The phrase “Egyptian transition process” has become tragicomically oxymoronic in light of the dizzying series of developments over the past month. More metaphorically, events have driven entire herds of elephants stampeding through every legal and constitutional loophole in Egypt’s makeshift interim political system. There are, to be sure, some rules. In the seven weeks following [...]
Why the Turkish Model of Military Rule Is Wrong for Egypt In the weeks and months since Egypt’s military officers forced then President Hosni Mubarak from power and assumed executive authority, the country’s military rulers have shown an interest in applying what many have taken to calling the “Turkish model.” Spokesmen for the Supreme Council [...]
How Pakistan Makes Washington Pay for the Afghan War The following ingredients should go a long way to produce a political thriller. Mr. M, a jihadist in an Asian state, has emerged as the mastermind of a terrorist attack in a neighboring country, which killed six Americans. After sifting through a vast cache of intelligence [...]
Personalizing civil liberties abuses
On Saturday, I was at the University of Chicago for an event to discuss humanitarian intervention and empire. One of my fellow speakers was Tariq Ramadan, the highly regarded Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford. He’s one of the world’s most accomplished scholars in his field. For almost six years — from 2004 until 2010 [...]
Do the WikiLeaks War Logs Reveal War Crimes — Or the Poverty of International Law? Anyone who would like to witness a vivid example of modern warfare that adheres to the laws of war — that corpus of regulations developed painstakingly over centuries by jurists humanitarians, and soldiers, a body of rules that is now [...]
Why Washington’s Iran Policy Could Lead to Global Disaster
What History Should Teach Us About Blockading Iran It’s a policy fierce enough to cause great suffering among Iranians — and possibly in the long run among Americans, too. It might, in the end, even deeply harm the global economy and yet, history tells us, it will fail on its own. Economic war led by [...]
Protesters Rally in Egypt in Bid to Prevent Candidates from Entering Presidential Race
Thousands of Egyptian Islamists rallied in Cairo’s Tahrir Square today to protest against candidates running for president who are linked to the former regime of Hosni Mubarak. The demonstrators also rallied in support of legislation pending in the Egyptian parliament that would ban those candidates from running for office. The protests were sparked by the [...]
Video: FBI Infiltrator Who Spied on Muslims Reveals Techniques
While the FBI insists they are acting to defend the US from potential terrorist attacks, a former informant says it treats an entire religious group as suspicious. He told RT about some of the bureau’s ethically murky practices.
Syria’s Phase of Radicalisation
As the 10 April deadline Kofi Annan (the UN and Arab League joint Special Envoy) set for implementation of his peace plan strikes, the conflict’s dynamics have taken an ugly and worrying turn. Syrians from all walks of life appear dumbfounded by the horrific levels of violence and hatred generated by the crisis. Regime forces [...]
Ten things you didn’t know about Turkey. No walls fell in Turkey at the end of the Cold War; there was no color-coded revolution. Yet, arguably, the country is in the throes of a transformation as profound as those of its neighbors. A country that once served as a lonely sentinel on NATO’s southern flank [...]
