Amnesty international has called the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp the “gulag of our time.” Since President Obama’s order to close the camp within one year on January 23, 2009, it has remained open because the president decided to amass political capital to use for...
I'm a bit under the weather so there is no column today, but I'll be back on Monday – so stay turned to this space. NOTES IN THE MARGIN You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often...
On the Cato Institute's blog, the results from a Chicago Council Survey which includes data on partisan differences in hawkishness is headlined under the pessimistic “The Interventionist Itch.” Fundamentally, though Republicans lead the pack in terms of...
Originally posted at TomDispatch. It was an impressive effort: a front-page New York Times story about a “new way of war” with the bylines of six reporters, and two more and a team of researchers cited at the end of the piece. “They have plotted...
As if they weren’t Machiavellian enough, spy agencies are evidently waiting for the next terrorist attack to change public opinion on the need for encryption backdoors, reports The Washington Post. The intelligence community’s top lawyer, Robert S. Litt, lamented in a...
For well over three years, heavy doses of propaganda have created a myth about a purported steel cylinder for testing explosives located on a site at Iran’s Parchin military testing reservation. Iran was refusing to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)...
I probably know more about Russia than most Americans. I have had the pleasure of visiting the “evil empire” on many occasions, since I am married to a Russian national. The effect of the current international sanctions have been a blessing in disguise for me,...
The State of Israel was established on the ruins of Palestine, based on a series of objectives that were initialed by letters from the Hebrew alphabet, the consequences of which continue to guide Israeli strategies to this day. The current violence against Palestinian...
A cholera outbreak that was first reported in the Abu Ghraib area appears to be spreading south. Reports are streaming out of Baghdad itself and the provinces of Babil, Najaf, Diwaniya, Najaf, and Samawa. The government is supplying citizens with water purification...
