Before no other country on the planet does the United States kneel and plead like this. In other trouble spots, America takes a different tone. It bombs in Afghanistan, invades Iraq and threatens sanctions against Iran and North Korea. Did anyone in Washington consider begging Saddam Hussein to withdraw from occupied territory in Kuwait?
America, stop sucking up to Israel
Brought to you by CIA : America's drug crisis
Kudos to the New York Times, and to reporters Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen, for their lead article today reporting that Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghanistan’s stunningly corrupt President Hamid Karzai, a leading drug lord in the world’s major opium-producing nation, has for eight years been on the CIA payroll.
What the article didn’t mention at all is that there is a clear historical pattern here. During the Vietnam War, the CIA, and its Air America airline front-company, were neck deep in the Southeast Asian heroin trade. At the time, it was Southeast Asia, not Afghanistan, that was the leading producer and exporter of opium, mostly to the US, where there was a heroin epidemic.
EIA: a tiny agency with a big role in energy debate
As energy increasingly dominates the economy, a quiet little agency in Washington holds the responsibility for tracking the particles that conduct, fuse, blow, heat, combust and convert the earth, wind and water into the energy that makes our society run.
The man behind the quiet data-crunching enterprise is Richard Newell, a Duke University economist and energy enthusiast. He sits in a glass-walled office a block off the National Mall, between the president who hired him and the congressional lawmakers who hammer his numbers into policy.
Goldman's secret bets may have violated security laws
McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman's failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.
"The Securities and Exchange Commission should be very interested in any financial company that secretly decides a financial product is a loser and then goes out and actively markets that product or very similar products to unsuspecting customers without disclosing its true opinion," said Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economics professor who's proposed a massive overhaul of the nation's banks. "This is fraud and should be prosecuted."
Documents Detail Conditions Found at Secret C.I.A. Jails
F.B.I. agents who arrived at a secret C.I.A. jail overseas in September 2002 found prisoners “manacled to the ceiling and subjected to blaring music around the clock,” and a C.I.A. official wrote a list of questions for interrogators including “How close is each technique to the ‘rack and screw,’ ” according to hundreds of pages of partly declassified documents released Friday by the Justice Department.
The documents include handwritten notes, apparently prepared by Justice Department officials, discussing the possibility of prosecuting some employees of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Female vets paralyzed by psychological scars of combat
Never before has this country seen so many women paralyzed by the psychological scars of combat. As of June 2008, 19,084 female veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan had received diagnoses of mental disorders from the Department of Veterans Affairs, including 8,454 women with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress — and this number does not include troops still enlisted, or those who have never used the V.A. system.
Their mental anguish, from mortar attacks, the deaths of friends, or traumas that are harder to categorize, is a result of a historic shift. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has quietly sidestepped regulations that bar women from jobs in ground combat.
New papers detail FBI, CIA wrangle over detainees
Newly-released documents show that the FBI interviewed a naked, chained terror suspect back in 2002 as the bureau struggled with the CIA over how to treat high-value prisoners.Details of the interrogation were contained in documents released as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union for details of U.S. treatment of terror detainees.
More...
Lawsuit Accuses Psychologist of Ignoring Guantanamo Torture
The state board responsible for licensing - and disciplining - psychologists in Louisiana is "fighting awfully hard to turn a blind eye to serious allegations of abuse" brought against one of its members, who is being accused of complicity in beatings, religious and sexual humiliation, rape threats and painful body positions during his service as a senior adviser on interrogations for the US military in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
Dr. Trudy Bond, an Ohio-based psychologist, is suing the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists to compel it to investigate the behavior of Louisiana psychologist and retired US Army Col. Dr. Larry C. James, a former high-ranking adviser on interrogations for the US military in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
US Rabbi: No to settlements is yes to peace
You can convince Americans of the miracle of Israel's founding and the justice of her struggle against terror and rejection. You can convince them that it makes demographic and political sense for Israel to trade settlements near Jerusalem to the Palestinian Authority in return for land elsewhere in Israel.
But you cannot convince Americans that it makes sense for an Israel that supports a Palestinian state to maintain a large settler population in the heart of the West Bank.
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