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Kosovo's prime minister is the head of a "mafia-like" Albanian group responsible for smuggling weapons, drugs and human organs through eastern Europe, according to a Council of Europe inquiry report on organised crime. Hashim Thaçi is identified as "the boss" of a network that began operating criminal rackets in the run-up to the 1999 Kosovo war, and has held powerful sway over the country's government since. The report of the two-year inquiry, which cites FBI and other intelligence sources, has been obtained by the Guardian. It names Thaçi as having over the last decade exerted "violent control" over the heroin...

Another part of Bush's speech dealt with the supposed spread of "democracy" in the Muslim world: "He [Bush] also offered plenty of praise for democratic advances, naming countries like Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq, Morocco and Jordan. 'The light of liberty is beginning to shine,' he said." Is he crazy? In Turkey, the so-called "light of liberty" is undoing Kemalism, putting the secularists in the universities, the judiciary, and the army, under great pressure, and bringing Islam back, step by grim step, as Erdogan and now Gul, cleverly backed by all kinds of people, including the shadowy millionaire Fethullah Gulen, probe and...

So there I was, listening to a few of the major "architects" of the war in Iraq -- Paul Wolfowitz, formerly No. 2 man at the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld; Douglas J. Feith, formerly No. 3 man at the Pentagon under Rumsfeld; Peter Rodman, another former senior adviser to Rumsfeld; and Dan Senor, former senior adviser to Paul Bremer of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). They had assembled at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., for a discussion of Feith's new book, "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism," but what they were...

Can Barack Obama, who campaigns as an icon of peace, actually be more bellicose than Bush? Yes, he can. President Obama would be a warmonger. He would be a wide-eyed, zealous interventionist who would not think twice about using America’s “military muscle” (his words) to overthrow “rogue states” and to suppress America’s enemies, real and imagined. He would go farther even than President Bush in transforming the globe into America’s backyard and staffing it with spies and soldiers. He would relish the “American mission” to police the world and topple tyrannical regimes. Iraq is the Obamabots’ favorite faultline in the...

Was Reagan the 1st neoconservative? Posted: June 14, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc. Would Ronald Reagan have invaded Iraq? Would he have declared a doctrine of preventive war to keep any rival nation from rising to where it might challenge us? Would he have crusaded for "world democratic revolution"? Was Reagan the first neoconservative? This claim has been entered in the wake of his death. Yet, it seems bogus, a patent forgery, a fabricated claim to the Reagan legacy, worked up in the same shop where they made the documents proving Saddam was buying up all...

Kerry’s Dogs of War By M. Bozinovich Recent Albanian violence against the Serbs in Kosovo appears to have been a screaming success. Aside that UNMIK has made no convictions of the arrested Albanian suspects, the fact that NATO inflicted no reprisal to counter its exposed military impotence leaves the Albanian militants in a confident position that, if repeated again, the violence will drive NATO out of Kosovo. In fact, it appears that the Albanian militants have also set the NATO drive-out date. "I'm not a fan of setting dates,” said Hasim Taci, the leader of the Albanian paramilitary in Kosovo...

Since WMDs were not the real reason for attacking Iraq, the question of the war’s true purpose remains unresolved. Almost two months since President Bush announced that “major combat operations” had come to an end the United States appears strangely uncertain of its post-war mission. Dozens of American soldiers have died in accidents and, much more worryingly, in hit-and-run attacks by assailants unknown: mysterious “diehard Saddam loyalists,” Tehran-prompted Shiite fanatics, and bandits who thrive on chaos are all suspected. The number of “peacetime” casualties—averaging a soldier a day—may soon exceed that of combat losses suffered in March-April. The cost of...