Ethan Casey

Or, to put the question differently: In the United States of America, do we enjoy the right to free speech?

You could certainly argue that Guillen should have known better than to say anything at all, on that particular subject -- Fidel Castro and Cuba -- in that particular city --...

My column under the Blogs heading on Dawn.com was cancelled last week. That's too bad, but it's the way it goes; journalism is an inherently unstable line of work. The reason was budget constraints; my wonderful editor, Zeresh John, told me she was especially sad because I was Dawn's only...

Twenty years ago in Detroit, I told fellow Tiger Stadium Fan Club member Tom Derry that I felt sad that I had never seen a game at Comiskey Park, longtime home of the Chicago White Sox, before they tore it down. "You should...

SEATTLE -- Well, the latest news is that a lone U.S. serviceman has gone on a shooting rampage outside Kandahar and killed at least 16 people. The Los Angeles Times reports:

The shooting early Sunday took place in Panjwayi district outside Kandahar city, in a village called Alkozai. U.S. military...

By "we" I mean we Americans, since I am an American and the question of the American presence in Afghanistan is the one that's most urgent and on people's minds. In 1967 the American author Norman Mailer published a novel about a hunting trip in Alaska, titled Why Are We...

I haven't fully digested the disgusting news that U.S. Marines have been caught on video urinating on dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, so this post is not offered as a coherent think-piece. But what is there to think about, anyway? What is there to say, really, except that there's absolutely...

A couple of weeks ago, in response to my article, "Microsoft, Chase Bank, and What's Good for America," a Pakistani-American acquaintance emailed me:

"An interesting perspective with a very ominous undertone. For someone like me and many others who waited years to get the blue passport so we...

The other day, I went into my local branch of Chase bank. It moved recently to a new location, not far from the previous location in Seattle's University District. The bank had to move because its previous location will be the site of a station on the wonderful new light-rail...

I woke up this morning to the news that Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, had directly accused Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of supporting the insurgents who attacked the U.S. Embassy in Kabul last week. The New York Times called it "the most serious...

The kidnapping eleven days ago of American development worker Warren Weinstein prompts this week's column. I don't know anything about the man except what I've read in news reports but, as an American who has spent a lot of time in Pakistan, I feel a personal stake in...

A decade ago, I read a book that made a lasting impression on me. It was a memoir called Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner, who had recently passed away at age 91 after a long career as a distinguished German historian. His son Oliver Pretzel, who made the decision to...

My column last week on drone attacks so clearly struck a nerve that I intended to write a follow-up this week, addressing some of the many comments and responses. I did publish an interim statement on my own website, where I invite you to continue that...

Drone attacks are wrong. I'm sure to be called an appeaser of terrorists for saying that, particularly in light of the latest events in Mumbai. But I think it's important for Pakistanis, who are on the receiving end of the humiliation and much worse that drone attacks inflict, to hear...

One of my purposes in this column is to help myself and my readers understand a rudderless country with a feckless president, a military caste with an entitlement complex, an aggressive right wing, and dangerous and self-righteous religious extremists. I mean, of course, the United States.

I want to write...

To my surprise, my column last week elicited more reader comments than anything I've written in a while. I have mixed feelings about this. I'm glad to have stirred up debate, of course. But the measure of success should be not the quantity of debate, but the quality.

On June 1, I took part in a TEDx event hosted by the Princeton Public Library in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. The TED people bill what they do as "ideas worth spreading," and during the weeks I spent preparing my talk I pondered what ideas I wanted to spread to...

What's said about sausage and journalism must also be true of foreign policy: that if you knew how it was produced, you wouldn't want to consume it. I'm certainly disgusted and alarmed to learn from WikiLeaks via Dawn.com that U.S. special operations forces deployed secretly on joint operations...

The evil that evil men do casts a long shadow, as a German court's recent conviction of former Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk brings home. The sight of a 91-year-old working-class immigrant (Demjanjuk hid in plain sight for many years as an autoworker in the U.S. state of Ohio)...

Republished with permission from The Dawn.

As I begin writing this it’s 2:00 a.m. where I am and 3:00 a.m. in New York and Washington, where exuberant crowds have gathered at Ground Zero and the White House, belligerently chanting “USA! USA!” and singing the national anthem and...

We need to believe that the world, and/or our situation in it, can be improved, or else there really isn't much point in getting out of bed in the morning. That's the real issue at the heart of the controversy being raised by the 60 Minutes story on...