Worldwide spending on weapons has reached record levels amounting to well over $1tn last year, a leading research organisation reported today.
Global military expenditure has risen by 45% over the past decade to $1.46tn, according to the latest annual Yearbook on Armaments, Disarmament, and International Security published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri).
In foreign policy, candidate Obama promised change - and as president he has
largely delivered. On Russia, Iran, Cuba, Europe, China, change has
taken place, sometimes dramatically so. But he has found it much more
difficult to escape his predecessor's legacy with respect to the Global
War on Terror (GWOT). Although the Obama administration discourages the
use of this term and in some areas - the Guantánamo closure, the
turning away from coercive interrogations - has stepped back from
inherited practices, in other areas it remains captive to the GWOT
mindset.
In the summer of 2002, as Jane Mayer described it in her book The Dark Side,
"The CIA, concerned by the paucity of valuable information emanating
from [Guantánamo], dispatched a senior intelligence analyst, who was
fluent in Arabic and expert on Islamic extremism, to find out what the
problem was." After interviewing a random sample of two dozen or so
Arabic-speaking prisoners, the analyst "concluded that an estimated
one-third of the prison camp's population
Last week, we reported
on how retired US Army Colonel Ralph Peters penned an essay for a
leading neocon group calling for future US military attacks on media
outlets and journalists. Writing for the journal of the the Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Col. Peters wrote,
"future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately,
military attacks on the partisan media...
In a move that seems to open up a route out of Guantánamo for
prisoners accused of having an active involvement with international
terrorism that does not involve reviving the much-criticized system of
trials by Military Commission, the Justice Department announced today
that Ahmed Khalfan G
Like many other American
progressive-types (title for sake of argument), I voted for Obama and
hope every day he'll facilitate the change he promised. A big part of
the change progressives interpreted that promise to mean was to bring
an end to the Bush administration's "War on Terror." The White House no
longer uses the term -- but how much of a break has the new
administration really made?
Captured al-Qaeda operatives, facing the threat or reality of torture,
appear to have fed the Bush administration's obsession about Iraq,
buying Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders time to rebuild
their organization inside nuclear-armed Pakistan.
