Archives for May 2006

Hekmatyar goes Al-Qaeda Kabul Bomb Kills Italians Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the radical Islamist guerrilla fighter, has pledged his allegiance to Usamah Bin Laden. Back in the 1980s, Hekmatyar was a “freedom fighter” supported strongly by the Reagan administration. His radical Islamists received on the order of a billion dollars from the CIA to fight the Soviets, […]

Hitchens Affair A little satire on the Hitchens affair. and . . . Sadly no!

Cole/Weisberg Correspondence on Hitchens With Mr. Weisberg’s permission, I am posting our correspondence on the Hitchens hatchet job on me in Slate earlier this week. ======== From: Jacob WeisbergSent: Thu 5/4/2006 6:15 PMTo: Cole, JuanSubject: RE: Forwarded from Weisberg Dear Juan Cole, Thanks for yor message. I certainly know your work and have seen it […]

28 Dead, over 50 Wounded in Bombings, Assassinations Shiites Keep Interior? At least 28 persons were killed in the Iraqi civil war on Thursday. Another big car bomb killed 10 and wounded 50, 15 critically, at a court building in the Shiite slum of Sadr City. In another Very Bad Sign, ‘ In other attacks, […]

Rumsfeld: It Depends on what the Meaning of “Where” Is Back in the Sixties it would be some activist college student who confronted the Secretary of Defense on an illegal, ill-conceived and unwinnable war. It is an index of the changed times that now it is retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern! William Dunham writes, ‘ […]

Hitchens “No Journalist”: Insider A person of long and wide experience with journalism and politics writes an interesting analysis of the Hitchens affair: ‘Hitchens has been in a spiral for a long time, more than a decade, and he threw in with the neocons sometime in the mid-1990s, and with David Irving about that time, […]

Dalila Case in Syria This is a letter I signed recently on behalf of the Committee for Academic Freedom in the Middle East and North Africa of the Middle East Studies Association. Thanks to the Committee members for their hard work, commitment and high ideals. I urge others to write or FAX about Dalila’s case. […]

Gold from Tomdispatch One of the essential websites for reality based journalism is Tomdispatch.com. It is always rich in commentary and reportage. But this week if you just go there, it is impossible to get away again without reading just everything. Tom Engelhardt meditates on the meaning of American power fantasies about bombing Iran. Money […]

Americana Update The initial fundraising drive for the Global Americana Institute has been extremely rewarding. Thanks so much to everyone who has supported us. We have noted that the great works of American political philosophy– Ben Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jeffers, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King, etc., etc. just are […]