Lawmakers say Syrian chemical weapons could menace U.S.

With Lebanon in political upheaval, largely due to the Syrian crisis, what is Hezbollah’s role in Syria, and elsewhere…

I wonder how much longer Hezbollah will sit on the sidelines, on Syria, and/or allow Israeli F-16s to loiter over Lebanon?

There’s a whole slew of foreign policy F*ckery afoot…!

Isn’t it interesting how another Security Chief was assassinated in a car bombing…?

As the Angry Arab noted…

WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange has started an interview show on Russian television, and the first show provides an unprecedented interview with a leader of Hezbollah. Assange declares the purpose of the interview is to ask Nasrallah to address why he is a “freedom fighter” to millions and at the same time a “terrorist” to millions of others, indicating Assange has no intention to simply prove critics of Hezbollah wrong. He wishes to objectively explore both issues that have earned mainstream attention.

The US and its allies have been attacking one evil empire after another for decades, including the evil empire of Mohammed Mosaddegh, the scary Red Menace in Iran, in 1953. We have nothing to show for any of them. Why do US, European and Israeli leaders think this time things will be different?

At one level, Prouty’s life story—before the FBI targeted a woman who had done so much for the Agency—reads like a classic, exceptional, immigrant success story. But so much of what the government used against her has been used on Muslims and other Arab-Americans without the means to fight back:

Secret evidence
National Security Letters
Threats of deportation (which in her case would have been lethal) and to family members
Border exception searches
Badly managed informants (in this case, Prouty’s own brother)
Trial in the public sphere

This week, Michele Bachmann tries to convince us that Hezbollah is going to use Cuba as a missile base.

In midsummer 2006, while my wife and kids were on our yearly trip down to Seattle, to be with our extended Norwegian-Jewish-Cambodian-Icelandic-Swedish-Texan family, the so-called Israel-Hezbollah War was in full rage. My brother-in-law and I were watching Wolf Blitzer on CNN, as he interviewed one pro-Israel talking head expert after another, describing the war not just from the Israeli point of view, but from a right-wing Israeli standpoint.

After the program, he lamented that the voice for Israel in the American media, in public affairs and in politics is almost always from a perspective much further from the right than it should be to reflect the views of the average Israeli, or those of the American Jewish community. He longed for a new organization, based from the positions of moderates, to counter the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other hawkish pro-Israel groups.

“But,” Lee lamented, “that’ll never happen.”

Some say it has now happened.

A brief look at what’s happening in the news on the morning of May 12th, 2010.