US National Public Radio reports that, despite global headlines about a possible nuclear conflict with North Korea, visitors to the Pyongyang are not seeing much out of the ordinary:
Detainees at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, March 2002
US National Public Radio considers the 166 prisoners remaining in Guantanamo Bay, almost 11 years after the first detainees were put behind bars and wire in the American "War on Terror". It also talks about those who have left, such as Canadian citizen Omar Khadr --- shut away as a 15-year-old in 2002 and released to a Canadian prison last month --- and those who have died, such as Adnan Latif, who apparently committed suicide in September.
The interviewees are Carol Rosenberg, a reporter for the Miami Herald, and Latif's lawyer Mark Falkoff.
A Bush-Era Cartoon on Drumbeats of WarA week ago, the media was dominated by the prospect of an Israeli strike and Tehran's reaction. But then President Obama, publicly and privately, let visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu know of Washington's line against this. The Supreme Leader, within his rhetoric of defiance, welcomed Obama's position with Israel, and the European Union accepted Tehran's offer for a resumption of talks about the Iranian nuclear programme.
;)
The discussion surrounding Iran's nuclear programme, and a possible US/Israeli preemptive strike against Tehran's facilities has grown in the last 6 months into a front-page narrative. Among those feeding the appetite for war is Matthew Kroenig. Many readers may have noticed his "5 Reasons to Attack Iran," published in the Christian Science Monitor, and Kroenig's article, "Time to Attack Iran" was set against Colin H. Kahl's "Not Time to Attack Iran" in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs.
On Tuesday, National Public Radio's Tom Ashbrook had both men explain their positions, with Ashbrook and listeners weighing in on the arguments made by each.
The result is a long, fairly comprehensive flushing-out of the arguments from both sides of the debate.
NPR's Map: Iranian Nuclear Facilities
View Iran's Nuclear Facilities in a larger map
After all these years, there's still this one thing that I can't quite understand. How could the same people who put the first man on the moon -- people who are so intelligent, so good at politics, so important in international affairs -- have made the mistake of invading Iraq? I can imagine two third-world countries deciding to go to war with each other and failing to plan ahead. But the Americans? Americans are good at business, aren't they? Normally, people in business would do a feasibility study. You'd think that you'd do that too before invading an entire country. You should make sure you have the right tools, alternative courses of action, back-up plans. But that didn't happen. There was no plan at all, as far as we could see. They should have been able to see, in a country with so many sectarian and ethnic divides, what would happen. But they didn't. They didn't understand anything.
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 at 6:27