Juan Cole

AP reports that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has denounced a US raid in Kut as a violation of the security agreement between Washington and Baghdad. WaPo goes further and says that al-Maliki is actually calling for the troops involved to be prosecuted in Iraqi courts. The US said its troops were targeting a major funder […]

Readers have written me asking what I think of the rash of almost apocalyptic pronouncements on the security situation in Pakistan issuing from the New York Times, The Telegraph, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in recent days. And Stephen Walt also is asking why there are such varying assessments of Pakistan’s security prospects. He […]

The NYT reports that behind the scenes the US has been pressuring Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to find a way to reconcile with former Baathist elements, but that he has refused. Actually the Arab press has been reporting for some time on this issue. From the point of view of an Iraqi government dominated by […]

Update: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Baghdad Saturday morning on a mission to assess the reasons for the recent rise in large-scale bombings. Two suicide bombers killed 60 persons and wounded 125 outside the shrine of Imam Musa al-Kazim in northern Baghdad on Friday, in an attack that is much more dangerous than […]

There is a delightful custom in Barcelona. On April 23, St. George’s Day, men give their girlfriends or wives a rose. And the women give their male beloved a book. The gift of the book is said to have been initiated in 1926 as a commemoration of Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote The rose […]

McClatchy reports that torture was reauthorized in spring of 2003 by four Bush administration officials: Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales. It has already been revealed by McClatchy that the reason for the reaffirmation to the CIA to go on intensively waterboarding and otherwise torturing Abu Zubayda and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was […]

Brian Murphy of AP reports that bombings in Iraq killed 78 persons on Thursday A female suicide bomber in the upscale Shiite neighborhood of Karrada in Baghdad struck a crowd that had gathered to receive Red Crescent aid, killing 31, including 8 police officers, and wounding 50. To the northeast, near Muqdadiya, a suicide bomber […]

MSNBC sent me this by email. I couldn’t find it on the web, so I’m reprinting here- JRIC REVISED TRANSCRIPT: LIZ CHENEY DEFENDS HER FATHER ON MSNBC NEW YORK – April 23, 2009 – Liz Cheney, former deputy assistant secretary of state during the Bush administration and the daughter of the former vice president, Dick […]

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi says she was briefed several years ago that Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) had shown up in a wiretap. Pelosi denies that she was pressured by Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban to appoint Harman chair of the House Intelligence Committee. But then at the end of the interview, Pelosi says that […]