War on Terror
As Marc said, quite the name and concept for Senator Whitehouse’s proposed commission. Can a “Truth Czar” be far behind? Look, it is certainly possible that stuff went on beyond the borderline silliness intitially reported to have occurred at Abu Graib. And without a doubt, the idea of rendering prisoners to another country for torture…
Some of the things on which President Bush stood firm made even folks as far to the right as me wary, particularly when it came to “enhanced interrogation” methods. Not believing the insanely bloodthirsty image that his detractors painted of him (and for which they ought to be even more extremely embarrassed after the smooth…
Mark Patinkin’s reasonable on the Israel-Palestine conflict: These were not rogue militants acting on their own. Gaza is now controlled by the extremist Hamas government. The missile firings were allowed, even encouraged, from on high. At last, on Dec. 27, Israel launched a counterattack to stop the rockets. Much of the coverage outside the United…
Both the remark and the reporter’s presentation are worthy of note in this recent New York Times piece on Israel’s movement of ground troops into Gaza: Another woman found only half of the body of her 17-year-old daughter in the Shifa morgue. “May God exterminate Hamas!” she screamed, in a curse rarely heard these days.…
I have to believe that the day will come when society at large will share my disgust with such phrasings as Owen M. Sullivan’s and be astonished that anybody would commit them to print, much less seek to publish them in major newspapers: The Israeli attack on the Gaza Ghetto, much like the Nazi attack…
Partisans may attempt to yoke each successive American administration with part of the blame, but it’s achingly frustrating to note the repetitive nature of events and rhetoric in the Middle East. Jeff Jacoby enunciates the lesson that the West never wants to learn about terrorism: The hard truth is that no matter how much Israelis…
Hey, whatever works: While the CIA has a long history of buying information with cash, the growing Taliban insurgency has prompted the use of novel incentives and creative bargaining to gain support in some of the country’s roughest neighborhoods, according to officials directly involved in such operations. In their efforts to win over notoriously fickle…
Here’s an interesting fact for perspective: The number of daily attacks in Iraq has fallen almost 95% from levels a year ago. Also of note, the murder rate in Iraq in November was 0.9 per 100,000 people. That is lower than the rate from before Saddam was overthrown. For those keeping score, the 2007 murder…
Mark Steyn gives it good and righteous to the PC media and a Western culture intent on turning a deliberately deaf ear to the beast growling outside the tent: In a well-planned attack on iconic Bombay landmarks symbolizing great power and wealth, the “militants” nevertheless found time to divert 20 percent of their manpower to…
Of course one should temper incredulity when addressing the opinions of a college professor who’s written a book on a related topic, but so wrongheaded does Jonathan Stevenson’s assessment of Osama post-Obama seem that it’s difficult to conclude otherwise than that he has an investment of some kind in the wrong argument: ONE OF SEN.…