The response to my column on Rand Paul has been generally favorable, much to my surprise: generally people who belong to a political movement tend to rally around their tribal leaders if and when they're attacked, but apparently libertarians are the exception to this...
Congress Slows Unilateral Sanctions Drive Against Iran
President Barack Obama's efforts to gain greater flexibility in dealing with Iran received a small but potentially important boost Tuesday when a key congressional committee announced that the deadline for a unilateral U.S. sanctions package will be put off until next...
Intelligence Reform Is a Failure
The sacking of Dennis Blair, the third director of national intelligence in the position's short five-year history, is one important indicator that the Intelligence Reform and Terrorist Prevention Act of 2004 has failed. That act was effective neither in achieving...
Settlement Policy Wrong, Say European Jews
PARIS - Prominent Jewish intellectuals living in Europe have begun denouncing the Israeli policy of allowing settlements to come up on Palestinian territories as "morally and politically wrong." In a collective declaration, presented in the Belgian capital Brussels on...
Tuesday: 19 Iraqis Killed, 20 Wounded
US Towns Open Doors to Cleared Gitmo Prisoners
As Congress stiffens its resistance to moving any Guantánamo prisoners anywhere near the continental U.S., some communities are putting out the welcome mat. Through an organization called No More Guantánamos, two New England towns have voted to welcome...
McChrystal Strategy Shifts to Raids – and Wali Karzai
Gen. Stanley McChrystal's team once talked openly about the need to remove Ahmed Wali Karzai, Afghan President Hamid Karzai's brother and the most powerful man in Kandahar, from power. Last October, as reports of Wali Karzai's role in the opium trade were circulating,...
Compulsory Armageddon
The April 20 Macondo blowout in the Gulf of Mexico is a gift from British Petroleum that keeps on giving: 11 human lives lost, 2,940,000 gallons of oil daily, a 2,500-square-mile oil slick, underwater plumes 10 miles across, softball-size tar balls washing up on...
US Funds Apartheid Roads on West Bank
RAMALLAH - The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is helping Israel to construct an apartheid road infrastructure in the occupied Palestinian West Bank by financing nearly a quarter of the segregated road system primarily for the benefit of...
How Dare They Make a Deal With Iran?
“I think this announcement is as convincing an answer to the efforts undertaken in Tehran over the last few days as any we could provide,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on START (strategic arms reduction...