Ding Dong the Witch….is…

I'm trying to work up an appropriate expression of...um. Gloating. Schadenfreude. Sympathy? For this news: Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper [has] suspended the weekly column of Barbara Amiel-Black after its parent, Hollinger International, filed a lawsuit accusing...

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US military nudist prisons

Guantanamo prisoner: "After a while, we stopped asking for human rights - we wanted animal rights."Senator: “Almost everybody was naked all the time.” I remember when these accounts first came out I thought they might be exaggerated. Tarek Dergoul, 26, from London,...

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There Is a Difference

We're all appalled by what happened to Nick Berg. But while some of us look at this crime and think my God, what have we gotten ourselves into?, others use it to stir up more hatred and violence. The belligerati have issued a giant sigh--or shriek--of relief as this...

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Releasing Abu Ghraib photos “illegal”

Rumsfeld says White House lawyers are claiming that it is "illegal" to release additional photos of torture at Abu Ghraib prison.U.S. administration lawyers are advising the Pentagon not to publicly release any more photographs of Iraqi prisoners being abused by U.S....

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A Beheading Deja vu

Photos of Nick Berg's beheading weren't shown to the general public, but a colleague of mine nonetheless remembered something similar she saw during the Bosnian War. Apparently, decapitation of captured Serb soldiers and civilians was rather common for the mujahedin...

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US damages mosque in Karbala

Juan Cole is sounding the alarm here. He points to an AP report about heavy fighting in Karbala.The US used heavy firepower in the sacred Shiite city, destroying half of the historic al-Mukhayyam Mosque not so far from the shrine of the Prophet's martyred grandson,...

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On the Nick Berg Beheading

On the Nick Berg Beheading Col. Lounsbury writes what I think may be the definitive post here. Lounsbury quotes the Washington Post: The persistent violence contrasts sharply with U.S. officials' optimistic calls for private companies to invest in Iraq. Over the past...

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EU? No thanks!

Just as a quick footnote to the April 29 article about Balkans and the EU: the BBC reported that EU's Commissar - er, Commissioner - Chris Patten was in Belgrade pressuring Serbia to submit to ICTY's demands. "He said compliance with the court was a key step on...

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Genocide crusaders at it again

Spearheading the movement that clamored for US (and Western) intervention in Bosnia in the early 1990s - and Kosovo in 1998-99 - has been a diverse group of people united around a desire to stamp out "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing". Naturally, their definitions of...

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Tony Parsons’ Mea Culpa

I suppose Tony Parsons' apology of sorts in yesterday's Daily Mirror is a giant step forward on the road to that warmonger's redemption. And yet, his argument is tained by a simple fact that his comparison (Slobodan Milosevic and Tony Blair) is facetious. Parsons...

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