Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Opinion / Op-ed / Respecting China: “Thus I was bemused by Donald Rumsfeld’s recent comments that China was a country ”we hope and pray enters the civilized world in an orderly way.’
A Pentagon spokesman, in a role similar to the fellow who follows the circus elephant with a [...]

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MSNBC – Aboard Air CIA: “NEWSWEEK has obtained previously unpublished flight plans indicating the agency has been operating a Boeing 737 as part of a top-secret global charter servicing clandestine interrogation facilities used in the war on terror. And the Boeing’s flight information, detailed to the day, seems to confirm Masri’s tale of abduction. Gnjidic, [...]

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TheStar.com – Top spy warns Iraq a boon for terrorists: “‘These jihadists who survive will leave Iraq experienced and focused on acts of urban terrorism,’ he said. ‘They represent a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells, groups and networks in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries.’
On a day when the top half-dozen [...]

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The Angry Arab News Service/????? ????? ?????? ??????: “‘Partial results from Sunday’s election suggest that U.S.-backed Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s coalition is being roundly defeated by a list with the backing of Iraq’s senior Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al- Sistani, diminishing Allawi’s chances of retaining his post in the next government. Sharif Ali bin [...]

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The Angry Arab News Service/????? ????? ?????? ??????: “The last refuge of Arab scoundrels is…sectarianism and religious identities. Ahmad Chalabi was a secularist until he moved to Iraq and discovered how unpopular he is. Now he operates in the shadow of Muqtada As-Sadr and the Ayatollahs. And Kanan Makiyya (who actually predicted–based on his keen [...]

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Foreign Policy In Focus Policy Report: After Iraq?s Wartime Elections: “The failure of the U.S.-backed election in Iraq is not that it was illegitimate for most Iraqis but that the exercise has only deepened Iraq?s sectarian divisions and perhaps moved the country closer toward the specter of a full-scale civil war. Progressives should remain critical [...]

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LRB | Eliot Weinberger : What I Heard about Iraq: “In 1992, a year after the first Gulf War, I heard Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, say that the US had been wise not to invade Baghdad and get ?bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq?. I heard [...]

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FT.com / World / Asia-Pacific – China to pioneer ?pebble bed? N-reactor: “China is poised to develop the world’s first commercially operated ?pebble bed? nuclear reactor after a Chinese energy consortium chose a site in the eastern province of Shandong to build a 195MW gas-cooled power plant.
An official representing the consortium, led by Huaneng, [...]

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What Bin Laden Sees in Hiroshima (washingtonpost.com): “A startling number of U.S. nuclear and terrorism specialists I have talked with during the last year believe that the threat of a jihadi nuclear attack in the medium term is very serious. They recognize that as a technical and scientific matter, such an attack can be very [...]

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BBC NEWS | Americas | US ‘war is fun’ general rebuked: “The US Marine Corps has publicly upbraided one of its generals for his comments describing shooting people in Iraq as ‘fun’.
Discussing fighting in Iraq, the General said he liked brawling and enjoyed shooting people. “

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