Alan Bock

Earlier this week a federal judge in Miami declared a second mistrial in the case of the so-called "Liberty City 7," a group of men accused of a terrorist plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. Only six men were on trial this time because last December a jury acquitted one of the … Continue reading “Prosecuting No-Threat Stumblebums”

Several things seem obvious from this week’s appearances by Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker before several House and Senate committee and President Bush’s subsequent speech on Thursday. First is that the U.S. "strategy" in Iraq now amounts to "hold on and pray," hoping that things won’t get catastrophically worse in … Continue reading “Hold On and Pray”

As if we didn’t already know, we have yet another piece of evidence that one of the major "accomplishments" of the Bush administration (and you didn’t think there were any) has been a relentless push for more executive power. It is hardly a secret, of course, that "regaining" unbridled and untrammeled executive power has been … Continue reading “Toward Monarchy”

As Anna’s King of Siam might have put it: "Is a puzzlement." As the grim milestones of five years of U.S. involvement in war and insurgency and possible civil war in Iraq and 4,000 U.S. deaths (and more than 29,000 wounded, but who’s counted) occurred only a few days apart, various elements of what are … Continue reading “Getting It Wrong Again”

McCain: The Myth of a Maverick Matt Welch Palgrave-Macmillan; 226 pages I‘m inclined to agree with a recent David Broder column. I was going to say that is not necessarily a common occurrence, but Broder is so anodyne a denizen of the middle of the establishment road that it is often difficult to disagree with … Continue reading “McCain’s Feet of Warlike Clay”

The rather sudden resignation of Adm. William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (Centcom), has any number of people worrying that war with Iran will surely follow. Adm. Fallon had famously said, about war with Iran, that it would happen "not on my watch," and he worked assiduously to make sure that would happen. Some … Continue reading “Fallon Leaves: Will Iran War Follow?”

It’s not easy to tell, despite all the blustering on various sides and even the movement of troops, whether there is really a crisis brewing in South America that could lead eventually to military confrontation. But animosities that have been expressed for some time mainly in nasty words and insults have started to become more … Continue reading “Roots of Venezuelan-Colombian Crisis”

Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as they demonstrated in this week’s televised presidential debate, are firmly against the war in Iraq — Barack earlier but Hillary even more firmly than before. At least that’s what they say. It’s worth remembering that at a much later stage in the campaign in 2000 George W. Bush … Continue reading “Democrats Offer Only Shallow Changes”

I am hardly of the party that thinks democracy as such is the key to all things true and beautiful in politics; indeed, I’m generally persuaded that the majority is almost always wrong, that any policy labeled "populist" is likely to be informed by ignorance, and that if my view tends to accord with that … Continue reading “Hope in Pakistan?”

So it’s out in the open now. Central Intelligence Agency Director Gen. Michael Hayden admitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday that the CIA used the coercive interrogation technique known as waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning, on three al-Qaeda operatives in 2002 and 2003. The technique is widely viewed as torture, which is … Continue reading “Tortured Justifications”