Hold Onto Your Underwear

Let me put American life in the Age of Terror into some kind of context, and then tell me you're not ready to get on the nearest plane heading anywhere, even toward Yemen. In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, according to the FBI. In that year, there were 34,017...

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Spies, Lies, and Fear

The Bosnian "Threat" to Empire Bosnia was in the headlines again this week. On Monday, police from both the Serb Republic and the Muslim-Croat Federation raided a Wahhabi village in the north of the country. And on Tuesday, U.S. Director of National...

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Who Was That Well-Dressed Man?

The Christmas Day bombing attempt by Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab quickly became a another tiresome political issue in the United States, yet another opportunity for the Republicans to bash the President. Why, they ask, is he being charged in a court of law, instead of...

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The COIN Myth, Part III

Parts I and II discussed how our counterinsurgency doctrine's requirements for a reliable host-nation government, a reliable host-nation security force, and reliable intelligence are impossible to achieve in our present wars. The third and final part of the series...

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Too Many Dots, Too Many Enemies

As intelligence agencies rush to connect more dots on a page so crowded with dots that they already almost touch, Americans need to focus on the real problem, our foreign policies. We have made ourselves the enemy of over a billion people, nearly a quarter of the...

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Pakistan: Vestiges of War, Hopes for Peace

PESHAWAR, Pakistan - "We aren't going to be browbeaten by acts of cowardice and [will] continue exposing Taliban and [other] militants," said an angry Shamim Shahid, president of the Peshawar Press Club (PPC). The spate of media killings in Pakistan in the...

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Helen Asks Why

Thank God for Helen Thomas, the only person to show any courage at the White House press briefing after President Barack Obama gave a flaccid account of the intelligence screw-up that almost downed an airliner on Christmas Day. After Obama briefly addressed L'Affaire...

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The Weird Factor

What I call the Weird Factor, for lack of a better name, seems to have become a permanent feature of our post-9/11 world, a dark and sinister leitmotif that plays in the background. On 9/11, of course, the Factor was on full display as a whole string of unusual events...

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Randolph Bourne Institute