however, Human
Rights Watch published a well-documented book-long report (available on line --
summary posted below) demonstrating that oil in southern Sudan is now "the
main objective and a principal cause" for the continuation of a 20-year civil
war in that unhappy country. "Oil now figures as an important remaining obstacle
to a lasting peace and oil revenues have been used by the government to obtain
weapons and ammunition that have enabled it to intensify the war and expand oil
development," says the Human Rights Watch report, issued in November 2003.
"Expansion of oil development has continued to be accompanied by the violent
displacement of the agro-pastoral southern Nuer and Dinka people from their
traditional lands atop the oilfields. Members of such communities continue to be
killed or maimed, their homes and crops burned, and their grains and cattle
looted." Human Rights Watch reports that "oil companies in Sudan, seeking
to make a profit in areas of the country wracked by civil war and often brutally
cleared of indigenous peoples," are complicit in the atrocities.[2] -- Three years
earlier, Amnesty International also issued a report calling attention to
"the link between the massive human rights violations by the security forces of
the Government of Sudan and various government allied militias, and the oil
operations by foreign companies."[3] |
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 26 June 2004 )
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FIRSTHAND: A father talks about the death of his son, killed in Iraq Apr. 4, 2004 |
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Written by Hank Berger
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Thursday, 24 June 2004 |
A moving interview with the father of Sgt. Michael Mitchell, a soldier killed in Sadr City on Apr. 4, 2004. "I can tell you that the days are not getting easier. It's not like I am OK with his loss. I look at a picture, or just have a thought. Those people closest to Mike are not getting over this. I remember the days before he died. Anytime the phone rang, I feared for my son's life. But nothing prepared me to know the real devastation that event has brought me. My life is so much worse than I could ever have imagined. Everything I do, 98 percent involves Michael. Everything I do involves my son's death. I'm not getting over it"... |
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 24 June 2004 )
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RECANTATION: Pro-war Australian Anglican bishop says war was unjust and asks forgiveness |
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Written by Hank Berger
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Thursday, 24 June 2004 |
An Anglican bishop in Australia who supported the invasion of Iraq admits he was wrong, regrets his complicity, asks forgiveness, and says this was an unjust war.... |
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 24 June 2004 )
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NEWS: Iraq's post-Saddam oil revenues ($10bn) spent in unaudited system 'open to fraudulent acts' |
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Written by Jerry Gwizdka
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Wednesday, 23 June 2004 |
The Financial Times (UK) reports that U.N.-mandated auditors attempting to examine how Iraq's oil revenues have been spent during the U.S.-led occupation have been stiff-armed by Coalition Provisional Authority (i.e. U.S.) officials. -- Oil worth more than $10 billion has been sold since the fall of Saddam Hussein, but the system under which this money was disbursed was "open to fraudulent acts," said the auditor. -- "One adviser to a member of the recently disbanded Iraqi Governing Council said the report raised the fear that no audit of the CPA's work would ever be completed. 'If the auditors don't finish by June 30, they never will, because the CPA staff are going home,' he said. 'I lament the lack of transparency and lack of involvement by Iraqis' "... |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 23 June 2004 )
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NEWS: Judge Calabresi likens Bush's accession to power to Mussolini's |
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Written by Madeleine Lee
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Wednesday, 23 June 2004 |
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On Saturday, Judge Guido Calabresi, an eminent jurist on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan, told a group at the annual convention of the American Constitutional Society that "the structural reassertion of democracy" necessitates voting George W. Bush out of office, calling the president a leader who "came to power as a result of the illegitimate acts of a legitimate institution that had the right to put somebody in power" and making a comparison to the manner in which Benito Mussolini attained power in Italy in 1922. -- Fascism, of course, takes its name from the party Mussolini founded. -- Judge Calabresi, a former dean of the Yale Law School, was born in Milan; his family fled Italy during Mussolini's dictatorship.... |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 23 June 2004 )
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HISTORICAL PARALLEL: Britain in Iraq, 1917-1920 and the U.S. in Iraq, 2003-2004 |
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Written by Henry Adams
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Wednesday, 23 June 2004 |
An account by Robert Fisk of the British occupation of Iraq in 1917 and its aftermath based on Iraqi scholar Ghassan Atiyah's Iraq, 1908-1921: A Socio-Political Study (Beirut: Arab Institute for Research and Publication, 1973), emphasizing chilling parallels with the present ordeal. -- Robert Fisk has won the British International Journalist of the Year award many times. He specializes in the Middle East, where he has spent three decades. Robert Fisk holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Trinity College, Dublin. He won an Amnesty International UK Press Award in 1998 for his reports from Algeria and in 2000 for his articles on NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. He was awarded the John Hopkins SIAS-CIBA prize for international journalism.... |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 23 June 2004 )
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NEWS: As instability grows, Kurds reclaim ancestral homes |
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Written by Henry Adams
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Tuesday, 22 June 2004 |
The New York Times reported Sunday that as many as 100,000 Arabs in NE Iraq have fled their homes and are living in camps as Kurds respond to the growing instability and uncertainty in Iraq by ignoring American orders to stay north of the "Green Line" and are moving to reclaim ancestral lands taken from them during the forty years of a Baath Party policy of forced Arab resettlement there. The Times reports that not all Arabs are being forced out, only families that came in the period of forced "Arabization" of the area. -- Kurds hope to make Kirkuk, with its vast oil reserves, their regional capital.... |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 22 June 2004 )
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BACKGROUND: Toronto Star on al-Zarqawi, a.k.a. 'Osama bin Laden 2.0' |
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Written by Fred Moreau
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Tuesday, 22 June 2004 |
The Toronto Star reviews what is and isn't known about al-Zarqawi, a.k.a. "Osama bin Laden 2.0"... |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 22 June 2004 )
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ANALYSIS: Wash. Post on causes of Iraq occupation's failure |
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Written by Jerry Gwizdka
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Tuesday, 22 June 2004 |
On Sunday, the Washington Post ran a front-page story reviewing the causes responsible for the failure of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The 5,000-word article is based on interviews with senior official both American and Iraqi, and on a review of internal Coalition Provisional Authority documents. -- Ironically, the failure has had less effect on Iraqis than on Americans: "In many ways, the occupation appears to have transformed the occupier more than the occupied. Iraqis continue to endure blackouts, lengthy gas lines, rampant unemployment and the uncertain political future that began when U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad. But American officials who once roamed the country to share their sense of mission with Iraqis now face such mortal danger that they are largely confined to compounds surrounded by concrete walls topped with razor wire. Iraqis who come to meet them must show two forms of identification and be searched three times." -- The effort to stimulate the economy has been a dismal failure: 80% of the $18.6 billion allocated by Congress last summer for Iraqi reconstruction remained unspent on June 1, and instead of 250,000 jobs for Iraqis, only 15,000 Iraqis have been hired. A senior reconstruction official said: "[T]he sad reality is that this program won't have a lot of impact in it for the Iraqis. The primary beneficiaries will be American companies." -- All senior CPA officials have the sense that they have failed, according to the Post. -- Ignorance, naÔvetÈ, and croynism marked CPA efforts to transform Iraq into a "model" society: "most CPA hiring was done by the White House and Pentagon personnel offices, with posts going to people with connections to the Bush administration or the Republican Party. The job of reorganizing Baghdad's stock exchange, which has not reopened, was given in September to a 24-year-old who had sought a job at the White House." -- Iraq is still importing gasoline and bottled water, despite its vast oil reserves and two large rivers. -- It was the refusal of Iraqi security forces to confront Moqtada al-Sadr's militias that made CPA authorities realize the extent of their failure. The response of the CPA was to begin staffing police forces with whomever could be found. "Of nearly 90,000 police on duty now, more than 62,000 still have not received any training," and they often lack weapons and equipment as well -- a situation that augurs ill for the future. -- As for the political transition, it was the Ayatollah Sistani who singlehandedly forced Bremer and the Americans totally to revise their plans for the drafting of a constitution, elections, and the transfer of sovereignty, and the Kurdish-Shiite dispute over what is to come has not been resolved, creating a source of great, possibly fatal political instability in Iraq in the months and years to come. "We were supposed to leave them with a permanent constitution," a senior CPA official told the Post. "Then we decided to leave them with a temporary constitution. Now we're leaving them with a temporary constitution that the majority dislikes." -- Meanwhile, life in the Green Zone (or "Emerald City," as some call it) is pleasant enough. "The power is always on. Shiny shuttle buses zip passengers around. Outdoor cafes stay open late into the night. There is little effort to comply with Islamic traditions. Beer flows freely at restaurants. Women walk around in shorts. Bacon cheeseburgers are on the CPA's lunch menu." But travel outside the Green Zone "requires armored vehicles and armed escorts, which are limited to senior officials. Lower-ranking employees must either remain within the compound or sneak out without a security detail." -- U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is said to have been shocked to discover how little knowledge of Iraqi society CPA officials had. -- Among Americans in Iraq, civilian-military relations are embittered, even poisonous. CPA official blame the military for not asking for enough troops to control the security situation, and the military considers the CPA utterly ineffectual. "Nobody has any idea what they do back in that palace," a senior Marine commander in Fallujah said recently. "We certainly don't see any results"... |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 22 June 2004 )
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COMMENTARY: Ronald Reagan as the link between Iraq and WMDs |
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Written by Donna Quexada
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Tuesday, 22 June 2004 |
Most of this material about U.S.-Iraq relations in the 1980s will be familiar to those who followed the news in the run-up to the Iraq war, but I find it surprising -- or would, if I weren't currently reading Robert W. McChesney's The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century (Monthly Review Press, 2004) -- how little was said about it in connection with the retrospectives about the Ronald Reagan's two terms as president (1981-1989). Thanks to Ted Nation for this item.... |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 22 June 2004 )
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NEWS: Hersh reports Israeli operatives now active in Kurdistan risk further destabilizing region |
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Written by Henry Adams
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Tuesday, 22 June 2004 |
"Kirkuk will be the Sarajevo of Iraq. If something happens there, it will be impossible to contain the crisis," a Turkish official told Seymour Hersh recently, commenting on the consequences of covert actions Israel is now engaging in. As its "Plan B" following the failure of U.S. policy in Iraq, Israel has decided to use Kurdish hopes for independence in order to build a power base. Given the view of Turkey, Iran, and Iraqi Arabs of Kurdish aspirations, however, the consequences could be incendiary -- hence the Turkish official's evocation of the event that set off World War I.... |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 22 June 2004 )
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COMMENTARY: 'Freedom, in this case, comes with corporate sponsorship' |
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Written by Madeleine Lee
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Tuesday, 22 June 2004 |
William Rivers Pitt considers the role of corporations in American history, and what that has to do with the war in Iraq.... |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 22 June 2004 )
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HISTORICAL PARALLEL: Torture in Algeria and Iraq |
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Written by Henry Adams
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Tuesday, 22 June 2004 |
A historian compares the French experience in Algeria with the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and argues that the use torture is mostly the result of a desperation It suggests that a cause is close to being lost, and can make a signal contribution to that loss. "In the short term, intelligence operatives can use torture to extract information that will save lives," writes Prof. Shawn McHale of the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. "But in the long term, the widespread use of torture destroys a population's acceptance of occupation. As Gen. Jacques Massu, commander of the army corps in Algiers, who played a leading role in the Algerian war, admitted in 2001, 'Torture is not indispensable in time of war, we could have gotten along without it very well' ". . . |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 22 June 2004 )
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NEWS: Investigative reporting in the N.Y. Times on intelligence from Guant·namo |
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Written by Donna Quexada
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Tuesday, 22 June 2004 |
The lead story in Monday's New York Times is a 6,000-word inquiry into the value of what the U.S. has learned from the hundreds of men imprisoned in Guant·namo, based on interviews with dozens of high-level officials. Its conclusion: "[G]overnment and military officials have repeatedly exaggerated both the danger the detainees posed and the intelligence they have provided." -- A 400-word synopsis precedes the full text of the article.... |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 22 June 2004 )
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REPORT: 47-page report on the US's secret system of off-shore prisons |
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Written by Madeleine Lee
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Monday, 21 June 2004 |
Last week Human Rights First published a 47-page entitled "Ending Secret Detentions," which describes what is known, and what is not known, about "a secret system of off-shore prisons beyond the reach of supervision, accountability, or law." The report is well documented: 11 of the 47 pages consist of notes on sources. -- More than two dozen facilities are involved in this prison system, about half of which exist in total secrecy, the U.S. not even acknowledging their existence. -- "Ending Secret Detentions" argues that such a system is utterly incompatible with the core set of beliefs upon which the American system of government was founded, which includes the beliefs that torture and degrading treatment are wrong, that arbitrary detention is an instrument of tyrnany, and that no government power should go unchecked. -- The authors of the report, Michael Posner and Deborah Pearlstein, call for "an official accounting -- to Congress and to the International Committee of the Red Cross -- of the number, nationality, legal status, and place of detention of all those the United States currently holds. We ask that all of these places of detention be acknowledged and open to inspection by the ICRC." After Abu Ghraib, "Trust is plainly no longer enough." -- A summary of the report and a link to the full report (a 400kb .pdf file) follow.... |
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Last Updated ( Monday, 21 June 2004 )
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NEWS: New weapons will soon be available to shock crowds, disable vehicles |
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Written by Donna Quexada
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Monday, 21 June 2004 |
The New Scientist (UK) reports that innovative weapons for controlling crowds by zapping them wirelessly with streams of electricity strong enough to stun people and disable vehicles are in the works both in the U.S. and Europe. Some use a stream of tiny conductive fibers; others project a stream of plasma (ionized gas), producing a conducting channel for an electric current. The first should be available to the Marine Corps in 2005. Others will soon be available for sale to police and military forces. Amnesty International and the Red Cross are expressing concerns.... |
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Last Updated ( Monday, 21 June 2004 )
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COMMENTARY & MORE COMMENTARY: News Tribune challenges Bush's credibility |
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Written by Fred Moreau
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Monday, 21 June 2004 |
The News Tribune of Tacoma was feeling feisty on Friday, June 18, the day George W. Bush came to town. It was the first time that a president holding office has visited Fort Lewis in 59 years, and they say the country is at war, but that didn't cow the Trib. Not only did Tacoma's daily newspaper send a reporter over to an I-5 overpass to cover UFPPC's anti-Bush demonstration, publishing a picture the next day of ten brave souls holding an enormous sign saying "BUSH VIOLATES AMERICAN VALUES" over the petroleum-powered torrent of I-5 traffic -- it also published an editorial attacking the president's credibility. "The American public has a right to know why the president and other administration officials played so fast and loose with the facts in building the case for war and a costly open-ended occupation," the News Tribune intoned, giving its readers hope that David Seago, Patrick O'Callahan, Cheryl Tucker, and Peter Bacho, who write the editorials over at 1950 S. State St., will fill us in when they stop scratching their heads and finally connect the dots.... |
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Last Updated ( Monday, 21 June 2004 )
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ANALYSIS: 'If Zarqawi did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him' |
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Written by Donna Quexada
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Monday, 21 June 2004 |
Gary Leupp of Tufts explains why Zarqawi is essential to the Bush administration's plans for brazening its way out of present difficulties.... |
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Last Updated ( Monday, 21 June 2004 )
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NEWS: U.S. ready to deal with Taliban again -- 'The dynamics of many things have changed' |
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Written by Randy Talbot
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Sunday, 20 June 2004 |
More on the complexities of Central Asian politics. -- According to this report, the U.S. appears once again to be cultivating, via contacts with British diplomats, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the radical cleric who was used by Pakistan's ISI to establish links with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The aim: to find a "good Taliban" (read: sans Mullah Omar) with whom the U.S. can deal, in order to secure an "honorable" exit from Afghanistan. -- Of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, Rehman says: "Certainly now they are preparing their minds for many compromises." |
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 20 June 2004 )
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