Sławomir Sierakowski | (Project Syndicate) | – – A new Polish law criminalizes blaming Poles for any wrongdoing against other nations. But the move only serves to highlight the fact that some Poles were complicit in crimes against Jews, while jeopardizing the country’s relationship with its three most important allies: the US, Germany, and Ukraine. […]
Russia Mounts intensive Syria Air Campaign in Response to Downed Jet
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The Russian side of the story, presented in the Syrian press, is that an al-Qaeda-linked group in Idlib, a northwestern province of Syria, used a shoulder-mounted missile launcher to shoot down a Russian fighter jet. The pilot ejected and landed, but then was attacked by ground […]
The Nunes Memo, Spirit Cooking and Pizzagate
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The confident pronouncements by pundits and politicians that the Nunes memo is a dud, dead on arrival, neglect to consider the main tactic of the Republican right wing for some time now. It is a conspiracy theory, and conspiracy theories carried Trump to the White House […]
Spying on the Wrong People: The Hypocrisy of the Nunes Memo & FISA
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The frenzy over the Nunes memo, likely to be released later today by the Trump administration, contains a profound hypocrisy at its core, one that points to the rot at the core of the American government. The Republican conspiracy theory promoted by Nunes is that the […]
The Great Trump Bubble
Nomi Prins | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – – There’s been lots of fire and fury around Washington lately, including a brief government shutdown. In Donald Trump’s White House, you can hardly keep up with the ongoing brouhahas from North Korea to Robert Mueller’s Russian investigation, while it already feels like ages since the celebratory mood […]
206 Global Companies profit from Israeli Squatting in Palestinian West Bank
Ma’an News Agency | – – BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — The United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a report on Wednesday identifying 206 companies from around the world that are doing business linked to Israeli settlements, which are built in the occupied West Bank in violation of international law. The long-delayed report […]
Cherry-Picking Intel, Nunes and the Iraq War Disaster
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Here is a caution against the Nunes memo that the Republican Party intends to release: it is the sort of thing that got us into the disastrous Iraq War. Cherry-picking raw intelligence is one of the ways the hawks around Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld bamboozled Washington […]
Egypt: Sisi Warns Opposition After Call for Elections Boycott
TeleSur | – – Opposition parties and leaders are calling for a boycott of Egypt’s presidential elections after other candidates were arrested or intimidated. Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi warned its political opponents after a boycott on next presidential elections was announced. “Be warned. What happened seven or eight years ago, will not happen again […]
The Fascist underpinnings of Trump’s State of the Union
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Trump’s State of the Union address had all the elements of fascism except brownshirts marching in the street beating people up (and he veered toward even that in his praise of the Klan and Neo-Nazis at Charlottesville). Fascism pretends to incorporate the good of the masses […]