Peace and Security
Yemen Is Starving, and We’re Partly to Blame
Twenty million people in Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world, are at risk of dying from hunger or thirst. That’s 80 percent of the country’s population, which according to UN agencies badly needs emergency supplies of food and water, along with fuel and...
What Caused the Charleston Massacre?
The recent mass murder of worshippers in an African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina raises troubling questions for all Americans. First among them: How could this have happened? I think the answer to that one is easy. We live in a heavily armed society....
Homegrown Terrorist
All Hacked Up
I've gotten a lot of unwelcome mail from the feds these last few years, like a copy of my indictment for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program. But this latest delivery was something altogether new. My jaw dropped as I scanned the form letter from the...
Odd Bedfellows for Liberty
Let's now praise a threesome of odd bedfellows: a Democratic ex-senator, an exiled American citizen, and a current Republican senator. I don't think they've ever met, yet their separate efforts over 14 years have now guided our ship of state away from some perilous...
Iraqi Army: Then and Now
Of Course Jeb Bush Would Have Invaded Iraq
Jeb Bush must have set some kind of record for political flip-flopping this month. "Knowing what we know now," he was asked — that Saddam Hussein didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction, for example — “would you have authorized the invasion" of Iraq? “I would've,”...
Add Korea to the Axis of Diplomacy
The George W. Bush administration famously dubbed Iran, Iraq, and North Korea the "Axis of Evil." The White House accused that ominous-sounding triumvirate of funding terrorism and developing weapons of mass destruction. The goal was to garner public support for the...
Closing the Door on Torture
After I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program in 2007, the fallout for me was brutal. To make a long story short, I served nearly two years in federal prison and then endured a few more months of house arrest. What happened to the torture program? Nothing....
Nonviolence for Whom?
Ferguson. New York. Baltimore. As cities erupt after decades of oppression and violence at the hands of police, calls for nonviolence can be deafening. "Violence isn’t the answer," the moralists chide when protesters throw rocks and clash with police. They're right....
