Archives for January 2010

The riots by some Muslims in Malaysia and attacks on Christian churches over a recent court ruling allowing Christians to call God “Allah” are as baffling and dismaying to me as to everyone else. I mean, there is a post-colonial dimension to these things. Malaysia was conquered by the British in the 19th century and […]

International Living has issued its annual ranking of countries as the best places to live. I do not know anything about the site, International Living, which seems to be oriented to selling real estate abroad to American retirees. At least some subscribers have raised questions about whether it is genuinely an informational site as opposed […]

Jumping from the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Via MSNBC Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy End/ (Not Continued) Cont’d (click below or on “comments”)

EXPLAINING THE CONCEPT OF “LEARNING CURVE” TO JEFFREY GOLDBERG � The Race for Iran Hillary Mann Leverett explains to American Likudnik Jeffrey Goldberg that an Iran realist is a Neocon who has been mugged by reality. End/ (Not Continued)

I just saw a clip on Aljazeera Arabic of the “martyrdom tape” of Humam al-Balawi, the Jordanian-Palestinian double agent who carried out a suicide bombing in Khost, Afghanistan, last week, killing 7 Americans working for the Central Intelligence Agency along with his handler, a Jordanian intelligence operative. He said his action was a message to […]

I give the text of President Obama’s speech on security below, along with video. Unlike the two speeches Obama gave in the immediate aftermath of the attempted underpants bombing, in this one the president was focused and decisive. As amazing as it seems, it appears that the Obama team had just never sat down and […]

In the past three weeks, Iran observers have been baffled by the range of opinion appearing on the op-ed page of The New York Times concerning Iran, and the uneven reporting on that country. Before the holidays, Alan Kuperman, a political scientist at the University of Texas Austin, called for bombing Iran– becoming the first […]

President Obama spoke firmly and with some smoldering anger on Tuesday about the failure of US intelligence to ‘connect the dots’ of information it had in hand about how dangerous Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the attempted airline bomber, had become. AP has video: I think two things could help fix the intelligence failure. One is just […]

Guantanamo: The Definitive Prisoner List (Updated for 2010) | Andy Worthington Worthington has updated his invaluable list of Guantanamo prisoners, including those released. He shows that most were arrested arbitrarily and were probably innocent. He has also recently argued against the anti-Yemen hysteria of recent weeks being used as a pretext for not releasing dozens […]