MER Article The Grand (Hip-Hop) Chessboard In November 2006, the film The Making of a Kamikaze by Nouri Bouzid, a respected Tunisian director, was screened to great fanfare at the Carthage Film Festival. The film, a collaboration between the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Tunisian Ministries of Interior, Defense and Culture, examines the grievances Hisham Aïdi • 46 min read
MER Article Bagram, Obama's Gitmo On President Barack Obama’s second day in office, one of the three executive orders he signed was a commitment to close the detention facility on the naval base at Guantánamo Bay as soon as possible but no later than one year thence. An inter-agency task force headed by White House counsel Greg Crai Lisa Hajjar • 28 min read
MER Article Lies, Damned Lies and Plagiarizing "Experts" The 9/11 Commission Report is the closest thing in print to an official narrative of the events that gave rise to the “war on terror.” In American political culture, the Commission embodied a trans-partisan act of knowledge creation, handing down a narrative meant to establish treasured national con Darryl Li • 3 min read
MER Article "Afghan Arabs," Real and Imagined During the holiday season of Ramadan 1425/October 2004, The Road to Kabul was one of the more popular television miniseries broadcast throughout the Arab world. The program traced recent Afghan history from one superpower invasion to another through a budding romance at Cambridge University between Tariq, a Palestinian pursuing Darryl Li • 13 min read
Current Analysis Washington Still Refuses to Learn an Obvious Lesson Back in 2004, three years into the hunt for Osama bin Laden, the 9/11 Commission report made its debut to the gushing admiration of the Washington press corps. The report was everything that the mainstream media adores: bipartisan, devoid of divisive finger-pointing, full of conventional wisdom. Tak Chris Toensing • 2 min read
MER Article Shoring Up the National Security State Many expected the Obama administration to slow or altogether stop the growth of the national security state that its two predecessor administrations brought into being, but just the opposite has occurred. Prisoners are still held without charge at Guantánamo Bay; the Patriot Act is still the law; t Nina Farnia • 10 min read
Current Analysis The Fateful Choice When 19 al-Qaeda hijackers attacked New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, the United States faced a strategic dilemma that was unique in magnitude, but not in kind. Terrorists had killed numerous civilians before, in the US and elsewhere, with and without state sponsorship. Al-Qaeda was not The Editors • 10 min read
MER Article Sulayman the Malevolent ‘Umar Sulayman, the director of Egyptian military intelligence from 1993 until his appointment as vice president in late January 2011, has had a close relationship with the United States for decades. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reportedly favored him to lead an “orderly, peaceful transition” away from ex-President Husni Mubarak. Katherine Hawkins • 8 min read
Current Analysis Getting It Wrong in Guantánamo I was at Guantánamo Bay prison on Halloween. In a ghoulishly fitting coincidence, that was the same day a former child solider was convicted for war crimes for the first time since the end of World War II. Eight years and one day after Omar Khadr arrived at Guantánamo, his military commission case c Lisa Hajjar • 2 min read
Current Analysis Travesty in Progress At 23, Omar Khadr is the youngest of the 176 people still imprisoned at the US military’s detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He has been there for eight years, one third of his life. A Canadian, he is the only citizen of a Western country remaining in detention, Lisa Hajjar • 27 min read
Current Analysis Grave Injustice On June 14, the Supreme Court buried the prospect of justice for Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian origin who was “extraordinarily rendered” by the United States (via Jordan) to Syria in 2002. Arar was suing the US officials who authorized his secret transfer, without charge, to a country inf Lisa Hajjar • 20 min read
