Dispatches

French Riots as Cyclic as Tour de France
11.23.2005 06:50 | RUSS WELLEN
Calling French rioters by the derogatory term racaille (rabble), Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy only reveals his fear of a new French Revolution. However, it's been fomenting for fifteen years. Lorenzo Vidino of Steven Emerson's Investigative Project...

Bush, bin Laden Headed for Melt-Down?
11.21.2005 07:07 | RUSS WELLEN
Melt-downs come in different shapes and sizes. There's the kind that can happen to plutonium in a nuclear reactor. Or to vast expanses of the planet should bin Laden sanction the detonation of nuclear suitcase bombs in the US and President Bush retaliates...

A King Rat Inches His Way Off Sinking Ship
11.18.2005 06:19 | RUSS WELLEN
In "Wrestling with History" (the November 13 Sunday Washington Post Magazine), David Von Drehle provides some of the deepest insight yet into ex-college wrestler Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He reports on a memo which Rumsfeld periodically remind...

Chalabi's Bay of Pigs
11.14.2005 14:33 | RUSS WELLEN
What is this love affair the administration continues to conduct with Ahmad Chalabi? Upon revisiting Patrick and Andrew Cockburn's Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein (HarperCollins, 1999), which chronicles how Hussein solidified his weak...

Al-Qaeda Losing Credibility on the Arab Street
11.11.2005 10:49 | RUSS WELLEN
From BBC News: "But actions such as the Amman bombing of the wedding tend to undermine mainstream support that al-Qaeda might have had. . . . hundreds of people [protesting against] Zarqawi. . . But the way to measure this [is in] public reporting on t...

The Wonders of the Web
11.11.2005 07:42 | RUSS WELLEN
From an article on Nuclear Threat Initiative: "The [Website} 'al-Firdaws', or 'Paradise', contains 80 pages of instructions and photographs of making bombs. . . lessons such as 'The Nuclear Bomb of Jihad' and the 'Way to Enrich Uranium.' . . . 'Normall...

Cheney Still Flogging the Old Torture Canard
11.09.2005 08:59 | RUSS WELLEN
From a November 5 article in Editor & Publisher about a Defense Intelligence Agency document from February 2002: "It shows that an al-Qaeda official [Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi] held by the Americans. . . 'was intentionally misleading the debriefers' in mak...

Iranq
11.07.2005 09:10 | RUSS WELLEN
Noted Iraqi blogger Riverbend, either modest to a fault or, equally appealing, lacking in media savvy, fails to mention her new book, Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq (Feminist Press, 2005) anywhere on her homepage. But her November 6 entry neatly sum...

Let Us Not Be Too Quick to Hail Chavez
11.04.2005 14:30 | RUSS WELLEN
Urged on by soccer legend Diego Maradona, ten thousand protesters chanted "Get out, Bush on Friday, November 4, by way of welcoming our president to Mar Del Plata. The Argentinean resort is hosting the Summit of the Americas, where the administration will...

I'm Aboard. Pull up the Ladder.
11.03.2005 10:31 | RUSS WELLEN
Entropy--the inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society--has long been the province of fiction and, recently, the liberal and progressive press. However, it's coming home to roost among the branches on high, where it was hatched. This i...

Video Store Tip
11.02.2005 08:45 | ALEXANDER ZAITCHIK
With immigrant-cop battles raging in Paris, it's a good time to re-visit Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 classic film, La Haine (Hate) of the same subject. If you've never seen it, acquaint yourself with it....

The Lamest Duck Ever
11.02.2005 08:09 | ALEXANDER ZAITCHIK
Now does he feel his title Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe Upon a dwarfish thief. -- Shakespeare, Macbeth Like Herpes, presidents last a lifetime. Watching the world crumbling around our peevish president one year into his second t...

"Atomic Apartheid"
11.01.2005 09:24 | RUSS WELLEN
"Unsurprisingly, the phrase 'atomic apartheid' is being heard increasingly in Iranian government circles as well as by ordinary Iranians who feel that their country is being unfairly singled out [for exclusion from the nuclear club]." Talk about twisti...

Lawrence of Iraq
10.28.2005 12:18 | RUSS WELLEN
Double-crossed by his own government (T.E.) Lawrence of Arabia was unable to succeed in bringing to Arabs the independence he fought for with them. The British occupation of Iraq also frustrated him. Here's an excerpt from a 1920 Sunday Times article,...

It Wasn't Only Joseph Wilson They Were After
10.27.2005 07:41 | RUSS WELLEN
As has been remarked, the lengths to which the administration went to exact revenge on Joseph Wilson for pulling the tablecloth off the WMD rationale and letting the yellowcake crash to the floor were way out of proportion to his imagined offense. Especia...

Mud People Beware: Virginal Hate-Mongers on the Loose
10.25.2005 09:31 | RUSS WELLEN
From an October 20 article on the ABC News Web site, "Young Singers Spread Racist Hate": "Thirteen-year-old twins Lamb and Lynx Gaede have one album out, another on the way, a music video, and lots of fans. They may remind you another famous pair of si...

Truth Most Brutal
10.21.2005 12:09 | RUSS WELLEN
Last Best Chance, the nuclear terror fright flick produced by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, premiered on HBO this week. NTI, headed by Sam Nunn, is Ted Turner's anti-WMD foundation. With its movie production values and starring TV star Fred Dalton Tho...

Our Ever-Shrinking Security Blanket
10.19.2005 08:42 | RUSS WELLEN
From an article in the Washington Post today about the CIA under the reign of Porter Goss: "Goss, who served as a CIA operative in Latin America in the 1960s, is also eager to reopen stations there so the agency is prepared when conflicts arise in othe...

"Cashpaks" Incoming at Three O'Clock
10.18.2005 07:33 | RUSS WELLEN
I defy anybody to read Philip Giraldi's American Conservative article on corruption in Iraq, "Money for Nothing," and constrain his or her reaction to an American's usual facile cynicism: "That's politics." The scale on which the administration has doled...

Reconstituted Statehood
10.14.2005 07:27 | RUSS WELLEN
Iraqis are constitutionally incapable of caring about their constitution because their own constitutions are compromised by the hardships of their daily lives. From the Independent, in a story about its own inimitable Middle-East correspondent, Robert...