Ali Khan

Washington, July 23: The Obama administration is considering whether to pay off Afghan farmers to stop them from growing heroin poppies on contract for the Taliban, senior officials say.

Paying farmers not to plant poppy would essentially supplant U.S. cash for the fees paid up front by the Taliban to its contract farmers. The idea seems to follow logically from the administration’s policy of protecting Afghan civilians and eroding support for the insurgency, but skeptics say it won’t work because farmers would take the money and plant poppies anyway.

Washington, July 21: A U.S. District Court Judge in Washington, D.C., ruled in documents made public Monday that Central Intelligence Agency officials committed fraud attempting to cover for the CIA’s former station chief in Burma in a wiretapping lawsuit.

The ruling was reported by the Associated Press on Monday afternoon, although the ruling was issued in recent months. The case’s result had been sealed from public eyes at the government’s request.

Bosnia, July 21: Two Bosnian Serb cousins were sentenced to life and 30 years in jail on Monday for what judges of a U.N. war crimes court termed the “callous” and “vicious” murder of Muslims in Bosnia’s 1992-95 war.

The pair were accused of “locking scores of Muslims in two houses and burning them alive,” the AP reports. “Yugoslav war crimes tribunal judge Patrick Robinson said burning at least 119 Muslims to death in the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad ‘exemplified the worst acts of inhumanity that one person may inflict on others.’”

Washington, July 20: Two of the key designers of the Bush administration’s torture program ended up in a “tug of war” with their superiors about how far to go when coercing information out of suspects, says a new article in the Washington Post.

Washington, July 20: US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, in a newspaper interview published Sunday, that US-led forces in Afghanistan must show progress by next summer to avoid the public perception that the conflict has become unwinnable.

Gates told The Los Angeles Times that victory in that country was a “long-term prospect” under any scenario and that the United States would not win the war in one year.

However, US forces must begin to turn the situation around in a year, he said, or face the likely loss of public support, The Times reported.

Washington, July 18: The Pentagon has shown it has a great appetite for drones and robots — everything from missile-firing UAVs to prototype patrol-bots guarding air base perimeters.

But a Maryland company working on a program for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, has the idea of giving the robots their own appetites, letting them feed on biomass as a means of fueling themselves.

Guantanamo Bay, July 18: An al-Jazeera journalist who was imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay plans to launch a joint legal action with other detainees against former US president George Bush and other administration officials, for the illegal detention and torture he and others suffered at the hands of US authorities.

The case will be initiated by the Guantánamo Justice Centre, a new organisation open to former prisoners at the US base, which will set up its international headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, later this month.

Tehran, July 18: Iranian Intelligence Minister Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejeie said on Friday that Israel had planned to assassinate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad around the time of last month’s presidential election.

The Fars news agency quoted Ejeie as saying that Israeli officials had met members of the exiled Iranian opposition group, People’s Mujahedeen of Iran (PMOI), to execute the plan.

” The Zionist regime had met with the hypocrite group (the term Iran uses for the PMOI) on the sidelines of (a meeting in) Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt and in Paris to assassinate Mr. Ahmadinejad ”