Last night, with the translation assistance of Leila Zand, director of the Iran program at the Fellowship of Reconcilation, I interviewed Habib Ahmadzadeh on the dispute over the Iranian election results from June 12. Perhaps you've heard of Habib Ahmadzadeh. He wrote the original short script for the Iranian movie...

I will pay $10,000 to the first person or organization that presents a coherent story for how the Iranian election was stolen that is consistent with knowable facts about the Iranian election process as it took place on June 12-13 and the information that has been published since, including the...

Last night the House Rules Committee decided that Rep. Jim McGovern's amendment requiring an exit strategy from Afghanistan would be in order when the House considers the FY2010 Defense Authorization [H.R. 2647]. That means that today or possibly tomorrow there should be a vote on the House floor on...

Last week, the House leadership prevailed on many progressive Democrats to vote for the war supplemental, paying for military escalation in Afghanistan with no exit strategy, giving $108 billion to the International Monetary Fund without requiring modest reforms such as requiring the IMF to publish minutes of its board...

It's interesting to observe when some Democratic Congressional leaders say Democrats have to be "loyal" to President Obama and when it's apparently OK to join Republicans in undermining him.

Earlier this week, Speaker Pelosi said progressive House Democrats said had to be "loyal" to President Obama in supporting more money...

In March, President Obama told CBS' "60 Minutes" that the United States must have an "exit strategy" in Afghanistan.

Ninety Members of Congress agree. They're supporting H.R. 2404, a bill introduced by Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) whose text is one sentence long: "Not later than December 31, 2009,...

Judging from commentary in the blogosphere, many Americans are already convinced by suggestions that have been carried in the media that the Presidential election in Iran was stolen. [Some press reports have been a bit more careful: the lead paragraph of the front page story in Sunday's New York...

Can Jane Hamsher's internet army teach Rahm Emmanuel and Timothy Geithner a lesson about accepting the input of progressive Democrats? That would be change I could believe in. Here she makes the case against progressive Democrats caving in to leadership pressure that they vote for the War/IMF Supplemental:

The official story is that the $108 billion for the International Monetary Fund that the House leadership wants to attach to the war supplemental on Tuesday is "global stimulus," "foreign aid," "money for poor people in poor countries."

Critics like Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research...

A spectacular, nasty Washington drama is unfolding which you aren't likely to read about in the New York Times or the Washington Post, until perhaps after the fact. Even if it is reported in these papers, few readers will understand it, because the reporters won't care to understand and explain...

U.S. policy in the broader Middle East over the next four years will be judged in the region according to whether the pledges that President Obama made in Cairo today are kept.

So it's important for Americans to know what those pledges were. Because when right-wing voices in America try...

Last month, 60 Members of the House of Representatives, including 51 Democrats, voted against the war supplemental for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. But this week, when the House is expected to consider the agreement of a House-Senate conference on the war funding, the supplemental could well be defeated on the...

President Obama has the opportunity to make history in Cairo on Thursday, the kind of history that President Eisenhower made when he rebuked the 1956 invasion of Egypt by Britain, France and Israel. Eisenhower's stand won tremendous goodwill for the U.S. in the Arab world. If Obama stands firm on...

The Obama Administration has been praised and vilified for its legendary caution, typically depending on whether the speaker supports or opposes the direction in which caution is being applied.

But a recent proposal by the State Department to the Organization of American States regarding Cuba's re-entry to the OAS rises...

There's little question that the Obama administration has tacked hard to the right on international economic policy since coming in to office. Its efforts to ram $100 billion for the International Monetary Fund through Congress via the war supplemental without reform language that would stop the IMF from making...

The most damning credible allegation to emerge regarding the Bush Administration is arguably that Dick Cheney and other Bush Administration officials ordered the use of torture to produce false evidence of a connection between Iraq and al-Qaida to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of...

With the passage of the war supplemental by the Senate, President Obama and Congress are "doubling down" on war in Afghanistan. Are we - and the Afghan people - doomed to endure many more years of war?

There is no reason that we need be, according to yesterday's New York...

If civilian deaths from U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan were CO2 emissions, perhaps we'd be having a more effective discussion about reducing them.

The pattern seems to be this. When there are complaints about civilian deaths from U.S. airstrikes and night raids, first the Pentagon denies there were...

It would be an exaggeration to say that Congress has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity this week to reform the policies of the International Monetary Fund. If the future is like the past, if Congress misses this opportunity, another one will come along - in about 10 years or so.

This week,...

Two cheers for President Obama.

President Obama, at the press conference today with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu:

Now, Israel is going to have to take some difficult steps as well, and I shared with the Prime Minister the fact that under the roadmap and under Annapolis that there's...