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in title, tags, annotations or urlBBC News - Straw says Iraq 'most difficult decision' in his life - 0 views
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He said he would never have "been a party" to such a policy: "I regarded it [the policy of regime change] as improper and self-evidently unlawful."
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Before that meeting Mr Straw wrote to Mr Blair - in a letter subsequently leaked - that "regime change per se is no justification for military action: it could form part of the method of any strategy, but not a goal". Asked whether No 10 had "pre-empted" the Foreign Office over Iraqi policy, Mr Straw said Mr Blair was "aware" that regime change could not be a basis for acting against Iraq nor could it be "disguised" as such.
Europe to contribute 5,000 extra troops to Afghanistan | World news | guardian.co.uk - 0 views
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Barack Obama today won agreement for substantial Nato troop reinforcements in Afghanistan, when nine European nations, including Britain, said they would send up to 5,000 troops and logistical help ahead of the presidential elections there in August. Britain is to send 900 extra troops almost immediately, who will remain until October.
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News of the reinforcements came as Nato named the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, as its next leader after overcoming Turkish opposition.
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David Miliband the foreign secretary said the surprisingly large number of troops offered was proof of a palpable "Obama effect."
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Analysis: Cold War with Iran heats up across Mideast | Reuters - 0 views
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The Sunni-ruled states of the Gulf, particularly Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, say Iran stirs up unrest in their Shi'ite communities, although many Western analysts believe blaming Iran for protests this year in those countries is an overstatement or at least oversimplification.
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"U.S. and Western power in the region is weakening, and that is leaving a vacuum - most notably in Iraq - and you can see the main stakeholders in the region reacting to Iran's readiness to fill that vacuum," says Reva Bhalla, head of analysis at US private intelligence company Stratfor.
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"A proxy Saudi-Iranian war in Iraq represents a very considerable threat to oil supplies," said Alastair Newton, chief political analyst at Japanese bank Nomura.
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BBC NEWS | Americas | Rumsfeld 'Bible texts' criticised - 0 views
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Former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been accused of using quotes from the Bible in his briefings to George W Bush during the Iraq War.
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The quotes were placed on the cover of the briefings alongside images of US soldiers, GQ magazine has reported.
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The decision to put the biblical quotations on the cover pages was taken by Maj Gen Glen Shaffer, a director for intelligence serving both Mr Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to GQ.
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BBC NEWS | Middle East | Clinton in Iraq amid new violence - 0 views
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Mrs Clinton said the recent upsurge in violence was a tragic signal that Iraq was in fact on the right path.
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On Friday, two female suicide bombers attacked Baghdad's main Shia shrine, killing at least 60 people and injuring 125 others, Iraqi officials said. On Thursday, 84 people were killed in two separate suicide attacks in Baghdad and Baquba.
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Many victims were Iranian pilgrims, and the violence was condemned in Tehran. On Saturday, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused US troops of involvement in the bombings that had killed Iranian nationals, Reuters news agency reported.
BBC NEWS | Middle East | Gaddafi storms out of Arab League - 0 views
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Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has stormed out of the Arab League summit in Qatar having denounced the Saudi king for his ties with the West. He disrupted the opening session by criticising King Abdullah, calling him a British product and an American ally.
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Col Gaddafi's grudge against King Abdullah goes back to an Arab meeting shortly before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, when they exchanged harsh words. "Now after six years, it has [been] proved that you were the liar," said the Libyan leader. He added that he now considered their "problem" over and was ready to reconcile.
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Splits among the Arab League nations have become glaring, says the BBC's Katya Adler who is in Doha, over Arab nations' differing attitudes to internal Palestinian divisions between the Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the Islamist militant group Hamas. Our correspondent says Western-backed Sunni nations fear the spread of Iranian influence - in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq and among marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf States - and are suspicious of those they regard as Iran's Arab friends, such as Syria and Qatar.
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'Merchant of Death', Viktor Bout, denies arming terror | World news | The Observer - 0 views
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The UN has accused him of arming the alleged war criminal Charles Taylor in Liberia, as well as rebels in Sierra Leone and the Congo. He was arrested in a five-star hotel last March while allegedly discussing the sale of shoulder-launched missiles with US agents masquerading as Colombian rebels from FARC. The request to Thai authorities to arrest Bout says the US feared he was travelling on a British passport, number K163077. UK officials have declined to comment.
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Bout's supposed client list reads like a Who's Who of the world's nastiest warlords but also includes Americans, Britons, Frenchmen and Russians. A former US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, has admitted that planes connected to his department did fly supplies into Iraq to aid the US occupation. Bout said it was possible that these deliveries were made by a company run by his brother, Sergei. He denied earlier reports that he shipped armoured cars into Iraq for Britain. He said the French government did hire him to fly its troops into the Congo in 1994 for Operation Turquoise, a relief mission after the Rwanda genocide.
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Some analysts suspect that Bout's activities were linked to Russian intelligence. He denies this, but, asked if he worked for the Russian state, he said: "Sometimes, yeah. We did the flights." His battle against extradition has now become intensely political. Some observers have speculated that he is of high value to the US because of his alleged links to Igor Sechin, a deputy to Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin and one of the Kremlin's most powerful figures. He denied any such links or ever meeting Sechin, saying that the two men did not – as is claimed – serve as intelligence officers in Mozambique at the same time.
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Iran's offer of help to rebuild Afghanistan heralds new age of diplomacy with the US | World news | The Guardian - 0 views
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Washington's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, had an informal meeting with the Iranian delegate, Mohammad Mehdi Akhundzadeh. The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, later described the exchange as "unplanned but cordial", adding that they had agreed to "stay in touch".
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Mark Malloch Brown, Britain's foreign office minister for Africa, Asia and the United Nations, said Iranian offers of help could mark a new "spring in the relationship" between the west and Iran.He was responding to Akhundzadeh's public pledge at the conference of Iranian co-operation in counter-narcotics and development efforts in Afghanistan.
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"I did think the Iranian intervention this morning was promising. The issue of counter-narcotics is a worry that we share. We will look for ways to co-operate with them on that," Clinton said. "This is a promising sign that there will be future co-operation."
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The truth about the Mossad | World news | The Guardian - 0 views
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two years ago this week, when a bomb in a Pajero jeep in Damascus decapitated a man named Imad Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh was the military leader of Lebanon's Shia movement Hizbullah, an ally of Iran, and was wanted by the US, France and half a dozen other countries. Israel never went beyond cryptic nodding and winking about that killing in the heart of the Syrian capital, but it is widely believed to have been one of its most daring and sophisticated clandestine operations
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The Mossad's most celebrated exploits included the abduction of the fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who was later tried and hanged in Israel. Others were organising the defection of an Iraqi pilot who flew his MiG-21 to Israel, and support for Iraqi Kurdish rebels against Baghdad. Military secrets acquired by Elie Cohen, the infamous spy who penetrated the Syrian leadership, helped Israel conquer the Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East war.
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Over the years, the Mossad's image has been badly tarnished at home as well as abroad. It was blamed in part for failing to get wind of Egyptian-Syrian plans for the devastating attack that launched the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Critics wondered whether the spies had got their priorities right by focusing on hunting down Palestinian gunmen in the back alleys of European cities, when they should have been stealing secrets in Cairo and Damascus. The Mossad also played a significant, though still little-known, role in the covert supply of arms to Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran to help fight Saddam Hussein's Iraq, as part of the Iran-Contra scandal during Ronald Reagan's presidency.
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Libyan attack: it should have been clear deposing Gaddafi was the easy bit | Simon Tisdall | Comment is free | The Guardian - 0 views
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Any number of other Libyan armed groups might have had a hand in the killings. But in truth, responsibility may also be traced back, directly or indirectly, to those in London, Paris, Brussels and Washington who launched last year's Nato intervention in Libya with insouciant disregard for the consequences. It was clear then, or should have been, that toppling Muammar Gaddafi was the easy bit. Preventing an Iraq-style implosion, or some form of Afghan anarchy, would be much harder.
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Once again, the western powers have started a fire they cannot extinguish. A year after David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy jointly travelled to Libya to lay claim to a liberator's bogus laurels, the Libyan revolution they fanned and fuelled is in danger of degenerating into a chaotic, violent free-for-all.
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Do not be misled by the fig leaf of this summer's national assembly polls. Post-Gaddafi Libya lacks viable national political leadership, a constitution, functioning institutions, and most importantly, security. Nationwide parliamentary elections are still a year away. The east-west divide is as problematic as ever. Political factions fight over the bones of the former regime, symbolised by the forthcoming trials of Gaddafi's son, Saif, and his intelligence chief, Abdullah al-Senussi.
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BBC NEWS | Americas | Iran 'leading terrorism sponsor' - 0 views
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Iran remains the "most active state sponsor of terrorism" in the world, a report by the US state department says.
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Iran remains the "most active state sponsor of terrorism" in the world, a report by the US state department says. It says Iran's role in the planning and financing of terror-related activities in the Middle East and Afghanistan threatens efforts to promote peace.
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Al-Qaeda remains the biggest danger to the US and the West, the annual report states, noting that terror attacks are rising in Pakistan.
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Obama stands firm on closing Guantánamo | World news | guardian.co.uk - 0 views
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Barack Obama today laid out a broad case for closing the Guantánamo Bay prison and banning the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that have been condemned as torture – while accusing his opponents of wanting to scare Americans to win political battles.In a grand hall at the US national archives, standing directly in front of original copies of the US constitution and declaration of independence, Obama said the current legal and political battles in Washington over the fate of the 240 prisoners there stemmed not from his decision to close the facility, but from George Bush's move seven years ago to open it.
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Obama stressed at several points that his administration would never free dangerous terrorists into the US, an effort to counter the Republican party's central argument against the closure. He said US prisons were tough and safe enough to handle the most vicious al-Qaida terrorist suspects now held at Guantánamo."I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people," Obama said. "Al-Qaida terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture – like other prisoners of war – must be prevented from attacking us again."
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Shortly after Obama spoke, Dick Cheney gave a rebuttal at a conservative Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. The former vice-president defended many of the Bush administration policies Obama is now unraveling, and mentioned either "September 11" or "9/11" 25 times.Cheney said Saddam Hussein had "known ties" to terrorists, an apparent rehashing of the widely discredited Bush administration effort to link the Iraqi dictator to the September 11 2001 hijackers."After the most lethal and devastating terrorist attack ever, seven and a half years without a repeat is not a record to be rebuked and scorned, much less criminalised," Cheney said."In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralising as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists."
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Bush officials defend physical abuse described in secret memos released by Barack Obama | World news | guardian.co.uk - 0 views
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Senior members of the Bush administration today defended the physical abuse of prisoners by CIA operatives at Guantánamo and elsewhere round the world set out in graphic detail in secret memos released by president Barack Obama.
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General Michael Hayden, head of the CIA under president George Bush, and Michael Mukasey, who was attorney-general, criticised Obama for releasing the memos. The two accused him of pandering to the media in creating "faux outrage", undermining the morale of the intelligence services and inviting the scorn of America's enemies.
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the interrogation techniques outlined in the memos prompted a flood of calls from human rights groups and others for the prosecution of politicians, lawyers, doctors and CIA operatives involved.
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Africa's arc of instability has myriad causes | Observer editorial | Comment is free | The Observer - 0 views
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Mali, little known or not, now belongs inside the arc of instability that was once defined as stretching from Afghanistan, in the days when the Taliban took charge, through Pakistan to the Middle East and the Horn of Africa via Iraq and Yemen. Now the arc is rapidly extending westwards beyond the Arab lands to Nigeria, west Africa and the Atlantic seaboard. The common denominators are poverty, underdevelopment, illiteracy, mass youth unemployment, misgovernance, authoritarianism, corruption, suppression of women's rights and of human and civil rights in general. All this and western political and commercial meddling, too.
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Despite all this disassociation, despite the looking the other way and the simplistic analysis pitting cut-throat, dynamite-wielding Islamist killers against innocents abroad, this bigger story in which Mali's plight is now entangled ultimately involves us all, more intimately and continuously than could any random threat of a terror bomb in Paris or London. A major shift in perception and in action is required. Otherwise, be it indirectly through mass migration, people trafficking, arms and drugs smuggling, epidemic disease, the pernicious poison of official corruption and abuse; or directly through resulting, premeditated ethnic and sectarian, religion-based violence, the nonchalant, unthinking condemnation of a vast swath of humanity to impoverishment, physical, material and spiritual, will inevitably return to haunt the more fortunate peoples of the west.
Pakistan nuclear projects raise US fears | World news | guardian.co.uk - 0 views
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Pakistan is continuing to expand its nuclear bomb-making facilities despite growing international concern that advancing Islamist extremists could overrun one or more of its atomic weapons plants or seize sufficient radioactive material to make a dirty bomb, US nuclear experts and former officials say.
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David Albright, previously a senior weapons inspector for the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency in Iraq, said commercial satellite photos showed two plutonium-producing reactors were nearing completion at Khushab, about 160 miles south-west of the capital, Islamabad.
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Albright warned that the continuing development of Pakistan's atomic weapons programme could trigger a renewed nuclear arms race with India. But he suggested a more immediate threat to nuclear security arose from recent territorial advances in north-west Pakistan by indigenous Taliban and foreign jihadi forces opposed to the Pakistani government and its American and British allies.
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