New York- A brief homage to San Diego, my favorite city in the world. San Diego is many things. It is a place where one can take a mere footstep from the first world to the third world. It is…
Category: America
Twenty Years of al-Salafiyya-al-Jihadiyya
New York- It’s been twenty long years since Eyad Ismail, Ramzi Yousef and co drove that Ford Econoline Ryder rental van through the Holland Tunnel from Jersey City and parked a massive urea urea nitrate bomb in the parking garage…
Beyond 2014: Afghanistan, Pakistan, the West and the Rest
New York- On February 5th, I participated in a Huffington Post Live discussion entitled “Engaging The Taliban” (featured below) after the trilateral meeting between David Cameron, Asif Ali Zardari, and Hamid Karzai at the British Prime Minister’s country residence outside…
Welcome to Hell
New York-Obama’s impending visit to Burma in the context of America’s “pivot” to Asia in this so-called “Pacific century” (in contrast to the previous Atlantic century epitomized by the formation of NATO etc) raises a lot of grave human rights…
The War That Was Barely Mentioned
New York- While Americans in many quarters erupted with both joy and relief that Barack Hussein Obama was reelected POTUS while right-wing ideologues and extremists (which may simply be cover for racism in some quarters) constantly harping on the just-around-the-corner…
From Unreasoned Righteousness to Reason
New York- So weird. A week ago today I was getting thrown around Long Island City by 90 mph gales as Hurricane Sandy thrashed Queen’s over gentrified littoral while NYPD barked on loudspeakers through sheets of rain not to get…
Meals Not Ready to Eat-Guns and Butter in Afghanistan
New York- I’ve been rummaging through my archives from the terror wars era for the last week or two while working on an upcoming project on Syria and have opened a veritable Pandora’s Box in the process. The other day I…
9/11 Cover to Cover
New York-Going through a storage locker the other day, I dug up a lot of stuff from my personal archives in the early post-9/11 period. I collected lots of odds and ends back then thinking they’d be of historical import…
An Historical Tour of Jihadi New York
New York- Yesterday for the 11th anniversary of 9/11 I decided to do something a bit off the beaten path. Though New York City was the site of the attacks, no other part of the ‘planes operation’ timeline is known…
Broken Windows on the World
New York- Ten years ago today a group of neoconservative goons and their attendant lackeys were busy plotting the destruction of the Iraqi capital in the auspiciously named “Office of Special Plans” at the Pentagon. The result was what you…
A Decade of War and Peace
Barcelona- Partly out of boredom and partly out of the itch to simply create something new out of old, I threw together this photo montage over the weekend. In this era of digital photography where one shoots thousands of frames…
Memory Screen
Barcelona- Sitting here in Spain, the fourth of July for me passed entirely unceremoniously. As I type this, it’s now technically the fifth over here. When I think of the fourth now, it mostly conjures up images of young people…
Getting My Kicks…
Grants, New Mexico- I stumbled into the old Route 66 town of Grants in western New Mexico after a very, very long drive from Oklahoma with the ubiquitous stop at Cadillac Ranch. I didn’t know anything about the town other…
The Graveyard of Obsolete Opulence
Amarillo, Texas- Made a quick stop at Cadillac Ranch, the roadside public art installation off the I-40 in the center of the Texas panhandle. Of course, it’s a cliche visit but that’s the fun of this spot. I was more interested…
The Gates of Time
Oklahoma City- I stopped in downtown Oklahoma City en route from New York to Los Angeles to make a brief pilgrimage to The Gates of Time, the monument on North Harvey street where just over fifteen years ago, a deranged…