The newest round of WikiLeaks revelations unearths troubling facts about the U.S. prison facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Operating for more than nine years now, the prison camp was originally said to be holding “the worst of the worst”—terrorists of the same moral plane and dangerousness as those who committed the attacks of 9/11....
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Obama has reportedly signed a secret order authorizing CIA operations in Libya, where the agency is there “to gather intelligence for military airstrikes and to contact and vet the beleaguered rebels battling Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces, according to American officials.” Al-Qaeda, a great enemy of the Libyan regime, has also offered assistance to these...
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Because the population stands by its government and war machine, despite years of continuing murder, torture and unspeakable spectacles of inhumanity like this. If you don’t have the stomach to see the photos, here’s a bit of prose from the Rolling Stone feature to digest: [A] review of internal Army records and investigative files...
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“The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” —Senator Barack Obama, December 20, 2007 On March 19, 2011, the exact anniversary day of the beginning of the war in Iraq, Barack...
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Juan Cole, the great historian and the author of the “to go to” blog on the contemporary Middle East, Informed Comment, will speak tonight at the University of Alabama on the timely topic of “Liberty, Power, and Dictatorship: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East.” His speech, which is the most recent installment of...
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Why won’t Obama’s $50 billion plan for transportation infrastructure fix the problems that road users consider to be the highest priorities? How different would Latin America be today had its political economy resembled Mario Vargas Llosa’s approach to literature? What does Bob Woodward’s latest book tell us about the Obama administration’s approach to the...
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Why would another federal “stimulus” package fail to promote long-term economic growth? How violent was the American West? What hidden strengths do the Taliban have in common with the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War? What are we to make of last week’s police protest in Ecuador? Learn the answers to these questions by...
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It goes without saying that if Bush had presided over a phony end to the Iraq war, expanded the Afghanistan war, extended its reach into Pakistan, solidified the state secrets doctrine and claimed in no uncertain terms the right to assassinate American citizens without due process, the left would be up in arms. The...
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The Cordoba House Islamic community center, scheduled for construction on private land within a few blocks of where the Twin Towers once stood, has drawn ire from many Americans, many of whom have provocatively called it the “Ground Zero Mosque” and have condemned it as offensive, and many of whom have called on the...
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Time for a pop quiz. What does Alvaro Vargas Llosa think about efforts to block the so-called Ground Zero mosque? What does Ivan Eland think U.S. foreign-policy leaders can learn from the military’s counterinsurgency operations? What does Dominick Armentano think about the prospects of the state lawsuits against Obamacare? What does S. Fred Singer...
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