Below is an excerpt of a translation of an article in the Saudi newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat by editor Tareq Al-Homayed that offers a fascinating insight into how the U.S.’s closest ally in the Middle East sees the outburst of violence in Iraq as the presidential race goes into overdrive. Marc Lynch, who says he checked the accuracy of the excerpt compared to the original Arabic before posting it at Abu Aardvark, notes that Al-Homayed is hard wired to the Saudi royal family and his views probably...

Mumia Abu-Jamal is the worst reason imaginable to oppose the death penalty, which I nevertheless do until the unlikely event that it can be meted out fairly and impartially. Abu-Jamal, who was caught pumping round after round from a handgun into Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner way back in 1981, was convicted at a less-than-fair trial and has been appealing his death sentence for years, all the while refusing to testify on his own behalf or produce his only alleged alibi witness to testify. As...

Now that the fog around the battle for Basra and upturn in violence elsewhere in Iraq is lifting a bit, we can conclude that: * The Pentagon’s spin that the bloodshed is a consequence of the “success” of the Surge would seem to be silly on its face, but it isn’t. * This is because the violence is the result of a carefully planned Al-Maliki government offensive to destroy the prime minister’s Shiite opponents in the advance of provincial elections in October. This is especially...

My journalist’s instincts and four decades in the political trenches are prompting me to tread with care when it comes to the Hillary Clinton doomsday scenarios increasingly appearing in the mainstream media and blogosphere as the once presumptive nominee becomes ever more desperate in what is now a long shot bid to wrest the big prize from Barack Obama. The root of my caution is because as much as I have written about how the Clinton campaign has determinedly taken the low road and as ruthless...

Steven Green is the poster boy-man for much of what is wrong about the Iraq war. This petulant loner was allowed to enlist in the Army and was fast-tracked to the war zone despite a history of drug, alcohol and emotional problems and a petty criminal record back in Midland, the titular home of the Bush family in Texas oil patch country. Green had been in Iraq for only a few weeks when he was found to have “homicidal ideations” by Army psychiatrists. Nevertheless, he was sent back into...

BAGHDAD DEMONSTRATORS DEMAND SHIITE PRISONER RELEASE As noted here on February 1, you don’t have to be a bloody genius to know that sooner or later the window of opportunity for Iraqi national reconciliation and a lasting reduction in sectarian violence as a result of the military successes of the Surge would begin to close unless there was progress by the Baghdad government. Well, there has been no progress of consequence despite the wishful thinking of pro-war pundits who endlessly write...

My most extensive conversation with Hillary Clinton was in 1996 when she and President Clinton stopped by the Philadelphia Daily News to meet with its editorial board although it was a foregone conclusion that this street smart tabloid would endorse the president over Republican candidate Bob Dole. The most memorable aspect of that day was not what Bill and Hill said, which was pretty much par for the course for a prohibitive favorite for re-election, but the botched Secret Service scan of the conference...

The more things change the more they remain the same, and that certainly is true of the mainstream media’s abysmal coverage of the Iraq war. While there are occasional exceptions, most media outlets continue to swallow the Bush administration’s lies, obfuscations and talking points whole, which it has done since the run-up to the March 2003 invasion, and that is why a casual viewer or reader is left with the impression that things are going rather grandly as the war lurches into its...

Howell Raines, who was executive editor of The New York Times from 2001-2003, is credited with bringing a healthy dose of advocacy journalism to the Gray Lady but was brought down by the Jason Blair scandal. He warns in his new column in Condé Nast’s Portfolio.com that there is no greater threat to American journalism than the possibility that media mogul Rupert Murdoch or some other unwelcome suitor would force its sale. Money quote: “He will spend whatever it takes to undermine the...

Few things are certain in this season of political upheaval on such a seismic scale, but here is one that is: Should Hillary Clinton win the nomination and the election, Bill Clinton will not morph from an alpha male into a passive male on Inauguration Day and will have an out-sized, historically-unprecedented and unwelcome impact on her presidency. The former president has played a central role in his wife’s quest for the White House. She has depended on him so much that the fortunes of her...

MORE HERE. Image by Werner Horvath

Given the flap over the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s incendiary sermonizing, it is appropriate to recall Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s landmark speech declaring his opposition to the Vietnam War. Dr. King was criticized by some civil rights leaders for the speech, which was delivered on April 4, 1967 at a meeting of an antiwar group at Riverside Church in New York City. Why, they asked, was he concerning himself about an issue that seemed to be divorced from the concerns and goals of a...

Despite the inherent sleaziness of the Bush administration, the news that two State Department contract employees have been fired for accessing Barack Obama’s passport file didn’t set off any alarm bells. Then we learned that the files of Hillary Clinton and John McCain had been breached, as well. Condi Rice apologized to the candidates (and she seems to be doing an inordinate amount of apologizing these days) while the White House had no comment, but there is a quick and easy way to...

WHO’S THE GUY WITH BILL CLINTON? The silence has been thunderous from the Hillary Clinton camp since Barack Obama’s speech on race and religion earlier this week, but her surrogates are continuing to work feverishly behind the scenes to try to discredit Obama for his association with a certain reverend. No word as to when Clinton will schedule her speech on race and religion. Meanwhile, Clinton continues to insist that she played a key role in Northern Ireland peace talks, but according...

In a campaign season where much ado has been made of endorsements but their value has been questionable, Barack Obama bagged a potentially big one today – Bill Richardson. Hispanic voters have been a key voting bloc for Hillary Clinton and, as the nation’s only Hispanic governor, Richardson could attract Hispanics to Obama. But Richardson, who largely based his own presidential campaign on opposition to the Iraq war, does not have wide name recognition, did poorly in the early primaries and...

MORE HERE.

In a left-of-center version of not seeing the forest for the trees, some Hillary Clinton supporters are outraged, just outraged that ABC News had the temerity to note the First Lady appears to have been in the White House on the day that her sex-addicted husband left his calling card on the blue dress of a young and naïve intern. While the item won’t win any Good Housekeeping awards, it is an appropriate historic footnote that neither the Clintons nor their supporters can wish away. Furthermore,...

I had been trying to get up with Ed Rendell for days for his reaction to the report by a blue-ribbon panel that found the Philadelphia Police Department had poor leadership, was soft on bad cops and well behind the times in how its officers were deployed and the equipment they were given. In other words, business as usual. The mayor, despite his considerable accomplishments, had never screwed up the courage to confront the perennial but politically sensitive mess at the Roundhouse, the police headquarters....

Barack Obama’s speech on race and religion, called a seminal moment in the presidential campaign even by some conservatives, is now history and the spotlight is about the shift to Hillary Clinton. And perhaps uncomfortably so for someone who has spent so much time attacking her opponent on the issue of experience. This is because of the long awaited and much anticipated release by the National Archives of thousands of pages of records from Clinton’s days in the White House as First Lady...

Having run through a series of rationales for the Iraq war that would have daunted a less arrogant man, George Bush finally settled on a real keeper in the fifth year of the Forever War: It was necessary in order to bring down the very terrorists who launched the 9/11 attacks. While it took some time to debunk the earlier rationales, this one was an instant classic, a whopper so big and transparently false that it beggared belief. This, of course, was because the Al Qaeda insurgents who have bedeviled...

MORE HERE. Photograph by Gemunu Amarasinghe/The Associated Press

I have come to believe that the 2008 presidential contest will be the last — or perhaps the second to last — where the race and the religion of the candidates really matter. The reason is that many voters, and this is especially true of young voters, simply don’t care about that stuff like their parents and forebears did and do. This already is substantially true in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination and is reflected in the popularity of Barack Obama. If this...

Sentient Americans long ago became accustomed to the gap between George Bush’s words and reality. But when the president spoke to the Economic Club in Manhattan the other day his understanding of arguably the biggest economic crisis since the Crash of 1929 was so shallow, his misrepresentation of the causes so complete and his solutions so inadequate that I wanted to cry. Few of those thinking Americans will miss hearing the phony twang of a man so able to lie and so unable to lead when he...

A MING DYNASTY TEMPLE (TOP) IN JIAYUGUAN ON THE SILK ROAD (MAP) I have read perhaps a dozen books in recent years about the Silk Road, the amazing ancient network of trade and cultural routes linking China and the Mediterranean coast. All were good in their own right and I recommend a couple of them below, but none have the combination of beautiful prose and deep insight as does Colin Thubron’s Shadow of the Silk Road. From the east on the Silk Road came Chinese gunpowder, printing and paper,...

There is a confluence between our national mania for drug testing and the news that as many as 41 million Americans are drinking from water supplies tainted with traces of pharmaceuticals ranging from anti-seizure medications to mood alterers. Americans are obsessed with drugs, but the wrong kind of drugs for the wrong reasons, and that’s not the half of it. I understand the rationale behind drug testing nuclear power plant operators, to name an obvious example, but why are registered nurses...