Generals Krulak and Hoar, still fighting for your freedom, but now on the Philly Inquirer op-ed page: A lone Nigerian caught with a bomb in his underwear is no match for FBI interrogators and skilled federal prosecutors – without resorting to torture, which violates our laws and subverts our values. Some assert that once suspects [...]

Very different circumstances obviously. But as I read everyone’s well-placed concerns about Haiti relief diminishing after the cameras go back home, it’s very hard not to think of Gaza. I see M.J. Rosenberg has similar thoughts. Gaza is a humanitarian catastrophe a year after Operation Cast Lead. Over a million people live in squalor, with [...]

I don’t know if I have it in me to comment on this. Tablet: After years of protests and an unsuccessful legal challenge, architect Frank Gehry has pulled out of a project to build a Jerusalem counterpart to the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance that is slated to stand on a site that was [...]

“If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower; it’s one of Rumsfeld’s Rules This is far more of a conjecture than a reported fact, but bear with me/take what follows in that spirit. There were real operational consequences to declaring through the Bush era that we were at war with “terror.” [...]

Why so few posts yesterday? Because I was wrapping this very long piece for the Washington Independent about a host of structural problems at the National Counterterrorism Center. What problems, you ask? According to interviews with several veteran NCTC analysts, the five-year-old center, meant to be a hub for pulling together terrorism information from across [...]

Imagine being buried alive for a day. A steel girder pins you down underneath the wreckage of your apartment. It happened in a moment. Now, your throat is so parched you can’t even yell for help. By a miracle, a neighbor finds you and frees you. What would you do next? One man did this: Mr. [...]

Doree Shafrir reports that rising poptart Ke$ha‘s brother is Lagan Sebert. I’m a huge Lagan fan, and not only because he sought out, filmed, edited and presented this Current TV piece from 2008 about the Flophouse. But also because he and then-American News Project colleague Davin Hutchins did this brief Guantanamo piece that I narrated! [...]

Obama has emerged from the Flight 253 controversy with nary a flesh wound, according to Pew. He’s got a 51 percent approval rating on counterterrorism, which ever so slightly outpaces his overall 49 percent approval. He continues to get markedly higher ratings for his handling of the threat of terrorism (51% approve) than for any [...]

I’m crashing on a story right now, but I didn’t want to let this excellent video — featuring some of your favorite bloggers — go unnoticed. It’s about the impact of expanding the Hyde amendment’s ban on abortion funding to private insurance markets, which the current healthcare bill apparently allows. You guys who follow healthcare [...]

There’s a war going down between my brothers tonight. But I want this war, going down, going down tonight. Because this is a war over dill, and you should not eat dill. Making the case for dill: Ezra Klein. Anti-dill: Matthew Yglesias and Kriston Capps. Especially Kriston Capps. Sadly, Yglesias neglects to bring one of [...]