At the National Interest, Cato's Ted Galen Carpenter argues Washington's Eastern European NATO allies "are dangerous strategic liabilities, not assets." NATO, he writes, has worn out its strategic value and expanding it as we have since the end of the Cold War merely...
In the New York Times, Ben Macintyre reviews the new book by Richard Overy The Bombers and the Bombed. Macintyre gives a summary of Overy's myth-busting about the Allied bombing of Germany. Indiscriminate bombing of civilians, instead of sticking to military targets,...
In September 2012, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. government considers cyber-attacks to constitute acts of war that can justly be countered with conventional retaliation. “Cyberattacks can amount to armed attacks triggering the right of self-defense and...
Rep. Mike Rogers, one of the most doggedly pro-NSA figures in Congress, is once again making claims for which he presents zero evidence and which contradict findings from the intelligence community. Specifically, he is going on television to claim Edward Snowden is a...
The National Security Archive, an organization founded "to check rising government secrecy," has awarded its annual Rosemary Award to James Clapper "for worst open government performance in 2013," chiefly for his now infamous lie to Sen. Ron Wyden that the NSA doesn't...
The most bellicose commentators on the current situation in Ukraine are pretty much exactly the same crew who zealously cheer-led for the illegal and deranged invasion of Iraq in 2003. Disappointingly, nobody thinks it appropriate to bring this up...as if it...
Commentators across the spectrum support Obama's recent executive order allowing economic sanctions to be placed on Putin's "inner circle." The fact that hardly anybody opposes this is instructive. To put it simply: sanctions don't work. The well known political...
The executive branch's Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) issued a report back in December that was devastating to the Obama administration's claims that NSA surveillance is both legal and effective in providing security. The report concluded that, in...
There are 54 different countries on Earth that the U.S. is legally obligated to militarily protect and defend if they get into their own conflicts. Below is the State Department's list of them (via Micah Zenko): NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY A treaty signed April 4, 1949, by...
If you quickly survey the media coverage and political rhetoric surrounding the Ukraine crisis, you find there is nothing easier than to condemn Russia for its opportunistic and illegal incursions into Ukraine's sovereign territory of Crimea. And this is correct: it...
