Roundup: Media's Take

Jim Castagnera: Sorting Out the Israeli Situation

[Mr. Castagnera, a Philadelphia journalist and attorney, is the Associate Provost at Rider University and author of the weekly newspaper column Attorney at Large.] The State of Israel was born the same year I was: 1947. My strongest impressions of that painful birth (Israel’s, not mine) come from the 1960 Otto Preminger film, based on the Leon Uris best-seller “Exodus.” As I recall that blockbuster epic movie, it accurately depicts the fact that the Jewish Haganah, especially an

Scott Shane: Is the CIA Really More Restrained than the CIA of the Cold War?

When the Central Intelligence Agency took a nervous look at its past in 1973, one potential illegal act officials identified was the treatment of a K.G.B. officer named Yuri Nosenko. After fleeing to the United States in 1964, Mr. Nosenko was held in a makeshift jail for three years and subjected to tough questioning to determine whether he was a genuine defector or a plant. A C.I.A. document released Tuesday said officials “became increasingly concerned with the illegality of the a

Steve Plaut: The Anti-Terror Campaign That Succeeded

[Steven Plaut, a frequent contributor to The Jewish Press, is a professor at the University of Haifa. His book"The Scout" is available at Amazon.com. He can be contacted atsteveneplaut@yahoo.com]Until recently, relatively little was known about groups like Werwolf. But several books, particularly those authored by Perry Biddiscombe, a

Bruce Bartlett: Climate History

[Bruce Bartlett is a former senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis of Dallas, Texas. Bartlett is a prolific author, having published over 900 articles in national publications, and prominent magazines and published four books, including Reaganomics: Supply-Side Economics in Action.] Many people are worried about global warming today. They fear that the polar ice caps will melt, raising sea levels and creating environmental chaos. Such concerns are not new. The hi

Cathy Young: Does the tenure case of Norman Finkelstein bode ill for academic freedom?

The denial of tenure to political scientist and author Norman Finkelstein at DePaul University, blamed by some on pressure from celebrity law professor Alan Dershowitz, has become the focus of a debate about academic freedom and academic standards. Where does one draw the line between unpopular opinions and junk scholarship, advocacy and agitprop, polemics and character assassination? These questions have implications far beyond the Finkelstein case. To Finkelstein's backers, he is

Kaleem Omar: Bush’s post-9/11 policies have become enemies of the open society

The United States of America has long prided itself on being a “bastion of freedom” and the world’s “first democracy,” even though many of the actions it has taken against other countries over the last hundred years have been neither democratic in character nor in support of freedom. Internally, true democracy didn’t come to the United States until the civil rights legislation of the 1960s which ended racial segregation in America and ensured that black Americans got the right to vote.

Shawn Brimley, Kurt Campbell: The Endgame in Iraq

What happens when you take a 40-year-old CIA memo on losing a war and replace the word “Vietnam” with the word “Iraq”? The result is a set of conclusions that are just as true today. Memorandum TO: CIA Director Gen. Michael V. Hayden FROM: Kurt Campbell and Shawn Brimley RE: The Consequences of Losing in Iraq American policymakers and intelligence analysts are currently struggling to consider the potential repercussions of failure in Iraq.

Bret Stephens: Who Killed Palestine?

Bill Clinton did it. Yasser Arafat did it. So did George W. Bush, Yitzhak Rabin, Hosni Mubarak, Ariel Sharon, Al-Jazeera and the BBC. The list of culprits in the whodunit called "Who Killed Palestine?" is neither short nor mutually exclusive. But since future historians are bound to ask the question, let's get a head start by suggesting some answers. And make no mistake: No matter how much diplomatic, military and financial oxygen is pumped into Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian

Sidney Blumenthal: Imperial presidency declared null and void

In private, Bush administration sub-Cabinet officials who have been instrumental in formulating and sustaining the legal"war paradigm" acknowledge that their efforts to create a system for detainees separate from due process, criminal justice and law enforcement have failed. One of the key framers of the war paradigm (in which the president in his wartime capacity as commander in chief makes and enforces laws a

Joshua Spivak: Bloomberg would be a spoiler

[Joshua Spivak, a lawyer and public relations executive, worked for State Sen. Seymour Lachman (D-Brooklyn) from 1996 to 1998.] With the news that he has dropped his Republican affiliation, Mayor Michael Bloomberg continues to play a highly public game of flirting with an independent presidential run. This meshes with the intense speculation that a noted independent political figure, the self-financing Bloomberg or someone else, such as the antiwar Republican Sen. Chuc

Richard Cohen: How the GOP Could Win

There are two ways to predict the winner of the 2008 presidential race: Check the polls or read some history. The polls tell you that with George Bush's approval ratings abysmally low; with the war in Iraq becoming increasingly unpopular; with the GOP lacking a dominant candidate; and with the party divided over immigration, social issues and even religion ( Mitt Romney's Mormonism), the next president is bound to be a Democrat. History begs to differ. The history I have in mind is

Charles Krauthammer: We must support Abbas, but this is his last chance

Gaza is now run not by a conventional political party but by a movement that is revolutionary, Islamist and terrorist. Worse, Hamas is a client of Iran. Gaza now constitutes the farthest reach of the archipelago of Iranian proxies: Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Mahdi Army (among others) in Iraq and the Alawite regime of Syria. This Islamist mini-replica of Comintern is at war not just with Israel but with the moderate Arab states, who finally woke up to this threat l

Anne Applebaum: The infuriating blandness of political speech

"Eager to preserve the English language against a rising tide of nonsense," a British newspaper last week asked readers to compose a piece of prose "crammed with as many infuriating phrases as possible." The results make for entertaining reading. "I hear what you're saying but, with all due respect, it's not exactly rocket science," begins one excellent example. "The bottom line is you wear your heart on your sleeve and, when all is said and done,

James Bowman: David Halberstam and the media's ethos of irresponsibility

"For those who remember journalism back in a 1970s heyday they can't explain to to [sic] the young, [David] Halberstam's death was not just the death of a hero, it was like the death of the great Hollywood stars--Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable." So wrote Henry Allen in the Washington Post shortly after the car crash which brought about the melancholy event to which he refers. He reminds us of what a paltry thing, in journalism's little kingdom, is "just" the death of a hero--

Mark Davis: Growing Pessimism Seems Justified

Pick any time in history, and you'll find daunting, discouraging problems. Today is surely no exception: A stagnant war, ineffective borders, soaring gas prices and other problems stew in a soup of political discourse so bitter that solutions seem unthinkable. Through it all, I try to stay upbeat. I believe America has more honest people in government than crooks, more involved citizens than snoozers, more good people than bad. And I can always find more reasons than not to feel goo

H.D.S. Greeenway: Radicalization, despair in the Mideast

ONCE AGAIN American policy in the Middle East lies in shambles. It can be argued, as Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian scholar at Columbia University, has, that the current crisis in Gaza began with the response by Israel, the United States, Europe, et. al., to the elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority in January 2006 -- the election that brought Hamas to power. The Bush administration pushed for the election, over considerable Israeli doubts, in the American belie

E.J. Dionne: Dragging down the Democrats

There's the brand, and then there's the product. At the moment, the Democratic brand is pretty good while the Republican brand is badly scarred. But when it comes to product, Democrats still have a lot of development work to do. As they toil away, Republicans will be working just as hard to soil the Democratic name. It's been clear for months that large majorities of Americans have given up on the Republicans. They've turned decisively against President Bush and, in principle, want

Simon Kennedy and Mark Drajem: Beggar-Thy-Neighbor Protectionism Looms

Deal or no deal, the latest round of global trade talks may be the last of its kind. Officials from the U.S., the European Union, India and Brazil meet this week to try to advance the faltering Doha round of negotiations. The talks are part of a six-decade push to liberalize trade that is yielding diminishing returns as technology and an increasingly integrated global economy render it less relevant. ``I don't want to be apocalyptic about the world trading system, bu

Froma Harrop: A Bad Breed of Brazen Republicans

Republicans hardly have a lock on corruption in Washington, but they do seem to hold the patent on an especially brazen breed of dodgy politician. This is the official who combines devious dealing with abusive behavior. Alaska Rep. Don Young seems to fit the mold, as did former California Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, now doing jail time for bribery, fraud and tax evasion. Sellers of the public interest tend to be amiable fellows, who, upon sensing they've gone too far, ba

Polly Toynbee: We need a rebellion against a press

Tony Blair was dead right about the British media. It's a fleet of runaway JCB diggers without driver or brakes, beyond accountability or control even by those who nominally run them. Needless to say, with almost one voice the media turned the blame back on Blair: who was this spin maestro to throw stones? They have a point, up to a point. But there was no nanosecond's pause for reflection, not a moment for self-doubt. Blair's enemies of right and left, current and former editors, used ev