After I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program in 2007, the fallout for me was brutal. To make a long story short, I served nearly two years in federal prison and then endured a few more months of house arrest. What happened to the torture program? Nothing....
Baghdad Blamed for Ramadi Fall; 61 Killed across Iraq
What America Should Learn From the British Election
Although many in the United Kingdom thought that the Conservative Party would ultimately lose control of the government to a coalition of the Labour Party and the Scottish National Party in the recent election, Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservatives won an...
Spartan Israel and its Palestinian Helots
Amid the 1948 war that would establish the State of Israel and dispossess the Palestinians (celebrated by Israel as its War of Independence and mourned by Palestinians as al Nakba, or “the catastrophe”), the great German-Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt...
The Vietnam War: After Forty Years
Today, 40 years after the American war in Vietnam ended in ignominious defeat, the traces of that terrible conflict are disappearing. Traveling through Vietnam during the latter half of April 2015 with a group of erstwhile antiwar activists, I was struck by the...
55 Killed While Militiamen Gather in Western Iraq
One Boy, One Rifle, and One Morning in Malakal
President Obama couldn’t have been more eloquent. Addressing the Clinton Global Initiative, for instance, he said: “When a little boy is kidnapped, turned into a child soldier, forced to kill or be killed – that’s slavery.” Denouncing Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance...
Litmus Test: Will Patriot Act Spying Continue?
With key provisions of the so-called Patriot Act set to expire on June 1, the fight to preserve the Constitution is heating up – and the battle lines tell us everything we need to know about the state of the country and the prospects for liberty. On one side we have a...
New Military Spending Bill Expands Empire But Forbids Debate on War
On Friday the House passed a massive National Defense Authorization for 2016 that will guarantee US involvement in more wars and overseas interventions for years to come. The Republican majority resorted to trickery to evade the meager spending limitations imposed by...


