Here begins the silly season of ignorant prognostication concerning group stage results. Let me get my kicks in early, with sides I know something about, mostly African and North American. It’s too late to bet.
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Looking For Cocaine Terrorists: The 2009 US Drugs Sting in Mali.
by Tommy Miles • • 0 Comments
This story originally appeared in Maghreb Politics Review on December 21, 2009, as “US Arrests Malians in Terror Drugs ‘Link'”. The claim that Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the FARC are part of a worldwide drugs for terror conspiracy remains active in American press and government, and remains a fantasy that meets the internal needs of the US, while ignoring real issues, like those that precipitated the unexpected collapse of the Malian state in 2012.
On Western analysts and the Mali Conflict, April 2012
by Tommy Miles • • 0 Comments
An excerpt from a letter written in 2012. “Two histories are now being written, each a litany of crimes and humiliations suffered, neither accepted as even having occurred by the other. …if privileged western analysts — however innocently — repeat propaganda of one side as ‘the background’ to this conflict, they help determine the outcome.”
Death and Career in the “Dark” Sahara: The Sad Fate of Jeremy Keenan
by Tommy Miles • • 6 Comments
People who don’t know much about northern Mali would be very poorly served by reading Keenan’s increasingly odd writing. Keenan used to be a scholar of some note. But his increasingly unhinged supposition that their hidden hands are behind all that is bad in the west-central Saharan region is simply unsupportable. Why it remains unchallenged is the mystery.
“Unrequested fission surplus”: Kent Brockman, meet Jay Lehr
by Tommy Miles • • 3 Comments
“Nobody builds better power plants than Japan, because they are the most seismically active country on earth. They are built to withstand this very earthquake… I am absolutely, 100% confident that they will be able to solve the existing problem of a meltdown, if it is occurring, that they will be able to totally eliminate the escape of any radiation”
Niger: Lucky Seven. Can a New President Signal More Responsive Politics in Niamey?
by Tommy Miles • • 1 Comment
Saturday the 12th of March will see second round voting in Niger’s Presidential elections, marking a return to civilian rule and the beginning of the Seventh Republic. It seems certain that front runner and PNDS-Tarayya candidate Mahamadou Issoufou will become…
An Echo of New York’s Unfinished Struggles: A. Philip Randolph, Frank Crosswaith and the Socialist Party
by Tommy Miles • • 1 Comment
Libya’s “African Mercenary” Problem
by Tommy Miles • • 46 Comments
Niger’s Presidential Elections are Underway
by Tommy Miles • • 0 Comments
A Cairo Revolution
by Tommy Miles • • 0 Comments
Marching in Imbaba, Cairo, originally uploaded by RamyRaoof. One overlooked media revelations from the Arab Revolutions of 2011 is the amount of material released with reusable copyright. Ramy Raoof in Cairo is releasing his work with a CC Attribution license,…