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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:…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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.,…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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,…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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[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…

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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…

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