Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
Obama's First Term Was a Failure for Civil Liberties
“It’s one thing to adopt the euphemisms that suggest we are no longer engaged in a war….Just remember it is a serious step to begin unraveling some of the very policies that have kept our people safe since 9/11.” – Former Vice President Dick Cheney admonishing President Obama, May 2009 READ MORE >>
Keeping Our Heads
The Mauthausen Trial: American Military Justice in Germany By Tomaz Jardim (Harvard University Press, 276 pp., $29.95) Conscience on Trial: The Fate of Fourteen Pacifists in Stalin’s Ukraine, 1952–1953 By Hiroaki Kuromiya (University of Toronto Press, 212 pp., $60) All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals By David Scheffer (Princeton University Press, 533 pp., $35) READ MORE >>
Anti-Islamism And The Culture War Mentality
The other day Will Wilkinson had a nice, albeit somewhat overwrought, summary of the right-wing culture war mentality: READ MORE >>
Right Mind
The Chief
Eric Holder, Pathetic … And His Pathos Is Right There On The Front Page Of The Times.
Poor Eric Holder. The fact is that he is none too smart ... and none too versed in constitutional issues. Although Ronald Reagan did appoint him Judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia! Ah, those were the days when Republican presidents appointed Democrats to judicial office and Democratic presidents appointed Republicans to same. Actually, aside from his graduation from Stuyvesant High School in New York City, "second rate" is what comes to mind when you hear Holder's name. Hey, Janet Reno wasn't so brainy either. READ MORE >>
The Bush Defense
Last night at a Cambridge dinner party, someone posited that the country would soon witness what she called “a Bush revival.” Another person at the table suggested that it had already begun. Now, 02138 would be just about the last zip code where such a phenomenon might be noticed. So I take this postulate seriously, very seriously. READ MORE >>
Ksm, Curiously Well-informed
In today's Washington Post article about the start of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's trial before a military commission at Guant READ MORE >>
War of Error
Omar bin Laden, the fourth son of the Al Qaeda leader, cuts a striking figure. In one photo, he stares out from beneath an Adidas baseball cap, his beard closely trimmed--an entirely different look from his father's seventh-century aesthetic. He wears jeans and sits next to his much older wife, a pale-faced British woman with pig tails, whom he divorced a mere five months into their marriage. While his father would not approve of his lifestyle choices, few men know the terrorist mastermind so well. READ MORE >>
