U.S. soldiers (L) and an Afghan policeman keep watch near a building which is held by the Taliban in Logar, south of Kabul August 10, 2009. REUTERS/Ahmad Masood KABUL — It is the open secret no one wants to talk about, the unwelcome truth that most prefer to hide. In Afghanistan, one of the...
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The US Department of State had prior knowledge of the coup. The Department of State and the US Congress funded and advised the actors and organisations in Honduras that participated in the coup. The Pentagon trained, schooled, commanded, funded and armed the Honduran armed forces that perpetrated the coup and that continue to repress...
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It is fitting that today’s deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq’s cities coincides with a meeting in Baghdad to auction off some of the country’s largest oil fields to companies such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and British Petroleum. It is a reminder of the real motives for the 2003 invasion and in...
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Bill for supplemental war and IMF funding could be defeated All 178 House Republicans plan to vote against the $100 billion Iraq/AfPak War Supplemental to protest $5 billion for the International Monetary Fund. That means 39 Democratic opponents could defeat the bill. Thirty-six Democrats on the right promised to vote no, so we only...
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At a hearing in Washington today, the federal Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan is releasing a 111-page report that represents its “initial investigations of the nation’s heavy reliance on contractors.” According to a release on the hearing: More than 240,000 contractor employees, about 80 percent of them foreign nationals, are working...
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Welcoming Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov to Foggy Bottom in early May of this year, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could think of nothing more original to say than “Azerbaijan has a very strategic location that is one important not only to their country, but really, regionally and globally….” But what Clinton’s...
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Danger of Military Conflict over Arctic? Battle For Resources May Intensify Russia says the point here is not militarization, but the possibility of a military conflict over this region, which could be high in the next ten years. Meanwhile, Canada also started increasing its military presence in the region. A new study by the...
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In recognition of “the emerging strategic importance of Africa,” in February 2007 President Bush ordered the creation of AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command. AFRICOM, like CENTCOM (Central Command) and EUCOM (European Command), centralizes all authority for the U.S. military operating in the African region under one command structure. AFRICOM also transfers many duties that...
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A true addict does not know that it is addicted. It does not know when to seek help. It cannot tell when its actions move from the sublime to the ridiculous. It cannot tell it is time to wean itself off a lethal product before it self-destructs. Russia threatening war in the Arctic over...
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Eugene Jarecki is an award-winning dramatic and documentary filmmaker whose previous film WHY WE FIGHT won the 2005 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. THE TRIALS OF HENRY KISSINGER, won the 2002 Amnesty International Award. In addition to his work in film, Jarecki is also the Founder and Executive Director of The...
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Debt, poverty, and the resource curse In the mid 1990’s economists Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner noticed a funny thing. One would think that countries that were well endowed with oil, gas and mineral wealth would be correspondingly economically well off – but in fact just the reverse seemed to be true. Sachs and...
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Bill Moyers on Big Oil and Iraq “Oh no, they told us, Iraq isn’t a war about oil. That’s cynical and simplistic, they said. It’s about terror and al Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from WMD. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire,...
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