Peace and Security
Buy Today, Kill Tomorrow
Good people can disagree about guns. Though I’ve always leaned left in my political views, I believe that Americans have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms. I owned a gun for many years myself — at least until my conviction for blowing the whistle on the...
Military Intervention Is the Problem, Not the Solution
A café. A stadium. A concert hall. One of the most horrifying things about the murderous attacks in Paris was the terrorists' choice of targets. They chose gathering places where people's minds wander furthest from unhappy thoughts like war. And they struck on a...
Bombs Won’t Cut It
When Paris suffered attacks that killed 17 last January — at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket — it responded with great class. Parisians filled the streets, locked arm-in-arm in solidarity against terrorism. Leaders from throughout Europe...
Climate Change in Paris
The Prison-Industrial Complex Takes Another Hit
"Too many people are behind bars that don't belong there," declared a group demanding that America do away with its throw-'em-all-in-jail mass imprisonment policies. For nearly 50 years, politicians and prosecutors have pushed a no-mercy, "tough on crime" mantra....
Paying for Patriotism
I go to a lot of Major League Baseball games. I really love the sport. Yet if you’ve been to a baseball game in the last decade, you’ve probably noticed some changes. National Guard members now perform flag ceremonies between innings. Military recruits are enlisted...
Sandra Bullock’s New Film Gets History Oh So Wrong
Sandra Bullock's latest film flopped. And it deserved to — but not only because of its inability to entertain. A comic political drama based on a documentary of the same name, Our Brand Is Crisis is a fictionalized retelling of how U.S. political consultants got an...
The CIA Is an Ethics-Free Zone
I joined the CIA in January 1990. The CIA was vastly different back then from the agency that emerged in the days after the 9/11 attacks. And it was a far cry from the flawed and confused organization it is today. One reason for those flaws — and for the convulsions...
Going to Syria in a Handbasket
How Rabid Extremists Exiled a 14-Year-Old
Our country's pack of foam-at-the-mouth, mad-dog, right-wing extremists just scored another win. For weeks, a crazed pack of these howlers had stalked, snarled, and snapped at a 14-year-old boy from Texas. Why was he under such a furious assault? Because his name is...
