In case you hadn’t noticed, Israel has been in the news a lot lately. After all, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived at the U.N. in the midst of an Iranian "charm offensive," just as presidents Obama and Rouhani were having the first...
Sometimes, the world sends you back to school. These last months have offered us a crash course – call it Surveillance 101 – in how Washington, enveloped in a penumbra of extreme secrecy, went to work creating a global surveillance state on a scale almost...
This may be a propitious moment to offer an up-to-date version of a classic riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the terrorist? For many in this country, the Kenyan mall horror arrived out of the blue, out of nowhere, out of a place and a time without context....
Listen to Ann Jones on Monday's Scott Horton Show The Afghan War is officially winding down. American casualties, generally from towns and suburbs you’ve never heard of unless you were born there, are still coming in. Though far fewer American troops are in the...
Among the curious spectacles of our moment, the strangeness of the Obama presidency hasn’t gotten its full due. After decades in which "the imperial presidency" was increasingly in the spotlight, after two terms of George W. Bush in which a literal...
“But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act. That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional. With...
For at least the last six years, government agents have been exploiting an AT&T database filled with the records of billions of American phone calls from as far back as 1987. The rationale behind this dragnet intrusion, codenamed Hemisphere, is to find suspicious...
Dear Whistleblower, I don’t know who you are or what you do or how old you may be. I just know that you exist somewhere in our future as surely as does tomorrow or next year. You may be young and computer-savvy or a career federal employee well along in years....
Looked at one way at least, the president's Syrian war proposal – itself an ever shifting target – couldn’t be more brain-dead. The idea that one country, on its own, has the right to missile and bomb another to resolve the question of a chemical attack and war...
Sometimes history happens at the moment when no one is looking. On weekends in late August, the president of the United States ought to be playing golf or loafing at Camp David, not making headlines. Yet Barack Obama chose Labor Day weekend to unveil arguably the most...
