America has always had two ways of stopping the undesirable course of enemy countries and switching their track: the overt and the covert. Overt means the Pentagon and covert means the C.I.A. Much has been written about the muting of Obama’s overt actions...
The news that Edward Snowden has – finally – been granted political asylum in Russia has provoked the Usual Suspects into bloviating the Usual Nonsense: Gee, how come Snowden didn't go to a "free" country, you know, just like America? Instead, he's gone to Russia,...
When Argentina defaulted on its national debt in 2001, US hedge funds swooped in to buy the nation’s bonds at pennies on the dollar, confident they would eventually prevail in the US legal system and force the country to pay out in full. That battle is set to...
The Washington Post editorial page under Fred Hiatt has long been a neoconservative bastion rivaling the Wall Street Journal, supporting every war to come down the pike while justifying every intrusion on personal rights as long as it might plausibly be justified on...
Last week, Justin Amash, the two-term libertarian Republican congressman from Michigan, joined with John Conyers, the 25-term liberal Democratic congressman from the same state, to offer an amendment to legislation funding the National Security Agency (NSA). If...
Within days of the inauguration of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s new president, both Tehran and Washington appear to be sending positive signals to each other. The latest came Monday in a flurry of reports from Iran that its former ambassador to the United Nations,...
In the 30 years, since President Ronald Reagan created his expensive pie-in-the-sky Strategic Defense Initiative – quickly and appropriately named "Star Wars" by critics and journalists alike – the United States has spent a whopping $250 billion on trying to...
Newly published recollections by the former French ambassador to Iran suggest that Iran was not running a covert nuclear weapons programme that it then decided to halt in late 2003, as concluded by U.S. intelligence in 2007. Ambassador Francois Nicoullaud recounted...
