Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy: President Barack Obama‘s administration has been delaying its planned $53 million arms sale to Bahrain due to human rights concerns and congressional opposition, but this week administration officials told several congressional offices that they will move forward with a new and different package of arms sales — without any formal notification to [...]
Dana Frank, professor of history at the University of California, has a piece in the New York Times about the Obama administration’s avid support for the corrupt military regime in Honduras. She’s written previously about it, as have I on this blog. Excerpt: It’s time to acknowledge the foreign policy disaster that American support for the Porfirio Lobo administration [...]
In the news section today, Jason Ditz points to inter-militia fighting and rampant torture in Libya, America’s latest liberated country. This shouldn’t be a surprise, as we’ve pointed to the ugly humanitarian abuses of the so-called freedom fighters NATO helped oust Gadhafi since the beginning. As an illustration of how widespread the torture is, Reuters [...]
Shamila N. Chaudhary at Foreign Policy notes how the Taliban are getting criticized for not having a consistent message on peace talks: they issued a Jan.3 statement about starting up a political office in Qatar and a willingness to negotiate, and then on Jan 12 they issued another statement clarifying that talks don’t mean “surrender [...]
Secrecy News has a post up on John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer being charged under the Espionage Act for contributing to the exposure of state crimes: In the present case, Mr. Kiriakou is charged with providing the name of a “covert agent” in response to inquiries from a reporter, “Journalist A,” who then passed that information [...]
I think this is a clever way to get around the financial blockade the government and the banks have placed on WikiLeaks: Starting in March, Mr. Assange will host a 10-part series of interview programs with “key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries” on Russia Today (RT), a state-funded English-language satellite news network which claims to reach more [...]
