Archives for 2010

Gen. David Petraeus, a straight shooter, admitted on Meet the Press Sunday that the Afghanistan War will take years and incur high casualties.. His implicit defense of President Obama from Dick Cheney on the issues of torture and closing Guantanamo will make bigger headlines, but sooner or later the American public will notice the admission. […]

The LAT reports that the National Dialogue Front, a secular party led by Salih Mutlak, is calling for a boycott of the March 7 parliamentary elections in Iraq. The NDF has 11 seats in parliament, but Mutlak and another prominent party member were among over 500 candidates (out of over 6000) for parliament disqualified as […]

It appears that, the International Atomic Energy Agency is at least allowing for the possibility that documents allegedly found on a laptop some years ago –but discounted by the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency as of dubious provenance and incompatible with other intelligence gathered in Iran — point to a nuclear […]

The USG Open Source Center monitored Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s speech at the christening of an Iranian destroyer, Jamaran, on Iranian official radio, in which Khamenei again denied that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons and affirmed that they are illegal in Islamic law because they kill large numbers of innocent non-combatants. “Khamene’i Denies Iran Seeking […]

If you hate the US government for collecting taxes from you and are willing to fly a plane into a Federal building, you just might be a terrorist. But, nah, not if you’re a white guy. Some Tea Partiers, who likewise are outraged at paying taxes, are eager to adopt this domestic terrorist. If he’d […]

A US drone strike on N. Waziristan has allegedly killed Muhammad Haqqani, a son of guerrilla leader Jalaluddin Haqqani. The Haqqani network is considered particularly skilled insurgents, and is the faction closes to both the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence and to al-Qaeda. Jalaluddin’s health is said to be poor and he may have already turned most […]

The great divide between liberal Jewish Americans and the Israeli Right has lurked as an issue since the Likud Party first challenged Labor dominance in the late 1970s. It is now coming to a boiling point, even as Israel’s reputation in the world is sinking. As rightwing policies more visibly fail, the Likudniks are flailing […]

Percentage of Americans who favor socialism: 20 Percentage of Americans involved in Tea Party Movement: 11 (Support for Tea Party is also about 12%). Number of mentions of “Tea Party” past month in Lexis radio and tv transcript search: 1042* Number of mentions of “socialism” past month in Lexis radio and tv transcript search: 69+ […]

As the Marjah campaign continued in Afghanistan, the LAT reports that Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar was captured in Karachi, Pakistan, in large part because of US electronic surveillance. It sounds as though the National Security Agency accidentally picked up a telephone call between him and someone else, and was able to triangulate his position. The […]