Featured

By Juan Cole | — This week, the release by the Senate of a report on torture as practiced in the zeroes by the CIA, along with Thursday night’s dramatic vote on an omnibus spending bill, laid bare the shape of the GOP platform in 2016. (Some Democrats were dragooned into voting for the spending […]

Bill of Rights

The Trial of Richard Bruce Cheney

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | — Satire alert : The hall at the International Criminal Court in the Hague was packed today as the trial began of former US Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney [they always give all three names of suspected felons in the newspaper.] The ICC justices begin with the first charge, that Mr. […]

Egypt

Israel, Egypt Implicated in Torture: Middle East Reactions to Senate Report lament own Involvement

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | — That the release in Washington of a dense 450 page report on CIA torture conducted a decade ago would provoke massive demonstrations in the Middle East all along struck me as unlikely. It could perhaps provoke small terrorist groups affiliated with al-Qaeda, but those groups are already plotting out attacks […]

Featured

Why the Founding Fathers thought banning Torture Foundational to the US Constitution

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | — I have argued on many occasions that the language of patriotism and appeal to the Founding Fathers and the constitution must not be allowed to be appropriated by the political right wing in contemporary America, since for the most part right wing principles (privileging religion, exaltation of ‘whiteness’ over universal […]

Featured

GOP Squirms at Release of CIA Torture Report, warns of “Violence” (So why did they Torture?)

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | — Outgoing House Intelligence Committee head Mike Rogers (R-MI) was on Candy Crowley’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, speaking against releasing any details concerning CIA use of torture in the period after the September 11 attacks. The Senate report is due out this week and is already the object of […]

Featured

Over 100 ISIL/Daesh Fighters Killed in US Airstrikes in Iraq; Attack on Syria Base Repelled

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | — The US war on Daesh (ISIL) in Iraq and Syria takes up less and less space in the MSM. The group and its issues haven’t gone away, however. A source in Iraqi security told AFP Arabic that US and allied air strikes had killed about 100 fighters near Mosul on […]

Coal

Solar Power in US doubles in 2014, Wind now 4% of Energy Mix

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | — Compared to Germany and Spain, the United States is woefully backward in its development of wind, solar and other renewable sources of energy for electricity generation. But there is some good news on this front, as CleanTech notes. Utility-scale solar power generation in the United States doubled in the past […]

African-Americans

Top 5 ways US treatment of African-Americans resembles Apartheid South Africa

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | — From 1949 though the early 1990s, South Africa was ruled by an Afrikaner Apartheid regime that made race the basis for law and politics, and which systematically excluded black Africans from their civil and national rights, empowering white Afrikaners alone. The social statistics produced by that regime, however, are not […]

Featured

UN General Assembly Demands Israel Mothball its Nuclear Arsenal

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | — The United Nations General Assembly (where all 193 countries in the world get a vote) has almost unanimously demanded that Israel give up its nuclear weapons and cooperate with making the Middle East a nuclear-free zone. The only dissenters were Israel and the United States, along with three small South […]