In The News

Riyadh Will Build Nuclear Weapons If Iran Gets Them, Saudi Prince Warns

Jason Burke June 30, 2011
Saudi Arabia actively campaigns to redirect international attention on Iran’s nuclear program and influence in the Middle East. If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, the West can expect Saudi Arabia will follow suit, Saudi officials advised NATO officials. A warning from Prince Turki al-Faisal, former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to the US, was implicit, but other Saudi spokesmen were...

Revolution 2.0: Democracy Promotion in the Age of Social Media

Mark Sedra February 18, 2011
New communication technologies from the printing press to Facebook and Twitter don’t cause revolutions alone, argues Mark Sedra in an essay for the Globe and Mail. But fast means for distributing criticism and making plans can spur activism, particularly in promoting democracy. Social networking has emerged as the Web communication “medium of choice in the developing world, with those who are...

Palestine Papers Are Distortion of Truth, Say Palestinian Officials

Ian Black, Seumas Milne, Harriet Sherwood January 26, 2011
Another round of sensitive documents – confidential Palestinian records on a decade of Middle East peace talks – were leaked to Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, which then shared them with the Guardian in the UK. The initial document releases suggest that Palestinian negotiators went to great lengths to make concessions during meetings with US and Israeli officials – including acceptance of Israel’s...

WikiLeaks Fallout – Part II

Frank Ching January 14, 2011
Leaked US State Department cables, more than 2500 published in diverse news outlets so far, offer glimpses into methods and goals of individual US diplomats. This two-part series explores how WikiLeaks adds to diplomatic challenges around the globe. The second article, written by author and journalist Frank Ching, examines one of the more thoughtful cables. In January 2009, Clark T. Randt, then...

WikiLeaks Fallout – Part I

Bruce Stokes January 12, 2011
About one percent of the 250,000 US State Department cables released to WikiLeaks have been published in newspapers since early December. While the official US reaction was fury, with revealed sources embarrassed, US citizens shrugged and the global public was fascinated. This two-part series, part of an ongoing special report on WikiLeaks, examines the fallout – whether the recent disclosure of...

Monitoring America

Dana Priest, William M. Arkin December 30, 2010
The US is assembling a vast data collection on its citizens, including those who haven’t committed crimes, relying on the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military investigators, report Dana Priest and William Arkin in an investigation for the Washington Post. One agent describes the process as looking for “dots” to connect. The Department of Homeland Security has provided...

WikiLeaks Poses Legal Challenges for US Prosecutors

Kate Woodsome December 27, 2010
At the start of 2010, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton heralded internet freedom as a top foreign policy concern. But the website WikiLeaks released a series of embarrassing military and diplomatic cables, and the US restricts its employees from reading documents readily available throughout the world. US analysts and researchers are at a disadvantage with foreign counterparts who can review...