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 general rule. That’s because they’re better than that. Most of the …
Continue reading “Our Vitriol, and Theirs”
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 month. The Democratic co-chairs of the “conference committee” charged with reconciling competing versions of …
Continue reading “Congress Slows Unilateral Sanctions Drive Against Iran”
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 real reform of the sprawling intelligence bureaucracies nor in preventing terrorist attacks. In fact, Blair’s …
Continue reading “Intelligence Reform Is a Failure”
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 May 3, hundreds of prominent European Jews also said that the main danger to the state …
Continue reading “Settlement Policy Wrong, Say European Jews”
Updated at 8:54 p.m. EDT, May 25, 2010
Gunmen at a Baghdad gold market staged a bold robbery that left over a dozen merchants and bystanders dead. At least 19 Iraqis were killed and 20 more were wounded in that attack and other violence across Baghdad and northern Iraq. Meanwhile, Army Lt. Gen. Lloyd Austin III has been tapped to lead U.S. forces in Iraq.
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 detainees who have been cleared for release, and similar actions are being planned in other locations. In …
Continue reading “US Towns Open Doors to Cleared Gitmo Prisoners”
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, McChrystal’s intelligence chief Gen. Michael T. Flynn said, “If we are going …
Continue reading “McChrystal Strategy Shifts to Raids – and Wali Karzai”
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 beaches of Louisiana, marshes and wildlife wiped out, the regional economy …
Continue reading “Compulsory Armageddon”
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 Israeli settlers. USAID’s figures state that the agency has financed 235 km of roads in …
Continue reading “US Funds Apartheid Roads on West Bank”
“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 treaty) on May 18, announcing the introduction of a draft resolution to …
Continue reading “How Dare They Make a Deal With Iran?” 
