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Summary: U.S./Top News Calls for dialogue with Iran, Syria, and North Korea have increased, Helene Cooper reports for the New York Times. Officially, the administration is sticking to form. But within the administration, things are a little more nuanced, officials said.
A new poll shows support for the war in Iraq is slipping among white evangelical Protestants, previously a key pillar of support for President Bush's conduct of the conflict, Reuters reports.
Spinning out implausible scenarios like the claim it might take only 12 to 18 more months for the Iraqis to be able to defend themselves won't get Iraq any closer to containing the mayhem, nor the US any closer to extricating itself, writes the New York Times in an editorial. What is needed is an explicit, credible and public set of deadlines.
Democratic leaders and candidates are virtually unanimous in opposing the president's conduct of the war, and most advocate American disengagement - either quickly or slowly, the New York Times reports. But the variety of formulations is dizzying, John Broder writes. Broder overstates his case. He acknowledges that the majority of Senate Democrats have agreed on a plan to begin withdrawing troops. He claims that "even if the Democrats win one or both houses of Congress, they will not have the authority to change the course of the war significantly," which is a silly assertion, since, if they had the majority, they could cut off funding, which would certainly change the course of the war significantly. Whether they would do so is another question, but that doesn't make Broder's assertion any less silly.
An Al-Qaeda terror suspect whose evidence of links between Iraq and the terror network was used to justify the US invasion confessed after being tortured, a journalist told the BBC. "What he claimed most significantly was a connection between ... Al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. This intelligence report … was used by Colin Powell as a key piece of justification ... for invading Iraq," Stephen Grey said.
The CIA tried to pressure Germany to quiet EU protests about human rights abuses in its clandestine torture flights program by making the action a condition of access to an imprisoned German citizen, the Guardian reports. After the CIA offered the deal to Germany, EU countries adopted an almost universal policy of downplaying criticism of human rights records in countries where terrorist suspects have been held, the Guardian notes. [Consular access to imprisoned citizens is guaranteed by international treaty - JFP.]
UN member states voted Thursday to create an international treaty to curb the illicit trade in guns and other light weapons, despite strong opposition from the United States, Inter Press Service reports.
Voters should oust congressional Republican leaders because U.S. foreign policy is delaying the second coming of Jesus Christ, according to a evangelical preacher trying to influence closely contested political races, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports.
Fifty years after the Eisenhower Administration cemented U.S. influence in the Middle East by its decisive action to repel the British and French invasion of Egypt in the Suez crisis, the era of U.S. domination is coming to an end, Jim Lobe writes for Inter Press Service.
Iran Iran has doubled its capacity to enrich uranium by successfully executing the process with a second network of centrifuges, an Iranian news agency reported. A spokesman for France's Foreign Ministry said the Iranian announcement was not a great surprise because the IAEA had said in August that Iran was developing new nuclear capacities. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said Iran's action was not a cause for worry.
Iran's official news agency quoted a foreign ministry official as describing reported US naval exercises at the end of October with Bahrain, Kuwait, France and Britain as dangerous and suspicious, the BBC reported Tuesday.
Palestine The Palestinian interior minister took home $2 million in cash from Muslim countries when he returned to the Gaza Strip this week, part of a continuing effort to meet government expenses in the face of a cutoff in aid from Western countries, the New York Times reports. The Times report again conflates US and EU aid funds with Palestinian tax revenues illegally withheld by Israel. In correspondence with Just Foreign Policy, a Times editor defended the paper's coverage, citing the fact that one time the paper reported the issue correctly.
North Korea At isolated border crossing with China, no one seems to have noticed the recent UN sanctions against North Korea, the New York Times reports.
A team of government and outside experts convened by the CIA concluded in 1997 that North Korea's economy was deteriorating so rapidly that the government of Kim Jong-il was likely to collapse within five years, according to declassified documents made public Thursday by the National Security Archive.
Thailand Investigators have failed to uncover solid evidence to support corruption charges against Thailand's ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the nation's coup leader said in an interview Thursday. General Sondhi had justified the coup on September 19 by saying that widespread corruption during Thaksin's five years in office had undermined democracy. Sondhi acknowledged the military could lose public support if nothing emerges to back up the corruption claims.
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