Independent report.

Nato's hopes for winning over the Afghan population in the south of the country ahead of a massive new military campaign took a major blow yesterday when Nato soldiers opened fire on a civilian bus in Kandahar City and killed four passengers.

Ynetnews report.

The under secretary of state stressed that Washington will adopt a "calculated ambiguity" policy towards countries which do not pose a threat to the US. Despite not explicitly pointing to Israel, it appears her statements were meant to reassure the Jewish state.

Times report.

Terrorists including al-Qaeda pose a serious threat to world security as they attempt to obtain atomic weapons material, Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, declared on the eve of a global summit in Washington to prevent a nuclear terror attack.

The Leveretts write.

Iranian officials have said repeatedly, over years, that the Islamic Republic does not want nuclear weapons and is not seeking them. Furthermore, political and religious authorities have said that acquiring nuclear weapons would be a departure from Islamic ethical standards. (In this regard, it is interesting to note that Iran decided not to weaponize and use chemical agents during the Iran-Iraq war, even though Saddam Husayn subjected both Iranian military forces and civilian targets inside Iran to chemical attack.) Our understanding is that, within the Islamic Republic's decision-making circles, Ayatollah Khamenei has steadfastly rejected the weaponization of Iran's growing nuclear capabilities--and that opposition to nuclear weaponization remains his position. Certainly, Ayatollah Khamenei's public statements on the subject are consistent with such a position.

This is important in the context of the Islamic Republic's political order and culture. Given Tehran's record of official and religious rejection of nuclear weapons, for Ayatollah Khamenei to shift course at some point in the future and endorse nuclear weapons fabrication by the Islamic Republic would require him to explain, to the Iranian public and his followers throughout the Shi'a world, how Iran's strategic circumstances had changed to such an extent that it was now both necessary and legitimate for the country to develop a full-fledged nuclear deterrent. But, as a highly regarded Iranian analyst pointed out to us last week, having the United States threaten to "nuke" the Islamic Republic could plausibly be an important element in the changed circumstances that might warrant a fundamental shift in Iran's posture toward nuclear weapons.

New York Times report.

A large majority of Iranian lawmakers, angered over the Obama administration's new nuclear weapons policy that conspicuously makes Iran and North Korea possible targets, urged their government on Sunday to formally complain to the United Nations in a petition that called the United States a warmonger and threat to world peace.

Henry Porter in the Observer.

Iceland is proposing radical new laws that will create a safe haven for investigative journalism and therefore the release of this kind of shocking footage, which exposes a cover-up, as well as the true nature of a war where a superpower deploys its weapons on a third world country, in this instance cutting down, among others, two people working for Reuters. The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (Immi) will allow organisations like Wikileaks to provide the strongest possible protections for sources and whistleblowers releasing sensitive material that big business and secretive states want to suppress.

Jim Boumelha on the Guardian's Comment is Free.

Possibly "friendly fire" in the headline here is a misnomer: there are strong suspicions that there was a deliberate policy of killing independent journalists.

In all of these cases, families and friends of the killed journalists continue to wait for credible investigations and honest reports about how and why their loved ones died. They just cannot understand why independent investigations of these incidents were not carried out.

Times report.

Assange, an Australian, says he was followed on a flight from Reykjavik to Copenhagen by two American agents. The group has riled governments by publishing documents leaked by whistleblowers.

[...]

Assange claims surveillance has intensified as he and his colleagues prepare to put out their Afghan film.

Christina Lamb in the Times.

The Karzai family has now hit back, accusing US officials of launching a smear campaign as a prelude to abandoning the country again. "There's a very bad policy developing towards Afghanistan," said the president's brother Mahmoud Karzai, a businessman who lives in Kabul. "They want to discredit the Afghan government in the eyes of the US public. I hope it's not the beginning of an exit strategy. If it is, God help us, it will be very bad -- don't they remember what happened when they did this before in the Eighties?"

Haifa Zangana in the Guardian.

I know the area where this massacre was committed. It is a crowded working-class area, a place where it is safe for children to play outdoors. It is near where my two aunts and their extended families lived, where I played as a child with my cousins Ali, Khalid, Ferial and Mohammed. Their offspring still live there.

Patrick Martin on wsws.org.

The new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) issued by the Pentagon Tuesday is being hailed by the Obama administration's apologists as a step towards global nuclear disarmament. It is nothing of the kind. The document lays out a rationale that would justify the use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state for the first time since the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Iran and North Korea are singled out as potential targets.

Philip Giraldi on Antiwar.com. The report he refers to is here (PDF)

It all adds up to a toxic brew. If the US refuses to cooperate in bombing Iran conventionally, Israel might well accept the view that the Iranian nuclear program can only be destroyed by using other nuclear weapons. Tel Aviv, controlling its own nuclear arsenal and the means to deliver the bombs on target, would be able to stage such an attack unilaterally. An increasingly isolated Israel headed by reactionary and irrational politicians who are influenced by their own sense of racial superiority just might decide that the gamble is worth it. It would be a very bad decision for Israel, Iran, and for the United States.

Ted Daley on Antiwar.com.

Although Gates said the NPR did pledge that America would not attack or threaten non-nuclear weapon states with nuclear weapons, he indicated that states "not in compliance with the NPT," specifically naming North Korea and Iran, had been placed by the drafters of the NPR in an entirely different category. For these states, he said, three times, "all options are on the table."

Such words can have only one meaning. The Obama Administration has now said to North Korea and Iran, "If you do not do what we tell you to do, we may launch a nuclear first strike upon you."

The Leveretts (Race for Iran) comment.

As we have pointed out, it is simply not possible any more--if it were ever possible at some point in the past--to achieve Israeli-Palestinian or Arab-Israeli peace in a manner that excludes and marginalizes the Islamic Republic and its regional allies. Rather, today, the link between Iran and Palestine runs in the opposite direction: the United States needs a better and more productive relationship with the Islamic Republic, in part, because it will be impossible to achieve Arab-Israeli peace absent U.S.-Iranian rapprochement.

Times report.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

From the "In the end we're all debt" blog. The Pentagon report referred to is here (PDF).

A report from the American Joint Forces Command published March 15 predicts that in 2015, the world capacity for petroleum prouction could be 10 million barrels per day less than the demand.