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The United States was never meant to be a Christian nation. Instead, the Founders envisioned a secular state in which religion would be pursued with complete freedom, but they also understood the need for the young nation to have a moral compass.
Osama bin Laden is dead. And so is the U.S. republic. We had to destroy our freedoms in order to save them.
As America’s morbid celebrations over the killing of Osama bin Laden begin to fade, we are left with a new landscape of risks – and opportunities – created by his slaying at the hands of a U.S. Special Forces team at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
This has been the kind of week that makes news junkies wig out in a frenzy of adrenalin and information overload while driving to distraction people who try to write weekly pieces like this one.
On April 9, Condoleezza Rice delivered a talk in San Francisco. Or tried to. The former Secretary of State was interrupted repeatedly by cries from the audience of "war criminal" and "torturer". (For which we can thank Code Pink and World Can't Wait.)
The WikiLeaks documents released on Guantanamo prisoners indicate appalling military incompetence in haphazardly patching together sketchy and contradictory information that has allowed many high-risk terror suspects to go free, while low-risk or innocent detainees continue to be incarcerated.
In the aftermath of the resolution of the Great Birther bash-up, even as President Obama tried to lay the issue to rest by producing the document that showed, proved, verified, documented, and validated his birth in one of the great states of our disunion, it was said that its release would only fuel more debate and convince no one.
President Barack Obama touched off American celebrations with his Sunday night announcement that U.S. forces finally had killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, but that long frustrating hunt might not have been necessary if George W. Bush had rejected neoconservative advice to pivot prematurely from Afghanistan to Iraq in late 2001.
Pre-emptive wars and pre-emptive policing have been instituted as a result of the fear planted (and deliberately hyped) in the "war on terror."
A few days ago, I received my copy of Time magazine and found that the Rev. Rob Bell, a pastor of a megachurch in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a graduate of my alma mater, Wheaton College, had made the front cover.
Since the Gilded Age of the 19th century, the wealthy financiers and "robber baron" industrialists have been effectively purchasing power – and creating further revenue for themselves – by directing money into the coffers of business friendly politicians, who in turn vote for lower taxes, special exemptions, tax loopholes, deregulation, etc.
Some Americans, especially on the Left, seem to have almost forgotten that Barack Obama is an African-American whose rise to the presidency was one of the most unlikely political stories in U.S. history.
The news that President Barack Obama has picked Gen. David Petraeus to be CIA director raises troubling questions, including whether the commander most associated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will tolerate objective analysis of those two conflicts.
On April 23, 1999, at 2:06 a.m. Belgrade time, as NATO was preparing for its 50th anniversary celebration in Washington D.C., two cruise missiles struck the Radio Televizija Srbija (SRT) headquarters in Belgrade.
Having laughed off Libyan government peace feelers, Official Washington is now beating the drum for a new round of “shock and awe” bombings and close-combat air strikes to “finish the job” of ousting Col. Muammar Gaddafi.
The introduction of NATO ground forces into Libya would be met by additional African and Moslem volunteers joining Libyan forces, according to sources close to Col. Muammar Gaddafi, who add that NATO’s targeting of government officials could provoke retaliation against Western leaders.
Two years ago as financial reform was put on the U.S. Congressional agenda, a skeptical Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois spoke of the power of the banks over the country’s legislative process.
The Republicans are making a cynical bet that Americans over 55 really are the “greedy geezers” of conservative ideology, people who care only for themselves and not for their children and subsequent generations.
The influence of lobbies and special interests is a structural part of the U.S. political system and has been so since the founding of the nation. This being the case, the United States is not really a democracy of individuals. Rather, it is a democracy of competing interest groups or factions.
Remember that scene in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" when Jimmy Stewart arrives in the capital for the first time?
Christians have special celebrations for the key events of Holy Week, but they often overlook one of the most important.
Afghanistan may be the graveyard of empires, but Iraq is home to a graveyard sense of humor. Iraqis wonder aloud whether the U.S. and Britain would have invaded Iraq if its main export had been cabbages instead of oil.
The prospect of regime change in Libya is not so much “mission creep” as it is “mission leap.”
NATO’s one-month intervention in the Libyan civil war has demonstrated that – whether the West likes it or not – Col. Muammar Gaddafi retains significant political support in parts of the country and that a peace deal with him may be the only way to achieve the stated goal of saving civilian lives.
After months of pressure, the Obama administration has finally transferred Pfc. Bradley Manning to a military prison appropriately designed for pre-trial detention in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas.
The global economy and its recovery, and the living standards of millions of plain folks, are now at risk from the sudden rise in oil and commodity prices.
Patriots Day commemorates the start of the American Revolution, the battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, and the staggering British retreat to Boston. What’s less known is how the Americans outfoxed the British at one of their own strengths, intelligence.
I’m still smarting from Fox News describing me as “an elderly man” who, it was thought, might have had a sign or might have begun to shout out, and thus had to be “escorted out” of the auditorium while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was speaking at George Washington University on Feb. 15.
We Americans are observing the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, also known as the War Between the States, North and South.
Lobbification is a word I have just coined for the corruptive process that bends politicians to the will of special interests – that is to the will of lobbies.
Some readers tell me that I devote too much time to the historical context of the American political/media crisis. They say I should focus more on its current manifestations, especially when there are so many to address. And these readers have a point.
Twenty years ago, there was a chance to expose some of the darkest secrets of Ronald Reagan’s presidency: how his men had sabotaged President Jimmy Carter’s reelection campaign and how the Iran-Contra scandal had really begun.
I’m in Atlanta, Georgia, at present, among the scent of pine trees and the reek of Southern denial.
The eight months of solitary confinement of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning at the Quantico brig has drawn national and international criticism in the last week. Support is growing for him around the world with 500,000 writing President Barack Obama in the last few days and with hundreds of top U.S. legal scholars criticizing his conditions of confinement.
The Pakistani military's recent demands on the United States to curb drone strikes and reduce the number of U.S. spies operating in Pakistan, which have raised tensions between the two countries to a new high, were a response to U.S. military and intelligence programs that had gone well beyond what the Pakistanis had agreed to in past years.
I was considering having myself dusted with ash and measured for sackcloth last week, so many are the current predictions of impending apocalypse.
Just think for a moment about the 55-year-old Tea Party activist who today is caught up in the excitement over Rep. Paul Ryan’s “bold” Republican budget. Picture the activist adjusting his tri-corner hat, waving his yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, and thrilled that finally someone is getting serious about dismantling the socialist tyranny of Medicare.
There are many practical reasons why the U.S. military attack on Libya is a bad idea.
In Charles Dickens’s 1848 story, A Christmas Carol, the ghost of Jacob Marley roams the earth weighted down by chains symbolizing the wrongs he committed in life.
I’m still mulling over the recent Wisconsin election in general and the actions of Waukesha County’s County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus in particular.
The technologies that inflicted upon the world the ongoing tragedies in both the Gulf of Mexico and Japan serve a dangerous addiction, an addiction to blind optimism, a habituation of mind that allows us to dwell within provisional comfort zones but renders vast spaces of the world into death realms.
I can’t remember how many times I have said that the U.S. military adventure in Afghanistan is a fool’s errand.
There is something tragicomic about the persona of Richard Goldstone.
The Capitol Hill battlefield is still for the moment as the Easter holidays approach and the combatants get a break from the heated polemics and overnight bargaining sessions.
A battle for the heart and soul of American democracy is being waged in this country. But it might not be the battle you’re watching.
President Barack Obama has given his approval to a Pentagon plan to station U.S. combat troops in Iraq beyond 2011, provided that Iraqi Premier Nouri al-Maliki officially requests it, according to U.S. and Iraqi sources.
Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the Republican chairman of the U.S. House Budget Committee, unveiled two proposals this week which if enacted would constitute a mortal threat to our nation’s health – particularly to the health of our seniors and our most vulnerable populations.
The consequences of three decades of anti-government Reaganism and free-market extremism are now coming clearly into view, a cruel and brutish America split sharply between a few lucky haves and many desperate have-nots.
The Obama administration’s decision to use a military tribunal rather than a federal criminal court to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others means the real motives behind the 9/11 attacks may remain obscure.
On March 20, Americans, in a vet-led assembly, gathered to support PFC Bradley Manning who is accused of leaking documents to WikiLeaks and who has been held in solitary confinement at the Quantico Marine Base for seven months.
The neocon editors of the Washington Post, who have pushed the Iraq War since the beginning, are bummed out over the looming reality of America’s strategic defeat after eight years of fighting.
Before he went over that mountain top in April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. said he had already seen the other side, as he spent his last days on earth fighting for the garbage men of Memphis while speaking out about the twin evils of war and poverty.
It will be recalled that after the September 2009 issuance of the Goldstone Report suggesting that Israel might be guilty of war crimes, Judge Richard Goldstone was barred from attending his grandson’s bar mitzvah. That is how much resentment was produced by the critical report that bears his name.
The historical parallel most unnerving the Obama administration about the Libyan conflict is not Vietnam or Iraq, but Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration eagerly armed Islamic fundamentalists as a proxy force against Soviet troops only to see these “freedom fighters” morph into the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
There’s a joke making the rounds and it goes like this: Big Business, a Tea Partier and Organized Labor are sitting around a table. A dozen cookies arrive on a plate. Big Business takes eleven of them and says to the Tea Partier, "Pssst! That union guy is trying to steal your cookie!"
Spokespersons for NATO, European politicians, members of the Obama administration, and the President himself have been out and about seeking to articulate justifications for the ongoing intervention in Libya. For better or worse, their public statements do not always make sense.
Forget Libya. The real bombing is not underway there. Pay less attention to Pakistan. The drone attacks there pale in comparison.
Guns in churches, schools and bars. Immigrants expelled to solve financial problems. Morality praised as the key national issue.
Twenty years ago, in spring 1991, the United States was at a crossroads that would decide the near-term fate of American democracy, but that reality wasn’t apparent to many. What was clear was that the U.S. empire was resurgent.
Things are bad when a president who says he wants out of Iraq and claims American soldiers will soon start to withdraw from Afghanistan succumbs to international and domestic pressure to do the heavy lifting in yet another civil war — this time in Libya.
The New York Times and the Washington Post both believe that the United States should have begun bombing Libya before the United Nations Security Council approved the mission – a sign that the two preeminent American newspapers continue their slide into neoconservatism.
The announcement by U.S. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy in congressional testimony that the United States would continue to carry out "counter-terrorism operations" from "joint bases" in Afghanistan well beyond 2014 signaled that President Barack Obama has given up the negotiating flexibility he would need to reach a peace agreement with the Taliban leadership.
Tsunami is a Japanese word – one sign of the island nation’s intimate relationship with the destructive forces of the ocean that surrounds it.
“Let me be clear,” President Barack Obama is fond of saying – and his desire was on full display two years ago when he announced a “comprehensive, new strategy” for the war in Afghanistan.
In Berlin, Germany, in early 1939, at Friedrichstrasse railway station, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, my grandmother placed my mother and her older sister, with a few family valuables sown into their clothing, on a Kindertransport bound for Great Britain.
If you think the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) couldn't possibly make its prisons more inhumane no matter how hard it tried, you are wrong. It has created CMUs, or Communications Management Units, where the “management” part consists of denying inmates virtually all communication with their families and the outside world.
Richard Falk, the United Nations Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, told the world organization’s Human Rights Council that the "continued pattern of settlement expansion in East Jerusalem combined with the forcible eviction of long-residing Palestinians are creating an intolerable situation."
Like Jake LaMotta and his brother Joey in the bloody boxing classic Raging Bull, we are gluttons for punishment. So here we are again, third week in a row, defending NPR against the bare-knuckled assault of its critics.
It's been a long time since I sat in a college literature class and learned about the theater of the absurd, the work of great writers like Beckett, Ionesco, Genet and Camus, among others.
Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is facing court-martial for leaking military reports and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, is being held in solitary confinement in Quantico brig in Virginia.
American neoconservatives worried that the pro-democracy wave sweeping the Middle East might take out only "moderate" Arab dictators, but the neocons now see hope that uprisings will topple "enemy" regimes in Libya and Syria.
Last week, Detroit News auto critic, Scott Burgess, resigned after a “Chrysler dealer complained about his review of the Chrysler 200 — the centerpiece of the company’s 'Imported from Detroit' advertising campaign."
The failure of the General Electric nuclear reactors in Japan to safely shut down after the 9.0 Tahoku earthquake – on the heels of last year’s catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the deadly methane gas explosion in Massey’s West Virginia coal mine – underscores the grave dangers to human society posed by current energy production methods.
The Florida state legislature has passed Bill 736, and Gov. Rick Scott has signed it. So this effort to "reform" teaching practices in the Florida public schools is now law.
Since Saturday night, the United States, France, and Britain have been bombing Libya with cruise missiles, B-2 stealth bombers, F-16 and F-15 fighter jets, and Harrier attack jets. There is no reliable estimate of the number of civilians killed.
On a state visit to Chile on Monday, President Barack Obama deflected questions about U.S. support for the late Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship by warning against the risks of becoming “trapped by our history.” But a clear and present danger to the United States is that it is being trapped instead by false and misleading narratives.
There is no question that the Christian church of the first three centuries regarded itself as a nonviolent community. It makes perfect sense. Jesus clearly taught and modeled the nonviolent love of friend and enemy, and his earliest followers tried to do so.
What will it take for our world to recognize the dangers that nuclear scientists and even Albert Einstein were warning about at the “dawn” of the nuclear age?
Whether you believe that the United Nations resolution authorizing extensive intervention in the Libyan civil war is justified or not, and whether you believe that the admittedly eccentric 42-year rule of Muammar Gaddafi over a complex and fractious tribal society has been cruel, there is one thing that all objective observers should be able to agree on.
The number of civilians killed in U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) raids in Afghanistan last year was probably several times higher than the figure of 80 people cited in the U.N. report published last week, an IPS investigation has revealed.
As Americans turn to their news media to make sense of the upheavals in the Middle East, it’s worth remembering that the bias of the mainstream U.S. press corps is most powerful when covering a Washington-designated villain, especially if he happens to be Muslim.
Although people can be educated in a variety of ways, experience is a particularly effective teacher. Consider the Japanese who today are certainly learning how dangerous nuclear power can be.
The United States government, in violation of international human rights treaties, is trying to prevent the return to Haiti of twice-elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was deposed in a U.S.-backed coup d’etat in 2004.
When I arrived in the capital of Qatar, as one of the guest participants in the 6th annual Al Jazeera Forum focused on the Arab world in transition, it was clear the mood had changed.
A number of years back, Pauline Kael took Steven Spielberg to task for his depiction of rural Georgia circa 1909 in his movie, “The Color Purple,” averring that Spielberg's only field of reference seemed to be images culled from cinematic history, rendering his movie tone deaf regarding the rhythms and cadences of life during the era.
Read on.The hideous King of Bahrain has called in troops from Saudi Arabia, UAE and Kuwait to attack pro-democracy protesters in Bahrain.
George Orwell argued that controlling language offered the ultimate tool for getting people to accept the unacceptable – such as the catastrophic risks of operating nuclear power plants.
It appears the most serious offense you can commit in Washington these days is telling the truth. You get a pass on torture, aggressive war, killing civilians, lying, destroying evidence and such, but don’t dare give honest information to the American people.
The ecological crisis posed by the exploding and leaking nuclear power plants in Japan following the massive earthquake and tsunami there presents an opportunity for Americans to rethink nuclear power.
I live in a university town just west of the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Both the town and the university share the same name, hence West Chester University. WCU is a publicly owned institution and part of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE).
Today’s American political crisis has many facets, but a key one is narrative – how the history and ideals of the United States are understood by the public. The strategic importance of narrative is why the Right has invested so much in building media to redirect and control the national storylines.
Government budgets are as much moral statements as the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. The language is different, but the essence is the same. Budgets reveal the values of the nation.
Come on now: Let’s take a breath and put this NPR fracas into perspective.
The eulogies for Washington Post columnist David Broder and the chaos surrounding National Public Radio have coincided as an unintended commentary on what went wrong with the U.S. news media.
I write to you in your capacity as the commander-in-chief of the armed services of the United States to express my concern, indeed my outrage, at the way in which the prosecution of U.S. Army Private First Class Bradley Manning is being conducted.
Reports that Bradley Manning is being held nude every night at the Quantico Brig, then forced to stand naked in the hallway while he waits for his clothes, shows the inconsistency of the treatment of Manning with basic American values of due process, fair trial and human dignity.
