Dear Senator Feinstein: On Thursday, when you responded to news about massive ongoing surveillance of phone records of people in the United States, you slipped past the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. As the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, you seem to be...
Of all the charges against Bradley Manning, the most pernicious—and revealing—is “aiding the enemy.” A blogger at The New Yorker, Amy Davidson, raised a pair of big questions that now loom over the courtroom at Fort Meade and the entire country: “Would it aid the...
Darwin observed that conscience is what most distinguishes humans from other animals. If so, grief isn’t far behind. Realms of anguish are deeply personal—yet prone to expropriation for public use, especially in this era of media hyper-spin. Narratives...
As a perpetual emotion machine -- producing and guzzling its own political fuel -- the “war on terror” continues to normalize itself as a thoroughly American way of life and death. Ongoing warfare has become a matter of default routine, pushed along by mainline media...
After the bombings that killed and maimed so horribly at the Boston Marathon, our country’s politics and mass media are awash in heartfelt compassion -- and reflexive "doublethink," which George Orwell described as willingness "to forget any fact that...
On a plane circling Baghdad in gray dawn light, a little Iraqi girl quietly sang to herself in the next row. "When I start to wonder why I’m making this trip," Sean Penn murmured to me, "I see that child and I remember what it’s about." After the...
Congress waited six years to repeal the Tonkin Gulf Resolution after it opened the bloody floodgates for the Vietnam War in August 1964. If that seems slow, consider the continuing failure of Congress to repeal the "war on terror" resolution – the...
A simple twist of fate has set President Obama’s second Inaugural Address for January 21, the same day as the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday. Obama made no mention of King during the Inauguration four years ago -- but since then, in word and deed, the...
