"An ethical train wreck" was the phrase used by one witness to describe the legal reasoning behind the Justice Department's recently released memos justifying the use of waterboarding and other forms of "enhanced interrogation techniques." The...
Human rights advocates and legal scholars fear that the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama may resurrect the military commissions designed by his predecessor to try Guantánamo detainees after Obama's 120-day moratorium on proceedings expires on May 20. That...
The last futile, expensive, and grotesquely immoral war launched by the United States was authored by those ideological shape-shifters and creatures of legend, the neoconservatives (neocons for short), whose storied history has been the subject of endless books,...
The choice of Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal to become the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan has been hailed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and national news media as ushering in a new, unconventional approach to counterinsurgency. But McChrystal's background sends a...
A story I read years ago culminated with the protagonist holed up in a cheap hotel in the Balkans, listening unwillingly through the paper-thin wall as the man in the room next door beat his wife. As he pummeled her, she cried again and again, "Balkan!...
Back in March, Pepe Escobar, that itchy, edgy global reporter for one of my favorite online publications, Asia Times, began laying out the great, ongoing energy struggle across Eurasia, or what he likes to call Pipelineistan for its web of oil and natural gas...
