William J. Astore’s Intro: I asked Pamela if I could highlight a recent comment she made at this site about the U.S. military’s approach to Afghanistan. Not only did she give me her permission: she elaborated on her point in an email. Pamela, a former aid worker with...
What’s a little cholera – excuse me, the worst outbreak of this preventable disease in modern history – compared to the needs of a smoothly functioning economy? A week before he was kicked out of British Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet for allegedly having...
In a bipartisan manner, Congress recently passed the FISA Reauthorization Act of 2017. On January 19th, President Trump signed this bill into law. That bill extended the controversial Section 702 program that allows the NSA to conduct warrantless surveillance of...
The TV series, The Vietnam War, is absolutely riveting. The ten discs in the DVD set provide over 17 hours of viewing, and there is hardly a moment wasted. It is evenhanded to the most admirable degree, and presents the points of view of war-supporters in the US and...
The only thing that has ever been faithful to the Kurds is history: it has faithfully, without fail, betrayed them. The Kurds have been cast in the role of the pawn in powerful countries’ games of chess. They do much of the hard work only to be sacrificed when...
During January, at least 747 people were killed, and another 389 were wounded. Among the dead was a U.S. servicemember killed in a non-combat incident. Also, at least six members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.) were killed, as was a Turkish soldier. Three...
I have argued for a few weeks now that House Intelligence Committee members have committed misconduct in office by concealing evidence of spying abuses by the National Security Agency and the FBI. They did this by sitting on a four-page memo that summarizes the abuse...
The mainstream media stories were straight out of a science fiction movie. Somebody in Cuba was aiming a super sophisticated “sonic weapon” at US diplomats here in Havana, causing them to experience hearing loss, dizziness, nausea, severe headaches and...
There’s usually not a whole lot of foreign policy material in the President’s State of the Union address, at least not since the days of George W. Bush and his invocation of Doestoevskyian nihilists as a justification for world conquest. Oh, it gets mentioned, of...
