June, 08 2011, 02:00pm EDT
Al-Qaeda Wants U.S. to Stay? * Palestinian U.N. Membership
WASHINGTON
GARETH PORTER, porter.gareth50 at gmail.com
Porter is an investigative journalist and historian specializing in U.S. national security policy and author of Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam. He just wrote the piece "Slain Writer's Book Says U.S.-NATO War Served Al-Qaeda Strategy," which states: "Al-Qaeda strategists have been assisting the Taliban fight against U.S.-NATO forces in Afghanistan because they believe that foreign occupation has been the biggest factor in generating Muslim support for uprisings against their governments, according to the just-published book by Syed Saleem Shahzad, the Pakistani journalist whose body was found in a canal outside Islamabad last week with evidence of having been tortured. ... The Shahzad account refutes the official U.S. military rationale for the war in Afghanistan, which is based on the presumption that Al-Qaeda is primarily interested in getting the U.S. and NATO forces out of Afghanistan and that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are locked in a tight ideological and strategic embrace."
See interviews of Syed Saleem Shahzad at the Real News.
FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle at law.uiuc.edu
Obama yesterday attacked the possibility of "Palestinians seeking a vote on statehood at the U.N. General Assembly" in September. Professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign, Boyle served as legal advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization and Yasser Arafat on the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, as well as to the Palestinian delegation to the Middle East peace negotiations from 1991 to 1993, where he drafted the Palestinian counter-offer to the now largely defunct Oslo Agreement. His books include Palestine, Palestinians and International Law and the recently-released The Palestinian Right of Return under International Law. [more]
A nationwide consortium, the Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA) represents an unprecedented effort to bring other voices to the mass-media table often dominated by a few major think tanks. IPA works to broaden public discourse in mainstream media, while building communication with alternative media outlets and grassroots activists.
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U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday announced that he is commuting the sentences of nearly 1,500 Americans and pardoning 39 people convicted of nonviolent crimes, a move the White House described as "the largest single-day grant of clemency in modern history."
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According to a White House fact sheet, those who received commutations "have been serving their sentences at home for at least one year under the Covid-era CARES Act," a law that extended the amount of time in which people could be placed in home confinement to reduce the spread of the virus in prisons.
The White House did not name those who received pardons or commutations but said the list includes a "decorated military veteran," a "nurse who has led emergency response for several natural disasters," and "an addiction counselor who volunteers his time to help young people find their purpose."
The Biden Justice Department paused federal executions in 2021, but President-elect Donald Trump pledged on the campaign trail to expand the use of the death penalty and is expected to allow the executions of the 40 men on death row to take place if they're still there when he takes office next month.
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Biden, who campaigned on ending the death penalty at the federal level, vowed to "take more steps in the weeks ahead" as his administration reviews clemency petitions, leaving open the possibility of commutations for death row prisoners.
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