Juan Cole

Gitmo-by-the-Sea: 5-Star Holidays for Oppressed Christians: Fisher Guest Satire by William Fisher “Oppressed Christians: Looking for a five-star holiday? Have we got a deal for you! GITMO-By-The-Sea” Don’t laugh, folks. Our Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could just be poised to become the country’s hottest tourist destination for folks of faith. It’s hard to […]

Guerrillas Kill 29 Iraqis Tuesday, Wound over 100 in North 3 US Servicemen Dead Kurds Abducting Arabs, Turkmen in Kirkuk The Associated Press reports “And an American soldier was killed when a roadside bomb hit his convoy in southern Baghdad, the military said, adding that two other soldiers assigned to a Marine unit died in […]

21 Dead, 40 Wounded in Guerrilla Violence AFP reports *At a checkpoint between Baghdad and Baquba (to the northeast of the capital) at Khan Bani Saad, guerrillas sprayed a police checkpoint with machine gun fire, killing 4 and wounding 7. When help came, a car bomber struck, wounding another three soldiers. *In Tikrit a guerrilla […]

Barzani President of Iraqi Kurdistan UPI transmits from al-Hayat a report that the Kurds are upset with Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari’s high-handed decision-making style. They say they will leave their coalition in parliament with the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance if Jaafari does not start consulting them more. It is not clear in the interim constitution […]

The Downing Street Memos and the Revenge of the Bloggers When Michael Smith of the London Times wrote about a further leaked British cabinet document on decision-making about the Iraq war in July 2003, he did not simply report the revelations in the document. Most commentators on the Smith story have missed his open acknowledgment […]

Top Ten Things You Wouldn’t expect to Happen if You Listened to Bush and Cheney 10. You wouldn’t expect Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Prison to have been put in “stress positions,” or physically poked and shoved, or subjected to “The Invasion of Space by the Female,” or to have had their heartbeat driven down to […]

The International Criminal Court and Blair/Bush: Amy Ross Guest Comments by Amy Ross “The International Criminal Court and Blair/Bush” “Regarding accountability and the ICC: It does seem that the Blair administration was much more cognizant of the potential conflict with the ICC. Indeed the prominent British human rights lawyer Cherie Booth (aka Mrs. Blair) wrote […]

Bush and Blair Committed to War in April, 2002 Leaked Cabinet Briefing Shows British Knew War was Illegal The London Times has dropped another bombshell document concerning the planning of the Iraq war in Washington and London. The leaked Cabinet office briefing paper for the July 23, 2002, meeting of principals in London, the minutes […]

More than 35 Killed by Iraqi Guerrillas US Kills 40 Fighters with Missile Strike CBC/AP reports: The new wave of violence began Friday evening when a suicide bomber targeted patrons of a falafel restaurant in the Shiite Shula quarter of Baghdad, killing 10 persons, some of them children waiting for ice cream. On Saturday, a […]