Juan Cole

The Other Shoe Drops: Bin Laden Weighs in It is interesting that Usamah Bin Laden explicitly said that it doesn’t matter to al-Qaeda whether Bush or Kerry is president. Only the degree to which the US gives “liberty” to the Muslim world matters to al-Qaeda, he says. [I’ll have things to say about this diction […]

Pentagon Briefing on Missing Explosives I just watched the Larry DiRita host a Pentagon briefing on the issue of the missing explosives at al-Qaqaa. I was disgusted by the political spin DiRita was putting out. The Pentagon should be serving the military needs of the whole United States, not of the Bush administration. DiRita kept […]

US Has Killed 100,000 in Iraq: The Lancet The Lancet, a respected British medical journal, reports that the US and coalition forces (but mainly the US Air Force) has killed 100,000 Iraqi civilians since the fall of Saddam on April 9, 2003. Previous estimates for civilian deaths since the beginning of the war ranged up […]

Missing HMX: It Really is Missing The evidence accumulates hourly that deadly HMX explosives were at the al-Qaqaa facility on April 18 of 2003 and subsequently disappeared. The allegation that the material was moved by the Saddam regime between March 16 and April 9 does not seem to me to get Bush off the hook. […]

2 US Troops, 15 Others killed 17 persons died in violent attacks in Iraq on Thursday, including two US troops. Al-Hayat reports that Grand Ayatollah met with the Chaldean Patriarch. The grand ayatollah urged Christian Iraqis to vote, and condemned attacks on Christian churches by what he called “takfiri” forces. The practice of declaring some […]

Breaking News: Film Crew May have Smoking Gun A US film crew has footage of the explosives at al-Qaqaa that later went missing. This development may be the downside of embedding for the US military. It makes things hard to deny later on if you leave a filmed trail. For instance, the Russians can’t have […]

Iraqi Officials Deny Early Disappearance of Explosives Dr. Muhammad Sharaa who leads Iraq’s science monitoring department, denies that the 380 tons of high explosives that has gone missing could have been moved in spring of 2003 before or during the war. AFP reports: “It is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this […]

Brown: 2004 Bremer Report on al-Qaqaa Looting Professor Nathan Brown of George Washington University writes: In the dispute between the Kerry campaign and the Bush administration over the disappearance of explosives at al-Qaqaa, the core of the Bush defense is that we don’t know when the explosives disappeared; it could have happened before American troops […]

Qazi tries to Forestall Sunni Boycott of Elections Az-Zaman: United Nations special envoy to Iraq, Ashraf Jahangir Qazi, held talks on Wednesday with Shaikh Muhammad Bashar al-Faydi, a leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars. They discussed the AMS attitude toward the January elections as well as the situation in Fallujah, which continues to be […]