For years, this space has been arguing – railing, really – that the ideological and legal currents unleashed by America’s response to the 9/11 attacks have been leading us down the road to dictatorship: see here, here, here, and here. Back in those halcyon days, circa...
Why is the talented journalist Barrett Brown in jail – awaiting trial on charges that could keep him there for one hundred years? A writer for Vanity Fair, the Guardian, and at one time an unofficial spokesman for the internet pirates known as "Anonymous,"...
Whatever else one might say about Cass Sunstein, he surely knows who his enemies are. The former head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and member of the President’s panel on NSA "reforms" – infamous for his suggestion that...
Individuals make history, but sometimes the process reverses itself and history makes individuals. President Barack Obama may have wanted to bomb Syria, and he certainly did want to meddle in Libya – where the results of his disastrous "humanitarian"...
They call it the "Good War," one supposes, in order to differentiate it from all the really bad wars we’ve been fighting – and losing – lately: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and all the future wars our political class has up its collective sleeve. I call it...
The response of self-identified progressives to the Edward Snowden revelations has been ambiguous from the beginning. On the one hand, there are the ACLU-type liberals, epitomized by Glenn Greenwald – the reporter most responsible (along with Laura Poitras) for...
We haven’t seen anything like this since the Vietnam war era: an administration caught red-handed illegally and systematically spying on Americans in the midst of an increasingly unpopular war. At that time, too, the political class was badly divided, with the...
So you thought progressives would rally ‘round Edward Snowden’s and Glenn Greenwald’s crusade to rid us of the NSA incubus that’s attached itself to our computers and our daily lives. Well, you were wrong: dead wrong. With a few notable exceptions, the...
As the US continues and expands its worldwide "war on terror," extending its militarized tentacles into Africa as well as the Middle East, a festering threat looms closer to home: the ungluing of Mexico and its rapid descent into the status of a failed...
There's no column today: looks like the flu has claimed yet another victim! But don't worry: I'll be back on Monday. Meanwhile, you can read this old column on Mexico's "vigilante" movement, which the rest of the world is beginning to notice this week. Just remember:...
