NewsTrust - National Security - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

Still Not Tired

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Thomas L. Friedman - Oct. 04 (Opinion) - Though we may be tired of this “war on terrorism,” the bad guys are not. They are getting even more creative.

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Obama’s Dick Cheney Moment

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Benjamin Wittes - Sep. 28 (Opinion) - His decision not to consult Congress on detentions represents a virtually wholesale adoption of Bush’s failed policies.

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Blackwater: Widening the rift

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Dawn - By Sana Saleem - Sep. 22 (Opinion) - Conspiracy theories have always had high currency in our part of the world and ritual cynicism towards America is quite usual. Recent reports claiming the presence of CIA’s contractual army – Blackwater – in Pakistan have bolstered concerns within the Pakistani public about US involvement in this country’s affairs. It’s high time, though, that the government came clean with the public about the extent of US involvement in this country’s security affairs.

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Fear was no excuse to condone torture

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Miami Herald - By Charles C. Krulak, Joseph P. Hoar - Sep. 15 (Opinion) - In the fear that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Americans were told that defeating Al Qaeda would require us to ``take off the gloves.'' As a former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and a retired commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command, we knew that was a recipe for disaster. But we never imagined that we would feel duty-bound to publicly denounce a vice president of the United States, a man who has served our country for many years. In light of the irresponsible statements recently made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, however, we feel we must repudiate his dangerous ideas -- and his scare tactics.

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Video: Dick Cheney calls Eric Holder's interrogation investigation political

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Fox News - By Chris Wallace - Aug. 31 (Interview) - WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you're OK with it. CHENEY: I am.

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10 things Americans should know about World War II

Sun, 24 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - By Rick Atkinson - May. 24 (Review) - The first thing to know about World War II is that it was a big war, a war that lasted 2,174 days and claimed an average of 27,600 lives every day, or 1,150 an hour, or 19 a minute, or one death every three seconds. One, two, three, snap. One, two, three, snap. In an effort to get our arms around this greatest calamity in human history, let's examine 10 things every American ought to know about the role of the U.S. Army in WWII.

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The Politics of Excusing Torture In The Name of National Security

Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

FindLaw - By John Dean - May. 15 (Editorial) - Politicians come and go, but the folks who actually run the government have an agenda of their own, including covering their mistakes.

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U.S. has a 45-year history of torture

Sun, 03 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By A.J. Langguth - May. 03 (Opinion) - As President Obama grapples with accusations of torture by U.S. agents, I suggest he consult the former Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle. I first contacted Daschle in 1975, when he was an aide to Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota, who was leading a somewhat lonely campaign against CIA abuses. At the time, I was researching a book on the United States' role in the spread of military dictatorships throughout Latin America. Daschle arranged for me to inspect the senator's files, and I spent an evening reading accounts of U.S. complicity in torture. The stories came from Iran, Taiwan, Greece and, for the preceding 10 years, from Brazil and the rest of the continent's Southern Cone.

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Obama's Unmacho Diplomacy

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Kathleen Parker - Apr. 07 (Opinion) - ...evaluating Barack Obama's first European tour as president, analysts have focused on whether he was quite manly enough. On their leadership blog, former Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee and columnist Steve Pearlstein asked whether Obama should have "grabbed an opportunity ... to demonstrate his toughness, showing his saber as well as his smile." Verily, spoken like men. What they're really asking is: Did Obama do justice to the fire hydrant?

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We are about to take the war against terror to a new level

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Gordon Brown - Mar. 22 (Opinion) - Two weeks ago, the world woke to the grim reminder that fringe terrorists in Northern Ireland still put fanaticism before innocent lives. These brutal acts, so devastating in their impact on the families of those murdered, have led the people and politicians of Northern Ireland to stand as one against any return of the terrorist threat. We should be under no illusion, however, that the biggest security threat to our country and other countries is the murderous agents of hate that work under the banner of al-Qaida. We know that there is an al-Qaida core in northern Pakistan trying to organise attacks in Britain. We know also that there are a number of networks here and as the head of MI5 reported recently: "There is no cause for complacency; there is plenty of activity and the threat level remains at severe."

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How to stop the drug wars

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Economist - Mar. 06 (Editorial) - Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.

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U.S. security

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

International Herald Tribune - By Peter Bergen - Dec. 15 (Opinion) - ... the American Muslim community has rejected the Qaeda ideological virus. American Muslims have instead overwhelmingly signed up for the American Dream, enjoying higher incomes and educational levels than the average.

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Obama the Healer

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By David Ignatius - Dec. 14 (Opinion) - Barack Obama wrote in "Dreams From My Father" of his days as a student at Occidental College, groping for his political identity: "We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Frantz Fanon, Eurocentrism and patriarchy." That's one of the passages from his autobiography that has fueled conspiracy theories among right-wing bloggers. They speak of Obama as if he's a tool of Third World revolutionaries who have somehow been preserved in dry ice since the 1960s. But that's silly. A man who plans to retain Bob Gates as secretary of defense and install a retired Marine four-star general as his national security adviser is not a creature of adolescent rebellion. But here's a contrarian thought: Before Obama assumes the burdens of commander in chief, maybe he should dust off that copy of Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth" and give the radical theorist another look. In doing so, he would remind himself of the special opportunity he will have as president to speak to a world that still suffers from the anti-Western fury that Fanon described in 1961.

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James L. Jones as National Security Adviser?

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Newsweek - By John Barry, Dan Ephron, Richard Wolffe - Nov. 30 (Opinion) - In Washington, the truism of the moment is that President-elect Barack Obama has cleverly set out to create a "team of rivals." He is said to be filling out the top ranks of his administration with strong-minded, hard-headed policy warriors—Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates—who will be encouraged to disagree with each other and even with Obama. The conversations may grow heated, but the best ideas will survive and yes men will be shown the door.

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Obama On Economic Crisis, Transition, Also Discusses National Security, Iraq, And His Cabinet

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

60 Minutes - By Steve Kroft - Nov. 17 (Interview) - Since Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States 12 days ago, he has largely remained out of sight, getting high-level government briefings and conferring with his transition team. But he surfaced on Friday afternoon in Chicago, alongside his wife Michelle to give 60 Minutes his first post-election interview.

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Obama's chance to end the fantasy that is Star Wars

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

The Independent - By Johann Hari - Nov. 13 (Opinion) - Sure, maybe one day scientists will discover some way to evaporate nukes in the brief window before they strike. Maybe they will discover how to turn lead into gold – a pursuit that obsessed Europe's best minds for centuries. Maybe aliens will get in touch. But none of these assumptions is a sensible basis for government policy.

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The Worst of the Worst?

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Foreign Policy - By Ken Ballen, Peter Bergen - Oct. 21 (Opinion) - Controversy over the Bush administration’s policy to detain enemy combatants at Guantánamo has raged since the facility opened in 2002—fueled primarily by the lack of legal protections afforded the detainees and allegations of their mistreatment. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that most of these detainees have never posed any real risk to America, for the simple reason that the vast majority of them were never “enemy combatants” in the first place. Indeed, striking new data we have obtained show that, if anything, the 17 innocent Chinese men are far from exceptional.

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A chink in the US-Mexico border fence

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By James Ridgeway - Oct. 14 (Opinion) - Close to the nation's busiest highway border crossing, from San Diego County to Tijuana, a border fence cuts across a park and a beach before stretching into the surf of the Pacific Ocean. This is the westernmost edge of the demarcation line in the US's war against unauthorised immigration, and we are heading into a militarised zone.

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Why Foreign Ownership of US Assets is a Big Deal

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Post - By John Crudele - Sep. 18 (Opinion) - A few weeks back President Bush used his trip to the Olympics to chide his hosts, the Chinese, about human rights violations. Even if the president was truly passionate about the issue that probably wasn't the best move. Last week the Chinese - along with our friends the Japanese - are said to have insisted that Washington take action to protect their investments in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which is exactly what happened. A lot of stuff has happened in the past week - AIG's bailout by the government, Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch's shotgun marriage to Bank of America, to name a few. But the fact that the Chinese, or anyone for that matter, had any influence as to how our country conducts its financial affairs is by far the most important and long-ranging event.

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Seven years later

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - Sep. 11 (Editorial) - SEVEN YEARS have passed since a terrorist plot hatched in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan produced the atrocities of Sept. 11. Soon after, fast-moving American forces accompanied by Afghan fighters of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance chased the Taliban hosts of Osama bin Laden from power. But like a recurring nightmare, the Taliban have come back, waging vicious guerrilla warfare from their sanctuary, now in Pakistan.

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September 11 2001 and a world that changed

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - Sep. 11 (Editorial) - A year or so ago the verdict on our performance would have been harsh: two bad wars, with a third one brewing, abrogations of the law and civil liberties that were as deplorable as they were ineffective, alienated minorities in many countries, and a relationship between the west and the Muslim world marked by misunderstanding and hostility. Today it might be a shade or two less withering. One war has lessened in its intensity, while the prospect of an American attack on Iran has dwindled. A general recognition that the Bush administration's violations of the law were counterproductive is evident across the political spectrum, even if it is also evident that ingenious new ways of circumventing the law are still being found. Second thoughts in some of the other 80 countries which have passed dubious counterterrorism legislation are emerging. Hard although it is to track, it may be that alienation among Muslim minorities in Europe is down, a product of efforts on both sides to improve understanding.

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"Claim of Privilege": Trail of "state secrets" followed like an absorbing mystery

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Kevin J. Hamilton - Jul. 18 (Review) - Ironically, as it turned out, the Reynolds case itself never did involve anything even remotely resembling "state secrets." When the accident report was declassified in the 1990s, all it contained was a dry summary of glaring negligence: engine maintenance orders (designed to prevent the fire) that had been ignored, negligent aircraft operation by the pilots, and a failure even to train the civilians on escape procedures or parachute operation.

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Oil Brings Americans Closer to OPEC Debtor Dependence

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Bloomberg - By Daniel Kruger - Jul. 15 (Opinion) - ``It's a net transfer of wealth from the United States to the oil exporting economies on a very, very significant scale,'' said Brad Setser, an economist with the Council on Foreign Relations and former acting director of the Treasury's Office of International Monetary and Financial Policy. ``That is a reality. Anybody who is pursuing a policy with large deficits is implicitly planning on relying on demand from those countries.''

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How dare they rip the Fourth Amendment?

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

McClatchy - Jul. 03 (Opinion) - How can even one senator on either side of the aisle in good conscience vote in favor of this law that does nothing to enhance our security and everything to diminish our rights as a free people?

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Gen. Taguba knew scandal went to the top

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

McClatchy - By Joseph L. Galloway - Jun. 23 (Editorial) - In a week when McClatchy published a five-part series by my colleague Tom Lasseter on the extra-legal American military detention center at Guantanamo and who's responsible for giving Americans a green light to mistreat, torture and detain both the guilty and the innocent prisoners in our custody, Maj. Gen. Taguba spoke out as well. In the preface to a damning report on the treatment of Guantanamo detainees by a group called Physicians for Human Rights -- which had examined and interviewed 11 former Guantanamo detainees freed without charges -- Taguba declared that there was no longer any doubt whatsoever that President George W. Bush and others in the White House had committed war crimes.

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