Dozens of people have been arrested under the Stolen Valor Act, which punishes, by up to a year in jail, the wearing of any unearned military medal. It is still a crime even if no effort was made to profit from the adornment or dissembling about earning it. This law...
Richard Holbrooke's comments on reconciliation with the Taliban in Afghanistan, made during the recent Munich Security Conference, echoed earlier remarks by UN officials and American military commanders in Kabul that suggest that diplomacy might be coming alive on the...
Once is an anomaly; twice is the beginning of a pattern. Right now, we're seeing the same sequence of events for the second time in less than a decade, and it looks like the signature American way of war in our time is coming into focus. In 2003, when the Bush...
As the Obama administration gears up for additional commitments to Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East, it is good to remind ourselves that in spite of the overheated rhetoric of the past few years, the region is of very little, if any, strategic value to the...
If there were any doubts about what exactly U.S. President Barack Obama meant when he warned Iran of "growing consequences" during his State of the Union address last month, they seem to be dispelled by recent statements from top administration officials,...
Respected journalist Jeremy Scahill wrote an article on Feb. 4 for The Nation titled "The Expanding U.S. War in Pakistan." In his article he presented as fact several assertions about the CIA and U.S. military special operations forces. In this article I will...
Almost every day, reports come back from the CIA's "secret" battlefield in the Pakistani tribal borderlands. Unmanned aerial vehicles – that is, pilotless drones – shoot missiles (18 of them in a single attack on a tiny village last week) or drop bombs and...
