A Slip-Up, Then a Spin | Newsweek Scope

‘Iran Has a Very Clear Choice’
Lally Weymouth 9/26/2009 12:00:00 AM
David Miliband, currently the British foreign secretary and a possible future leader of the Labour Party, sat down last week with NEWSWEEK's Lally Weymouth to defend the release of the Libyan terrorist convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, and to discuss Britain's role in Afghanistan and the upcoming talks with Iran. Excerpts:
The End of Lockerbie
Jerry Adler 8/20/2009 12:00:00 AM
It was the largest criminal investigation in history, and it was solved by evidence smaller than a fingernail: a fragment of circuit board tucked inside a scrap of fabric, picked up by detectives somewhere in the 845 square miles over which the wreckage of Pan Am Flight 103 scattered after a bomb blew it out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland. And on that tiny clue depended the fate of nations, of billions of dollars in payments to the families of the 270 people killed that night in 1988—and of one 57-year-old man, dying of cancer, who was released today by Scottish authorities to live out his days in his homeland of Libya.
Meddle Nettle
8/6/2009 12:00:00 AM
A sovereign state is, by definition, supposed to manage affairs inside its borders. But that's not always the case, especially when it comes to disputes involving guerrilla movements. After all, moral equivalency or not, one nation's terrorists really are another's freedom fighters, and foreign governments sometimes cross international borders to protect antigovernment forces elsewhere, reinforce ethnic movements, or simply to make their presence known. Last week, for example, documents revealed that Venezuela is still supporting the FARC guerrillas in Colombia.
THE LAST WORD
Our Main Enemy Is Al Qaeda
Kevin Peraino 4/18/2009 12:00:00 AM
Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, has long governed a tinderbox. His party survived armed clashes with separatist rebels in the country's south and Houthi tribesmen in the north. Al Qaeda is also a growing threat. Last month a suicide bomber detonated himself at a crowded archeological site in Yemen, killing four South Korean tourists, and earlier this month CentCom chief Gen. David Petraeus warned that Yemen was becoming a safe haven for Qaeda militants. Saleh spoke with NEWSWEEK's Kevin Peraino at his palace in Sanaa. Excerpts:
CAPITAL SOURCES
The Afghan Puzzle
Dan Ephron 1/12/2009 12:00:00 AM
President-elect Barack Obama's national-security team is studying several options for improving the situation in Afghanistan, including the military's plan to nearly double troop levels there. But assessments of the seven-year-old war are mostly grim. A report issued last month by the International Council on Security and Development said the Taliban now holds a permanent presence in 72 percent of Afghanistan.
FACTCHECK.ORG
Soft on Iran?
Joe Miller 6/5/2008 12:00:00 AM
Analysis For the past two weeks, presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain and Democratic front-runner (and now presumptive nominee) Barack Obama have engaged in a war of words over their respective positions on Iran. In a June 2 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, McCain upped the ante, criticizing Obama's failure to support an amendment that called for designating Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, a charge that McCain repeats on his Web site. It's true that Obama opposed the amendment in question. But McCain is wrong to suggest that Obama's opposition had anything to do with the IRGC's designation. And McCain fails to mention that Obama cosponsored an earlier bill that would have named the IRGC a terrorist organization.