American Footprints

Adam Serwer highlights only the most recent encroachment on civil liberties undertaken by an executive branch that is, in this regard, as avaracious in its appetites with Democrats in charges as with Republicans:

Civil libertarians have been trying to add more restrictions to the FBI’s National Security Letters since their use exploded after the [...]

I am a bit late in commenting on the news that Pakistan Chief of Army Staff Ashfaq Kayani will stay in his position until 2013.  Even so, I wanted to highlight an article on the subject by widely-respected Indian strategic analyst K Subrahmanyam.  He points to something I hadn’t realized, namely that:

This extension [...]

This might interrupt the steady flow of flowers and candy from the lucky liberated:

As the US draws down its troops and supplies, which should culminate in a total withdrawal by 2012, funds for humanitarian relief operations in Iraq are dwindling at an alarming rate. US funding generally comprised 30-56% of total funding for humanitarian activity [...]

As I’m sure many readers are aware, Wikileaks released a massive trove of classified reports on the Afghan war effort over the weekend (see the Wikileaks report here, and media coverage here, here and here). 

The Wikileaks expose reveals a history of the conflict that often contradicts official Obama and Bush administration statements – with documented incidents [...]

I have already written two posts without telling anyone who I am, and I should not write a third without doing so.  I became involved with American Footprints through my work with Eric Martin at the Progressive Realist Metablog.  I live in (hot, miserable) Washington DC, where I work on arms control issues, particularly [...]

I had fully intended to go to this Cato hill briefing on the effects of the U.S.-India nuclear deal, but illness prevented me from going.  Thankfully, Cato podcasted it.  All three speakers (Ted Galen Carpenter, Stephen Cohen, and Henry Sokolski) gave good presentations, and the differences between them highlighted the extent to which the [...]

Paul Krugman comments on a recent Karl Rove op-ed that addressed the Iraq war and related political implications:

Karl Rove now tells us that his “biggest mistake” was not fighting back against the perception that the Bush administration deliberately misled us into the Iraq war. His main evidence that nothing like that happened is the fact that [...]