In Foreign Affairs, Christopher Swift attempts to debunk what he calls the "drone blowback fallacy." After visiting Yemen and investigating the issue himself, he argues that US drone attacks aren't a significant motivator of al-Qaeda recruits. Last month, I traveled...
Human Rights Watch is again calling on President Aquino of the Philippines to prosecute and put a stop to the rampant torture, extra-judicial killings, and disappearances of "leftist activists, journalists, and clergy." The Aquino government has only been in power for...
Gideon Rose, editor of Foreign Affairs spoke about Egypt yesterday on the Brian Lehrer Show. Here is an segment of his response to the question of why the US has continued to support the military rulers (listen here): The US has a relationship with the Egyptian...
The five permanent members of the UN Security Council will meet on Saturday with several other regional players (excluding Iran?) to hash out a plan to end the violence in Syria. UN envoy Kofi Annan seems to have persuaded* Syria's biggest ally, Russia, to support an...
Via Ben Armbruster, it is revealed that lawyers for alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed have written to the UN special rapporteur on torture asking for an investigation into his torture at Guantanamo Bay, which included being water boarded 183 plus 7.5...
Via FORA.tv, a very revealing interview with Colin Powell: These are remarkable statements for a number of reasons. Let's take them one at a time. "Our force has never existed just to be ready to fight wars," but "to deter wars." Well, not never. As James Madison...
As further illustration of how Libya was not the victimless war it is still made out to be, the Times reports on unexploded ordnances: The United Nations said this month that NATO, in an exchange not publicly disclosed, had shared details of 313 possible sites...
Pro-Publica summarizes how absurd the Obama administration is being on its secret drone wars they keep telling everybody about: Over the past year, the American Civil Liberties Union and reporters at The New York Times have filed several requests under the Freedom of...
Via Micah Zenko, this short excerpt from New York Times reporter David Sanger's new book, Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power: And the core of the American argument [to Israel] was simple: attack Iran, and you set the program...
