The nation is still reeling from the recent tragedy at the Fort Hood base in Texas, which left 13 U.S. soldiers dead and over 30 wounded. Major Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, perpetrated the horrific crime. Most media outlets have turned this into a case of security at military bases and have focused attention on ideology and religion as motivating factors.
Resource-rich Angola was once known as the scene of Africa’s longest-running civil war. Today, life expectancy hovers around 44 years — not unlike that of an average Briton living in the 1800s. Over 70% of the population lives in poverty, and the country has one of the highest child mortality rates in the world. And the nation’s lifetime dictator of 30 years, Jose Dos Santos, leader of the liberation-party-turned-permanent-government, the MPLA, does not appear to have lost his lust for the throne.
David Swanson’s provocative new book Daybreak brings to light the many crimes and injustices perpetrated by the Bush team during its eight-year term. The Obama administration’s reluctance to confront head-on the various illegalities committed by the Bush-Cheney regime l eaves the door open, Swanson argues, for future abuses of power, “I oppose accepting the pretense that one president orders torture legal and the next orders it illegal,” he writes. “If we accept that, then what is to prevent a future president declaring it legal again?” It isn’t enough for the Obama administration to reverse the policies of George W. Bush, which ranged from torture and censorship to spying and misappropriation of funds. Criminal prosecution of Bush and Dick Cheney can diminish the likelihood of future abuses of executive authority.
How should the United States relate to a solid ally whose human rights record is better than the norm in its region and better than its own record of 20 years ago — but is now heading in the wrong direction?
Tirana cafe. Photo by Don Russell.
A headline for a recent McClatchy news story suggests that the decision of Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah not to contest the second round of the Afghan presidential election will have a major impact on whether the Afghan government is perceived as legitimate: “Challenger’s pullout leaves Afghan government of dubious legitimacy.”
President Obama has talked a lot about ridding the world of nuclear weapons. He won a Nobel Peace prize largely on the strength of those words. Now, he needs to translate words into actions and vindicate the Nobel committee’s decision. When he goes to Japan this month, the president should make an unprecedented visit to Hiroshima.
Abdul Qadeer Khan is a now infamous character in the nuclear age, known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapon along with being linked to spreading his nuclear know-how to several rogue states such as North Korea, Iran, and Libya. Gordon Corera’s book opens with a history of the man behind the myth, detailing his fervent desire to make Pakistan a strong, proud country after its humiliation at the hands of India’s army. This desire and perhaps a stroke of luck landed him in the field of nuclear research despite the fact that his professional training was in metallurgy. Once he acquired his nuclear proficiency and its potential for deterrence was understood, bringing that power into the hands of Pakistan was A.Q. Khan’s way of ensuring another military defeat would never happen again.
As President Obama and his advisors debate future troop levels for Afghanistan, a new report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) muddies the water on one of the most important issues in the debate — the effects of Afghanistan’s drug production.
In a stunning blow against international law and human rights, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a resolution on Tuesday attacking the report of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict. The report was authored by the well-respected South African jurist Richard Goldstone and three other noted authorities on international humanitarian law, who had been widely praised for taking leadership in previous investigations of war crimes in Rwanda, Darfur, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere. Since this report documented apparent war crimes by a key U.S. ally, however, Congress has taken the unprecedented action of passing a resolution condemning it. Perhaps most ominously, the resolution also endorses Israel’s right to attack Syria and Iran on the grounds that they are "state sponsors of terrorism."