INTERNATIONAL

  Speak Softly and Carry a Very Big Carrot By Maidhc Ó Cathail Even those familiar with the long and shameful history of America’s appeasement of Israel were taken aback by the Obama administration’s extraordinary offer to Netanyahu. In exchange for a paltry one-off 90 day freeze on illegal settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem), Israel …

A diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks shows that the US military covered up the killing of dozens of civilians during a cruise missile strike in south Yemen in December 2009. The secret cable from January 2010 corroborated images released earlier this year by Amnesty International, implicating the US in the use of cluster bombs. The cable was sent by Yemen's …

THE US military has been charging its allies a 15 per cent handling fee on hundreds of millions of dollars raised internationally to build up the Afghan army, according to US diplomatic cables. Details of the fee are just one of a series of embarrassing revelations regarding Afghanistan that have come to light from documents released by the website WikiLeaks …

Some in the media glibly dismissed the US embassy cables at first, but such WikiScepticism is on the wane Richard Adams It's a sad fact that many journalists who have been scooped or cut out of a breaking news story react by knocking it down. "That's old news," they say, "we knew that already." Sometimes it's true. But mostly it's …

Iran hawks are crowing after the latest WikiLeaks dump, but they've been playing this game for two decades now BY JUSTIN ELLIOTT With the release of the first round of WikiLeaks State Department documents this week, Iran hawks in the United States have embraced a new line: Look at the number of Arab leaders who privately urged the U.S. to …

Officials gently mock the Israeli habit of making bogus predictions about when Iran will obtain a nuclear bomb BY JUSTIN ELLIOTT   A couple of items from the WikiLeaks trove suggest that State Depatment officials do not take particularly seriously Israeli predictions about when Iran will obtain a nuclear weapon.   That's because those predictions are so often wrong.   There's …