If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
As in most presidential election years, noisy battles have been raging as the nation's political armies gear up for what promises to be an even nois...
KSM's trial is the condensed metaphor for the way the west has dealt with terrorism. Only in this case, the prosecution knows better than to give in to what al Qaida wants.
As we remember Adam Yauch and his pioneering musicality, we should also acknowledge his pioneering civic courage -- his identity as a punk musician and rapper for whom citizenship was a natural expression of art, and interdependence a necessary concomitant of citizenship.
Speaking to former Guantanamo detainee 727 was like talking to a prisoner of Azkaban, that terrible prison guarded by soul-sucking Dementors from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series.
Are we safer now than we were before the launch of our massive counterterrorism effort?
Regarding the campaign commercial, yes -- more like that, please. It's an important distinction that's crying out to be defined: while the Republicans might be good at coming up with scary bumper sticker slogans, the Obama team can actually do the job.
Past sacrifice is a poor justification for continued sacrifice unless it is warranted. The truth is that while the United States still has interests in Afghanistan, none of them, other than opposing al-Qaeda, rise to the level of vital.
The course of my life was altered dramatically by Osama bin Laden in ways that I had never considered. Specifically, the response by my country to bin Laden's attack on 9/11 changed my fate and exposed me to a world and experiences that would lead me down a very strange path.
We are into the second decade of the "war on terror." It now ranges from the mountains of Afghanistan to the jungles of Colombia. It has dominated our lives since 9/11. Yet there is no measure of success to gauge progress or to say when it may end.
The Obama administration had an opportunity to make clear that it takes due process rights and international law seriously, and that, as the war in Afghanistan winds down, it plans to bring indefinite military detention without meaningful review, charge, or trial to an end.
Wars are incredibly wasteful and counterproductive to the goal of stopping terrorism. Unfortunately, U.S. officials remain hostage to the outdated notion that a specific territory matters -- they remain possessed by a sort of safe haven syndrome.
The advanced technology of the war on terrorism, combined with deferential courts and legislators, have endangered both the right to privacy and the right of people to be free from government snooping and tracking.
To fight our insane wars, we're wrecking our soldiers' ability to live with themselves and function in society, then regulating what's left of them with chemicals, which often make things immeasurably worse.
What Americans and world citizens have gone through in the past decade has been excruciating. But when did it become acceptable or rational for government to use grief as an excuse to trample on our rights?
The PREAL manual was a textbook for military instructors, outlining how to do role-plays to teach students about pressures they might be exposed to if captured by an enemy government.
Journalists, pundits and politicians seem increasingly obsessed with fears that Islamists winning elections in the wake of successful Arab Spring uprisings will prove detrimental to democracy, regional security, and the War on Terrorism. Nothing could be further from the truth.
