I mentioned yesterday that I was working on a piece about the recent fusillade of arrests of American Muslims for terrorism-related activities, something that warranted an update to my 2005 TNR piece about the resistance of American Muslims to radicalization. But I wanted to take the idea further, and address both the implications of this [...]

Mark Hosenball reports on the drone-strike debate: One person standing in the way of expanded missile strikes: President Obama. Five administration officials tell NEWSWEEK that the president has sided with political and diplomatic advisers who argue that widening the scope of the drone attacks would be risky and unwise. Obama is concerned that firing missiles [...]

Leah Farrall’s second round of dialogue with Abu Walid has been translated and posted. In this one, he comes across as a disgruntled blog commenter, chiding Farrall for picayune misimpressions or perceived inaccuracies in her account of Taliban/al-Qaeda relations at the expense of substantive engagement with her broader points. This might be my favorite example: [...]

Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas vote for a scheme that includes West Bank settlements as areas that “qualify for grants, tax benefits, and other forms of aid” totaling millions of dollars. Cushioning the blow on the settlement freeze or encouraging growth despite the freeze? Either way, look at the wages of settlement: a West Bank [...]

This might be the only song that could have possibly made last week’s heartwarming FDL holiday party any better. I am… not the biggest fan of Christmas. Don’t have anything against Christmas-qua-Christmas; it’s just not the most comfortable holiday for non-believers. I try not to rain on anyone else’s parade, because there’s no need to [...]

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economyI don’t know a thing about U.S.-Uganda relations. But it strikes me as essentially cost-free for the Obama administration to put the principles of the Nobel speech into practice by telling the Museveni government that those relations will be severely jeopardized if the parliament [...]

I really have to pay more attention to the British inquiry into the origins of the Iraq war if this is what it’s producing: Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said he would have found a justification for invading Iraq even without the now-discredited evidence that Saddam Hussein was trying to produce weapons of [...]

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross has a post justly taking issue with an assertion I made about the relationship between the arrest of five Virginia youths in Pakistan and CAIR’s role in encouraging their families to go to the FBI with their concerns. I wrote that the arrests “wouldn’t have happened” absent CAIR’s intervention, which was my read [...]

If you haven’t gotten enough of my reporting about the past week’s Afghanistan hearings, check out this ten-minute segment on Ana Marie Cox’s Air America radio show. I can’t actually get this to play, myself, as it seems like Silverlight and Firefox and my laptop would prefer not to have anything to do with one [...]

Deep thought: if the U.S. really did invade Iraq to steal its oil, we sure fucked that up.