Scott Horton

Company Men

Torture, treachery, and the CIA

The APA Grapples with Its Torture Demons: Six Questions for Nathaniel Raymond

Nathaniel Raymond on CIA interrogation techniques.

The Guantánamo “Suicides,” Revisited

A missing document suggests a possible CIA cover-up

A Final Act for the Guantánamo Theater of the Absurd?

A new report from Seton Hall University exposes government surveillance of attorney-client conversations

Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out

Congress prepares to slap down prosecutors linked to the suicide of Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz, RIP

A leading cyberactivist commits suicide at twenty-six. Was he hounded to death by federal prosecutors?

The DOJ’s Torturer-Protection Program

By sending a decorated intelligence officer to prison, the Justice Department shields torturers in the ranks of the CIA

European Court Condemns CIA Extraction Techniques as Torture

A European human rights court hands down the first binding decision against Bush-era  rendition techniques

Boss Rove’s Justice

“There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember the second.” That quip was offered by Mark Hanna during the first modern…

A Stinging Rebuke of the DOJ on Access to Counsel at Gitmo

The Bush Administration originally created special-detention facilities at Guantánamo on the theory that—given the unique historical provenance of the base, which was secured under a lease at the end of…

CIA Waterboarding, Qaddafi Collaboration Revealed

Just days after Attorney General Holder announced a formal decision of impunity resulting from a probe into 101 documented cases in which CIA agents engaged in acts of torture and…

Boss Rove: Six Questions for Craig Unger

After four years in the political penalty box, Karl Rove has returned as the undeniable mastermind of the G.O.P.’s electoral effort. Vanity Fair contributing editor Craig Unger has just published…

Holder Announces Impunity for Torture-Homicides

There is some long-settled wisdom among Washington politicos: When you have bad news and want to avoid attention, you release it just before a holiday weekend. And when you can…

Privacy: Six Questions for Garret Keizer

We live in a world in which the private space we are afforded seems to be constantly shrinking. Travelers are subjected to ever-mounting indignities at airports, and those who turn…

Great Games, Local Rules: Six Questions for Alex Cooley

Alex Cooley Through much of modern history, Central Asia has been a borderland between great empires that vied for influence within it. This came to an end with the Soviet…

The Gray Lady’s Voter Suppression Quandry

In the midst of a recent deposition under oath in a lawsuit in which he was seeking to recover money he believed he was owed by the Florida G.O.P., former…

Private Empire: Six Questions for Steve Coll

Measured by revenue, ExxonMobil is the largest corporation on earth. Its operations span the globe, and it behaves like a powerful sovereign, exercising immense influence over the governments of the…

Mozart at the Gateway to His Fortune: Six Questions for Christoph Wolff

The last years of Mozart’s life and the prodigious and important works he created during them have been heavily romanticized in the musical literature. Now, one of this generation’s leading…

Our Politicized Judiciary

The Supreme Court has held the news spotlight this week as at no other time in recent memory. The Court’s 5–4 ruling on this year’s cornerstone case, addressing challenges to…

The Art of Intelligence: Six Questions for Henry Crumpton

Henry Crumpton spent twenty-four years in the CIA’s clandestine service. His work put him at the forefront of the agency’s counterterrorism efforts, and on the front lines as America took…

Obama’s Intelligence Striptease

Attorney General Eric Holder has announced the appointment of two prosecutors to investigate recent leaks of classified intelligence. At issue are disclosures concerning the CIA’s drone war in Pakistan and…

Framed: Six Questions for Sanford Levinson

The American Constitution has been the subject, just as Thomas Jefferson predicted, of a great deal of “sanctimonious reverence,” especially from American politicians who make comments demonstrating they know little…

The Edwards Circus Leaves Town

The case of United States v. John Edwards has come to an end. The jury acquitted Edwards on the principal charge of accepting an illegal campaign contribution from heiress Rachel…

Traitor: Six Questions for Jesselyn Radack

Jesselyn Radack came into the Justice Department through the Attorney General’s Honors Program and worked as an ethics adviser until she found herself embroiled in a scandal that arose because…

Obama’s Kill List

In a detailed and well-crafted story by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, the New York Times takes a close look today at the Obama Administration’s program of targeted killings, and…

Behold the Lord High Executioner!

Kimberley Dozier of the Associated Press reports that the burden of making the life-and-death decisions surrounding drone use is settling on the shoulders of a single man, White House counterterrorism…

Two Thousand False Convictions Documented Since 1989

This week has been full of illuminating disclosures concerning the American criminal-justice system. Last Monday, a Columbia Law School project showed convincingly that Carlos DeLuna, executed for homicide by the…

Unimaginable Atrocities: Six Questions for William Schabas

A successfully completed prosecution in the International Criminal Court, new demands for investigations into atrocities in Syria, ongoing issues surrounding crimes committed by American officials during the Bush-era “war on…

Columbia Study Suggests Texas Executed an Innocent Man

British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, appearing in character as Admiral General Haffaz Aladeen to promote his new film, The Dictator, has been working in lines about the double standards of…

Blocking Pardons at Justice

ProPublica’s Dafna Linzer continues her examination of the federal pardons process with a piece, excerpted in Monday’s Washington Post, that contrasts two pardon candidates. Both cases are the sort of…

Yoo, Latif, and the Rise of Secret Justice

One of the lasting challenges to America’s federal judiciary will be addressing American complicity in the tortures and disappearances of the past ten years. Two recent appeals-court decisions show us…

The Costs of Secrecy in Pakistan

If America’s national-security mavens had to identify their biggest worry on a world map, odds are that the pin would land within a hundred miles of Islamabad. Once hailed as…

Every Nation for Itself: Six Questions for Ian Bremmer

The world is quickly being reshaped, writes political economist Ian Bremmer. America established itself as the paramount power following the collapse of Communism, but the emerging system is one in…

Another Victory in the War on Drugs

Daniel Chong, an engineering student at the University of California at San Diego, went to a 4/20 party thrown by some friends. He got stoned, fell asleep, and was still…

Jose Rodriguez, Poster Boy

Why did Jose Rodriguez, the former head of the CIA’s clandestine service, destroy ninety-two tapes of interrogation sessions in which terrorism suspects were subjected to waterboarding and other torture techniques?…

Bread, Circuses, and the Edwards Prosecution

Last week, in a courtroom in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Justice Department launched its latest political charade in the guise of a public-integrity prosecution. Former Democratic vice-presidential nominee John Edwards,…

The Crisis of Zionism: Six Questions for Peter Beinart

Peter Beinart, a former editor of The New Republic who now writes for the Daily Beast and teaches at the City University of New York, has just published a remarkable…

For Official Washington, Terrorism Is a Laughing Matter

Just how serious is Washington about battling terrorism? The airwaves fill regularly with sanctimonious declamations about terrorist threats and with vows to pursue the war against them to its ultimate…

Witness for the Prosecution

Yesterday the Obama Administration, after a delay of several years, released an important document relating to the Bush Administration’s torture policies: a memorandum by Philip Zelikow, a high-ranking State Department…

The High Court’s Body-Cavity Fixation

In a case that may summarize conservative judicial attitudes toward human dignity, Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders, the Supreme Court has decided on the claim of Albert Florence, a…

Pakistan On the Brink: A Conversation With Ahmed Rashid

I will be participating in a discussion with Ahmed Rashid, whose new book is entitled Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, at Fordham University on…

U.N. Official Presses Query into Gitmo Deaths

One month ago, Truthout’s Jeffrey Kaye published a review of autopsy reports released last year by the Department of Defense in response to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act request…

First Criminal Charges Brought in Polish Probe of CIA Black Site

The Warsaw-based newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza and TVP Polish Public Television are reporting that criminal charges have been brought in the long-pending investigation into torture and kidnapping associated with a CIA…

Merton: The Distortion of Dogma

It seems a little strange that we [Catholics] are so wildly exercised about the “murder” (and the word is of course correct) of an unborn infant by abortion, or even…

Justice in Afghanistan

Early in the morning on Sunday, March 11, sixteen villagers were killed and five wounded in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. The dead included nine children, four men,…

What the Stevens Case Tells Us

Following the Justice Department’s agreement in 2009 to vacate the convictions it obtained of former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, it conducted an internal probe into the conduct of its senior…

The Man Without a Face: Six Questions for Masha Gessen

Vladimir Putin is emerging as an iconic figure for Russian politics in the period following the collapse of the Soviet Union, but he remains rather mysterious even at home, and…

The Drone War on Journalists

Yesterday I wrote about how the Obama Administration has insisted that its deal with Yemen’s dictatorship concerning the use of drones there is a secret, and how it has been…

The Drone Secrecy Farce

Following Attorney General Eric Holder’s speech at Northwestern, publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times responded with renewed demands for the release of…

Holder Dances the Assassination Tango

On Monday afternoon, Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before law students and faculty at Northwestern University in Chicago to deliver a speech widely billed as a definitive statement about the…

Uzbekistan as a Values Challenge for NATO

This post is based on remarks delivered at a hearing in Berlin on March 1, 2012, entitled “From the Uzbek Cotton Fields to the Termez Military Base.” NATO is not…

The United States of Fear: Six Questions for Tom Engelhardt

Tom Engelhardt is a prolific writer and editor, and the curator of TomDispatch, a popular website that presents political commentary. I put six questions to him about his new book,…

Good News from Ashgabat

Turkmenistan, a nation the size of California, and home to 5.5 million people who live atop some of the world’s largest natural gas reserves, recently held presidential elections. The outcome…

The Afghanistan Dilemma

Violence broke out across Afghanistan last week when news emerged that American forces had burned copies of the Koran. American military officials explained that the books had been taken from…

Schopenhauer: Causality and Synchronicity

Alle Ereignisse im Leben eines Menschen standen demnach in zwei grundverschiedenen Arten des Zusammenhangs: erstlich, im objektiven, kausalen Zusammenhange des Naturlaufs; zweitens, in einem subjektiven Zusammenhange, der nur in Beziehung…

Franco is still dead…

… but his spirit seems to have inspired a courtroom drama in Madrid the past few weeks. Baltasar Garzón—the crusading investigative judge who once sought the arrest of Chilean dictator…

All the Missing Souls: Six Questions for David Scheffer

Ambassador David Scheffer steered America’s engagement with the concept of war-crimes accountability throughout the Clinton years, and has been one of the nation’s leading observers and commentators on the subject…

Egypt’s War on NGOs

The New York Times reports: Egypt’s military-led government said Sunday that it would put 19 Americans and two dozen others on trial in a politically charged criminal investigation into the…

Lessing: In Praise of Laziness

Faulheit, jetzo will ich dir Auch ein kleines Loblied bringen.— O—wie—sau—er—wird es mir,— Dich—nach Würden—zu besingen! Doch, ich will mein Bestes tun, Nach der Arbeit ist gut ruhn.   Höchstes…

The Operators: Six Questions for Michael Hastings

Michael Hastings’s Polk Award–winning Rolling Stone article, “The Runaway General,” brought the career of General Stanley McChrystal, America’s commander in Afghanistan, to an abrupt end. Now Hastings has developed the…

Spanish Court Resumes Gitmo Prosecution

On Friday, a judge from Spain’s national security court, the Audiencia Nacional, issued a decision directing the resumption of criminal proceedings relating to the torture and mistreatment of three prisoners…

Martin Luther King Jr.: Nonviolence and the Struggle Between Rich and Poor

The emergency we now face is economic, and it is a desperate and worsening situation. For the 35 million poor people in America—not even to mention, just yet, the poor…

Donne: An Anatomy of the World

And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out, The sun is lost, and th’ earth, and no man’s wit Can well direct him…

Gitmo at Ten

On January 11, 2002, the first prisoners from the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror” were landed at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, a forty-five-square-mile enclave at the eastern end of…

Hobbes’s Mortal Gods: Six Questions for Ted H. Miller

The last decade was clearly something of a Hobbesian moment in American history. Now, political philosopher and Hobbes scholar Ted H. Miller has written a book entitled Mortal Gods: Science,…

Obama Signs the NDAA, World Does Not End (Yet)

On New Year’s Eve, as most Americans were focused on parties and football games, President Barack Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012. He issued a…

Tolstoy: The Chain of Ideas that Constitutes Art

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The Pentagon and its Sock Puppets

An internal Department of Defense review has concluded that a Rumsfeld-era program under which retired military officers who appeared on American broadcast media were given special briefings and access was…

Court of Appeal Orders Release of Bagram Prisoner

In an important ruling that sheds light on the complications that American torture and abuse of prisoners presented for NATO allies attempting to support U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq,…

With Liberty and Justice for Some: Six Questions for Glenn Greenwald

In the wake of September 11, Glenn Greenwald emerged as the nation’s premier chronicler of the war that U.S. officials waged on the nation’s civil liberties under the pretext of…

Dasht-e-Leili, Ten Years Later

In December 2001, Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, with strong U.S. backing consisting of special-forces units and CIA paramilitary operatives, were close to consolidating their control over the country. Kabul was occupied,…

Inside the CIA’s Black Site in Bucharest

Reporters for German network ARD’s Panorama newsmagazine and the Associated Press have pieced together key details surrounding the CIA’s operation of a black site in Bucharest, Romania. AP’s Adam Goldman…

Unpardonable

Dafna Linzer and some of her colleagues at ProPublica have published a two-part feature in the Washington Post based on their year-long study of the American presidential-pardons system. The story’s…

Blair Addresses the CIA, Drones, and Pakistan

On Monday, Admiral Denis Blair, former National Intelligence Director for President Obama, presented remarks concerning military readiness and potential defense budget cuts at a function hosted by the Aspen Institute.…

A Club of Liars, Demagogues, and Fools

The German newsweekly Spiegel takes the latest disclosures concerning Herman Cain and the rise of Newt Gingrich as an opportunity to offer a foreign bird’s-eye view of the current Republican…

The DSK Affair Unravels?

On May 14, 2011, the then-director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, had a six-minute encounter with a chambermaid at the Sofitel Hotel in midtown Manhattan. The brief interaction…

Quesnay: The Despotism of Natural Law

Les loix naturelles et fondamentales des sociétés sont la règle souveraine et decisive du juste et de l’injuste absolu, du bien et du mal moral, elles s’impriment dans le cœur…

Propagandastan

With the predictable failure of the “Super Committee,” Washington is now coasting toward mandatory cuts to the holiest of holies within the Beltway: the defense budget. Against this backdrop, David…

The Justice Cascade: Six Questions for Kathryn Sikkink

Kathryn Sikkink has spent thirty-five years studying how nations hold their leaders to account for such crimes as kidnapping, torture, and extrajudicial execution, which are often committed against the backdrop…

Leopardi: The Eve of the Feast Day

Ecco è fuggito Il dì festivo, ed al festivo il giorno Volgar succede, e si travolge il tempo Ogni umano accidente. Or dov’è ’l suono Di que’ popoli antichi? or…

Abramoff 2.0

Jack Abramoff is back. “Casino Jack,” the man at the heart of the biggest corruption scandal in Washington since Teapot Dome, began his career as national chairman of the College…

The Rizzo Investigation

Marc Ambinder and Yochi Dreazen report in the National Journal: The Justice Department is investigating whether a former top U.S. intelligence official, John Rizzo, improperly disclosed classified information about the…

“Dryboarding” and Three Unexplained Deaths at Guantánamo

Did the three Guantánamo prisoners who died the evening of June 9, 2006, succumb to the misapplication of a controlled-suffocation technique called “dryboarding?” That prospect was raised last week in…

Innocence Is No Defense

The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg reports: The U.S. military tribunal for the USS Cole bombing suspect has no power to free a captive found innocent of war crimes but shouldn’t…

The Black Banners: Six Questions for Ali Soufan

The name and face of former FBI special agent Ali Soufan have only recently become known to the public, but to those inside the U.S. government Soufan has long been…

Gitmo Forever

In today’s New York Times, Charlie Savage tells us that Republicans are continuing to tie the Obama Administration’s hands in dealing with terrorism suspects: Republican senators are pushing to include…

Waiting for Tinkerbell in Tashkent

At a time when Republican presidential frontrunner Herman Cain is touting his indifference to “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan,” American diplomats and military leaders are in fact making the pilgrimage to Tashkent to pay…

Obama and Libya

I was skeptical this past spring when the Obama White House reversed course on Libya. One day it was resolved not to intervene, following advice from Secretary of Defense Robert…

Plato — The Origins of Democracy

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The Lieberman Material-Support Dilemma

Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman has put forward the Enemy Expatriation Act, which threatens to strip the citizenship of any American who is convicted of “providing material support or resources to…

A Decade of Fear: Six Questions for Michelle Shephard

Join Michelle Shephard for a conversation with Bart Gellman about A Decade of Fear at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, in Robertson Hall, on Tuesday,…

Secrecy: Making America Dumber and Less Democratic?

On Wednesday, Scott Shane wrote in the New York Times: Speaking hours after the world learned that a C.I.A. drone strike had killed Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, President Obama could…

A Snapshot from the Age of Distraction

At pollsandvotes.com, Charles Franklin takes a look at polling from the Republican presidential primary race and notes a remarkable phenomenon. On one hand, Mitt Romney is ensconced as the candidate…

The Secret Al-Awlaki Memo

The Washington Post reveals that the Obama Administration secured a legal opinion from the Justice Department stating that the president has the power to authorize a strike abroad to kill…

When Prosecution Becomes Persecution

Richard J. Oppel has just published a piece in the New York Times detailing the rising prominence of plea bargains in the U.S. criminal-justice system. In this passage, he shows…

Injudicious Judge

Earlier this week, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit let stand, by a 6–6 vote, a panel decision authorizing an ACLU suit challenging warrantless surveillance of…

Brennan Does Yemen

Deputy National Security Advisor John O. Brennen delivered an important speech at Harvard on Friday evening, in which he gave what may well be the most comprehensive presentation so far…

The 9/11 Effect

Remarks prepared by Scott Horton for The 9/11 Effect, a Harper’s Magazine panel discussion held on September 14, 2011. A decade is certainly an appropriate point for a survey. To…

Good-bye to All That

Once in a blue moon, a figure deep inside the Beltway beast leaves and says something profound and honest about the environment in which he works. One such figure is…

The Illusion of Free Markets: Six Questions for Bernard Harcourt

University of Chicago professor Bernard Harcourt is a student, but not a follower, of the Chicago School, an academic movement that has had a profound effect on America in the…

An Army in the Shadows

In Friday’s Washington Post, Greg Miller and Julie Tate published a must-read study tracing the evolution of the Central Intelligence Agency from an intelligence-collection and -analysis operation into a shadow…

Shakespeare/Morley — “O Mistress Mine”

O Mistress mine, where are you roaming? O, stay and hear; your true love’s coming, That can sing both high and low: Trip no further, pretty sweeting; Journeys end in…

Putting the Question to Dick Cheney

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has just released his memoir of the Bush years, entitled In My Time. The volume is exactly what you might expect: a full-throated defense of…

The CIA’s Censorship Machine

As we approach the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Americans will be taking measure of our government’s response to those events. To be sure, the American reaction included selflessness, dedication, and…

Solov'ëv and the Eternal Struggle with Evil

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Justice Department Rolls Snake Eyes in Alabama Gambling Trial

The Justice Department’s public-integrity section was hit with another embarrassing setback Thursday, this time from the jury in the bizarre Alabama bingo case — Justice’s highest-profile political litigation since its…

The Anatomy of Influence: Six Questions for Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom, Yale professor and celebrated literary critic, has a new book — his thirty-eighth — entitled The Anatomy of Influence. In a sense it is an updating of The…

A Setback for Obama’s War on Whistleblowers

Although President Obama campaigned on calls to respect and protect whistleblowers, no sooner did he take office than the Justice Department adopted a diametrically opposite posture. Under Eric Holder, the…

In Defense of Flogging: Six Questions for Peter Moskos

Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore policeman who now serves as a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, is disgusted with the nation’s prison system.…

The DOJ’s “Gitmo Suicides” Slam

In Al-Zahrani v. Rodriguez, relatives of two of the three Guantánamo prisoners who died under disputed circumstances on June 10, 2006 are seeking damages from Donald Rumsfeld and 23 other…

The CIA’s Secret Prison in Somalia

The Obama Administration’s recent decision to charge a Somali militant named Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame with crimes in a federal court in Manhattan has focused a good deal of attention on…

Remembering Elena Bonner

Elena Bonner, the doyenne of Russia’s human rights and democracy movement, died in Boston on June 19. Her life was full of dramatic turns and twists that uncannily mirrored those…

The DSK Case Takes More Unexpected Turns

In an interview with Spain’s El Público, I discuss the latest reversals in the case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn: Why is the District Attorney trying to secure a reduced-charge guilty plea?…

Unredacting “The Interrogator”

In June 2006, Ron Suskind’s best-selling book The One Percent Doctrine created ripples by reporting the success of a massive intelligence operation launched by the United States to cripple Al…

The Interrogator: Six Questions for Glenn Carle

A career clandestine-services officer in the CIA, Glenn Carle drew an unusual assignment in the fall of 2002. He was sent to serve as the case officer of an Afghan…

Did the Bush Administration Use the CIA to Attack a Domestic Critic?

James Risen reports in the New York Times about a White House–instigated effort to use the CIA to attack a prominent academic critic of its Middle East policies, Professor Juan…

Prosecution of NSA Whistleblower Collapses

The Obama Administration’s highly touted effort to prosecute Thomas A. Drake, a former senior National Security Agency official, for violations of the Espionage Act due to his disclosure of pervasive…

Outsourcing War and Peace: Six Questions for Laura Dickinson

Waging war and engaging in diplomacy would generally be reckoned among the most important powers of any sovereign. Yet as Laura Dickinson argues in her new book, Outsourcing War and…

No Blood, No Foul

In the period immediately following the publication in 2004 of photographs from Abu Ghraib, the Department of Defense pledged to fully investigate every allegation of prisoner mistreatment. By 2006, the…

Congress and the War Powers

When the 112th Congress convened on January 3rd, the new Republican leadership made a great show of respecting the Constitution. In the House, the text of the Constitution was read,…

Pakistan: A Hard Country: Six Questions for Anatol Lieven

Journalist turned foreign-affairs analyst Anatol Lieven has Pakistan in his bones. Descended from civil servants and officers in British India, one of whom fought in the rugged North-West Frontier, he…

The DOJ and the Ensign-Hampton Affair

Yesterday, the Senate Ethics Committee released the fruits of its long-anticipated investigation into senator John Ensign (R., Nev.), who resigned last month in order to avoid being deposed by the…

The Bin Laden Photos

President Barack Obama’s decision not to release photographs of Osama bin Laden’s corpse has been justified in practical terms, as well as in terms of military honor. “It is very…

The Mosaic Philosophy at Gitmo

On March 17, 2009, Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as Colin Powell’s right-hand at the State Department, penned a short piece for the Washington Note. “There are…

The Times’s Guantánamo Skew

Sunday evening, WikiLeaks published a number of new Guantánamo-related government documents, putting the spotlight back on detention policies at the military prison, and on the unsettled questions surrounding the deaths…

Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes

Let Observation with extensive View, Survey Mankind, from China to Peru; Remark each anxious Toil, each eager Strife, And watch the busy Scenes of crouded Life; Then say how Hope…

Barth – Standing with the Downtrodden

In diesem Zusammenhang wird es nun wichtig, daß als das Volk, dem Gott sich in seiner Gerechtigkeit als Helfer und Retter zuwendet, im Alten Testament durchweg das bedrängte, unterdrückte, recht-…

One Nation Under Contract: Six Questions for Allison Stanger

Under Ronald Reagan and each of the presidents who followed him, America went on a privatization rampage. At some point, the privatization turned increasingly to core governmental functions: railroads and…

Madison, Corporations, and the National Security State

In Citizens United, Justice Anthony Kennedy musters James Madison in support of a decision striking down congressional efforts to limit corporate electioneering. Whatever the merits of the opinion itself, Kennedy…

Public Events in Tuscaloosa and Madison

On Thursday, April 14, from 5–7 p.m., I’ll be delivering a Liberty and Power Lecture at the University of Alabama Law School in Tuscaloosa. My subject is “James Madison, Corporations,…

Tomorrow Night: Who Killed Natasha?

On Wednesday, April 13, from 6–8 p.m., please join us for a screening of “Who Killed Natasha?” at the IFC Center, 323 Sixth Avenue, in New York. The film, by…

Justice Goes to Not-War

In 2004, a group of prominent alumni of the Justice Department’s once-prestigious Office of Legal Counsel, shaken by disclosure of the torture memoranda and other evidence of unethical conduct within…

More on JSOC’s Secret Prisons in Afghanistan

In an important report for the Associated Press, Kimberley Dozier writes: “Black sites,” the secret network of jails that grew up after the Sept. 11 attacks, are gone. But suspected…

Stiglitz on the One Percent Nation

Writing in Vanity Fair, economist Joseph Stiglitz reminds us that, as crowds across the Middle East decry kleptocratic elites, a dramatic social transformation has taken place in the United States.…

Al-Shabi – To the Tyrants of the World

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Constant – The Faulty Judgment of the Powerful

Il y a dans le pouvoir quelque chose qui fausse plus ou moins le jugement. Les chances d’erreur de la force sont multipliées que celles de la faiblesse. La force…

The Supreme Court Stands Tall for Misbehaving Prosecutors

Can prosecutors press a criminal case against a man by suppressing the existence of forensic evidence that shows him to be innocent, without themselves being held accountable? “Yes,” says the…

America and the Arab Revolution of 2011

Did the Bush Doctrine help provoke the Arab Revolution of 2011? Yes. But not in the way that Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer think. My remarks to a conference at…

Capital Offense: Six Questions for Michael Hirsh

Michael Hirsh, the longtime economics correspondent for Newsweek , now serves as chief correspondent for National Journal. In his new book, Capital Offense: How Washington’s Wise Men Turned America’s Future…

Public Events at Harvard and Duke

Tomorrow, Thursday, March 24, at 5:00 p.m., I will have a public conversation with Daniel Ellsberg entitled “Wikileaks and the Pentagon Papers: Government Secrets and the Public’s Right to Know”…

Two New OLC Opinions on Warrantless Surveillance

Under cover of the quasi-war against Libya and the Japanese nuclear crisis, the Justice Department released two significant and long-outstanding Bush-era legal memoranda on Friday evening. Both deal with an…

The Justice Department’s Prison Rape Problem

The abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the mistreatment of Private Bradley Manning: cases like these grab headlines around the world. But comparable crimes that occur in civilian prisons in…

A Culture of Legal Nihilism

Last year, two Russian oligarchs, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, both nearing the end of lengthy jail terms on corruption charges, were tried and convicted a second time. Observers of…

Spy Games

In a feature at Foreign Policy, I explore in greater depth the case of Raymond A. Davis, a CIA contractor who shot and killed two Pakistanis on a motorcycle back…

Inhumanity at Quantico

Bradley Manning, an American soldier under suspicion of having leaked classified and sensitive information to WikiLeaks, has been in prison since May, 2010. His conditions of confinement are increasingly strange…

Qaddafi’s Dilemma

The Arab Revolution of 2011, still in progress, started in Tunisia, continued to Egypt, and is now being played out in Libya, the nation that separates them. Tunisia’s Zine El…

The Obstinate Dr. Heicklen

The New York Times reports on the case of Julian P. Heicklen, a 78-year-old retired chemistry professor from New Jersey, who now faces federal criminal charges. What has the mild-mannered…

Justice Cranks Up Its Covert War on Whistleblowers

As noted previously, candidate Barack Obama promised to protect whistleblowers who come forward with information disclosing government waste, abuse, and inefficiency. Unfortunately, President Obama has done exactly the opposite. Obama’s…

State Stupidities, State Secrets

In the years after 9/11, national security agencies in the United States found themselves with a lot of money to lavish on contractors. They spent tens of billions, and there…

Kill or Capture: Six Questions for Matthew Alexander

Career Air Force interrogator Matthew Alexander, who won the Bronze Star for leading a team in a series of intelligence breakthroughs in Iraq, has written a dramatic account of the…

The Strange Story of a Double Homicide in Lahore

Raymond A. Davis is a U.S. government employee or contractor now in police custody in Pakistan in connection with the shooting of two men in Lahore on January 27. The…

Obama and Egypt

In the New York Times, Helene Cooper, Mark Landler, and David E. Sanger offer a curious glimpse into the Obama Administration’s internal dialogue over Egypt. They lead with Frank Wisner’s…

The Life of Wolkenstein

Es fügt sich, do ich was von zehen jaren alt ich wolt besehen, wie die werlt wer gestalt. mit ellend, armüt mangen winkel, haiss und kalt hab ich gebawt bei…

Planck on Science’s Commitment to Truth

Sollte aber Ihr ehrliches, durch mehrfache Proben bewährtes Streben Ihnen mit Entschiedenheit besondere, von den bisherigen abweichende Wege weisen, dann—folgen Sie Ihrer eigenen Überzeugung mehr als jeder anderen. Denn diese…

Gimme Shelter: The Game’s Afoot

The Swiss Federal Council acted quickly on news that Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has resigned. Neue Zürcher Zeitung reports (my translation): The Swiss Federal Council has immediately frozen all money…

The CIA’s Culture of Impunity

What happens to a CIA agent who authorizes the torture of an innocent citizen of a NATO ally, leaving a long trail of dumb mistakes behind? The answer appears to…

The Institutionalization of Torture: Six Questions for Cherif Bassiouni

Cherif Bassiouni, a law professor at DePaul University in Chicago, was one of the key authors of the Convention Against Torture and is one of the world’s preeminent experts in…

Bush Cancels Trip to Switzerland

Former president George W. Bush was slated to speak at a gala charity event in Geneva on February 12, supporting United Israel Appeal. This weekend, a Bush spokesman announced that…

Gimme Shelter

Why is Hosni Mubarak struggling to add a few more months to a thirty-year run as president of Egypt? Part of the answer lies in the fact that deposed dictators…

Some Questions About Egypt

I spent the last week watching the developments in Egypt from London, where U.S., European, and Arab media are equally accessible. Watching them side-by-side, sometimes over many hours a day,…

Because It Is Wrong: Six Questions for Charles and Gregory Fried

Beginning with the disclosures of Abu Ghraib and continuing over a period of several years, Reagan Administration Solicitor General and Harvard law professor Charles Fried discussed the Bush Administration’s policy…

Australia Opens Probe of CIA Rendition

Mamdouh Habib, an Egyptian-born Australian citizen, traveled to Pakistan in 2001, seeking work and religious schooling for his children. On October 5, 2001, he was arrested by Pakistani police while…

Fet/Rachmaninoff – In the Mysterious Silence of the Night

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Burke on Sharia Law

On one side, your lordships have the prisoner declaring that the people have no laws, no rights, no usages, no distinctions of rank, no sense of honor, no property; in…

Boehner’s Challenge

In the current Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi offers an incendiary portrait of the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner. It opens with a blast that is typical…

Wall Street Sponsorship for the 112th Congress

The 112th Congress is the first since the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United. How has that decision—which effectively opened the gates for corporate spending in election campaigns—shaped Congress? MSNBC’s…

In Texas, 41 Exonerations from DNA Evidence in 9 Years

In a Dallas courtroom yesterday Cornelius Dupree, who had spent thirty years in prison on a conviction for rape, robbery, and abduction, was told that he had been exonerated. DNA…

Bach’s Cello Suites: Six Questions for Eric Siblin

Bach’s cello suites are among the best known works of classical music, now risking popularization to the point of fatigue as they provide background music for cat food commercials. But…

Justice Department Refuses Cooperation With Polish Prosecutors Investigating Torture at CIA Black Site

Polish prosecutors looking into the torture (including waterboarding) of prisoners held at the former CIA black site in northeastern Poland near Szymany air base turned to the U.S. Department of…

How Prosecutorial Misconduct Helps Criminals Get Off

The USA Today series on the systematic misconduct of federal prosecutors continues today, with an examination of the consequences that prosecutorial misconduct has for criminal defendants. It considers the case…

Monteverdi – Beatus vir

Beatus vir qui timet Dominum: In mandates ejus volet nimis. Potens in terra erit semen ejus Benedicetur generatio rectorum, Gloria et divitiae in domo ejus: et justitia ejus manet in…

The Legend of Meister Eckhart’s Daughter

A daughter came to the Dominican cloister and asked for Meister Eckhart. The gatekeeper said, “Who should I say is asking after him?” She said, “I don’t know.” He said,…

On Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Six Questions for Eric Metaxas

Eric Metaxas, whose best-selling biography of William Wilberforce, Amazing Grace, provided the framework for an important motion picture, is now out with a thick review of the life of Dietrich…

Rethinking Public Integrity Prosecutions

In the last month, Texas prosecutors secured a dramatic conviction of former House Republican leader Tom DeLay, and the Justice Department announced it was not going anywhere in its long-standing…

Expanding the Surveillance State

Dana Priest and William Arkin continue their “Top-Secret America” series with a review of our government’s penchant for storing more and more information about its citizens. Some of the high…

Knowing a Terrorist When You See One

Discussing the Wikileaks disclosures last week, New York Congressman Peter King urged Attorney General Eric Holder to designate the organization as a “foreign terrorist organization,” saying it “posed a clear…

The Death of Neoconservatism: Six Questions for C. Bradley Thompson

C. Bradley Thompson, a political science professor at Clemson University, has recently teamed up with Yaron Brook to write Neoconservatism: An Obiturary for an Idea, a classical-liberal critique of the…

The Hipponion Text

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Madison – The Threat of Gradual Accretions of Executive Power

If powers be necessary, apparent danger is not a sufficient reason against conceding them. He has suggested that licentiousness has seldom produced the loss of liberty; but that the tyranny…

WaPo’s Ignatius: Dreaming of the Golden Days of Black Sites and Torture

David Ignatius, recently ranked number 14 in Salon’s list of the worst opinion writers in America, has demonstrated his skills in another effort published yesterday. “If you don’t like the…

The Madrid Cables

In Spain, the WikiLeaks disclosures have dominated the news for three days now. The reporting has been led by the level-headed El País, with its nationwide competitor, Público, lagging only…

A Letter from Idil Biret

Dear Editor, In the 1970s, during a stay in Vienna for concerts, I made the acquaintance of Miraben Madeleine-Slade, the daughter of an admiral of the British Navy who had…

The El-Masri Cable

From the small mountain of diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks is now slowly putting up at their website, one significant historical document has so far gotten only scant mention. It’s dated…

The Decline and Fall of the American Republic: Six Questions for Bruce Ackerman

Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman surveys the last fifty years and sees the American presidency transformed into a potentially dangerous vehicle for political extremism and lawlessness. In his latest book,…

Unpleasant Recollections

In Berlin, on November 9th, people placed votive candles before a neighborhood synagogue. A sign in front of a busy train station reminded passersby that trains once took passengers to…

Hesiod – Pandora, Guardian of Hope

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Goethe – Friendships of Youth

Wenn wir immer vorsichtig genug wären und uns mit Freunden nur von Einer Seite verbänden, von der sie wirklich mit uns harmoniren, und ihr übriges Wesen weiter nicht in Anspruch…

Travel Warning for Book Tour

London’s Tory mayor, Boris Johnson, has some strong words of caution for former president George W. Bush: if you come to Europe to promote your book, pack heavily and be…

Karzai Charts an Independent Course?

As the United States meets with its NATO allies in Lisbon to discuss their strategy in Afghanistan, distress signals from Kabul continue to show just how troubled that strategy is.…

The Verdict on Ghailani

Yesterday a Manhattan jury convicted Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani on a charge of conspiracy to destroy government buildings and property, in connection with the East African embassy bombings of 1998. He…

Interrogators Call for the Elimination of Appendix M

In response to sharp public criticism, the Department of Defense modified its Field Manual on intelligence interrogation, (PDF) taking pains to note that many practices associated with Abu Ghraib and…

DOJ and the Nazis

Between 1979 and 2010, the U.S. Justice Department had a small band of investigators dedicated to identifying and tracking down war criminals, with a special focus on Nazis, called the…

Interrogation Nation

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate offers the smartest take so far on George W. Bush’s noncoerced confession that he authorized waterboarding and aggressively defended torture as part of his “legacy” to…

Political Justice

The New York Times sounds an appropriate note of warning about the flawed disposal of the Military Commissions case against child warrior Omar Khadr: In reaching a plea deal to…

Trakl – In Venice

Stille in nächtigem Zimmer. Silbern flackert der Leuchter Vor dem singenden Odem Des Einsamen; Zaubrisches Rosengewölk. Schwärzlicher Fliegenschwarm Verdunkelt den steinernen Raum Und es starrt von der Qual Des goldenen…

Keynes – The Unseen Power of Political Ideas

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by…

Letter from Moscow

At the end of part I of Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol presents a romantic vision of his country as it hurtles to its destiny: And you, my Russia–are you not…

Churchill’s Dark Side: Six Questions for Madhusree Mukerjee

Madhusree Mukerjee, a former editor at Scientific American and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, has published a bombshell book about Churchill’s attitudes toward India and the steps that he…

The White House, the Pentagon, and Central Asia

Following the April revolution in Kyrgyzstan, the nation’s new political leaders were virtually unanimous in one criticism of the United States: “All they care about is that air base.” The…

WaPo’s Broder: Another War Would Be Good for the Economy

On Sunday we were offered more Washington Post editorial page brilliance by David Broder. In “The War Recovery?” Broder looks beyond the looming Republican takeover of Congress to ask how…

The Washington Post and WikiLeaks

The disclosure of roughly 400,000 classified U.S. government documents by WikiLeaks at the end of last week gained prominent press play around the world. Der Spiegel carefully reviewed the data…

Corruption and U.S. Occupation

Yesterday evening, as I was on Pakistani TV’s “The Platform” with former Inter-Services Intelligence chief Gen. Asad Durrani and Colonel Michael Shuhmacher discussing private security contractors in Pakistan, Transparency International…

Standing Tall for Tyranny

The Department of Justice has persuaded the Supreme Court to take a look at Ashcroft v. Al-Kidd, in which it argues that former attorney general John Ashcroft cannot be sued…

Pushkin – The Bronze Horseman

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Grossman – Russia’s Freedom Deficit

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Aftermath: Six Questions for Nir Rosen

Most American war reporting stretches from the corridors of the Pentagon to embeds with the troops. It rarely offers a street-level view, and almost never the perspective of the civilians…

Why Holder Defends DADT

Former Bush-era Solicitor General Paul Clement, the only senior Justice official to survive when the U.S. attorneys scandal and related troubles brought down the entire senior echelon of the Gonzales…

Another Chapter in the Justice Department’s State-Secrecy Charade

ProPublica’s Dafna Linzer has an important story on a court opinion issued in the case of Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman, a man imprisoned for seven years in Guantánamo. Judge…

Inside a Secret DOD Prison in Afghanistan

In a new report (PDF) by the Open Society Institute, human-rights researcher Jonathan Horowitz contrasts the official prison system that the Pentagon has constructed in Afghanistan—where they often arrange press…

Life and Fate

In the current issue of Foreign Policy, Leon Aron has a moving essay on one of the Russian literary masterworks of the last century, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (?????…

Dante – The Curse on Those Who Do Nothing in the Face of Evil

“Maestro, che è quel ch’i’ odo? e che gent’è che par nel duol sì vinta?”. Ed elli a me: “Questo misero modo tegnon l’anime triste di coloro che visser sanza…

Aristotle – The Wisdom of Silenus

“You, most blessed and happiest among humans, may well consider those blessed and happiest who have departed this life before you, and thus you may consider it unlawful, indeed blasphemous,…

Psychologists and Torture

A former president of the American Psychological Association and the current director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, Martin Seligman is one of the field’s preeminent…

Lawfare: A Discussion with Alan Dershowitz and Scott Horton

A Kidnapping in Milan: Six Questions for Steve Hendricks

Steve Hendricks, an investigative journalist who lives in Knoxville, Tennessee and Helena, Montana, has just published A Kidnapping in Milan, his in-depth study of the botched CIA renditions operation in…

The “Ground Zero Mosque” of 1785

Friday’s New York Times offered a bit of local history courtesy of Father Kevin V. Madigan, the pastor of St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church in lower Manhattan. When St. Peter’s…

Keats – Ode to Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness! Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; To…

Burton – Conscience and Melancholy

The last and greatest cause of this malady [melancholy], is our own conscience, sense of our sins, and God’s anger justly deserved, a guilty conscience for some foul offence formerly…

Nobel Peace Prize for Liu Xiaobo

In a brave gesture sure to evoke the ire of Beijing’s octogenarian autocrats, the Nobel Prize for Peace has been awarded to the Chinese literary critic and essayist Liu Xiaobo.…

Private Security Contractors in Afghanistan Fueling the Taliban, Senate Report Concludes

The American decision to rely more heavily on contractors and to downplay the use of uniformed military in Afghanistan has led to a sharp detour in the process of nation-building,…

Compensating Victims of Torture Should Be a Two-Way Street

When American citizens are victims of torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading teatment by foreign governments, the United States sometimes presses their claims to compensation aggressively, under the Convention…

A Question of Approach

Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of State issued an unusual Europe-wide travel advisory, and U.S. counterterrorism officials, speaking off the record, were talking it up as an enormous new…

A Coda to “Casino Jack”

Alex Gibney’s new documentary, “Casino Jack and the United States of Money,” surveys the rise and fall of Jack Abramoff. Few aspects of this film are better than its coverage…

The Secret World of Extreme Militias

Bart Gellman’s cover story in the current issue of Time is essential reading. One of the premises of the post-9/11 security environment is that small bands of dedicated activists can…

The Mendacity of Hope: Six Questions for Roger D. Hodge

Former Harper’s Magazine editor Roger D. Hodge has just published what may well be the definitive critique of the Obama presidency from the left: The Mendacity of Hope: Barack Obama…

News That’s Unfit to Print: UN Report on the Flotilla Deaths

The United Nations Human Rights Council appointed an expert panel to look into the deaths resulting from the August 10 May 31 Israeli interception of a flotilla of vessels bringing…

A Footnote on Quirin

A number of readers have written asking questions about the construction I put on Ex parte Quirin in a recent post about the al-Awlaki case. Do I really believe that…

Hölderlin – Evening Fantasy

Vor seiner Hütte ruhig im Schatten sitzt Der Pflüger, dem Genügsamen raucht sein Herd. Gastfreundlich tönt dem Wanderer im Friedlichen Dorfe die Abendglocke. Wohl kehren itzt die Schiffer zum Hafen…

Mah?bh?rata – The Warrior’s Duty

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Justice After Skilling

In the Skilling (PDF) case, the Supreme Court, moved by a skeptical view of the Justice Department’s use of “honest-services theft” theories to prosecute corruption cases, sharply hemmed in the…

The President’s Power to Order the Extra-Judicial Execution of an American Citizen

When stories originally surfaced to the effect that President Obama had authorized the killing of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, my first reaction was to say that the criticism of…

No Federal Court Hearing in Camp No “Suicides” Case

Federal District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle declined a motion (PDF) to reopen a lawsuit by relatives of two of the Guantánamo prisoners who died on June 29, 2006. The Defense…

Inside C Street: Six Questions for Jeff Sharlet

Harper’s contributing editor Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to report on the Family’s C Street power base on Capitol Hill from the inside. Now he has updated his reporting…

Misconduct at DOJ: Who Pays the Bill?

USA Today continues its study of abusive federal prosecutions, reporting on the efforts of victims to recover their legal costs by relying on the Hyde Amendment, which “was intended to…

Oxford – My Mind to Me A Kingdom Is

My mind to me a kingdom is; Such perfect joy therein I find That it excels all other bliss That world affords or grows by kind. Though much I want…

Smith – The Perfection of Human Nature

The insolence and brutality of anger, in the same manner, when we indulge its fury without check or restraint, is, of all objects, the most detestable. But we admire that…

An Ethics Meltdown at the Justice Department

USA Today offers an extraordinary multi-part study of prosecutorial misconduct at the Department of Justice over the last decade, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The stories generally show prosecutors…

Our Century: A Dialogue with Helmut Schmidt and Fritz Stern (IV)

With the kind permission of C.H. Beck Verlag, former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and Columbia University historian Fritz Stern, I am pleased to present here the fourth and last in…

Eileen Nearne and the Times Torture Policy

In today’s New York Times, John Burns has a top-notch obituary for Eileen Nearne, a woman who served as a British spy in Nazi-occupied France during World War II. Nearne…

Otunbayeva, Obama to Discuss Fuel Contracts

The Washington Post scores an interview with Kyrgyz President Roza Otunbayeva in New York. Notwithstanding the immense range of problems facing her country, including unrest in the south, discussion of…

The FBI vs. Greenpeace

Did the FBI launch a surveillance program targeting anti-war groups and environmental activists during the Bush era? Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine has issued a report looking into that…

Obama and the Khadr Case

How did an ambiguous case against a child soldier from Canada that seems to frame the United States in the worst possible light wind up as the center stage opener…

Secrets in Plain Sight

Scott Shane compares an unredacted copy of Anthony Shaffer’s new book, Operation Dark Heart, with a heavily blacked-out copy approved for release by the Pentagon. Just what has the Pentagon…

Hafiz – The River of Wine

O Beloved, upon this river of wine, launch our boat-shaped cup, And into this river throw those weeping with envy, too. Winebringer, throw a cask of wine into my boat,…

Hawthorne – The Celestial Railroad

At the end of the valley, as John Bunyan mentions, is a cavern, where, in his days, dwelt two cruel giants, Pope and Pagan, who had strown the ground about…

The Obama Administration and the War on Terror: Public Event in Springfield, Mass.

On Monday, September 20, I will be delivering a talk in the Clason lecture series at Western New England School of Law, in Springfield, Massachusetts. The event will be at…

A Failing Grade for Contractor Oversight

Presidential candidate Barack Obama stated, (PDF) “We cannot win a fight for hearts and minds when we outsource critical missions to unaccountable contractors.” But there is little evidence of material…

Black Ops for Hire

The black ops department of Blackwater (now Xe Services) specializes in the sorts of operations we normally associate with the CIA’s clandestine service and the Pentagon’s JSOC. Their principal clients…

Reconsidering Nietzsche: Six Questions for Julian Young

Julian Young is a well-known scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophy. I put six questions to him about his new book, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. 1. Most books…

Operation Silence Shaffer

A fascinating new chapter in the story of the intelligence community’s obsessive secrecy is the Pentagon’s duel with St Martin’s Press over Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer’s book, Operation Dark Heart.…

State Secrecy and Official Criminality

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals split down the middle in finding (PDF) that the Justice Department was entitled to halt a civil lawsuit between private parties because of the…

Lawfare!

I’m in Cleveland, speaking at Case Western Reserve Law School’s conference on Lawfare on Friday and Saturday. The event is open to the public from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.…

The Torturer’s Reward

So what has become of those whose involvement in torture was so troubling that even a government inspector general recommended a criminal investigation? While investigations proceed apace overseas, Special Prosecutor…

America’s Corruption Policy in Central Asia in Flux

A series of recent reports highlighting conflict between the United States and local governments in Central Asia over the corruption issue has apparently led to a change in policy by…

Lying for One’s Country

Diplomacy, according to Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, is the “patriotic art of lying for one’s country.” A fine example of this comes from the U.S. Department of State’s Report to…

Rahm Emanuel’s Competence Test

Most of the controversy surrounding Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has focused on his management of policy issues. As all political advisors do, he has prioritized initiatives based…

My Trip to Al Qaeda: Six Questions for Lawrence Wright

Author Lawrence Wright has gained acclaim for his penetrating studies of Arab terrorists, from the Muslim Brotherhood to Al Qaeda. His work, regularly featured in The New Yorker, has included…

Sandburg – Psalm of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight

The policeman buys shoes slow and careful; the teamster buys gloves slow and careful; they take care of their feet and hands; they live on their feet and hands. The…

Ashoka – The Universal Elements of Religion

Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, honors both ascetics and the householders of all religions, and he honors them with gifts and honors of various kinds. But Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, does not value…

When Is Offering a Drink of Water a Crime?

Last August, I reported on the case of Walt Stanton, a graduate student at Claremont Theology School who, with a group called “No More Deaths,” deposited bottles of water at…

Misconceptions Behind the Immigrant Scare

America, we are told by breathless voices on the political right, faces a horrible crisis from illegal immigrants, particularly from Mexico. These histrionics recently helped drive Arizona legislators and Governor…

Glenn Beck’s 12-Step Plan

Writing at the Washington Post, Kathleen Parker offers some frank insights about Glenn Beck: Despite all the words spilled in evaluating Glenn Beck’s tent-less revival last weekend, the real meaning…

Seven Secrets that China Would Like to Keep

Writing at the New York Review of Books blog page, Princeton professor Perry Link enumerates the seven deadly secrets that China’s octogenarians want to keep from the public at all…

Obama’s War on Whistleblowers

As a young lawyer, Obama represented a whistleblower; as a presidential candidate, he pledged to “strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority…

Letter from Bishkek

In a typically wry observation about revolutionaries, Joseph Conrad warns the observer not to be so attached to the romantic incendiaries, the “narrow-minded fanatics” who capture the headlines when the…

Dickinson – There is Another Sky

There is another sky, Ever serene and fair, And there is another sunshine, Though it be darkness there; Never mind faded forests, Austin, Never mind silent fields – Here is…

Rolland – The Truth Behind National Exceptionalism

Toute race, tout art a son hypocrisie. Le monde se nourrit d’un peu de vérité et de beaucoup de mensonge. L’esprit humain est débile; il s’accommode mal de la vérité…

BBQ of the Century

It was the most expensive barbecue in all history, writes Berlin’s Tageszeitung today about a fete arranged by German Chancellor Angela Merkel for George W. Bush and his entourage in…

More on the CIA Paymaster in Kabul

Today’s Washington Post offers a follow-up to yesterday’s Times story about the senior Afghan national security official who is the target of a U.S. driven anti-corruption probe while being on…

The Anarchic Republic of Pakistan

The current issue of The National Interest contains Ahmed Rashid’s exhaustive and provocative essay on the current state of affairs in Pakistan. It’s a must-read for anyone trying to come…

America’s Corruption Racket in Central Asia

In another significant piece datelined Kabul, Dexter Filkins and Mark Mazzetti reveal that the man in the eye of the storm of an Afghan-American corruption scandal, Mohammed Zia Salehi—the chief…

Our Century: A Dialogue with Helmut Schmidt and Fritz Stern (III)

With the kind permission of C.H. Beck Verlag, former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and Columbia University historian Fritz Stern, we present here the third in a series of excerpts from…

Crazy Like a Foxman

Perhaps you understood that the Anti-Defamation League exists to promote tolerance. According to its website, the ADL “fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry in the U.S. and abroad through…

How Bill O’Reilly Got a Critic Fired

In 2008, Barry Nolan, then the host of a Boston-area cable television show, criticized the New England Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for its decision…

False Charges Ricochet in the War on WikiLeaks

This weekend, the controversies surrounding WikiLeaks took another strange turn. Late on Friday, the Swedish newspaper Expressen disclosed that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was the subject of an arrest warrant…

A License to Steal

In “The Forfeiture Racket,” an essay in the February issue of Reason, Radley Balko took a close look at the use of civil asset forfeiture cases. He starts with the…

The Amazing Disappearing and Reappearing CIA Torture Tapes

The Associated Press reports: The CIA has tapes of 9/11 plotter Ramzi Binalshibh being interrogated in a secret overseas prison. Discovered under a desk, the recordings could provide an unparalleled…

The Choral Fantasy

Schmeichelnd hold und lieblich klingen unsres Lebens Harmonien, und dem Schönheitssinn entschwingen Blumen sich, die ewig blühn. Fried und Freude gleiten freundlich wie der Wellen Wechselspiel. Was sich drängte rauh…

Hegel – Purpose, Results and the Philosophical Essence

Worin könnte mehr das Innere einer philosophischen Schrift angesprochen seyn, als in den Zwecken und Resultaten derselben, und wodurch diese bestimmter erkannt werden, als durch ihre Verschiedenheit von dem, was…

DOJ Pays Damages in Axion Case

In March 2007, U.S. Attorney Alice Martin charged Axion Corp., a small business in Huntsville, Alabama, with illegally giving technical drawings for a Blackhawk helicopter part to manufacturers in China.…

Prosecutorial Flim-Flam at Gitmo

The military commissions are back underway at Guantánamo, and so far the Obama Administration proceedings look an awful lot like the end-phase proceedings under Bush. The process started with the…

Greenwald on Digital Surveillance

Glenn Greenwald has a must-read essay at Cato Unbound surveying America’s governmental surveillance industry. Millions of Americans supported Barack Obama with the understanding that he would begin to rein in…

Tales from Stasiland: The letter that makes you disappear

One of the creepier weapons in the arsenal of the national-security state is the “national-security letter” or NSL. It’s no ordinary letter, and it travels postage-free, but at enormous expense…

Tony Judt’s Liberalism

NYU historian Tony Judt died last week. I knew him only vaguely as a participant at academic seminars and conferences, but over the last months I have read with complete…

In Afghanistan, A War on Corruption Falters

Experts now often talk about a “new front” in the Afghanistan war: one targeting the corruption that is causing the cost of the war effort to spiral. Although special efforts…

Kazakhgate Ends With a Whimper

The biggest Foreign Corrupt Practices Act prosecution of all time, United States v. Giffen, just fizzled out. The Associated Press reports: A businessman once accused of paying tens of millions…

Three-Card Monte at Gitmo

Here’s an AP investigative story that reveals in good detail the Bush Administration’s attitude to the law and the Supreme Court. As the Supreme Court began to take steps that…

Financing WikiLeaks

Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung takes a look at what makes WikiLeaks tick and finds that it rests on the in-kind contributions of supporters, who tend to be young computer geeks who…

The Scapegoating of General Lavelle

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama, acting on the advice of the Department of Defense, asked Congress to restore the rank and benefits of John Daniel Lavelle, an Air Force general.…

Proposition 8 Overturned

In a San Francisco courtroom yesterday, the chief judge of the federal district court, Vaughn R. Walker, handed down his long-awaited ruling in the challenge to the constitutionality of California’s…

Tales from Stasiland: The Internet Vigilantes

Champions of liberal democracy were quick to celebrate the information revolution. Authoritarian societies thrive on isolation, secrecy, and manipulation of information, they reminded us, but the global technology revolution will…

More on the CIA’s Torture Doctors

The current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association carries an important new study (sub only) by Len Rubenstein and Brigadier General Stephen Xenakis, probing more deeply into…

Neoconned

Writing at Time, Joe Klein surveys the bounty that America can now harvest from its dalliance with neoconservatism. He starts with the still highly ambiguous outcome in Iraq, and continues:…

The Importance of Being Judgmental

One of the most serious distortions of liberalism in modern American thought could be reduced to a simple, oft-repeated phrase: don’t be so judgmental. The argument is that it’s healthy…

WikiLeaks: The National-Security State Strikes Back

WikiLeaks’ disclosure of the 91,000 U.S. government documents that it labels the “Afghan War Diary” raises a number of vital issues. Most of the discussion so far has focused on…

The Party of Fiscal Irresponsibility

Two figures tightly connected with Republican economics blast their party’s rampant fiscal irresponsibility. David Stockman in a New York Times op ed: If there were such a thing as Chapter…

Founding Fathers Address Proposed Islamic Cultural Center in Lower Manhattan

On Saturday, we learned that the controversy surrounding the construction of an Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan, has, in the assessment of the newspaper of record, become the burning…

Letter from Batumi

When I last visited Batumi, the Soviet empire was in its final death throes. Nestled around a fine Black Sea harbor, Batumi had every appearance of a place that had…

More on the Latest DOJ Whitewash

As noted previously, the Justice Department’s criminal probe into the U.S. attorneys scandal ended with a “whimper not a prosecution” last week. The Department informed congressional overseers that, even though…

Our Century: A Dialogue with Helmut Schmidt and Fritz Stern (II)

With the kind permission of C.H. Beck Verlag, former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and Columbia University historian Fritz Stern, we present here the second in a series of excerpts from…

Those Slippery Fuel Contracts

At his SpyTalk blog at the Washington Post, Jeff Stein reports on why the congressional probe into the Manas fuel contracts has been stagnant. It seems that Red Star/Mina Corp.,…

Get Your Latest Kafka

No, not another report from Guantánamo. Ha’aretz reports that an Israeli court has cleared the way for the publication of a hitherto unknown work by the reclusive writer whose works…

Tales from Stasiland: Send us a FOIA request, and we’ll investigate you

During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama offered a lengthy, detailed critique of the way the Bush Administration had undermined the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). “We need more transparency in…

Another Audacious Whitewash at DOJ

The Associated Press reports that the Justice Department’s two-year-long internal criminal probe into the U.S. attorney’s scandal has closed without bringing criminal charges. As usual, the Department waits for the…

Tales from Stasiland: The policeman’s right not to be on YouTube

With the spread of phone cameras and pocket videorecorders, citizens around the United States have taken to recording the conduct of police. Often the conduct seems innocuous enough. But sometimes,…

Non, je ne regrette rien

Strike up the band and bring on Edith Piaf: we now have Jay Bybee’s theme song. The former White House counsel who headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel…

Top-Secret America

In the midst of a press season focused on moronic political banter (lately including analyses of the twitter feed of a certain former governor), it’s good to see the Washington…

From the Department of Pre-Crime

Here’s some news that Phillip K. Dick could work into a novel: The lower house of the Russian Parliament passed a draft law on Friday allowing the country’s intelligence service…

Bill Keller’s Political Correctness

The man who authored the New York Times’s doublespeak standards on torture, Bill Keller, responded recently to the Harvard University study of his paper’s use of the word “torture” with…

Tchaikovsky/Khomyakov – Heroism

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Tolstoy – The Human River

???? ?? ????? ??????? ? ???????????????? ???????? ??, ??? ?????? ??????? ????? ???? ???? ???????????? ????????, ??? ?????? ??????? ??????, ????, ?????, ??????, ??????????, ????????? ? ?. ?. ???? ??…

Kazakhgate Limps Along

James P. Giffen, who has been at the center of the most significant case ever brought under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for a decade now—the so-called “Kazakhgate” scandal—heads back…

None of Us Were Like This Before: Six Questions for Joshua Phillips

Earlier this year, Joshua Phillips received the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for his 2008 American Radio Works documentary What Killed Sergeant Gray. Now he’s developed that story in a…

Britain Investigates Torture

For the past three years, British courts have led the press for a comprehensive investigation of British intelligence involvement in CIA torture programs. In case after case, judges rejected the…

Gitmo Shrinks Face License Challenge

In a comprehensive recent study, Physicians for Human Rights alleges that healthcare professionals experimented on human subjects in order to hone the torture techniques authorized by the Bush Administration. The…

The Case Against Kissinger Deepens, Continued

As I noted earlier, Christopher Hitchens’s two-part 2001 article, “The Case Against Kissinger,” built a strong though circumstantial case connecting Henry Kissinger to a series of assassinations in Chile around…

Another Habeas Defeat for Holder’s Justice Department

As the Guantánamo prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions wind their way through the courts, the Obama and Bush Administrations have scored remarkably few victories—and many of them have come from the…

Blake – America, a Prophecy

Preludium The shadowy daughter of Urthona stood before red Orc. When fourteen suns had faintly journey’d o’er his dark abode; His food she brought in iron baskets, his drink in…

Kennedy – The Ripple of Hope

[M]any of the world’s great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended…

Dalrymple’s Glum Forecast on Afghanistan

Writing in the New Statesman, British historian William Dalrymple offers a disturbing take on the current prospects for the U.S.-led NATO operations in Afghanistan: nearly ten years on from Nato’s…

Judiciary Committee Winners and Losers

Elena Kagan ended her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. The hearings have followed the predictable pattern: it’s been a game of dodgeball in which the nominee establishes a…

The ‘Torture’ Hypocrisy of the New York Times

Has the newspaper of record adopted a double standard for torture techniques—using the “t”-word when the techniques are applied by other nations, but using more evasive characterizations when agents of…

Britain Moves Forward on Torture Probe

The new Conservative-Liberal Democrat government in Britain moves forward on its pledge to investigate and hold accountable those in government service who were involved with torture. Most published accounts containing…

Patrick Fitzgerald, Torture Prosecutor?

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald can claim an important victory. The Associated Press reports: A decorated former Chicago police lieutenant accused of suffocating, shocking and beating confessions out of scores of…

Siegelman Conviction Vacated by Supreme Court

The Supreme Court has just handed down an order vacating the conviction of former Alabama Governor Don E. Siegelman for honest-services fraud and referring the case for review by the…

The Thurgood Marshall Nomination

As Elena Kagan noted in a book review she penned for the University of Chicago Law Review, (PDF) Supreme Court confirmation hearings usually succeed in disclosing very little about the…

Heym – War

Aufgestanden ist er, welcher lange schlief, Aufgestanden unten aus Gewölben tief. In der Dämmrung steht er, groß und unerkannt, Und den Mond zerdrückt er in der schwarzen Hand. In den…

Pestalozzi – Humanity’s Inner Truth

Im innen meiner Natur ist Aufschluß zu dieser Wahrheit. Alle Menschlichkeit ist in ihrem Wesen sich gleich und hat zu ihrer Befriedigung nur eine Bahn. Darum wird die Wahrheit, die…

A Letter from Accra

I’m not proposing to replace or second-guess Ken Silverstein’s commentaries on the World Cup, but when the U.S. team faces the Ghana Black Stars tomorrow afternoon, I’ll find it impossible…

Rethinking the Afghan Strategy

With the change in command in Kabul, is it time to reexamine the strategies being applied? It seems widely understood that the Obama Administration does not intend to make a…

Obama, Medvedev and the Crisis in Osh

Two thousand people murdered, a half million left homeless—that’s the bottom line following a week of horrendous terrorist violence in Kyrgyzstan. The nation has given both the United States and…

Auden—September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over…

Our Century: A Dialogue with Helmut Schmidt and Fritz Stern (I)

With the kind permission of C.H. Beck Verlag, former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and Columbia University historian Fritz Stern, I am pleased to present here the first in a series…

DeGaulle in Ankara

With his column in yesterday’s Times (“Letter from Istanbul”), Tom Friedman predictably joins the growing chorus of critics of Turkey, led by Walter Russell Mead. Not coincidentally, this is the…

The Justice Department and the Torture of Maher Arar

Yesterday the Supreme Court declined to review the Maher Arar case, leaving in place a reprehensible Second Circuit decision that proclaims the immunity of American government officials even in the…

The Long Road to Justice for the Victims of “Bloody Sunday”

On the bright and sunny Sunday afternoon of January 30, 1972, British paratroopers, using high-velocity self-loading rifles, fired at a number of civilians in the Bogside area of Londonderry, killing…

Blackwater’s Prince Moving to the Emirates?

Jeremy Scahill reports that the reclusive Blackwater owner, Erik Prince, has travel plans on his horizon. Sources close to Blackwater and its secretive owner Erik Prince claim that the embattled…

Mossad Agent Arrested in Poland

The Associated Press reports: An alleged Mossad spy from Israel wanted in connection with the hit-squad slaying of a Hamas agent in Dubai has been arrested in Poland, officials said…

Five New Orleans Policemen Indicted

Sometimes—though certainly rarely–solid investigative journalism catches the attention of law enforcement authorities and leads to justice. A remarkable case comes out of New Orleans this week. The New York Times…

The Saudi Arabia of Lithium

The New York Times reports: The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter…

Tragedy in Osh

I discuss the latest developments from Osh, where inter-ethnic violence has claimed nearly 120 lives and is leading to the displacement of thousands, in an interview with DemocracyNow’s Amy Goodman…

Heine/Schumann – Im wunderschönen Monat Mai

Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, Als alle Knospen sprangen, Da ist in meinem Herzen Die Liebe aufgegangen. Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, Als alle Vögel sangen, Da hab’ ich ihr gestanden Mein…

Leibniz – The Radical Origin of Things

Picturam pulcherrimam intueamur, hanc totam tegamus demta exigua particula, quid aliud in hac apparebit, etiamsi penitissime intueare, imo quanto magis intuebere de propinquo, quam confusa quædam congeries colorum sine delectu,…

Genocide Convictions at The Hague

Marlise Simons at the New York Times reports: Judges at The Hague handed down two rare genocide convictions on Thursday, sentencing two security officers for the Bosnian Serb Army to…

Dawn Johnsen on the Appointments Dilemma

Indiana law professor Dawn Johnsen, who recently asked that her nomination to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy be withdrawn after it languished for more than a year,…

Thiessen’s Heroes

A recent post at the AEI website gives us another glimpse into the mind of Marc Thiessen, the Cheney family publicist. He notes a story running in the Washington Post…

Rules for Drone Wars: Six Questions for Philip Alston

Last week the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, NYU law professor Philip G. Alston, issued a study on targeted killings in which he exhaustively reviewed…

Turkey Basting

In a piece up at the American Interest, “Terrible Twins: Turkey, Brazil and the Future of American Foreign Policy,” Walter Russell Mead takes aim at the government of Recep Erdo?an…

Bush-era CIA Human Experimentation Program Revealed

New York Times reporter James Risen: Medical professionals who were involved in the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogations of terrorism suspects engaged in forms of human research and experimentation in violation…

Tagore – The Angel Child

Let your life come amongst them like a flame of light, my child, unflickering and pure, and delight them into silence. They are cruel in their greed and their envy,…

Tagore – Decline of the Complete Man

[W]hat I have to say about the nation has more to do with the history of Man… This issue has come to a stage when the moral man, the complete…

Politics and Justice in Ingushetia

Kudos to New York Times reporter Ellen Barry for bringing us the story of Magomed Yevloyev, a young gadfly intent on exposing corruption in the North Caucasus who was rewarded…

George W. Bush, Torture President

Last week we learned from an interview with former Argentine president Néstor Kirchner that former president George W. Bush touted war as a cure to a nation’s economic ills. Bush…

A Dangerous Rogue State

Stephen Kinzer: Quick, name the rogue state in the Middle East. Hints: It has an active nuclear-weapons program but conducts it in secret; its security organs regularly kill perceived enemies…

At What Cost Intelligence?

In an article just out in Military Review, (PDF) Major Douglas Pryer describes the struggle of the TF 1AD, an elite military intelligence unit serving in Iraq, with Bush-era torture…

Not for Profit: Six Questions for Martha Nussbaum

Is America making a mistake by orienting its education system towards national economic gain? In her new book, Not for Profit, University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes the case…

Public Event: U.S.-Kyrgyz Relations

You are cordially invited to attend a guest presentation The Manas Fuel Contracts and U.S.-Kyrgyz Relations By Scott Horton, Contributing Editor, Harper’s Magazine on Wednesday, June 2, 2010, at 16.00…

Sandburg – Lost

Desolate and lone All night long on the lake Where fog trails and mist creeps, The whistle of a boat Calls and cries unendingly, Like some lost child In tears…

Bruchmann/Schubert – Am See

In des Sees Wogenspiele Fallen durch den Sonnenschein Sterne, ach, gar viele, viele, Flammend leuchtend stets hinein. Wenn der Mensch zum See geworden, In der Seele Wogenspiele Fallen aus des…

Babur’s Inscription

With the hot weather came the news that Shaibaq Khan was coming up into Ura-Tyube. Consequently, as the land is level about Dikhkat, we crossed the Ab-burdan pass into the…

George W. Bush, War President

In a February 7, 2004 interview with NBC’s Tim Russert, George W. Bush said: I’m a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign-policy matters with…

The Obama-Gates Department of Detentions

The White House has released its 52-page National Security Strategy (PDF). If you saw President Obama’s West Point speech, you already know the highlights of this policy, and it’s unsurprising…

Freedom Watch Interview

Here’s my appearance last night on Fox News’s Freedom Watch with Judge Andrew Napolitano, in which I discuss the Guantánamo “suicides:”…

Silencing the Lawyers

A total of 779 prisoners have been held in Guantánamo in connection with the war on terror. Five hundred seventy-nine were released, most by the Bush Administration, a quiet recognition…

Central Asian Democracy

Is Central Asian democracy an oxymoron? That’s the question posed by Bakyt Abdrisaev and Alexey Semyonov in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. They talk about the deeply rooted authoritarianism in the…

The Khadr Boomerang

In the military commissions prosecution of the Canadian child warrior Omar Khadr, the United States charges murder and attempted murder in violation of the laws of war, in connection with…

A Judge Takes on Sentencing Guidelines

In theory, federal sentencing guidelines are supposed to insure the observance of nationwide standards in sentencing persons convicted of serious crimes. In practice, they are a nightmare requiring absurdly harsh…

American History, Texas Style

Wondering what kind of country the Tea Party would create? Texas offers us a glimpse. Governor Rick Perry, who just put down a challenge from establishment Republican candidate Kay Bailey…

Shakespeare – Sonnet 138

When my love sweares that she is made of truth, I do beleeue her (though I know she lies) That she might thinke me some vntutor’d youth, Vnskilful in the…

Montesquieu – Tyranny in the Shadow of the Law

Il n’y a point de plus cruelle tyrannie que celle que l’on exerce à l’ombre des lois et avec les couleurs de la justice: lorsqu’on va, pour ainsi dire, noyer…

Afghanistan: Six Questions for Thomas Barfield

Boston University anthropology professor Thomas Barfield is one of America’s foremost authorities on Afghanistan, a country he first visited over forty years ago as a student. He has just published…

New U.K. Government Opens Formal Torture Inquiry

How does a newly elected government concerned about civil liberties and the accountability of its predecessor react to credible claims that intelligence operatives were involved in the torture of prisoners?…

The Texas Death Penalty Express

The New York Times‘s Adam Liptak brings us another exhibit in the geek show that is the Texas criminal justice system: a criminal defense attorney named Jerry Guerinot, whom Texas…

New York Times 0, Richard Blumenthal 0

Back in the 2008 campaign, the New York Times rushed out a breathless article that insinuated, without ever making the clear charge, that the Republican presidential candidate had an improper…

Still Crazier in Alabama

Political ads from Alabama have been getting national attention in recent days. Some of their features: violent language, brandishing of firearms, criminalization of adversaries. A good example is this ad…

Trotsky Proclaims New York Center of the World!

In this rare footage from 1932, Leon Trotsky, then in exile in Copenhagen, announces the end of European world power and declares New York the new center of the world:…

Outsourcing Battlefield Intelligence Gathering

Many of the worst-kept secrets surrounding the current war in the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands have to do with how the United States wages drone warfare. One striking aspect of this venture…

Deepwater Horizon Springs Another Leak

The massive ecological disaster of the Deepwater Horizon oil well offers a good opportunity to study how the petroleum industry avoids its obligations to society in the name of profit.…

DIA and the Black Jail at Bagram

Marc Ambinder reports that the secret prison at the periphery of Bagram is actually operated by the Defense Intelligence Agency: The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) runs a classified interrogation facility…

Beinart Looks at AIPAC’s Leadership Failure

In the New York Review of Books, Peter Beinart gives a not-to-be-missed account of how the Jewish establishment (particularly AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations)…

Spain’s New Civil War

Spain’s judicial oversight body suspended Judge Baltasar Garzón as he prepares to stand trial on charges of disregarding the amnesty law shielding crimes of the Franco era from investigation. The…

APA’s Unpredictable Past

Stanford historian Robert Conquest was fond of saying that the Soviet Union was the only nation in human history with a completely unpredictable past. Legions were employed in carefully scrubbing…

Baudelaire – Harmonie du soir

Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige Chaque fleur s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir; Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir; Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!…

Benjamin – History and the State of Exception

Die Tradition der Unterdrückten belehrt uns darüber, daß der „Ausnahmezustand“, in dem wir leben, die Regel ist. Wir müssen zu einem Begriff der Geschichte kommen, der dem entspricht. Dann wird…

Jeff Sessions’s Constitution

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III of Alabama serves as ranking member of the Judiciary Committee. In that position he is the potential leader of the opposition to judicial candidates, including recent…

Is Reason Winning the War on Drugs?

Libertarians argue that the criminalization of recreational drugs like marijuana cannot be justified in a society that legalizes alcohol and tobacco and relies extravagantly on commercial pharmaceuticals. They also argue…

Arrest of 13 CIA Agents Sought in Spain

Prosecutors attached to the Audiencia Nacional in Madrid are reportedly requesting that Judge Ismael Moreno issue an order for the arrest of thirteen CIA agents involved in an extraordinary rendition…

Obama’s Black Sites

On January 22, 2009, Barack Obama signed an executive order that closed all CIA-operated black sites. The text of the order was carefully drawn, and the shutdown was limited to…

Holder Proposes a Legislated Change to Miranda

In an appearance on ABC’s This Week, Attorney General Eric Holder proposed that Congress legislatively authorize an exception to the Miranda rule: “The [Miranda] system we have in place has…

Barrett Browning – Sabbath Morning at Sea

The ship went on with solemn face; To meet the darkness on the deep, The solemn ship went onward. I bowed down weary in the place; for parting tears and…

Melville – What the Whale Teaches Us

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding…

The End of the Free Market: Six Questions for Ian Bremmer

Ian Bremmer is one of Wall Street’s leading political risk analysts and consultants and the president of Eurasia Group. In his new book, The End of the Free Market, he…

Press Censorship at Guantánamo

The Gates Pentagon has decided to ban four journalists from covering the Guantánamo proceedings. The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein reports: The Pentagon said they were expelling the reporters because they…

Fear Itself

Senator Joseph Lieberman has developed a knack for craven fearmongering. His latest proposal was born from the police operation by New York’s finest that led to the capture of Faisal…

U.S. Seizes Alleged Perpetrators of Massacre in Guatemala

A special unit of the Department of Homeland Security dedicated to identifying and seizing alleged war criminals has claimed an important victory. Over the past few days, three immigrants from…

Did Prince Spill the Beans on Blackwater’s Pakistan Ops?

On his new blog at The Nation, Jeremy Scahill continues his relentless tracking of Blackwater Worldwide (now Xe Services LLC) and its owner, automotive-parts heir Erik Prince. Recently he reported…

Building Democracy With Ballots, Not Bullets

In an op-ed in today’s Christian Science Monitor, Kathleen Collins looks at the developments in Kyrgyzstan and offers the Obama Administration some sage advice: Maintaining stability while pursuing a democratic…

When Prosecutors Run Amok

For the second time in the history of our republic, we face a public crisis of confidence in federal prosecutors, prompted by a flood of cases of misconduct and the…

Secrecy, Torture, and the Common Law

Much of the debate about possible trials of Guantánamo prisoners in a federal court and much of the struggle in proceedings at Guantánamo has a dark subtext. The Obama Administration…

The Trouble with Drones

Dean Harold Koh recently offered a spirited defense of the Obama Administration’s heavy reliance on Predator drones in the course of speech at the American Society of International Law. “There…

Michelangelo – Painting the Sistine Chapel

In this hard toil I’ve such a goiter grown, Like cats that water drink in Lombardy, (Or wheresoever else the place may be) That chin and belly meet perforce in…

Cicero – The Duties of Government Officials

Omnino qui rei publicæ præfuturi sunt duo Platonis præcepta teneant: unum, ut utilitatem civium sic tueantur, ut quæcumque agunt, ad eam referant obliti commodorum suorum, alterum, ut totum corpus rei…

“I Challenge Marc Thiessen”: Six Questions for Malcolm Nance

An Arabic-speaking counterterrorism expert and a combat veteran with twenty-eight years of operational experience in the Middle East, Malcolm Nance has now published a sweeping new strategic proposal for engaging…

The Trail from a Murder in Vienna Leads to the President of Chechnya

The New York Times’s C.J. Chivers reports that Austrian prosecutors have linked the Kremlin-backed president of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, to the assassination of Umar Israilov, a political opponent in Vienna…

Justice Department Subpoenas Times Reporter

Charlie Savage at the New York Times reports: The Obama administration is seeking to compel a writer to testify about his confidential sources for a 2006 book about the Central…

Lessons from the Failed Nomination of Dawn Johnsen

Two weeks ago, the Obama Administration gave up its efforts to appoint Dawn Johnsen as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel. The story received only…

Clueless at the Pentagon

It’s hard to study the situation in Kyrgyzstan and not come away with the sense that the Pentagon and CENTCOM horribly misplayed the strong hand they had. The result: a…

Your Papers, Please!

Arizona’s unelected Governor, Jan Brewer, has signed into law a measure that makes it “a state crime for illegal immigrants to not have an alien registration document,” and requires police…

Frum on NRO’s Circular Firing Squad

William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review was the intellectual bastion of Catholic-leaning conservatism in America, filled with well-written prose, a love of literature, and a critical take on G.O.P. politics.…

New Afghan Strategies Put to the Test

General Stanley McChrystal is putting his mark on the American and NATO effort in Afghanistan. His major new strategic effort includes a focal attempt to “roll up” the Taliban leadership…

Stevens – Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Not less because in purple I descended The western day through what you called The loneliest air, not less was I myself. What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?…

Goethe – The Star of Hope

Von dem Geschick des Königs-Hauses scheint Sie tief gerührt. Wer sie auch immer sei, So hat sie selbst den König wohl gekannt Und ist, zu unserm Glück, aus hohem Hause…

Convicted Former Argentine President Sentenced to 25 Years

Reynaldo Bignone served as Argentina’s head of state from 1982-83. He was involved in the military coup d’état that brought down Isabel Perón in 1976. Together with a number of…

Corrupt U.S. Contracts and the Revolution in Kyrgyzstan

A public perception of massive corruption concerning U.S. Department of Defense fuel-supply contracts has now helped bring down the government of Kyrgyzstan twice–in 2005, and again two weeks ago. Was…

The Law of Armed Conflict: Six Questions for Gary Solis

Cambridge University Press has just issued Gary Solis’s The Law of Armed Conflict, a comprehensive and current treatment of one of the most controversial legal topics. Solis teaches at Georgetown…

Department of Political Seismology

One of the many views that Rush Limbaugh shares with the Iranian mullahs is his firm belief that natural disasters can be attributed to political or social developments. In his…

Blackwater’s Legal Woes Mount

It billed itself as the nation’s premier private security contractor, but now Blackwater Worldwide (redubbed Xe Services) faces cascading legal worries that reach into its executive offices. James Risen and…

García Lorca – The Seawater Ballad

El mar sonríe a lo lejos. Dientes de espuma, labios de cielo. ¿Qué vendes, oh joven turbia con los senos al aire? Vendo, señor, el agua de los mares. ¿Qué…

Brecht – Change the World!

Mit wem säße der Rechtliche nicht zusammen Dem Recht zu helfen? Welche Medizin schmeckte zu schlecht Dem Sterbenden? Welche Niedrigkeit begingest du nicht, um Die Niedrigkeit auszutilgen? Könntest du die…

The Poet, the Judge, and the Falangists

Federico García Lorca, perhaps Spain’s greatest poet, died under murky circumstances on August 19, 1936. It’s assumed that his republican sentiments angered the Falangist (fascist) leaders then asserting their power…

Destruction of CIA Tapes: Did Goss Approve?

Former CIA operative turned novelist Barry Eisler is fond of pointing out the well-honed tactics developed by the CIA for dealing with bad news. As he notes in his forthcoming…

Public Event: Kyrgyzstan’s Second Revolution

“Behind Kyrgyzstan’s Second Revolution” Guest Lecture by Scott Horton Contributing Editor, Harper’s Magazine Thursday, April 15, 2010, 6:00 p.m. Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York Olin Hall, Room 202 For more…

Wild Things

By far the best piece in the U.S. media on the developments in Kyrgyzstan is Eugene Huskey’s article at Salon. I was struck by the remark of one Kyrgyz activist…

The Case Against Kissinger Deepens

On September 21, 1976, agents of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet placed a bomb in a car in Washington, D.C., used by Chile’s former ambassador, Orlando Letelier. When detonated later that…

Hardy – Lines to a Movement

Show me again the time When in the Junetide’s prime We flew by meads and mountains northerly! – Yea, to such freshness, fairness, fulness, fineness, freeness, Love lures life on.…

Conrad – The Problem with Revolutionaries

In a real revolution–not a simple dynastic change or a mere reform of institutions–in a real revolution the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls…

Neoconfederate History Month

Ed Kilgore has an intriguing take on the recent flap over Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s proclamation of “Confederate History Month.” [A]s a white southerner old enough to remember the final…

Inside Central Asia: Six Questions for Dilip Hiro

With unrest and another revolution in Kyrgyzstan, the Central Asian region is back in the news. I put six questions to Dilip Hiro, one of the region’s most prominent observers,…

Did Bush Know Guantánamo Prisoners Were Innocent?

Bush Administration officials, starting with President Bush himself, routinely vilified the prisoners held at Guantánamo as the “worst of the worst.” Yet they knew that the great majority of these…

In Kyrgyzstan the Tulips Turn Blood Red

The tulips are pushing up, so it must be time for more political tremors in the home of the “Tulip Revolution,” the mountainous Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan. Yesterday demonstrators…

Death in the Salt Pit

The AP’s Kathy Gannon and Adam Goldman expand their coverage of the death of Gul Rahman in CIA custody in November 2002. They reveal a bit more about who Rahman…

Possible Video Emerges of 2007 Baghdad Killings

In 2007, two Reuters employees — photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver Saeed Chmagh — were killed by a U.S. helicopter strike in Baghdad. The U.S. military issued an official statement…

Military Admits Deception in February Afghan Incident

In “The Trouble with Embeds,” I discussed Jerome Starkey’s reporting on the deaths of three Afghan women in a raid that occurred on February 12. NATO public affairs officers described…

The Ghost of Diem

With the war in Afghanistan and on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border now clearly taking center stage in Obama’s foreign policy, Afghan President Hamid Karzai is suddenly a major embarrassment. In a…

Herbert – Easter

Rise heart ; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise Without delayes, Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise With him mayst rise : That, as his death…

Descartes – The Chain of Reason

Ces longues chaînes de raisons, toutes simples et faciles, dont les géomètres ont coutume de se servir pour parvenir à leurs plus difficiles démonstrations, m’avaient donné occasion de m’imaginer que…

Disappearing Act

On Monday, in a post entitled “Inside the Salt Pit,” I noted that the identity of the CIA agent who managed the Salt Pit at the time of Gul Rahman’s…

Rapp Revisited

After giving a painfully unconvincing speech in Geneva on the subject of complementarity, U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes Stephen J. Rapp made an appearance on CNN with Christine Amanpour. To…

A Third District Court Finds Bush Administration Engaged in Illegal Surveillance

Can the federal government engage in surveillance of U.S. citizens without a warrant, without consequences, despite the Fourth Amendment and the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act? The Bush Administration concluded this…

Thursday Lamentations

“One evening I went to a concert, hoping against hope that the music might revive me; but it did not work, the whole concert bored me—until the last piece was…

Media Alert

Readers Downunder can listen to Harper’s contributing editor Scott Horton and Sergeant Joe Hickman discuss the Guantánamo “suicides” on ABC’s Late Night Live, 10 p.m. Sydney time. Catch the entire…

An Iranian Nuclear Defector

Last October, in “When Fact Is Stranger Than Fiction,” I pointed to stories about the disappearance of an Iranian nuclear scientist. I noted that the episode sounded just like the…

Pontifex Maximus Claims Head-of-State Immunity

I spent the last two weeks in Europe, where the Catholic Church’s child-abuse scandals in Ireland and Germany were continuously grabbing headlines. Returning home, I see comparable stories being played…

Steve Kappes, Profiled

Leon Panetta’s number two, and by all accounts the man who really runs the day-to-day operations at CIA, Steve Kappes, is profiled in an extraordinary piece by Jeff Stein in…

The President’s Lawyer

Last week, Anne Kornblut profiled White House counsel Robert Bauer for the Washington Post, in generally flattering terms: For Bauer, whose expertise is elections law, health care may be among…

Sarkozy at Columbia

French President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke at Columbia University this morning, and he delivered some words that seemed much in line with things I heard over the last two weeks in…

What Does the Dreyfus Affair Mean Today?

In a superior review essay in the weekend’s Financial Times, Donald Morrison considers the historical shadow of the affaire Dreyfus. Of the defining role of this scandal in modern French…

Rift in Obama Counterterrorism Policy?

The New York Times’s Charlie Savage attempts to chart the policy differences inside the Obama camp and between Obama lawyers and career legal staff on issues relating to counterterrorism policy.…

Slahi: Another Habeas Defeat for the Justice Department

On March 22, Judge James Robertson, reviewing the habeas corpus petition of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, concluded that the United States had failed to produce sufficient evidence to justify his detention.…

Inside the Salt Pit

What does the Justice Department do when a prisoner dies as the direct result of a Justice Department-approved torture technique? The question presents a direct challenge to the integrity of…

Nietzsche – Ecce Homo

Ja! Ich weiß, woher ich stamme! Ungesättigt gleich der Flamme Glühe und verzehr’ ich mich. Licht wird alles, was ich fasse, Kohle alles, was ich lasse: Flamme bin ich sicherlich.…

Nietzsche – Cowardice in the Face of Reality

Es gibt eine reichsdeutsche Geschichtsschreibung, es gibt, fürchte ich, selbst eine antisemitische, – es gibt eine Hof-Geschichtsschreibung und Herr von Treitschke schämt sich nicht… Jüngst machte ein Idioten-Urteil in historicis,…

Why We Need a Torture Commission

At Foreign Policy, UCLA law professor David Kaye writes that, in the light of the Justice Department’s OPR report, the case for a commission to review the failure in the…

What Frum’s Firing Tells Us About Politics Today

I’ve previously suggested that, in terms of tactics, I see the G.O.P. diverging into two main tendencies. One is Karl Rove’s G.O.P., in which short-term partisan gain trumps all other…

Germany’s Secret Military Assistance to Uzbekistan Revealed

While Ken Silverstein reports on the Pentagon’s hushed dealings with the brutal dictatorship in Uzbekistan, Germany has a scandal of its own with a potentially wider scope. In June 2006,…

CIA Attacks the John Adams Project

Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball report that Attorney General Eric Holder has tapped Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. Attorney in Chicago, to manage a special investigation into complaints by the…

The Trouble With Embeds

Embedded journalists operate under the terms imposed on them by their hosts, which may—for entirely understandable reasons, starting with operational security—restrict their ability to report on certain operations, weapons systems,…

Talking To Terrorists: Six Questions for Mark Perry

Mark Perry is a journalist and author who focuses on the military and the intelligence community and particularly on their engagement with the Middle East. I put six questions to…

The CIA’s Failed Al Qaeda Recruitment

Has American intelligence had any success in penetrating Al Qaeda cells? What efforts has it made to recruit Al Qaeda members to learn about the organization’s inside workings? Those questions…

The Alternate Reality of Marc Thiessen

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer takes a close look at Marc Thiessen’s book, Courting Disaster, and finds polemics but not much truth. “Thiessen is better at conveying fear,” she concludes,…

Wordsworth – Intimations of Immortality

Then sing, ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song! And let the young lambs bound As to the tabor’s sound! We in thought will join your throng, Ye that pipe…

Grotius – Conscience and Judgment

We should keep in mind that a proposed course of action may in itself be lawful, but the actor contemplating it should weigh first all the circumstances. He might conclude…

The Pentagon Loses a Skirmish with WikiLeaks

What does the Pentagon have in common with North Korea, China, Zimbabwe, and a number of private Swiss banks? They all feel threatened by WikiLeaks, the Internet service that offers…

Glenn Beck, Explained

In his best send-up of Glenn Beck so far, Jon Stewart probes what it means to be a Conservative Libertarian: The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p…

The Trouble with Contractors

Blackwater, International Media Ventures (IMV), and International Security Corporation are certainly not the only contractors engaged to perform sensitive missions inside the Afghanistan-Pakistan border zone. At least a half dozen…

Is International Law Really Law? Six Questions for Michael Scharf

Neoconservative legal scholars and their allies argue aggressively that international law isn’t really law because the nations who make it–through treaties and conventions and by practice–don’t really treat it as…

Jason Bourne Does Waziristan

Last week, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of Britain’s MI5, said her U.S. counterparts acted as if they took their cue from having watched Fox’s “24” program. But today…

“This is Starting to Get Dangerous”

Last week, Vice President Joe Biden was publicly slapped in the face by the Netanyahu government during his trip to Jerusalem. The Israeli government used the occasion to announce the…

Solon – Fragment 4

??????? ?? ????? ???? ??? ???? ?????? ??????? ????? ??? ??????? ???? ??????? ????????: ???? ??? ????????? ????????? ??????????? ?????? ??????? ?????? ??????? ????: ????? ?? ???????? ??????? ????? ??????????…

Schumpeter–Standing for Convictions in a Democracy

No more than any other political method does democracy always produce the same results or promote the same interests or ideals. Rational allegiance to it thus presupposes not only a…

Controlling the Brand

Consider this passage from today’s New York Times report on the rise and fall of Obama social secretary Desirée Rogers (my italics): Long before the State Dinner party crashers and…

Lawfare Redux

As the recent attacks by Liz Cheney and her organization demonstrate, “lawfare” as a subject is not going to disappear anytime soon. Lawyers simply make too inviting targets–even when they’re…

Is Torture a Leading U.S. Export?

How did Bush-era torture policies affect our allies in the war on terror? Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former director of MI5, made stinging remarks yesterday suggesting that the torture dilemma…

Roberts’s Rules

Chief Justice John Roberts embodies the values of the Court he heads. And public opinion polling shows that those values don’t sit well with most Americans. In Roberts’s world, law…

Unfair to Bradbury?

David Cole, reviewing the Department of Justice ethics reports on the torture lawyers, says that the almost exclusive focus on John Yoo and Jay Bybee is inappropriate. The report lets…

Outed Al Qaeda Lawyer Fesses Up

Air Force Lieutenant Colonel David Frakt, a JAG defense counsel who has been representing Gitmo prisoners, having been outed by Liz Cheney, confesses at Salon that he’s working for Al…

The Alternate Reality of Karl Rove

It’s not surprising—indeed, it’s even somewhat admirable—that Karl Rove’s new book focuses on burnishing the reputation of his boss, George W. Bush. The 608-page book covers a lot of turf,…

Thiessen and the “Al Qaeda Lawyers”

Former Bush Administration speechwriter Marc Thiessen used his space at the Washington Post to defend the McCarthyite smear campaign that Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol have launched against a group…

Waterboarding for Dummies

At Salon, Mark Benjamin reviews a cache of internal CIA documents giving directions on how to waterboard prisoners: Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned…

Incompetent McCarthyism and Shared Beliefs

Back in 2008, Michael Goldfarb and others on the right tried a typically McCarthyite tactic against candidate Barack Obama. Obama was assailed for a supposed relationship with Columbia University professor…

Kapsberger – Che fai tu

Che fai tu, vita mia, che fai tu lontan da me? Che fai tu, chi ti desvia? Torna, ahi, volgi il piè, Toma mia com’eri pria! Che fai tu, vita…

Solon – Doing the Right Thing

?? ?????? ???? ?????????? ????? ???? ?? ??????, ?? ??????? ??????? ?? ?????? ??? ?? ?? ????????? ???? ????????? ?? ??????? ??????????????, ???? ??????? ???? ?? ?????? ??? ?????????? ?????????…

Rahm’s Masterstroke

Meet Barack Obama’s new attorney general: Rahm Emanuel. The Associated Press reports: In a potential reversal, White House advisers are close to recommending that President Barack Obama opt for military…

The Bloody White Baron: Six Questions for James Palmer

James Palmer, a British writer who lives in Beijing and has a fascination for all things Mongolian, has produced a captivating biography of Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a Baltic nobleman…

Opening for the Defense at a War Crimes Trial

How exactly did Dick Cheney’s speechwriter Marc Thiessen come to write a book justifying waterboarding and other torture techniques–and insisting, moreover, that President Obama is putting the country at risk…

A Transformation Underway in Turkey?

The developments in the last several weeks in Turkey strike me as extremely significant. They could have lasting consequences for the nation’s self-understanding and its role in the Western Alliance,…

Why Has WaPo Become the Voice of Rahm Emanuel?

Not long after the tiresome bootlicking recently furnished by Dana Milbank, Jason Horowitz steps in to report that a “contrarian narrative is emerging” about the heroic Rahm Emanuel: Emanuel is…

Doctors Without Morals

In the torture memos, medical professionals pop up repeatedly. They define and refine torture techniques, and sometimes they are even in the room to be sure that torture procedures are…

Stuart Taylor’s Stuck Record

Writing behind the paywall at the National Journal, Stuart Taylor makes a sustained effort to defend Jay Bybee and John Yoo. He expresses his support for the analytical approach that…

The Party of George Wallace?

In the wood-paneled chamber that was the scene of Friday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, I listened to Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, the Republican ranking member, drone on in his soft…

The Guantánamo “Suicides”

A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

Borges – The Conjectural Poem

… Yo, que estudié leyes y los cánones, yo Francisco Narciso de Laprida, cuya voz declaró la independencia de estas crueles provincias, derrotado, de sangre y de sudor manchado el…

Dr. Johnson–Dishonesty and the Craft of Lawyers

“But, Sir, does not affecting a warmth when you have no warmth, and appearing to be clearly of one opinion when you are in reality of another opinion, does not…

Where are the Yoo and Philbin Emails?

This morning’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, convened by Chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), quickly came to a focus on the critical evidence that disappeared into the recesses of the Justice Department…

More Investigations for the Torture Lawyers

I am just back from the Alliance For Justice’s panel discussion on the OPR Report, at which I spoke, at the Washington office of Wilmer Hale. The show-stealer was the…

Roberts’s Idea of Oversight

It’s reasonably clear now that between 2002 and the beginning of 2007, congressional oversight of the intelligence community simply went out of business. While there have been signs of life…

The Margolis Memo

Legal ethicist David Luban delivers a coup de grâce to the Margolis memorandum in a piece at Slate entitled “David Margolis is Wrong”: Margolis’ critique got Yoo and Bybee off…

Justice, Texas Style

Texas is in the process of declaring itself a judicial ethics-free zone. Adam Liptak reports on the latest courthouse embarrassment to emanate from deep in the heart of crazy: Charles…

Quid Pro Quo

A critical question in examining the criminal culpability of the torture memo writers goes to what lawyers call mens rea or “guilty mind.” With respect to a joint criminal enterprise…

Poland Discloses Collaboration on CIA Black Site

The Polish Government today released official flight records documenting a pattern of collaboration with the CIA relating to the operation of a CIA black site close to Szymany Airport, in…

The President’s Power to Exterminate Villages

Q: I guess the question I’m raising is, does this particular law really affect the President’s war-making abilities… A: Yes, certainly. Q: What is your authority for that? A: Because…

Unredacting the OPR Report

As released, the OPR report is heavily redacted. No explanation is provided for the redactions, but the original contains a “top secret” classification, and it is likely that executive privilege,…

A Triumph for the DOJ Roach Motel

In a late Friday afternoon document dump, the Justice Department finally released a heavily redacted report addressing the ethical lapses of the torture lawyers: John Yoo, now a professor at…

Goethe/Schubert – An den Mond

Füllest wieder Busch und Tal Still mit Nebelglanz, Lösest endlich auch einmal Meine Seele ganz; Breitest über mein Gefild Lindernd deinen Blick, Wie des Freundes Auge mild Über mein Geschick.…

Schopenhauer – Music Before the Dawn

Ich erkenne in den tiefsten Tönen der Harmonie, im Grundbaß, die niedrigsten Stufen der Objektivation des Willens wieder, die unorganische Natur, die Masse des Planeten. Alle die hohen Töne, leicht…

A Judge Keeps His Promise

Nina Bernstein at the New York Times reports a human interest story that is at once heartwarming and very troubling: it’s the tale of young Qing Hong Wu, who pleaded…

Tear Down This Myth: Six Questions for Will Bunch

Will Bunch is an award-winning senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and a senior fellow with Media Matters for America. His latest book, Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing…

Thiessen’s Catechism of Torture

Fred Hiatt, rifling once more through the neoconservative refuse bin, has tapped former Jesse Helms staffer Marc Thiessen as a new Washington Post columnist, continuing that publication’s slide into the…

A Convergence of Extremes

From Jonathan Schwarz: This is Bruce Anderson, a conservative British columnist, explaining why he’s supported torture since before it was cool. You see, it’s our duty: “Before 9/11, in front…

Court Dismisses Suit Over Gitmo Deaths

Yesterday Judge Ellen Huvelle dismissed a lawsuit brought on behalf of the survivors of two of the three Guantánamo prisoners whose mysterious deaths on June 9, 2006 the United States…

The All-Powerful Lindsey Graham and the Principle of Freedom

Two recent articles examining the legal policy of the Obama White House have concluded that one man wields unprecedented power and influence: Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina…

What to Do With a Captured Taliban Commander?

While Republicans in America were babbling about the Obama Administration’s “weakness” in battling terrorist groups, U.S. forces on the ground, now in the midst of a major military operation to…

Does Dick Cheney Want to Be Prosecuted?

After he was indicted for the murder of Alexander Hamilton, vice president Aaron Burr fled to South Carolina, to hide out with his daughter. Another vice president, Spiro Agnew, kept…

The Blackest Sort of Secrets

When secrets are kept to preserve information vital to national security, the interests of a democracy are served. When secrets are kept to avoid embarrassing a senior official who’s done…

Holder at Bay

A week ago, Jane Mayer’s important portrait of Eric Holder, “The Trial,” appeared in the New Yorker. Today, Jodi Kantor and Charlie Savage treat us to their own in-depth examination…

Wordsworth – London, 1802

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour; England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall…

Mill – The Essence of Judgment

The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom,…

Justice: Six Questions for Michael Sandel

Harvard professor Michael J. Sandel teaches one of the most popular courses on campus. Entitled “Justice,” it asks students to engage questions about the society in which they live in…

Wieseltier contra Sullivan

The longest running feud in the magazine industry is between two men closely associated with The New Republic: Leon Wieseltier and Andrew Sullivan. It is a bit surprising, however, that…

Exposing the G.O.P. Myths about Military Commissions

The FBI’s star interrogator, Ali Soufan, takes on the largely unchallenged Republican talking points about military commissions in an op-ed in today’s New York Times: As someone who has helped…

Lincoln–Right Makes Might

Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence…

Ahmadinejad and Friends

Foreign Policy profiles the neoconservative sextet—Daniel Pipes, John Bolton, Norman Podhoretz, Joshua Muravchik, Thomas McInerney, and Max Boot—who have taken to the airwaves in a well coordinated push to start…

British Appeals Court Forces Release of Torture Details

The British Government was dealt a stunning defeat yesterday by a Court of Appeal decision rejecting tenacious arguments of state secrecy. The court forced the publication of a seven-paragraph summary…

Seeding Torture

At Salon, Joe Conason highlights some important details from the background of Mel Sembler, the Florida strip-mall mogul who is financing “Keeping America Safe.” That foundation, managed by Bill Kristol…

Detainee Affairs Post Goes to Lietzau

Few Washington developments in recent weeks establish the parameters of “change you can believe in” better than this: following the resignation of Phil Carter, the White House is reportedly prepared…

Sullivan on Gitmo “Suicides”

Andrew Sullivan addresses “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides’” in the Sunday Times: What really happened? I do not know. But it seems to me that these credible witnesses should have at least…

Talking with the Enemy

One of the great bugaboos of the Bush era was the notion of talking with the enemy. Once a group was defined as an enemy, even the mildest hint of…

Pushkin – Winter’s Morning

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Tolstoy – The Renunciation of Violence

Ivan Kramskoi, Portrait of Count Lev Tolstoy (1873) The longer I live–especially now when I clearly feel the approach of death–the more I feel moved to express what I feel…

Trouble in North Korea

No wannabe totalitarian regime in the world is quite so ripe for ridicule as North Korea. I traveled there some years back and marveled over the Ryugyong Hotel, a 105-story…

Holder on Trial

Jane Mayer’s feature on Attorney General Eric Holder is just up at the New Yorker website. She presents Holder as at the center of the controversy surrounding counterterrorism policy, under…

DOD Contradicts DOD: Seton Hall responds

Last year, when the law faculty and students at Seton Hall University published their groundbreaking report, Death in Camp Delta, the Department of Defense had little to say. But after…

Six Questions for Dr. Michael Baden: The Guantánamo autopsies

Dr. Michael Baden, the former chief medical examiner for New York City, was host of the HBO series Autopsy and is the forensic science contributor to Fox News. I furnished…

Hersh in Syria

I continue to think that Syria might yet offer a platform for some fairly modest foreign policy advances for the Obama Administration in the Middle East. But that’s far from…

The Holder-McConnell Letter

The American political landscape is heavily populated with fake debates—hot-button issues designed to rile people up, but which are not likely to have any real impact on policy. One of…

The Cost of Conscience: The hidden challenges of dissent in the workplace

Location: Center for American Progress, Washington, D.C. Event Date: February 11, 2010 Event Time: 5:30–7:30 p.m. Speakers: Matthew Alexander, Richard Cizik, Elizabeth MacKenzie Biedell, Morton H. Halperin, Scott Horton Navigating…

Six Questions for Rachid Mesli: The missing throats

Rachid Mesli is the legal director of Alkarama, a Geneva-based organization that documents human rights abuses throughout the Arab world. After Ahmed Ali Al-Salami died at Guantánamo Naval Base in…

Deconfliction

This segment from CBS’s The Agency dramatizes the crossed wires that result from “stovepiping” national security operations, in which undercover agents from multiple agencies work to identify potential terrorists:…

Margolis Moves to Exonerate Yoo and Bybee, as Criminal Investigation Opens in Spain

Three developments last week show the growing gap between the Obama Administration and its NATO allies with respect to the legacy of torture from the Bush era. They also demonstrate…

Rinuccini/Monteverdi – Lamento della ninfa

Non havea Febo ancora recato al mondo il dì ch’una donzella fuora del proprio albergo uscì. Sul pallidetto volto scorgease il suo dolor, spesso gli venia sciolto un gran sospir…

Machiavelli – The Eternal Contest of Parties

Io non posso negare che la fortuna e la milizia non fossero cagioni dell’imperio romano; ma e’ mi pare bene, che costoro non si avegghino, che, dove è buona milizia,…

A Marine Biologist Scopes Out “Camp No”

In February 2004, David J. Evans, a marine biologist and photographer, was engaged as part of a team working on the Pentagon’s Legacy Program, which documents the cultural and environmental…

Obama’s Secret Afghan Prisons

Secretary of Defense Gates’s detentions-policy advisors see Guantánamo as old policy. The all-new, streamlined detentions policy goes by the name of Bagram. Looking over the new policies, there’s no doubt…

Going to War in Iraq

In the United States, we’re all supposed to have forgotten that the narrative leading to the Iraq War was propelled by false facts and arguments, often in circumstances where the…

Kiriakou Recants

In December 2007, John Kiriakou, a former senior CIA operative, made a series of public comments about the agency’s use of Bush-era torture techniques. In one interview, he described in…

Rapp for the Defense

Stephen J. Rapp was a U.S. attorney in Iowa from 1999 to 2001. He served as a senior war crimes prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and then…

Learning from Peru

A democratically elected president was confronted with a severe terrorist challenge. The peace and stability of his nation were threatened by terrorists, he argued, and extraordinary measures were justified. He…

A New Scandal for OLC?

Last week, the Department of Justice’s Inspector General issued a new report (PDF) looking at the FBI’s improper use of Exigent Letters to unlawfully secure phone records—prominently in connection with…

Auden – The Shield of Achilles

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke) And sentries sweated for the day was hot: A crowd of ordinary decent folk Watched from…

Merton – The Value of Essential Works

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the…

Chickenhawk Thiessen

Former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen has a new mission: to convince the American electorate that we are less safe and secure today because Barack Obama won’t use the torture techniques,…

Syllabus for the Court

The shorter Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission: Held, 5-4: The guarantee of a “Republican form of Government” contained in Article IV of the Constitution must be construed to guarantee…

Time for a Special Prosecutor

Citing the Seton Hall report on the June 9, 2006 deaths, as well as “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides,’” the St. Louis Post Dispatch assesses the situation perfectly and draws exactly the…

The Official Response Begins

When a cover-up is exposed, nothing is more telling than the first reactions from those who are involved. Do they maintain their stories and face potentially aggravated consequences? Or do…

The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

[For the full text of Scott Horton’s “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides,’ ” please visit http://harpers.org/archive/2010/03/the-guantanamo-suicides.]…

Martin Luther King–Letting Justice Run Down Like Water

You know my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled by the iron feet of oppression… If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this…

Military Justice and the Fear Game

Watching the G.O.P. spin machine attack the Obama Administration over its decision to bring a group of serious terrorist leaders, led by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to trial in New York,…

Unaccountable Mercenaries

The New York Times calls the situation just the way it is: A federal judge in Washington, Ricardo Urbina, has provided another compelling argument against the outsourcing of war to…

Remembering Freya and Helmuth James von Moltke

This weekend we learned that Freya von Moltke died at the beginning of the year at her home in Norwich, Vermont. A lion of the resistance to Hitler and the…

Adam Smith – The Foolish Admiration of Wealth

This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both…

Judge Dismisses Charges Against Blackwater Employees in Nisoor Square Killings

Judge Ricardo Urbina dismissed all charges against five former Blackwater employees stemming from the September 2007 killing of seventeen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square. I discuss the decision with…

Celano’s Judgment

Liber scriptus proferetur In quo totem continetur Unde mondus judicetur Judex ergo cum censebit Quidquid latet, apparebit Nil inultum remanebit Lacrimosa dies illa Qua resurgit ex favilla Judicandus homo reus…

Balzac–Prosecutors and the Public Trust

Aucune puissance humaine, ni le roi, ni le garde des sceaux, ni le premier ministre ne peuvent empiéter sur le pouvoir d’un juge d’instruction, rien ne l’arrête, rien ne lui…

The Afghanistan Detention Dilemma

Max Boot prescribes a new imperial detentions policy in the Washington Post: Successful counterinsurgency operations require locking up suspects based on a lower level of evidence — often based on…

Novalis – Hymnen an die Nacht

Hinüber wall ich, Und jede Pein Wird einst ein Stachel Der Wollust seyn. Noch wenig Zeiten, So bin ich los, Und liege trunken Der Lieb’ im Schoos. Unendliches Leben Wogt…

Meister Eckehart – The Trinity of Love

Hâst dû dich selben liep, sô hâst dû alle menschen liep als dich selben. Die wile dû einen einigen menschen minner liep hâst dan dich selben, dû gewünne dich selben…

Happy Christmas!

Listen to Puer natus in Bethlehem by Michael Praetorius from the Polyhymnia caduceatrix et Panegyrica (1613-17) and the Musae Sioniae VI (1609) in a performance by the Gabrieli Consort. The…

Does the Constitution Follow the Flag?: Six Questions for Kal Raustiala

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently noted that, although one might assume that the Bill of Rights follows and limits the conduct of American officials wherever they go, “that is not…

Doctors and Torture, Iran Edition

Farnaz Fassihi of the Wall Street Journal reports on the mysterious death of Ramin Pourandarjani, a heroic young doctor who defied authorities by refusing to sign death certificates to cover…