The grandly named “Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission” submitted its final report to Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa yesterday. The document is meant to account for the failure of a 2002 ceasefire and the events leading up to the end of the country’s 26-year-long war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil …
In November 2006, as ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko lay dying of radioactive poisoning, his wife Marina held a bedside vigil. At first doctors at his London hospital blamed an E. coli infection for Litvinenko’s yellowing skin, sunken eyes and dramatic weight loss. But Marina sensed something more sinister. “We asked many times …
Tuesday’s milestone prisoner exchange does not, repeat does not portend a new peace process between Israel and Hamas. Neither side is even seeking that goal: If the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is unable to agree peace terms with the moderate President Mahmoud Abbas, it’s hardly about to seek a “grand bargain” to end …
A used car salesman, a Mexican narco snitch, and an Iranian spook walk into a bar. What is this, says the ex-CIA barman, some kind of a joke?
Let’s just say that the ostensibly Iranian plot to blow up Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington is not yet proving to be the smoking gun that allows the Obama Administration to rally …
As momentous as Tuesday’s release of Sergeant Gilad Shalit and 477 Palestinian prisoners (with another 550 to freed within two months) may be, it is unlikely to be a game-changer — or a milestone on the road to peace. Indeed, while the spectacle of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu breaking the ostensible taboo on negotiating with …
The fact that President Barack Obama on Thursday found himself insisting that the facts support his Administration’s efforts to hold Tehran accountable for a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington suggests that the world is not yet rushing to fall in line with his call for “the toughest sanctions” on Iran.
The “toughest …
“We are not talking to Iran, so we don’t understand each other,” outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen told the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace last month. “If something happens, it’s virtually assured that we won’t get it right — that there will be miscalculation, which could be extremely dangerous …
If Iranian government operatives really did try to contract a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., as the Obama Administration alleges today, then they weren’t just being diabolical. They were being fairly stupid.
Granted, the Zetas – the drug mafia that Iranian-American Manssor Arbabsiar …
Every day, Mother Jones, an American magazine, publishes a photograph from a war zone or military base. The pictures, taken in places like Ramadi, Iraq, or Kabul, Afghanistan, are labeled with the date, the location and a bracing tagline: “We’re still at war.” Indeed, today marks 10 years since the beginning of the U.S.-led war in …
The truck bomb attack that killed more than 100 people in Mogadishu on Tuesday was a not entirely unfamiliar horror for the residents of a city locked in a permanent state of fratricidal warfare for two decades, but it highlighted the scale of a foreign policy challenge recently accepted by the government of Turkey.
Prime Minister …
It seems not a week goes by without more accusations heaped upon Pakistan’s controversial military intelligence agency, the ISI. The shadowy agency, seen by many as an enabler and tacit ally of militant extremists and terrorist groups in South Asia, had just been in headlines following a Taliban assault on the U.S. embassy and …
The prominence of Anwar al-Awlaki in al-Qaeda had been a symptom of the organization’s degradation under the relentless attack of U.S. and allied intelligence services over the past decade. For the U.S.-born Yemeni Youtube preacher was not exactly your battle-hardened field commander who’d made his name as a leader of men in battle; …
U.S. and other Western diplomats quietly gathered up their papers and walked out of the U.N. General Assembly chamber when Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reiterated his claim that the 9/11 terror attacks were orchestrated by the U.S. itself. But if the diplomats were irked, the remnants of al-Qaeda — at least the chapter in …
