Harold Koh, formerly the Obama administration's top State Department lawyer, has criticized the systematic secrecy surrounding the drone war. The New York Times: In a speech Tuesday at Oxford University, Harold H. Koh, a Yale law professor who as the State...
Writing in The New Yorker, Dexter Filkins runs through the Obama administration's reluctance to further intervene in Syria. There are many cons White House officials articulate, but here's two that stood out to me. Unintended Consequences Filkins quotes a senior White...
Much has been made of the Obama administration's decision to set up shop in Jordan under the pretense of containing the Syrian conflict and of training so-called moderate elements in the Syrian rebel opposition. That is the pretense that has so far been publicized in...
The September 18, 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), ostensibly a vehicle for the U.S. to go after the perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC., turns out to have been a whole hell of a lot more than that nearly 12...
The sex assault problem in the military is turning out to be a poison that has infected every branch, and it just seems to be getting worse as more women enlist and rise through the ranks. Just when military women were celebrating the successful storming of the...
If, as alleged, the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons, it would indeed be a serious development, constituting a breach of the Geneva Protocol of 1925, one of the world’s most important disarmament treaties, which banned the use of chemical weapons. In 1993, the...
Israel's bombing of Syria this week represented a very serious escalation in the civil war that carries a high risk of internationalizing the conflict. The supposed justification for the attacks was to eliminate a depot of Fateh-110 missiles, shipped from Iran and...
Bill Keller's piece in The New York Times yesterday got a lot of attention, and for all the right reasons. The absurdity of the piece wasn't lost on most people: Keller lays out how terribly wrong he was for supporting the Bush administration's war of choice in Iraq,...
On Friday, Israel attacked Syria. On Sunday, they launched multiple additional attacks, destroying several military targets in the Syrian capital city of Damascus and killing 42 people. Today (Monday), Israel has filed an official complaint to the United Nations after...
Director Kathryn Bigelow's cinematic valentine to dogged CIA sisters doin' it and taking out Osama Bin Laden for themselves, Zero Dark Thirty, was controversial long before it was released last December. Initially there were rumors the film would be released two...
