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Latest show April 7, 2007
- A new strategy in Iraq?
- Iran and hostages
- Ethiopia and torture
Citations
- Federal Official in Student Loans Held Loan Stock - New York Times
- A senior official at the federal Education Department sold more than $100,000 in shares in a student loan company even as he was helping oversee lenders in the federal student loan program. ... John Edwards, the Democratic candidate for president, also weighed in on the issue yesterday, arguing that students should borrow directly from the government. "We need to fix the student loan program to take banks which are just an expensive middleman out of the process," he said in a statement.
- Permanent drought predicted for Southwest - Los Angeles Times
- The study, published online in the journal Science, predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest one of the fastest-growing regions in the nation.
- US priority: managing captives in Iraq | csmonitor.com
- For the past several years, the United States itself has held about 13,000 individuals captive and now holds about 18,000 captives. But as the Baghdad security plan also known as Fard Al Kanoon moves forward, Petraeus is planning for the possibility of holding as many as 40,000 captives. ... American commands will hold many of those detainees indefinitely
- British Sailors Were Gathering Intel on Iranians Before Capture - Sky News
- Captain Chris Air of the Royal Marines revealed to Sky News that he and his colleagues had been gathering intelligence on the Iranians.
- Democratic Blood Money - Senator Feinstein's War Profiteering
- Feinstein, who served as chairperson and ranking member for the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee (MILCON) from 2001-2005, came under fire early last year in these pages for profiting by way of her husband Richard Blum who, until 2005, held large stakes in two defense contracting companies. Both businesses, URS and Perini, have scored lucrative contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last four years, and Blum has personally pocketed tens of millions of dollars off the deals his wife, along with her colleagues, so graciously approved.
- Bill to cut off almost all war spending - USATODAY.com
- "If the president vetoes the supplemental appropriations bill and continues to resist changing course in Iraq, I will work to ensure this legislation receives a vote in the Senate in the next work period," Reid warned in a news release. The action marks a potential escalation in the war of words between Bush and Senate Democrats. The emergency war spending bill would require only the withdrawal of troops, but the new measure would cut off future funding as well as require the withdrawal.
- High court won't hear detainees' appeals - The Boston Globe
- Justices signaled, however, that the high court eventually may hear the cases, filed by two groups of Guantanamo detainees. Three justices dissented yesterday, writing that "these questions deserve this court's immediate attention." And two members of the court, John Paul Stevens and Anthony Kennedy, issued a joint statement, emphasizing that the decision "does not constitute an expression of any opinion on the merits" and holding out the possibility that the cases could be considered once detainees tried all the legal steps available to them. Court rules require the agreement of four of the nine justices to accept a case.
- Bush acts on Eastern Europe missile defense - Los Angeles Times
- "Iran won't be able, in the foreseeable future, to manufacture missile launchers with more than 3,000 kilometer (1,800 miles) radius. How can it present an acute danger to the United States, then?" said retired Maj. Gen. Roman Popkovich, a former chairman of the defense committee in the lower house of the Russian parliament. "Maybe they are not telling us about their real strategic plans, something like being able to shoot down our missiles at take off."
- U.S. diplomat visits American prisoner in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia - Nation/World
- Ethopia's intelligence service is holding an American who fled Somalia's fighting in a secret facility pending a hearing on his status next month, U.S. officials said Friday.
- Police Log Confirms FBI Role In Arrests - washingtonpost.com
- A secret FBI intelligence unit helped detain a group of war protesters in a downtown Washington parking garage in April 2002 and interrogated some of them on videotape about their political and religious beliefs, newly uncovered documents and interviews show.
- Cheney Sticks to His Delusions - By Dan Froomkin - washingtonpost.com
- As it happens, just in case anyone needed more evidence of the spuriousness of Cheney's views, yesterday also marked the release of yet another report confirming that that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's government were not working together before the invasion. The report also further documents how Cheney willfully ignored reliable intelligence in favor of broadcasting invented assertions emerging from a rogue Defense Department office -- a habit he apparently has yet to break.
- An Administration's Epic Collapse | TIME
- The three big Bush stories of 2007--the decision to "surge" in Iraq, the scandalous treatment of wounded veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys for tawdry political reasons--precisely illuminate the three qualities that make this Administration one of the worst in American history: arrogance (the surge), incompetence (Walter Reed) and cynicism (the U.S. Attorneys).
- Army Sees Gap in Jurisdiction Over Military Contractors - Secrecy News
- Contractors accompanying U.S. military forces in Iraq or elsewhere who commit crimes may be beyond the reach of law enforcement, a recent Army publication warns (pdf), because the Defense Department has not yet updated its regulations to conform to a Congressional mandate, resulting in a "gap" in legal jurisdiction.
- Humanitarian Crisis in Iraq, and More from CRS
- "The humanitarian crisis many feared would take place in March 2003 as a result of the war in Iraq appears to be unfolding," says a new report (pdf) from the Congressional Research Service. "It is estimated that in total (including those displaced prior to the war) there may be two million Iraqi refugees who have fled to Jordan, Syria, and other neighboring states, and approximately two million Iraqis who have been displaced within Iraq itself."
News notes
Saturday 7 April 2007
[These notes on the "Global War on Terror" were prepared for the weekly meeting of AWARE, the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign-Urbana. Much of this material was discussed on the Saturday morning radio program, "News from Neptune," by me and Paul Mueth, with the assistance of producer J. B. Nicholson-Owens and research director Eric Sizemore. Archived programs and citations are at <www.newsfromneptune.com>. Other references will be provided on request. —Carl G. Estabrook]- Congress recessed this week, but not before passing two bills (one in each house) providing a vast amount of money to continue killing people in the ME. Congress may produce a joint bill after recess (and probably milk and cookies and a nap), but Bush has said he will veto it because of suggestions (no more) from both houses about withdrawal from Iraq. I actually don't believe it -- Bush can sign the bill with the sort of signing statement about the authority of the Commander-in-Chief that the administration has used all along, and pocket the money. The political parties -- both substantially to the right of the US populace -- will have done their job of neutralizing the vote against the war in last fall's election.
-
The division between the parties and the people was on display in other ways this week. House Republican leader John Boehner was booed on Wednesday at a construction workershe said, "Who doesn't believe that if we just pull out of Iraq and come home that the terrorists won't follow us here and we'll be fighting them on the streets of America?" Boos and catcalls grew louder as Boehner continued, "We have to fight the enemy at some point, and if we don't fight him now, when will we fight them?"
Meanwhile, a great liberal hope, almost-senator Harold Ford of Tennessee, the new chairman of the rightist Democratic Leadership Council, this week said he does not thank that Congress should set a deadline for U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq. "I think most Americans want to win, they don't want to see us leave early, and if we leave prematurely, we may create a broader set of conflicts and invite a bigger problem in that region than before leaving."
-
In a week in which Iran announced that it will allow the monitoring of its nuclear program that the UN has asked for, the Iran news in the West has been about the captured British sailors -- perhaps the basis for a Tonkin Gulf incident for the Bush administration. And perhaps to that end, the US rejected an exchange of the sailors for the Iranian diplomats that the US imprisoned in Iraq two months ago and still holds.
The Russian government is leaking a story that the US plans to attack Iran this week, apparently with the intention of forestalling the attack. Russian sources say a vast air attack is planned for this Friday, April 6 (Good Friday in the Western Christian Church)
- Saudi
King Abdullah, whose country is one of the three upon which US control
of the Middle East rests (the other two being Israel and Turkey) on
Wednesday slammed the "illegitimate foreign occupation" of Iraq in an
opening speech to the annual Arab summit in Riyadh. He also said that
Arab nations would not allow any foreign force to decide the future of
the region. The Arab nations repeated their five-year-old Middle East
peace plan at the summit, offering normal relations with Israel if it
complies with UN resolutions.
- Two Afghanistan experts
painted a sobering picture of the conditions there yesterday, arguing
support among Afghans for NATO forces is plummeting, the U.S.-driven
policy of poppy eradication is wrongheaded, and the war might not be
winnable in its present form. U.S. scholar Barnett Rubin and Gordon
Smith, Canada.
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