Juan Cole

Shin Bet at Abu Ghuraib The respected journal of military affairs, Jane’s, is reporting that Israeli Shin Bet interrogators were used by the Americans at Abu Ghuraib. A twist: the article maintains that the US chose them because they were less likely to use heavy-handed torture techniques than secret police from US allies like Egypt […]

Veterans Protest War as Dishonest In a move reminiscent of the Vietnam era, some returning Iraq veterans are condemning the Iraq war as basically dishonest. They point out that no weapons of mass destruction have been found, even though that was the major pretext for the war. [Am traveling; hope to post more Thursday afternoon].

Car Bomb in Khalis kills 13; 3 Marines Die in al-Anbar On Tuesday, Australian Broadcasting says that guerrillas drove a car bomb into the midst of a funeral in Khalis, 80 km. north of Baghdad, and detonated it. They killed at least 13 persons and wounded 35. It says the funeral was for the brother […]

Tomdispatch: The Way we Were Veteran journalist Tom Engelhardt considers the impact of the past three years on the position of the US in the world. Speaking of the Bush-Cheney national security state, he observes: ‘ They identified an “arc of instability” that stretched east-west from the former Yugoslavia to the borders of China and […]

Mylroie as Bush Rasputine Peter Bergen, veteran journalist and al-Qaeda expert, raises the question of whether the bizarre and crackpot theories of Laurie Mylroie have undue influence high in the US government. Mylroie alleges that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, a thesis for which there is no evidence whatsoever. […]

Iraqi Parties Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has worked up a basic guide to Iraqi political parties. It has a Part One and a Part Two. See also their Guide to Armed Groups in Iraq.

John Edwards and the Iraq War Now that John Kerry has chosen John Edwards as his running mate, I looked around for some Edwards quotes on Iraq. Some good ones are at On the Issues. One thing that hadn’t been clear to me before was Edwards’ antipathy to Halliburton and his critique of “unbid contracts.” […]

Guest Comment on Fallujah and Kaplan: Nir Rosen Journalist Nir Rosen, who has spent most of the past year in Iraq and has fluent Arabic, recently reported on Fallujah for the New Yorker. He objects to many details and arguments in the reporting of of Robert Kaplan on Fallujah for The Atlantic Monthly. We print […]

2 US Pilots Wounded; Strike on Fallujah Mortar Strike in Basra US jets dropped 500-pound bombs on Fallujah again on Monday, targetting an alleged safe house of the al-Tawhid terrorist network. The Iraqi caretaker government announced that it had supported the move. A dozen or more persons were killed, according to local Iraqi observers. Guerrillas […]