Barack Obama entered the presidency as one of the most rhetorically pro-civil liberties politicians in recent memory. And shortly after taking office, he drew applause from friends of liberty for promulgating executive orders closing Guantánamo and CIA secret...
RAMALLAH – Negotiations for the political endgame of the recent Gaza war have proven much more difficult than – presumably – the Israeli cabinet imagined last December, when it took the final decision to start the war. Now, the negotiations to stabilize...
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) just released its latest report on Iran's nuclear program. The report states that all of Iran's nuclear materials, research, and development are under the Agency's containment and surveillance, and all the nuclear...
President Barack Obama decided to approve only 17,000 of the 30,000 troops requested by Gen. David McKiernan, the top commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, and Gen. David Petraeus, the CENTCOM commander, after McKiernan was unable to tell him how they...
First, the good news. Adel Abdul Hakim, one of five Uighurs (Muslims from China's oppressed Xinjiang province), who was released from Guantánamo in May 2006, has had his asylum claim accepted by the Swedish government. The Uighurs' story It has been a long journey for...
Joan Walsh, the Salon.com political editor who appears often on MSNBC with Chris Matthews, is emblematic, for me, of a type I know all too well: the well-meaning Bay Area liberal. Her politics exemplify the psychology of our opinion elites who got behind Barack Obama...
*with Khushal Arsala One of the first difficult foreign policy decisions of the Obama administration will be what the United States should do about Afghanistan. Escalating the war, as National Security Advisor Jim Jones has been encouraging, will likely make matters...
BAGHDAD – "We only want a normal life," says Um Qasim, sitting in a bombed out building in Baghdad. She and others around have been saying that for years. Um Qasim lives with 13 family members in a brick shanty on the edge of a former military...
JERUSALEM – Israel's outgoing prime minister Ehud Olmert is risking a crisis of confidence with Egypt by insisting that a prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas precede any Egyptian-mediated ceasefire arrangement to end the Gaza war. Olmert overrode the...
After eight years of the closest possible relations, the United States and Israel may be headed for a period of increasing strain, particularly given the likelihood that whatever Israeli government emerges from last week's election will be more hawkish than its...
