President Obama is scheduled to give a speech tomorrow at the National Defense University on national security and counterterrorism policy. Many are eagerly awaiting an unprecedented moment of candor, expecting the president at least to clarify certain 'ambiguities'...
This may ultimately come as no surprise, but yet another party connected to the torture and abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib circa 2004 may get off with little more than a slight taint on their reputation. At this point it is part of the record in at least two...
The New York Times' Disunion series has an excellent essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne by Cynthia Wachtell, author of “War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914.” In 1863, Hawthorne wrote to an English friend: "The war-party here do not look upon...
The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf has written a good post on an unfortunately seldom-made argument against so-called "humanitarian intervention" - namely that there are huge opportunity costs. "Almost every time someone calls for a war to be entered on humanitarian...
According to Peter Scheer, a lawyer and executive director of the First Amendment Coalition (FAC), "the real outrage about the Justice Department's use of secret subpoenas for the phone records of Associated Press journalists is that...it was probably legal." Although...
"A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home." -James Madison As previously discussed in these spaces by Kelley...
Via NPR, Holder said yesterday in a news conference that he's not sure how many times he's signed off on Justice Department requests to spy on journalists: "I'm not sure how many of those cases...I have actually signed off on," Holder said. "I take them very...
With the manufactured Benghazi scandal tying with the IRS for the story that the right is pretending is a story, it’s worth looking back at what a real scandal looks like. Most people think of Watergate when they think “scandal” but by Nixon standards, Watergate is...
