set up dark sites in Syria at the time of the second Iraq war. Current American treatment is a peculiar way to pay back your friends.

What is very curious about Professor Cole's antipathy for Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian government is that he is usually one of the most balanced commentators in the American blogosphere on the Israel-Palestinian issue.

Thank you for the informative and wide-ranging look into the Qatar situation. The Saudis don't seem to be able to put a foot right since they agreed to cooperate with the US on crushing world oil prices in late 2014.

The courts were bought in both countries. As Professor Cole points out, the whole scenario was a stitch-up. US government officials openly threatened Wikileaks and Assange from early 2010 (the releasewill never get a deal unless the US or Russia or better yet both together force their hand.

Professor Cole you do your credibility no favours by publishing unredacted hatchet jobs from dubious sources like Anders Aslund.

Even back in 2002, Aslund had lost all credibility in Russia, cavorting with carpetbaggers:

The World Bank recently appointed Anders Aslund to inspect the books and determine how well World Bank funds were used in Russia in the past decade. Aslund spent the decade asserting his own superiority and did financially well out of his relationship with Gaidar and Chubais, his close friends. The World Bank has sent a moral rat to check if anything went wrong when the moral worms stopped moving. The new World Bank representative in Moscow, Julian Schweitzer, says, “We