Juan Cole worries that Iraqi's -- in considering how the fate of the Askariya Shrine in Samarra might cause the country to unravel -- will come to sequence it like this....
Continue ReadingThey said: "This is the only known photo of soldiers at Abu Ghraib taking pictures of a fully clothed person inside the prison." (DOD photo/Jerry Morrison) http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/bushbeat/archive/000639.php Very ironic image: Soldiers taking photos of Rumsfeld in the Abu Ghraib prison.... http://www.antiwar.com/photos/perm/karpinski-rummy.jpg Congressman McDermott in June of '04 said Karpinski...
Continue ReadingI'm going to assume you've already seen the fresh images and video from Abu Ghraib. (If not, check links below). Because the story is so new, I wanted to focus on how the western media tends to visually edit and delimit controversial content. As of early this morning, at least,...
Continue ReadingAny irony to the fact that this crappy food and this stupid icon is considered America's primary cultural export? This is not a new point, but... looking at this guy seeming to contort Ron's leg, it makes me think about how the Danish cartoons (simply) constituted a "tipping point" for...
Continue ReadingSaudi Arabia and Syria recall their ambassadors from Denmark and Libya closes its embassy in Copenhagen. Muslims storm the Danish embassy in Jakarta, and gunmen threatened the European Union offices in Gaza. Why? Because of 12 cartoons that ran in a Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten, in September. From The BAG's standpoint,...
Continue Readingstoking fear with pix of building http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-uniran22jan22,1,5801937.story Iran's Nuclear Stance Poses Quandary for U.N. Bringing Tehra Iran & the Bomb 1: How Close Is Iran? guest post by Dr. Jeffrey Lewis of armscontrolwonk.com. http://wampum.wabanaki.net/vault/2006/01/002300.html Image of a nuke plant not same as where actually do the work...
Continue ReadingIn the "family," he's referred to as the "capo di tutti capi." This image, accompanying the NYT Week In Review snapshot of Iraq's mother of all elections (Iraq Is in a Race Against Time as Congress Grows Restless - link ) is a telling depiction of the current power arrangement. Introduced...
Continue Reading(click image for the better view) This is the image that accompanied a grim story in Thursday's NYT titled Police Recruits Among Massacre Victims Found in Iraq. According to the article, 25 bodies, some with police ID, we found in the desert east of Baghdad. The men were reportedly...
Continue ReadingNice Fallujah series at Crisis Pictures taken by photographer Maricio Lima (only?).... I had a number of impressions -- tendency to photograph children alone, and what happens (#_, #_) when parents/adults are also in the picture.... Wonder why photographers have such a tendency to shoot them, what ethics are...
Continue Readinghave since raided two more prisons, one in Baghdad and the other in Tal Afar.... In the dead week between Christmas and New Years, an interesting piece of news was reported that contradicts the message that a pan-Iraqi security effort is growing in effectiveness.... In still another instance where...
Continue ReadingBush Just Plain Nuts No More Apples -- Suggests that Rove draws parallel to Roosevelt in terms of remaking the New Deal with a permanent Republican majority. http://nomoreapples.blogspot.com/2005/12/bush-is-just-plain-nuts.html Used the room to nominate Bernard Kerik as as Homeland Security head. Hours earlier, Mr. Bush ushered Mr. Kerik into the...
Continue ReadingIn this case, reporter Louis Hansen and photographer Hyunsoo Leo Kim of the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk had their privileges pulled for photographing a damaged vehicle at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait.... Ironically, the two journalists were given specific access to the location of the vehicle by military escorts. Officers of...
Continue ReadingAn angry mob set fire to the offices of former prime minister Iyad Allawi and his communist allies in Nasiriyah, on the eve of Iraq's defining general election.(AFP/Ahmad Al Rubaye) protest sistani Iraqi Shiite demonstrators gather by an election campaign poster for Shiite list United Iraqi Alliance, seen left...
Continue ReadingAs one of any number of generic photos tossed into the newspaper to depict the ongoing diligent training of Iraqi forces (this one published on the eve of Bush's recent speech), it's as factually illegible and abstract as the effort itself.... Besides chronicling the history of U.S. ineptitude over...
Continue ReadingThe military authorities in Baghdad and Washington do not provide the press with a daily accounting of missions that Air Force, Navy, and Marine units fly or of the tonnage they drop, as was routinely done during the Vietnam War.... In the battle for the city, more than...
Continue ReadingUnited Iraqi Alliance tacit backing of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani For the 15 December elections the UIA includes: The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the Da’wa Party (2 branches), the Sadr movement, the Centrists, the Badr Organization, Hizbullah, 2 (Shi’ite) Turkmen groups, and smaller parties.......
Continue ReadingI didn't see it but the American advisers told us about it at the end of the day, I can't comment on whether or not it "seems likely" -- they were detaining people, letting some of them...
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