Pro-Israel commentators have been known to downplay the importance of the Israel lobby here in the U.S. "The lobby" is not as influential, coordinated, sneaky, or nefarious as many of its critics maintain, they insist, while often making accusations of conspiratorial...
An editorial in yesterday's Washington Post urges President Obama to use the threat of a U.S. bombing campaign to achieve political ends on a transition deal in the Syria talks. Obama "could force" a diplomatic agreement for a transition government in Syria "by...
The NSA's bulk collection of every American's telephone call records is illegal, according to the federal government's independent review panel, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. The NSA's interprets Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which permits the...
Directly lifted from the Electronic Frontier Foundation blog: January 23, 2014 - 7:30pm Berkeley, CA Join us for "NSA Surveillance and Our ‘Almost Orwellian’ State," hosted by St. John’s Presbyterian Church on Thursday, January 23, 2014. Address: St. John's...
The Geneva II talks on the Syrian civil war in Switzerland started today. In the lead up to the conference, the media focus, unfortunately, had been on which parts of the Syrian opposition would attend and whether or not Iran, the Assad regime's close ally, would...
Today at Al Jazeera America I argue that the U.S. should stop occupying South Korea, not only because they don't belong there but because the highly militarized alliance between the U.S. and South Korea doesn't actually weaken North Korea, but helps sustain the regime...
Robert Gates's new memoir, which I've mentioned I'm making my way through, has a nice example of how dangerous entangling alliances can be. Not only does Gates write frankly about how U.S. interests are subordinated to those of our weaker allies, but he is unusually...
In recent months, President Obama has been pressured in the face of widespread public outrage to make two important speeches on national security. In May, he gave a lengthy talk on U.S. drone policy in which he placated public concerns by saying that America needed to...
Governments use fear of threats at home and abroad to increase their power and abridge individual freedom. If there is any singular lesson in Antiwar.com's motto, War is the Health of the State, that is it. Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern...
The excited media coverage of former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's new memoir Duty as an unusually frank retelling of his time in the Bush and Obama administrations caused me to make an exception to my lifelong moratorium on reading the memoirs of politicians or...
