By Viola Gienger and Roger Runningen, Bloomberg Press
Nov. 12 (Bloomberg) — Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and a former top military commander there, has recommended that President Barack Obama not send more troops to the country for the time being, a U.S. official said.
The advice, which counters a troop-increase request from the current American commander in Afghanistan, was sent by cable to Washington, the official said yesterday on condition of anonymity.
This statement was issued by the Fort Hood chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War and Under the Hood Café, a meeting place organized near Fort Hood by antiwar activists for soldiers to meet and unwind.
Socialist Worker, November 9, 2009
OUR COMMUNITY is distraught by the tragic shooting at Fort Hood yesterday. We extend our condolences to the families and friends of the victims.
As upset as we are about this incident, this shooting does not come as a shock. Eight years of senseless wars have taken a huge toll on our troops and their families. It’s time to admit that the wars in southwest Asia are in no one’s best interests. Bring the troops home now!
By Fidel Castro, ZNet, Nov. 9, 2009
Anyone with some information can immediately see that the sweetened ‘Complementation Agreement for Defense and Security Cooperation and Technical Assistance between the Governments of Colombia and the United States’ signed on October 30, and made public in the evening of November 2, amounts to the annexation of Colombia to the United States.
The agreement puts theoreticians and politicians in a predicament. It wouldn’t be honest to keep silence now and speak later on sovereignty, democracy, human rights, freedom of opinion and other delights, when a country is being devoured by the empire as easy as lizards catch flies. This is the Colombian people; a self-sacrificing, industrious and combative people. I looked up in the hefty document for a digestible justification and I found none whatsoever.
Middle East Online, November 10, 2009
‘Shame on you’, the hardline premier was told
Hardline Netanyahu leaves White House without Obama appearance amid Israeli defiance.
WASHINGTON – Hardline Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu left the White House Monday after spending an hour and forty minutes inside, emerging without US President Barack Obama.
It is not immediately clear whether Netanyahu spent the entire time in closed-door talks with Obama.
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu, Israel National News, Nov. 3, 2009
An unprecedented number of American generals, along with 1,400 U.S. army soldiers, are participating with top IDF brass in the high-level Juniper Cobra military exercise that one U.S. Navy commander said is aimed at “specific threats.” Public affairs officials interrupted the naval commander in order to divert the conversation from the scenario of Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities and defending itself from a counter-attack.
Noam Chomsky is the west’s most prominent critic of US imperialism, yet he is rarely interviewed in the mainstream media. Seumas Milne meets him
Seumas Milne, The Guardian/UK, November 7, 2009
Noam Chomsky: ‘Obama’s campaign rhetoric was completely vacuous’ Photograph: Rex FeaturesNoam Chomsky is the closest thing in the English-speaking world to an intellectual superstar. A philosopher of language and political campaigner of towering academic reputation, who as good as invented modern linguistics, he is entertained by presidents, addresses the UN general assembly and commands a mass international audience. When he spoke in London last week, thousands of young people battled for tickets to attend his lectures, followed live on the internet across the globe, as the 80-year-old American linguist fielded questions from as far away as besieged Gaza.
Peace and Justice Post 
‘Declare Independence of Palestine Now’
November 11, 2009Nasir Khan’s Note: The betrayal and isolation of the Palestinian people has run its full course. The imbecile Arab regimes (in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, etc.,) more in the nature of prehistoric shapeless oddities, have failed to support meaningfully the cause of the occupied, oppressed and brutalized fellow Arabs of Palestine. Instead, they have furthered the U.S. imperialism’s geopolitical interests in the Middle East so that the United States controls the Middle East and it remains the prime guarantor of the continued support to their corrupt and decadent dynastic rule and their antidemocratic system.
The present leadership of the Palestinian people is divided; the myopic PA President Abbas has been dancing to the tunes of Tel Aviv and Washington for long. A growing number of the suffering people of Palestine regard him a traitor and puppet of the U.S. and the Israeli Zionists.
The talk of peace and peace negotiations under various U.S. administrations served only Zionist expansion and further colonization of the occupied Palestine. If President Obama had any intention to stop Israel’s ever-increasing expropriation of the Palestinian land then he has failed miserably. Obviously, Secretary of State Clinton, Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli lobby struck at his intentions and nullified him. It leaves no doubt about who control American foreign policy.
Where can the Palestinians go from here? The question of establishing a viable independent state is in the doldrums. The occupied land has been eaten up by Israel. That leaves the possibility of one-state solution the only alternative for the Israelis and the Palestinians.
But if Israel turns its back on its previous history of colonization and expropriation, accepts the UN resolutions and reverts to the pre-1967 borders by vacating all its illegal settlements then the two-state solution has a chance to materialize. But this is more of a long shot in the dark.
Mr Yesh Prabhu’s advocacy of declaring an independent state by Palestinians can be instrumental in breaking the present impasse. At least, the Palestinians will not lose anything. On the contrary, it can take the matters out of the hands of Washington and Tel Aviv and this may create a new momentum. But one major hurdle remains: the divided Palestinian leadership of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. If Abbas disappears then even worse traitors like Mohammad Dahlan may be waiting for a complete sell-out to Washington and Tel Aviv.
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Declare Independence of Palestine Now
Yesh Prabhu, A Sane Voice For Peace Blog, Nov. 10, 2009
It is now abundantly clear that the stalled negotiation for peace in the Middle East is now dead.
During Secretary of State Clinton’s recent short sojourn through the region, in her joint press conference with Mr. Netanyahu in Jerusalem, she effusively praised Netanyahu’s intransigence regarding Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank. The peace process died when she bizarrely described as “unprecedented” Mr. Netanyahu’s paltry concession to slow down the feverish tempo of building illegal housing units in the occupied territories. Even though she hastily tried to back-track, the damage to the peace process had been done. It was as if she had given the peace process a death blow. The Palestinian negotiators were deeply shocked. Did not President Obama, and even Mrs. Clinton herself, say only a month ago that the Israeli settlements in the occupied land were illegitimate? It dawned on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that the peace process was dead, and so he announced that he will be resigning from his position soon. He had threatened to resign a couple of times on previous occasions, of course, but this time it seems that he means to carry out his threat.
Continues >>
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