October 2011
11 posts
From Beirut To Washington DC
How Walid Phares went from advising Lebanese warlords to counseling the GOP frontrunner, Mitt Romney:
During the 1980s, Phares, a Maronite Christian, trained Lebanese militants in ideological beliefs justifying the war against Lebanon’s Muslim and Druze factions, according to former colleagues. Phares, they say, advocated the hard-line view that Lebanon’s Christians should work...
Amurrica
Things Americans like to read about: “Sharia Law” and “McRib.”
Geography With Michele Bachmann
Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, on Obama’s foreign policy from last night’s GOP debate:
Defense spending is on the table, but again, Anderson, now with the president, he put us in Libya. He is now putting us in Africa.
Sometimes it’s hard for some American politicians to remember which brown people go with what continent.
Because That Would Be Monstrous
From Gideon Rose’s How Wars End, on U.S. public opinion toward Japan in 1944:
In response to a December 1944 poll asking “what do you think we sould do with Japan as a country after the war?” 13 percent of Americans wanted to “kill all Japanese” and 33 percent wanted to destroy Japan as a political entity. The poll’s comparable question on Germany did not even...
9 tags
Mother Jones magazine on Tumblr: The weirdest... →
According to Glass, the officer posed a number of questions: Did he plan to super-glue himself to President Obama? What would Glass do if he met the president? After the officer wrapped up his questions, Glass proceeded to his actual visa interview with consular officials. There, too, he was…
9 tags
How Do You Break A Terrorist?
Waterboarding? Stress positions? How about cookies?
The most surprising element of former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan’s memoir, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, is how receptive terrorists are to food. When Soufan takes L’Houssaine Kherchtou, an Al Qaeda fixer, out for pizza, Khertchou tells him he’s “not an Al Qaeda guy...
