The National (UAE)

...“Politics is going to come in here very, very fast,” said Frida Berrigan, an organiser with the grassroots group Witness Against Torture, which is also seeking to close Guantanamo. 

“Does Congress have a mandate to back the supreme court in the middle of this election season?” she asked. “I think there’s going to be a lot of roadblocks in the way of enacting what the supreme court has judged and determined.

“What does it mean for the men of Guantanamo?” Ms Berrigan… more

The most important long-term strategic challenge facing the Gulf Cooperation Council is not the threat of Islamic extremism or the rise of Iran -- it is the continuing economic decline of the United States.

Ever since 1980, when Jimmy Carter, then president, first publicly committed the United States to use military force to defend the free flow of oil from the Middle East, the United States has been the region’s unquestioned hegemon. And ever since the GCC was formed in 1981,… more

“Where are you from, my friend?” the merchant in Sharm Al-Sheikh asks me. I have been in enough bazaars in the Middle East to know the routine: I state my nationality (American), he makes a light joke about Rambo or Hollywood (avoiding politics), and then proceeds to hawk his goods to me at triple the going price.

But this time I took a different tack: “Iranian,” I said, citing my other nationality. “Iran?” the merchant responded, somewhat confused and pleasantly surprised.… more

Five years after a war allegedly launched to liberate Iraq’s Shiite majority, American forces have been bombing Shiite neighbourhoods in Basra and Baghdad while their snipers and tanks remain on the ground in places like Sadr City.

Iraq seems to have emerged from the worst phase of its civil war, but the victorious Shiite factions have turned their arms on one another in a fight over the spoils, battling for political power in advance of the upcoming provincial elections.

But as the… more

...Washington would “protect” the world’s natural resources, not necessarily for American consumption but to give the US military a franchise for flexing its muscle.

“The power to protect by its nature is the power to threaten,” as the American analyst Michael Lind puts it in his masterful book, The American Way of Strategy.

Thus the US, which relies on the Gulf for less than a third of its oil supplies – the sham of US “dependence” on Middle East oil is a… more

...Steve Coll, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has just published a book titled The Bin Ladens, wrote: “Pakistan’s new democratic government should now be motivated to prove its case. Delivering Bin Laden – which Musharraf’s government so conspicuously failed to do – would be a coup of global proportions for Pakistan’s new civilian leaders, and it would bring considerable political and other rewards to Islamabad.”

He pointed out that most senior al Qa’eda targets arrested or killed in Pakistan have been… more