The muted American response to the Pakistani flood disaster could be seen by Muslims as another example of American disrespect for Muslims, similar to the mosque controversy.

British Deputy Prime Minister calls the Iraq invasion illegal — but it doesn’t get much play in U.S. media.

As pressure to end the war builds in Washington, supporters of the war in Afghanistan will invariably return to their strongest argument: the threat of Al-Qa’eda. However, a reasonable understanding of the terrorist organization shows that even Al-Qa’eda is not enough to justify a bloody and expensive occupation.

Not only the Gulf disaster but several wars, tension with Iran, and terrorism directly or indirectly could link back to our addiction to oil. (A post by former CNN Middle East correspondent Tony Collings from his blog, capturingthenews.com.)

Once extremely top secret telegrams prove, according to former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, UK complicity in torture. I’d add they prove the same thing about the U.S. government. The most amazing new piece of evidence is a memo by UK Foreign Office Legal Adviser Michael Wood that it was perfectly okay for the government “to receive or possess information under torture.”

In a “top secret” paper (undated) entitled “The CIA Interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, March 2001 – January 2003,” in a section that, though heavily redacted, describes the review of the tapes by a CIA attorney from the Office of General Counsel, “interrogation materials” are described as consisting of “videotapes, logbook, notebook, and psychologist’s notes.” From what is known or speculated about a second taping system used in the interrogation of Zubaydah, it seems likely that psychologist notes were also an integral part of the process involved in the use of those tapes. The specific use of psychologist’s notes corroborates earlier information that ongoing psychological and medical observations were playing a key role in the CIA interrogation process.

Jason Leopold at Truthout writes that a number of intelligence sources have described a hitherto unreported second taping system that was used on Zubaydah at the black site CIA prison in Thailand where the interrogations took place in 2002-2003. The new finding corroborates reports of experiments done on prisoners held in the CIA’s black site program.

A new report from the New America Foundation states that one of every three people killed in the U.S.’s not-so-secret drone war in Pakistan is a civilian. The report also discloses that none of the strikes in 2009 targeted Bin Laden, and that they have had little impact on the Taliban’s ability to plan operations [...]

Was Obama’s attack of the Al-Qaida “base” in Yemen that resulted in death of civilians, women, and children actually a diversion from the December 17, 2009 seeming debacle of Health Care Reform in the Senate?

If Matthew Hoh could tell you one thing to help you understand the U.S.’s predicament in Afghanistan, he’d tell you:

The presence of our ground combat troops is not doing anything to defeat al-Qaida.