American Footprints

Listening to critics of Obama’s decision to try certain terrorist suspects in civilian courts, one gets the impression that Obama is taking a big risk, and that civilian courts are either ill-equipped to handle such cases, or the rules governing the proceedings in those venues create too big an advantage for defendants.  Obama’s critics argue that military commissions [...]

Coming on the heels of the Senate’s passage of a bill authorizing President Obama to impose a new round of sanctions against Iran (a truly counterproductive policy), Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett diagnose a drift in Obama’s Iran policy that, sadly, rings true:

Obama has moved, during just one year in office, from relatively forward-leaning expressions of interest [...]

Dexter Filkins’ story about the recent flipping of one large and powerful tribe in Afghanistan is generating a lot of buzz – with some touting the conversion as the first stage in a recreation of the Sons of Iraq program which established alliances with Sunni elements against al-Qaeda in Iraq.  However, there are concerns raised [...]

Bernard Finel argues against knee-jerk resort to the use of military force in places like Yemen – or rather, argues that the full implications of such involvement should be subject to a more rigorous strategic analysis before the bullets fly.  Finel points out that military involvement creates reinforcing loops of circular reasoning that tend to deepen the [...]

In the aftermath of the recent earthquake that devastated the already beleaguered people of Haiti, the impoverished condition of that nation – which greatly exacerbated the lethality of the quake - has received sudden heightened scrutiny.  Unsurprisingly, various factions have simply plugged Haiti’s current condition into their preferred framework to reach their desired explanation. 

In some cases, the results were bizarre.  [...]

The only surpsing part of this story is that the protagonist actually admitted that he lied:

Well, it’s official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn’t know what he was talking about.

Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency’s intelligence [...]