If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
Talk about 'Beyond Right & Left' -- when Franken-Rove clash with Scahill-Beck over the NSA program, knee-jerkers are confused. So Huffington & Matalin debate domestic snooping not by Hoover against protestors in the '60s but by Obama after 9/11 and Boston. Is Snowden an Ellsberg or Manning?
Leaders in House and Senate Intelligence Committees have defended the program, saying it's nothing new. To my mind, "Of course we're spying on you!" constitutes a new definition for government transparency.
But why? Are these readers hoping to find out if things today are really as bad as Orwell foretold? Do they want to know if it has a happy ending? Or are they already expecting the worst and simply want a roadmap for an orderly transition?
We can end war. War is not inevitable, no matter how cluelessly enthusiastic the media may be to promote it, no matter how thoroughly it runs the global economy and dominates almost every government.
Obama should convene a Special Joint Session of Congress to consider immediate amendments to the Patriot Act that authorized unprecedented domestic spying following the attacks on Sept 11, 2001.
President Carter had the right ideas, but was brutally stomped out by an elitist body politic that felt threatened by his election to office. Mr. Obama is different. He neither has Carter's principles nor his plain-folk thinking, although Obama does an excellent job, far better than Carter ever could, articulating them.
The alleged mastermind of that attack, a 48-year-old Saudi Arabian named Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, still has not been brought to justice. Yet the U.S. government has held him in custody for over a decade.
A four-month hunger strike, mass force-feedings, and widespread media coverage have at last brought Guantanamo back into American consciousness. Still unnoticed and out of the news, however, is a comparable situation in the U.S. itself.
With Dirty Wars it is as if Jeremy Scahill is holding up a mirror against the U.S. government's war against al Qaeda and its affiliates across the Middle East and Africa, while inviting us to look into the abyss of its practices.
I'm not under any illusions that these demands are going to be met immediately. But here are three things that, following President Obama's speech, I claim are realistic goals for reforming the former "Global War on Terror" in Yemen in the next six months.
Earlier this week Tony Blair penned a piece for the Daily Mail about Islam. His core argument is right, but he shies away from the conclusions it points to.
Blair refuses to consider the possibility that the disastrous foreign policies of the West might possibly have aggravated tensions in the Middle East and throughout the world leading to occasional acts of violence.
After Michael Adebolajo allegedly decapitated Lee Rigby on May 22nd, he stood on the streets of Woolwich and told the Western worl...
The last person Morsi would admire is Ronald Reagan. But as he and his cohorts keep trying to strong-arm Egypt towards an Islamic Republic, he might do well to heed Reagan's words: "Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root."
Islam is in fact a religion of peace. Ahmadi Muslims prove every day in 200 nations worldwide that the link between Islam and terror is neither necessary nor appropriate.
The time is excruciatingly right, the hell of the current system screams at us in daily headlines, most people want it -- but war is the way things are. Government serves it. The economy serves it. The media serve it.
