Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) demanded that President Barack Obama’s administration release information on 600 detainees held at Bagram...
Questions about the US’s knowledge of the attacks of September 11 were raised even before the dust had settled in New York. Now details are emerging. Officials in the Bush administration are struggling to explain embarrassing revelations...
In the early eighties, Peshawar was the hub of activity for anti-Soviet fighters.
The NPT was opened for signatures in 1968. Initially, the US, Soviet Union, Britain and 59 other countries signed the treaty...
Both the US and its Zionist protege have increased the intensity of their rhetorical attacks against Islamic Iran. Last month, nuclear-armed Israeli submarines sailed through the Suez Canal, followed ten days later by Israeli warships crossing it into the Red Sea...
It was bound to happen; in fact, the US wants it this way. Its gross failures in Afghanistan are not only blamed on others, the war is also deliberately being spread to Pakistan and the Central Asian republics with frightening consequences. The expan
Tiny Lebanon (population, 4 million) seems to be getting far too much attention from the US on the eve of parliamentary elections scheduled for June 7. There is palpable panic in Washington at the prospects of the Hizbullah
One of the first acts of Barack Obama as president of the United States was to order a review of all Guantanamo Bay detainees. He also announced that the notorious detention camp will be closed in a year. That, however, has not deterred guards at the prison from abusing detainees, as Mohammad al-Gharani revealed in a telephone interview posted on Al-Jazeeratelevision website on April 14.
Like the chicken and egg question, what came first: the torturers or torture memos? Despite the mounting evidence, for years, officials in the Bush administration brazenly maintained: “TheUnited States does not do torture.” This was not stated merely by low level officials. Starting from former US President George Bush down, everyone had memorized this mantra about torture.
This year’s spring has arrived with the Americans singing a new tune about Afghanistan: the Taliban cannot be defeated militarily. While this was obvious for quite some time to most observers familiar with the Afghan scene, the Americans being slow learners needed extra time to grasp this reality. From US PresidentBarack Obama down, most Americans are now singing from the same page.
Every day brings more bad news about the state of the US economy, and indeed that of much of the rest of the world. Not only is America’s economy the largest in the world, its currency—the dollar—is also the global reserve currency with 63 percent of the world’s central bank reserves held in dollars.
If it were another government it would have caved in by now, but the heavenward Islamic government in the world has survived. The Islamic Republic of Iran, whatever one’s view of it, has weathered political pandemonium, economic earthquakes, and media twisters the likes of which we have not witnessed. This is a government and leadership with a people and population extending beyond its geographical frontiers.
The Obama administration is off to a sluggish start in foreign policy. The strategic toxins that have been lodged in the organs and tissues of the American body politic throughout the previous decades of successive administrations are pathological and substantial. When it comes to dealing with the Islamic movement and State, American politics are downright malignant and cancerous.
Long before Barack Obama was sworn in as president, the Americans had started to mutter darkly that Hamid Karzai was not only ineffective, he presided over a government that was corrupt and harbored drug and warlords in Afghanistan. While not all charges are false, Karzai alone cannot be blamed for all of them; it appears like another desperate attempt to shift blame for America's own disastrous policies.
Barack Obama’s election on November 4th and his inauguration as the 44th president of the United States on January 20th have led to misplaced optimism even among those who should know better. Obama’s claims to America’s “greatness” because it afforded him — son of a cattle-herder from Africa — the opportunity to rise to the highest office in the land should not mislead anyone.
Is it the beginning of the end for foreign occupation in Afghanistan? Seven years after driving the Taliban from power, Western bravado about defeating them militarily has evaporated. Several Western commanders and diplomats have at different times admitted that defeating the Taliban militarily was not possible and that a negotiated settlement to contain the insurgency was the only possible option.
By the time these lines are read, the US presidential election would be over. Current trends suggest Barack Obama would be the next president unless some unforeseen catastrophe or electoral fraud like those in 2000 and 2004 occur. Obama will inherit the biggest economic mess in US history since the 1930s depression. How did the US, the largest economy in the world, come to such a sorry state?
The days of the American empire are over; even US elites are writing its obituaries. The world Capitalist System was established on such factors as greed, living beyond means, using other people’s wealth, compound interest and a rigid focus on short-term profit.
