Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Submitted by Justin King via The Fifth Column, Those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it, those that do understand are doomed to watch in horror while everyone else repeats it. The run up to overthrowing President Assad of Syria was occurring before The Fifth Column existed. I covered it when I wrote daily…
The New York Times this morning has an op-ed by Al Jazeera host Mehdi Hasan, whom I regard as one of the world’s best television journalists. Its primary point is one that has been recently promoted by others such as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes: namely, that in the wake of 9/11, George W. Bush diligently avoided,…
During Iraq’s long summer of 2004, one of the many prisoners who arrived at the American-run facility at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq was a young jihadist who fought under the name Abu Ahmed. Though he’d feared prison, Abu Ahmed found, to his surprise, a kind of jihadist salon, as extremist fighters locked up together…
JOSEPH, an Egyptian Copt who now lives in Chicago, fled for his life when his apartment in Egypt was vandalised and his car set on fire. Three years ago he travelled to America with his family under the pretext of a business trip and applied for asylum. His hearing at the Chicago Immigration Court, which…
ISIS — the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria — is one of the least funny organizations on the planet. From child trafficking to attempted genocide, everything they touch turns into a big steaming pile of tragedy. Things seem to be going pretty well for them, too. The West’s new boogeymen captured the city of…
Today, October 12, is Columbus Day. Every year it’s officially the second Monday in October; this year it falls on the exact anniversary of the Niña, Pinta and Santa María’s arrival in the Bahamas 523 years ago. So to mark today, I’ve made a list. I’m sure to almost all Americans it would seem like…
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has said at least nine of its staff have been killed in an overnight bombing of a hospital in the embattled Afghan city of Kunduz. The attack early on Saturday also wounded 37 people, including 19 MSF staff, the medical charity told Al Jazeera. Officials of MSF later told Reuters…
Photo Dan Quinn was relieved of his Special Forces command after a fight with a U.S.-backed militia leader who had a boy as a sex slave chained to his bed. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times KABUL, Afghanistan — In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father…
Having misunderstood the lessons of the Iraq War, Republicans are taking a dangerously hawkish turn on foreign policy. Edmon De Haro / The Atlantic We noticed that you have an AD BLOCKER ENABLED Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these ways Subscribe Now > Over…
Photo Hillary Rodham Clinton, campaigning for president, attended a town hall event in Nashua, N.H., in July to speak with potential supporters. Credit Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist for The New York Times WASHINGTON — Earlier this summer, the inspector general of the nation’s intelligence agencies contacted the longtime lawyer for Hillary and Bill Clinton with a…