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...
Who violated international law, Russia or the US? We did get UN authority to threaten Saddam Hussein but not to invade. Our country attacked Iraq with no provocation except for threats of nuclear weapons that turned out to be false. We killed probably well over...
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...
After the killing of Osama bin Laden, Pakistan vehemently denied any knowledge that the most wanted terrorist operative in the world had lived in a protected compound in Abbottabad just a few short miles from Pakistan's military academy. Nobody really believed them....
Over at PolicyMic, Eileen Shim cites a recent report from Reporters Without Borders that names the U.S. in its annual "Enemies of the Internet" list: Reporters Without Borders did not name entire governments on its list, but rather focused on the individual agencies...
