BBC Newsnight, By Peter Taylor, May 9

Secret CIA video tapes of the waterboarding of Osama Bin Laden's suspected jihadist travel arranger Abu Zubaydah show him vomiting and screaming, the BBC has learned.

The tapes were destroyed by the head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, Jose Rodriguez.

In an exclusive interview for Newsnight, Rodriguez has defended the destruction of the tapes and denied waterboarding and other interrogation techniques amount to torture.

The CIA tapes are likely to become central to the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, at Guantanamo Bay.

It's pretty clear that neither side in Syria wants a peaceful resolution. Rebel bomb attacks, what would be called terrorism if it happnened here, are rising while the Syrian authorities have stopped using as many heavy weapons but are continuing right on with mass arrests and lower-key attacks. UN SecGen Ban Ki-moon has it right:

"The government and all elements of the opposition must realize that we have a brief window to stop the violence, a brief opportunity to create an opening for political engagement between the government and those seeking change," Ban said.

"If this opportunity is not seized, I fear that what ... Annan has warned about will come to pass - a full-scale civil war with catastrophic effects within Syria and across the region," he said.

But - sometimes civil wars just have to happen and no matter how long you tamp them down they erupt again eventually. We're seeing that beginning to happen in Iraq now and most fully expect it in Afghanistan too. Western intervention to referee the sides in an inevitable civil war might just be the very definition of stupid. Perhaps all we can do is to help try to contain the knock-on effects in the region and beyond - as we are still singularly failing to do in Libya.

Tsipiras has given up on trying to form a coalition to govern Greece. There was more than a bit of added pressure from eurocrats.

In Brussels, a EU official told AFP news agency that Greece would receive a $5.4bn loan as expected on Thursday, but a further $1.29bn would be held back until Monday.

Eurozone officials who met on Wednesday evening "decided to leave the decision on disbursement of [$1.29bn] to the Eurogroup on Monday", said the source, referring to the eurozone finance ministers.

The political uncertainty pushed markets and the euro down, as fears resurfaced of Greece quitting the eurozone before the year is out.

...Speaking in Berlin on Wednesday, Angela Merkel, German chancellor, stressed that EU countries that have signed the bloc's fiscal pact for greater budgetary discipline must stick to what they have agreed.

"Everyone must stick to the things we have agreed. Twenty-five countries have already ... signed the fiscal pact," she said in remarks seen as directed at both Greece and France, whose president-elect, Francois Hollande, has also said he wants to renegotiate the deal.

Now the mandate passes to the PASOK leader to have a try, and then on to a presidential call to form a unity government. It's unlikely either of those attempts will work so we're looking at new elections sometime soon after May 17. Tsipiras' party has to be favorite to come out ahead in those now as he's obviously expressing the will of the people best. Even the leaders of the outgoing coalition that signed off on the agreement with the IMF and the EU have started to suggest that the deal would have to be reopened.

It's shit like this LA Times report on activity at Iran's Parchin site that gives me heartburn.

A flurry of recent activity at an Iranian military compound, spotted on commercial satellite photos, has raised concern that Iran may be "cleansing" a building before nuclear inspectors can examine it, said an analysis by a Washington-based security institute.

...
Satellite photos taken in April show unknown objects lined up outside a Parchin building and a stream of water emanating from or near it, suggesting that Iranian officials may be trying to clean the building of nuclear traces, the Institute for Science and International Security wrote on its website Tuesday. The building is suspected of holding an explosives chamber used in nuclear experiments.

To clean it, Iran might try to grind down surfaces or equipment, creating dust that would then be washed away, said Paul Brannan, a senior analyst with the institute. The goal would be to defeat environmental testing by inspectors if they were allowed to visit the site.

Nothing like this has been seen in satellite shots of the Parchin building going back months or even years, Brannan said. "All of a sudden we see this activity after the IAEA says they’re interested in visiting this site," the analyst said.

Three things here:

1) ISIS' analysis relies on "correlation as causation" - the logical fallacy that two things that happen near each other are obviously connected. It's not even a good example of the fallacy. The IAEA has been trying to get access to Parchin for a lot longer than just the last month so these activities, if they are a "clean up: are belated in the extreme. I.e. they're being done while everyone with access to satellite images is now watching, instead of six months ago. Doesn't seem very clever of the "perfidious Persians" to me, but shit, I'm just a blogger.

2) The LA Times writer compounds the level of disinformation exponentially by adding the word "nuclear" where it is unwarranted, in the phrase "suggesting that Iranian officials may be trying to clean the building of nuclear traces". Even if the building at Parchin is a testbed for explosive shells designed to implode a fissile core to critical mass the last thing anyone would want to do is use actual nuclear materials in that testing and risk the shell working, leading to at best a "damp squib" atomic explosion in the sub-kiloton range and a whole lot of radiation. Shit, I'm just a blogger and I know that. No, the traces that might be looked for would be traces of the explosives themselves and ISIS at least has the sense not to actually mention "nuclear traces" on it's own page at all.

3) The very last sentence of the LA Times piece stands the whole of the rest on its head:

If Iran is indeed trying to clean up the building to avoid detection when inspectors arrive, it is unlikely to work, said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Assn. "It only takes a few atoms of these trace materials to show up around the sites," Kimball said.

The place to look now is in the trail left by the water flushing, if that's what it is. But that's so obvious and the chances of escapong detection so small that instead it might be more efficient to wonder why David Albright and ISIS have a hatchet out for Iran and are passing such shoddy analysis to reporters. That's the real story, going back years. But shit, I'm just a blogger - what do I know?

Via Doctor "Dave" Gonzo at American Politics Journal
http://www.americanpolitics.com/index.php

After reading this column, I have to scratch my head a little.

Check out Chuck Todd, NBC's chief White House correspondent, openly speculating that President Obama is going to embrace same-sex marriage because he needs money from gay people. "Gay money in this election has replaced Wall Street money," he reported. NBC's David Gregory agreed. For some reason, neither man seemed to think this theory reflects poorly on the president.

...I think.

As you no doubt have heard by now, the US foiled a new and improved underwear bombing scheme dreamed up by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (apparently, Al Qaeda has a franchise operation.)

Jingoistic heel-clicking aside, the counterterror operation involved human intelligence and a double agent:

(CBS News) NEW YORK - It's a stunning revelation in the foiled plot to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner: The triggerman chosen by al Qaeda was actually a double agent who was working for the CIA and Saudi intelligence services.

David Wearing at New Left Project reviews Belén Fernández's recent book, The Imperial Messenger – Thomas Friedman At Work, noting how Friedman's banal pro-imperialist bloviation reflects -- and helps to further -- an all-too entrenched broader mentality:

Friedman puts the Iraqi public’s failure to appreciate the benefits of foreign occupation down to “the wall in the Arab mind”. As Fernández notes, “the Orientalist tendency to anchor Oriental subjects in antiquity, where they remain in perpetual need of civilisation by the West and its militaries, is viewable time and again in Friedman’s discourse”. Arabs and Muslims are “backward”. Iraqis “hate each other more than they love their own kids”. Shortly after the invasion of 2003, he opines that “it would be idiotic to even ask Iraqis here how they felt about politics. They are in a pre-political, primordial state of nature”.

For the American missionaries, the noble mission of raising the savages out of the swamp is not without its dangers. “While we would like an Iraqi national movement – building Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis – to coalesce, we don’t want it coalescing in opposition to us”. Evidently then there is a limit to which even this staunch advocate of enlightened Western values will support democracy, the limit being whether the liberated people then bow before the might of western power.

All of this would be of limited relevance were Friedman an isolated figure, rather than the ugly face of ideas and assumptions which have a much wider currency. His complaint that American occupying forces in Iraq “are baby-sitting a civil war” is a direct echo of Barack Obama’s promise during the 2007 presidential election campaign that “we're not going to babysit a civil war”, as though the bloodbath engulfing the country was attributable to the infantilism of its people and not to the effects of it being violently invaded by a foreign power. Elsewhere, Friedman’s likening of the US occupation of Afghanistan to the adoption of a “special needs baby” bears more than a passing resemblance to Donald Rumsfeld’s description of Washington’s role in teaching Iraqis how to run their own country:

“Getting Iraq straightened out was like teaching a kid to ride a bike: 'They're learning, and you're running down the street holding on to the back of the seat. You know that if you take your hand off they could fall, so you take a finger off and then two fingers, and pretty soon you're just barely touching it. You can't know when you're running down the street how many steps you're going to have to take. We can't know that, but we're off to a good start.”

The flip side of this casual racism is of course the chauvinistic view of the nature of Western civilisation; the paternal figure to the Iraqi and Afghan infants. For Friedman, “without a strong America holding the world together, and doing the right thing more often than not, the world really would be a Hobbesian jungle”, a faith in the benevolence of Western power which is shared right across the spectrum of mainstream intellectual opinion.

Related: If you have not yet done so, please read--nay, experience--Matt Taibbi's legendary takedown of The World is Flat. If snark were whiskey we'd all be shit-faced before breakfast.

TPM has the rundown on the primary defeat of one of the last great moderate conservatives in government.

Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar (R), Senate stalwart known for a kind of moderate Republicanism well out favor in the modern GOP, lost his primary bid against insurgent state Treasurer Richard Mourdock Tuesday night.

The embarrassing defeat for Lugar caps off a 35-year career in the Senate and puts another nail in the coffin of centrist Republican political thought in government, which has been in deep decline since the Tea Party revolution of 2010 that put an increasingly ultra-conservative brand of Republican in Washington.

Lugar's work on nonproliferation alone guarantees his place in the short list of US statesmen who were worth a fuck. Dems helped oust him to get an easier target for the general.

Democrats were eager to help Mourdock along. They attacked Lugar, helping push the residency status hits and generally making life as hard for the veteran Republican senator as possible. Mourdock — who is vastly more conservative than Lugar — they left alone.

The reason is simple: Democrats see Mourdock as a Republican candidate of the Christine O’Donnell-Sharron Angle-Ken Buck school. Those three losing Republican Senate nominees (from Delaware, Nevada and Colorado, respectively) came to represent Tea Party over-reach in 2010, when the movement helped nominate candidates so unappealing they lost Senate races the GOP should have won.

So now that Lugar is done, Democrats are turning their full fire on Mourdock, painting him as a dangerous ideological extremist. They say centrists and independents who have been pulling the lever for Lugar for decades will be open to the Democratic nominee, Rep. Joe Donnelly, once they take a real look at Mourdock.

Six months until the election. Gods give me patience because if you give me strength you better also give me bail money.

Update BooMan has John Kerry's statement, a fond farewell to a man he worked closely with as often as they crossed swords. BooMan writes: "John Kerry didn't have to do this, but I am glad he did." Yep. Lugar's own statement is here.

Karen McVeigh | Raleigh, NC | May 8

The Guardian - Election official reports high tensions and record turnout as state is expected to pass constitutional ban on same-sex unions

The North Carolina election to decide on a state constitution amendment to ban same-sex unions has emotions running high at polling stations and is the "craziest in 13 years", according to a senior official at the board of elections in the state capital.

Gary Sims, the deputy director of Wake County board of elections in Raleigh, told the Guardian that there were "some really angry people" on both sides of the highly-charged debate.

Observers from the Republican party have sought to "challenge and confront" precinct officials from the board and were "clogging up the phone lines" back at Wake County headquarters. "This is the craziest election I've seen in 13 years" said Sims, at his office next to the courthouse.

The formerly-gagged FBI translator-turned-whistleblower's new memoir is 'a masterpiece revealing corruption and unaccountability in Washington, D.C.' and 'a rotten barrel of toxic waste that will sooner or later infect us all'...

The Brad Blog, By David Swanson, May 2

Sibel Edmonds' new book, Classified Woman, is like an FBI file on the FBI, only without the incompetence.

The experiences she recounts resemble K.'s trip to the castle, as told by Franz Kafka, only without the pleasantness and humanity.

I've read a million reviews of nonfiction books about our government that referred to them as "page-turners" and "gripping dramas," but I had never read a book that actually fit that description until now...

Ari Berman at The Nation:

After being branded as too liberal by conservative GOP activists four years ago, Romney aligned himself with Bolton and other neocons in 2012 to protect his right flank. Today there’s little daylight between the candidate and his most militant advisers.

...“I can’t name a single Romney foreign policy adviser who believes the Iraq War was a mistake,” says Cato’s Preble.

Obama's military interventionism, dressed up as it is in neoliberal humanitarian sheep's clothing, is bad enough. Putting people like John Bolton, Dan Senor and Eric Edelman back in charge of America's foreign policy would, I have to admit, be even worse by an order of magnitude.

Still, it's not enough to seduce me to calls of "the most important election EVAH!" any more than the realization that Republican social and economic policies are far worse for the nation than the already bad Dem ones. On the one hand, despite being in power at least half the time, Republicans haven't completely destroyed the nation yet. (Nor have Dems, of course, if you're looking at it from the other side of the aisle.) On the other, I do think there probably has to be a foul-up so awful that it destroys one half of the two-party system before there'll be meaningful change, and the GOP are for sure the party most likely to deliver that.

Robert Lee Hotz | May 7

WSJ - Talking about ourselves—whether in a personal conversation or through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter—triggers the same sensation of pleasure in the brain as food or money, researchers reported Monday.

The new French President, Francois Hollande, intends to announce his nation's accelerated departure from Afghanistan at the upcoming Chicago summit of NATO members on May 20 and 21, withdrawing all French forces by the end of this year. President Obama will meet with him beforehand, presumably to try to change his mind as Obama has said there would be no "rush to the exits" for NATO.

But Obama might instead consider a new poll by the CS Monitor that shows a majority of Americans - even Republicans - disagree with his policy of staying to pay and die for another decade in Afghanistan.

By a margin of 63 percent disapproval to 33 percent approval, respondents rejected a description of the deal that will include a US troop presence and billions of dollars in monetary support for Afghan forces in the decade after 2014, according to a Monitor/TIPP poll conducted April 27 to May 4.

...Respondents in the TIPP poll were asked: “The US plans to remove most American forces from Afghanistan by 2014. To help Afghanistan after 2014, the US will sign a 10-year deal that keeps some US troops there and the US will also spend several billion dollars a year on the Afghan military. Do you approve or disapprove of such US involvement in Afghanistan beyond 2014?”

Among Democrats, 13 percent strongly approved, 17 percent somewhat approved, 19 percent somewhat disapproved, and 46 percent strongly disapproved. Among Republicans, the percentages skewed only slightly more positive, 15, 22, 20, and 38, respectively. For independents, the percentages were 12, 21, 15, and 49.

As America approaches it's own presidential elections in November, neither Obama nor his opponent are listening to the will of the people. May 20th and 21st are likely to see large protests calling upon them to uphold democracy and change their staid course on Afghan withdrawal. This time, there's unlikely to be a "freedom fry" anywhere in sight.

The sudden death last month of American landscape artist Thomas Kinkade, at age 54, left the art world perplexed at the loss of one of its most ridiculed yet successful practitioners. A coroner’s report released yesterday showed that Kinkade died of an accidental overdose of alcohol and the anti-anxiety drug Valium. His brother’s response to this report indicated that Kinkade suffered from alcoholism, and depression over his divorce, substantial financial problems, and the incessant criticism of his art by professionals.

This last point is rather surprising, since throughout his career Kinkade showed scorn for the critics, and claimed to be crying all the way to the bank. Apparently all those millions of dollars he made mass-producing his art didn’t really assuage his inner need for critical approbation. Or, to put this another way, maybe it really was about the art after all. His art did have an immediate emotional pull, and had he chosen just to do oil paintings without all the reproductions and marketing hype, the emotional pull would still be there. The fact that critics didn’t like the nature of that emotional connection to the viewer – that it was too coy, too 19th century, too deliberate – apparently offended Thomas Kinkade. After all, he said, he was only giving the public what it wanted.

Well, Bibi is broken and will now have to sit down with the Palestinians for reals.

Now, before we open the champagne, let's note that Netanyahu forced the issue himself, which means he didn't just surrender to the alignment surrounding him: he's still in control which means he's still going to have final say on what transpires.

But it seems pretty clear that the Kadima Party-- Netanyahu's main adversary in the Knesset-- extracted a price from his flesh, which means he has to at least go through the motions of making overtures to Mahmoud Abbas and the PA in order to keep his own clutch on power.

I alluded yesterday to the elections in Greece, in which the EU plan to bailout the nation in exchange for austerity measures to be put in place was symbolically rejected and a new government elected.

Well, it's more than symbolic now.

A Greek political party leader who has vowed to rip up the terms of Greece’s international bailout was handed the mandate to try and form a government after Antonis Samaras of New Democracy failed to forge an agreement.

David Cole on the latest example of forward-thinking re: the Bush/Cheney torture regime:

Sometimes I think being American means never having to say you’re sorry. On Wednesday, May 2, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a federal appeals court in San Francisco, unanimously dismissed a lawsuit against former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo by José Padilla, the US citizen picked up at O’Hare Airport and held in military custody as an “enemy combatant” for three and a half years, during which he says he was subject to physical and psychological abuse.

As an official in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003, Yoo wrote multiple memos designed to deny “enemy combatants” legal protections that might get in the way of our holding them incommunicado, depriving them of sleep, slamming them into walls, forcing them into painful stress positions, and waterboarding them. Padilla alleged that Yoo’s memos provided the basis for his years in detention, of which twenty-one months were in incommunicado isolation, and authorized his captors to subject him to abuse. As a result, he claims, he was threatened with death and serious physical abuse; shackled in painful stress positions for hours at a time; administered psychotropic drugs; denied medical care; and exposed to extreme temperatures.

The court dismissed the case before the truth of these allegations could be tested. It reasoned that even if Padilla’s allegations were true, it was not “clearly established” that his treatment violated the Constitution, and therefore the suit must be dismissed. John Yoo could not even be sued for the nominal damages of one dollar that Padilla and his mother sought as a way of emphasizing that their desire was for vindication of their rights, not remuneration.

How did the court reach such a cognitively dissonant constitutional conclusion?

[The 9th Circuit's reasoning] relied on the doctrine of “qualified immunity,” which holds government officials immune from personal liability for constitutional violations unless the violations were “clearly established” at the time. The idea is that government officials should not be held personally responsible where the law is murky and they have to make difficult judgment calls.

In other words: if you muddy up the waters enough, all options are on the table (barring organ failure and/or death, natch).

Related: CSM on how US government torture drove Padilla insane (but remember: he's tainted by AQ cooties, which make him worse than Pedobear or something); Meanwhile, in GITMO...

PHOTOS FROM THE 2012 BALTIMORE KINETIC SCULPTURE RACE

It's back. The 2012 Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race – a 15-mile race of human-powered sculptures over a course of streets, water, and mud and sand pits – was Saturday. Here are photos from the race website, where you'll find more pics as well as a link to additional photos uploaded by spectators. I've also posted more photos after the jump.

"The 1%"

"Lickety Split"

(MORE PHOTOS AFTER THE BREAK)

By Michael Collins

When you take the right side, style trumps substance every time in politics. President Obama was on fire Saturday in Columbus, Ohio, hammering home populist themes that will define his campaign. This was his campaign kick-off. He couldn't have done a better job of stating his case as the candidate of the people, while painting Romney as the darling of The Money Party (Wall Street, big banks).

PRESIDENT OBAMA: The problem with our economy isn’t that the American people aren’t productive enough -- you’ve been working harder than ever. The challenge we face right now -- the challenge we faced for over a decade is that harder work hasn’t led to higher incomes. It’s that bigger profits haven’t led to better jobs. President Obama (Full text of Obama's remarks, Columbus, Ohio, May 5, 2012)

It's not your fault the president tells us, which happens to be absolutely correct. Then he nailed Romney:

Le sigh - this is not good.

Many analysts say a negotiated solution will require compromises on both sides: Iran would be allowed to continue some lower-level enrichment if it accepts much more intrusive U.N. nuclear inspections to make sure it has no weapons aims.

But the EU, which includes European heavyweights France, Germany and Britain, showed no sign of backing down on the suspension demand in its statement to the Vienna meeting.

"Iran must suspend its enrichment activities and heavy water related projects, including research and development," Gyorgyi Martin Zanathy, head of the EU delegation, said.

I find myself wondering if this was Sarko's parting gift to Israel.

New French President François Hollande is losing no time in keeping at least one of his campaign promises. He'll announce France's early exit from Afghanistan at the NATO summit in Chicago later this month.

Manuel Valls, Mr Hollande's communications director, confirmed that France would use the summit to "announce the withdrawal of its forces from Afghanistan between now and the end of the year."

Both NATO boss Anders Fogh Rasmussen and President Obama are expected to try to talk Hollande out of his earlier withdrawal, I suspect not because it would really hurt the mission there but because the optics look bad for the stick-the-coursers.

Meanwhile, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee say they believe that the Taliban has grown stronger since President Obama sent 33,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan in 2010. The Surge (tm) was a failure and there's absolutely no argument for staying a moment longer left. Dave Dayen has the details.

Louis Klarevas explains why at FP magazine:

Despite these gains on the right, though, the biggest winner was SYRIZA, on the left, which with a jump from 5 percent to 17 percent went from the periphery of Parliament to the mainstream. As a result, SYRIZA is in a position to offer Greek society something it has not seen since the 1960s: a viable third party.

Greece's left would have even been in the majority had its two other major left-wing parties -- KKE and the Democratic Left (DA) -- been willing to join forces with SYRIZA heading into the elections. The two parties secured 8 and 6 percent of the vote, respectively, which when combined with SYRIZA's 17 percent would have given the left an insurmountable 31 percent. Their disagreements, however, paved the way for ND to earn first bite at governance, while leaving KKE and DA marginalized as power brokers.

...Under Greek law, if the first-place party cannot form a government within three days, the mandate goes to the second-place party. (The third-place party also gets a shot, if necessary, three days after that.)

That said, there's no reason to panic just yet. Even if SYRIZA earns the mandate and manages to somehow seize the reins of power, the changes in Greek policy will hardly be "radical," as the Coalition of the Radical Left's name misleadingly implies. The party's young, charismatic leader, Alexis Tsipras, has made it clear that he has no intentions of withdrawing Greece from the eurozone, let alone the European Union. Instead, we should expect a more nuanced approach to economic revitalization, which would likely include an aggressive renegotiation of the bailout terms currently in place between Greece and the "troika" composed of the EU, the European Central Bank, and the IMF, as well as a demand for more public investment in lieu of loans.

If this scenario plays out, expect Ireland, Spain and Portugal in particular to be watching what happens closely and emulating the Greeks if things appear to go well for them in facing down the German-led neoliberal banking autocracy. France enters into such renegotiations as one of the big kids on the block and one which isn't yet in such a desperate hole. Greece's Tsipras is more likely to become the impromptu leader of the second-line EU nations than Hollande.

Update Greek conservative leader Antonis Samaras has admitted his failure to form a coalition government and handed back the mandate to the Greek president. So now it's Alexis Tsipras' turn to try.

Steve Early profiles the Vermont Progressive Party, the most successful third party in current US politics. Good stuff. This especially:

Taking a leaf from Sanders’ singular 30-year career – as Burlington mayor, then Vermont’s lone congressman, and now junior senator, the Progressives have distinguished themselves from their Democratic competitors by focusing, in populist fashion, on economic issues. In areas of the state where working-class voters might otherwise be swayed by cultural conservatism or residual rural Republicanism, the VPP has, like Sanders, won elections by campaigning for labor rights, fair taxes and single-payer healthcare far more consistently than the Democrats. The party’s statement of principles has a distinct tinge of Occupy. “Democracy,” it declares, “requires empowering people not only in government but also in the workplace, schools, and in the overall economy. Society’s wealth should not be concentrated in the hands of a few, and a wealthy minority should not control the conditions under which we live.”

...“We have a homeopathic role in the Vermont body politic,” says Ellen David-Friedman, a former organizer for the Vermont-National Education Association (NEA) and longtime Progressive Party activist. “We’ve managed to create enough of an electoral pole outside of the Democrats to constantly pull them to the left on policy issues, by dispensing an alternative brand of medicine that’s become increasingly popular.”

It's taken the VPP a couple of decades to reach where they are, but it's been worth it for them and their state. "One measure of the Progressive impact on public policy is the preliminary steps that Vermont took last year to create a first-in-the-nation single-payer healthcare system ." The VPP proves, as I've been saying for years, that you can't get to a left/progressive agenda by blindly supporting the Whigs of the Democratic Party out of fear of Republicans.

Kabul | May 7

Reuters - Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Monday that the strategic pact sealed by U.S. President Barack Obama last week was at risk of being "meaningless" if Afghans do not feel safe, according to a statement, which referred to recent civilian casualties by NATO.

Karzai called U.S. General John Allen, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, to the palace on Monday to discuss what he said were dozens of civilian casualties caused by NATO in four provinces since Sunday evening.

"Karzai signed the strategic pact with the United States to avoid such incidents (civilian casualties) and if Afghans do not feel safe, the strategic partnership loses its meaning," a presidential palace statement said.