Imagine that you were hoping that Al Qaeda would bring down Western Civilization.  So, you go to Al Qaeda and ask them, “how’s bringing down Western Civilization going?”
Their answer: We almost sort-of brought down a civilian airplane and we also almost murdered a Danish cartoonist.  Both agents have been neutralized and the Yemeni government has apparently declined [...]

Here’s the link for public records acquired by the ACLU.  Why should we investigate?  Because when a human being dies not of natural causes where the physical actions of another person are the likely cause of death, that’s what you do.  If it’s proven to be true to a jury of peers beyond a reasonable doubt, then [...]

Glen Greenwald wrote (and I read via Will Wilkinson) 
(1) The fact that we are not really bothered any more by taking helpless detainees in our custody and (a) threatening to blow their brains out, torture them with drills, rape their mothers, and murder their children; (b) choking them until they pass out; (c) pouring water down their throats [...]

Not to sound like Yakov Smirnov, but in America, most people think that a Presidential election that came to people (who mostly worked for the Republican Party - I mention this only to say that they were unlikely to get violent as they were essentially a publicity stunt) was a sad moment in American history.

In [...]

Andrew thinks the Israel question in last night’s debate was nonsensical:
If Iran attacks Israel with nuclear weapons (the prevention of which is the scenario both candidates chose to address), the United States committing troops isn’t going to do anyone any good. On the other hand, if Iran attacks Israel with conventional forces, Israel won’t need [...]

While many of the great writers and thinkers of the middle twentieth-century defended the Soviet Union, or gazed upon it with hope, one of the most important figures who effectively killed all of that type of talking once and for all was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn’s stories, particularly The Gulag Archipelago, gave Western audiences a clear [...]

I want to say something very, very simple about the man who allegedly shot up a Unitarian church in Knoxville because of his hatred for “liberals.” First of all, two people lost their lives in this terrible crime. Second, this man does not represent Christians, Conservatives, Southerners, or Tennesseeans (most of whom are liberals in [...]

The elections in Zimbabwe came to an all-too-predictable end today.  There are few things I can think of that I feel more conflicted over than our obligations when such failures take place. The UK appears to be moving quickly into the realm of sanctions and I don’t have any real sense of where the United [...]

“We’re not scaremongering, this is really happening.”  -Radiohead, “Idioteque”
If you have not read Parts One and Two on Vice President Cheney in The Washington Post, it is must read material, perhaps the most important news story of our times.
Before I talk about the article, a conceptual premise: It is an essential feature of free society, [...]

The Washington Post has a nice interactive map of Sudan, and a little time line outlining some of the major events in the history of what has happened there.
The failure of the United States to get involved to stop a genocide over two years after publicly acknowledging it as such, in defense of a [...]