The Wailing Cassandras Return

WASHINGTON – "The budget is an announcement of American retreat." Thus begins the rending of clothing and the gnashing of teeth that one would generally expect from the editors of National Review, who typically only weigh in (quite clumsily) on foreign...

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Afghanistan: It’s the Election, Stupid!

"And believe it or not, so far, so good. Most news reaching the United States about Afghanistan is troubling, but the election campaign is going reasonably well" – Michael O’Hanlon, Foreign Policy magazine – 1/14/14 A few weeks after the never-prescient O’Hanlon...

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Jason Leopold Talks Forensic Journalism

WASHINGTON – They call him a "FOIA terrorist." This is ironic, because most of Jason Leopold’s efforts at obtaining information through the Freedom of Information Act are because the so-called Global War on Terror has made it virtually impossible to do it...

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War in Afghanistan: The Jig Is Up

The last several years of US operations in Afghanistan have been an exercise in mondo message management. If it were a sport, it would be the highlight of the ESPN X Games. Between Afghanistan and the "war of perception" in Iraq, students of so-called...

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2013: The Year Democracy Caught a Cold

No one who watches global events could forget the January 2011 democracy protests in Cairo, so big and massive that Western mainstream media were sending reporters in droves. For days, we watched in awe as young Egyptians took to the streets in their major cities,...

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