Peace and Security
Running Against Islam
Every political season has its hot-button issues. There’s race, abortion, lunar colonies. But the hottest hot-button issue these days, judging from comments by Republican presidential hopefuls as well as what happened during the 2010 mid-term elections, is Islam.
Politics, Perpetrators, and the Plight of Women
Angelina Jolie’s writing and directorial debut “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” snubbed by the Oscars and screened in very few U.S. theaters, isn’t generating the blockbuster actress’s usual buzz. It deserves better.
Playing with Fire
Some Americans want to starve our cities, close our schools, and knock away the ladder that our children are supposed to climb to economic security. Your lawmakers may be among them.
Profiting from the Pentagon
Washington’s talking about cutting the military budget. Whoopee.
Whistle-Blowing Takes Guts
No government cares to be accused of a war crime. If you happen to commit one, your military bosses will move heaven and earth to cover for you and pretend it didn’t happen. However, if you should instead expose a war crime, they will hunt you down like a dog and make sure you never again see the light of day. After all, reputations and careers are at stake.
The Risky Business of Post-War Contracting
The Iraq War is officially over. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops slipped quietly out of the country last year with none of the bodies-clinging-to-helicopter-struts drama that characterized America’s exit from Saigon in 1975.
A Zero on the Home Front’s Richter Scale
Among the strange things that happened last year — and there were many — perhaps the strangest was the end of the war in Iraq.
Endless War
Let’s Stop Sentencing Children to Life without Parole
“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way it treats its children,” Nelson Mandela once said. If that’s the case, the United States has much soul-searching to do. The United States is the only country in the world that regularly applies life without parole for offenses committed before the age of 18. More than 2,500 imprisoned Americans are slated to spend the rest of their lives behind bars for crimes they committed as kids.
A Watchbird Is Watching You
The FBI now employs 36,000 people and focuses ever more on dissenters. The CIA, supposedly prohibited from spying domestically, now stations agents in local police departments. Homeland Security may legally confiscate your computer and smart phone at the airport, copy their contents, and eventually give them back. Civilian agencies have drones to follow you.
