By PATRICK COCKBURN | The United States is moving towards ending its military control of Iraq by agreeing to withdraw combat troops from Iraqi cities and towns by June next year and from the rest of Iraq by 2011, according Iraqi and American negotiators. The withdrawal of US troops to bases outside the cities, towns and villages would make the Iraqi government, whose security forces number half a ...

By Larry O'Hara | Fascinating fall-out recently following the publication of Ron Suskind's new book  'The Way of the World' (Simon & Schuster 2008) in which he argues two things of interest.  Firstly, the the US regime leant on Iraqi informer (Tahir Habbush) to help manufacture evidence there were 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' in Iraq, when there weren't.  No surprise there.  Second in the course of writing ...

By Andrew Brown | HUNDREDS of people across Merseyside have been under surveillance by local authorities using powers under so-called “terror laws”, according to details released under the Freedom of Information Act. An investigation has revealed that organisations ranging from local councils, including Sefton, to Merseytravel have used the powers created by the Government under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa). The use of the laws by local councils and organisations ...

By Richard Tyler | A London court has ruled that the British government must disclose information that could support the claim that torture was used to extract confessions from Binyam Mohamed, a former British resident who has been held in Guantánamo Bay since September 2004. The ruling by the Judicial Review—a special court that considers the lawfulness of a decision or action made by a public body—is a rebuff to ...

By Allan Woods | OTTAWA–Canadian soldiers could get training from a U.S. company closely linked to Blackwater USA, a private security firm implicated in the killings of hundreds of Iraqi civilians, if the Department of National Defence has its way. The military gave notice this week of its intention to award an $850,000 contract for advanced counterinsurgency training to the Terrorism Research Center, a Virginia-based firm that specializes in ...

From the Blog of Kev: I will refuse to comply with any compulsary ID card scheme. but only if 1,000 other UK people will do the same. Deadline to pledge 31st December 2008, pledge creator Ken Hall In light of the government's proven incapability to guarantee the security of personal data and the ...

Demands grow for windfall tax as fuel companies rake in record profits Socialist Worker | "British economy grinds to a halt" cried the headlines last weekend. Charles Bean, the deputy governor of the Bank of England, said the current economic downturn could "drag on for some considerable time" – especially since there always seemed to be "another grenade" waiting to explode in the financial markets. "We've got our fingers crossed ...

By Robert Scheer | Just great! Nuclear-armed Pakistan is falling apart, Iran’s nuclear program is unchecked and congressional legislation on cooperation with the Russians on controlling nuclear proliferation is now dead in the water. Horrid news except for Sen. John McCain, who thrills to a repeat of the danger lines of the Cold War, and now stands a good chance of being our next president. A very good chance, ...

By Glenn Greenwald | Writing in a New York Times blog yesterday, Clinton pollster Mark Penn hails the selection of Joe Biden as "a smart and successful choice" and says this: From Al Gore on, the role of the vice president seems to have fundamentally changed. It used to be where the winner parked the loser or some other figure that he wanted to neutralize. ...

The Pentagon: Some-Things-Never-Change Department Tomgram | What a difference four and a half years makes. When I first penned "The Wild Weapons of DARPA," in March 2004, I was a new TomDispatch writer; the war in Iraq was not yet a year old; the war in Afghanistan had been bubbling for less than two and a half years, and I suggested that "what's left of the USSR is a collapsed ...

By George Monbiot | In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis tells the story of the famines that sucked the guts out of India in the 1870s. The hunger began when a drought, caused by El Nino, killed the crops on the Deccan plateau. As starvation bit, the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export to England of a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. While Lytton lived in ...

By Noah Shachtman | Iraq's government and Sunni militias appear to be headed for a showdown. One of the things that just might keep a full-blown insurgency from erupting again, a leading expert in the region says, is a set of databases of fingerprints and irises, built by the U.S. military -- and fed with data from Saddam. The extra troops get all the credit, ...

By PAUL VON ZIELBAUER | In March or April 2007, three noncommissioned United States Army officers, including a first sergeant, a platoon sergeant and a senior medic, killed four Iraqi prisoners with pistol shots to the head as the men stood handcuffed and blindfolded beside a Baghdad canal, two of the soldiers said ...

Fascism’s principles are wafting in the air today, surreptitiously masquerading as something else, challenging everything we stand for. By Laurence W. Britt  | The cliché that people and nations learn from history is not only overused, but also overestimated; often we fail to learn from history, or draw the wrong conclusions. Sadly, historical amnesia is the norm.  We are two-and-a-half generations removed from the horrors of Nazi Germany, although constant reminders jog ...