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There’s no keener observer of the situation in Pakistan than Lahore-based Ahmed Rashid. In a piece in the Sunday Washington Post, Rashid says that America’s arrangement with Musharraf has been…

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A few weeks ago, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates addressed the graduating class of Naval midshipmen at Annapolis. He offered an extraordinary message: As officers, you will have a responsibility…

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Seymour Hersh furthers his remarkable coverage of the Abu Ghraib story in next week’s New Yorker. He gives us a portrait of Major General Antonio Taguba, whose report on detainee…

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In watching the Republican debates, I have generally marveled over the performance of one participant: John McCain. Fact is, I disagree with McCain about a lot of things – too…

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Jacob Burckhardt, the great cultural historian of the late nineteenth century, tracked the evolution of the Italian city-state culture from the Late Middle Ages into the Renaissance. It was, he…

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It’s Friday after the close for the evening news, just the time every week when we sit and wait for the latest carefully shelved piece of bad news from Bushland…

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For the church, the many abuses of human life, liberty, and dignity are a heartfelt suffering. The church, entrusted with the Earth’s glory, believes that in each person is the…

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Associated Press quotes Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace in his first remarks following Secretary Gates’s announcement of his pending replacement on June 8: Gen. Peter…

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I just finished reading the Jeff Gerth-Don Van Natta book on Hillary Clinton entitled Her Way and relived the tumultuous days of the Whitewater investigation through it. One thing that…

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There is a subgenre of English travel literature that features a generally silent amanuensis recording the peregrinations of a Great One. This starts, I think, with Boswell’s wonderful Journal of…

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Before there were “enhanced interrogation techniques,” there was verschärfte Vernehmung, (which means “enhanced interrogation techniques”) developed by the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst in 1937 and subject to a series of…

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America under George Bush embarked upon a remarkably assertive foreign policy placing heavy reliance on the use of force of arms and downplaying diplomacy. As a presidential candidate in 2000,…

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One of the principal architects of the GOP’s voter suppression campaign is an attorney from North Georgia named Hans von Spakovsky. The son of emigrants who fled Nazi oppression, Spakovsky…

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The Senate Judiciary Committee has confirmed that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is now the subject of an investigation concerning his testimony about and dealings with former DOJ employee Monica Goodling,…

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The New York Times’s Neil Lewis profiles exactly what the Civil Rights Division does under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Racial discrimination and protection of the voting rights of minorities is…

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The U.S. Attorney in Birmingham, Alice Martin, is currently under investigation on perjury charges, according to the Political Parlor. The investigation relates to statements that Martin made in an EEOC…

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As followers of this column know, I’ve been tracking the Neocon manipulations in Israeli-Syrian relations for some time, drawing largely on reports in the Israeli press and some scattered sources…

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I’ve now heard from several sources within the Administration that a significant part of the documents which are being withheld–both by the Department of Justice and the White House–demonstrate Karl…

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Michael B. Nifong was the state prosecutor in Durham, North Carolina, who brought and trumpeted rape charges against a group of Duke University lacrosse players. The charges were false, and…

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Yesterday, White House press spokesman Tony Snow assailed the Fourth Circuit’s ruling that President Bush does not have the power to lock away people lawfully in the United States forever…

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Only a short while back, Senator Majority Leader Trent Lott was denigrating “French socialists” and their influence. And Congressman Bob Ney was forcing the House cafeteria to change “french fries”…

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I recently spoke with one of the Pentagon’s most senior medical officers. Official DOD attitudes towards homosexuality, he said, had followed a strange trajectory over the last decade. From a…

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In America today, we have political figures who call themselves Conservatives, but whose notions of what constitutes conservatism seem drawn from certain political movements in Europe between the wars. They…

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Last week two military judges collapsed the Bush Administration’s plans to try two Guantánamo detainees before military commissions. Today the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most conservative court in…

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On March 27, 1782, the House of Parliament at Westminster voted no confidence in Lord North, then serving as Prime Minister. He immediately announced that in view of the expression…

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In an op-ed column that appears in today’s Washington Post, the “dean of the Washington press corps,” David Broder, struggles with the trial and sentencing of Scooter Libby. It raises…

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Mark Twain, “Stirring Times in Austria,” Harper’s, March 1898 Mark Twain, “Concerning The Jews,” Harper’s, September 1899 In the last days, an important compromise bill negotiated between Republican and Democratic…

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Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Colin Powell has clear advice to the Bush Administration and to Congress on the steps…

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