Roundup: Media's Take

Sidney Blumenthal: Absolute Executive Power?

President Bush's explanations of why he is justified in ordering domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency have shifted with every news cycle. He has sent out Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to bolster his justifications. (Rice averred that she was "not a lawyer" before repeating the talking points.) Bush personally tried to suppress disclosure by the New York Times, which had held the story for more than a year before breaking it,

Norman Solomon: A New Phase of Bright Spinning Lies About Iraq

Three days before Christmas, the Bush administration launched a new salvo of bright spinning lies about the Iraq war. “In an interview with reporters traveling with him on an Air Force cargo plane to Baghdad,” the Associated Press reported Thursday morning, Donald Rumsfeld “hinted that a preliminary decision had been made to go below the 138,000 baseline” of U.S. troops in Iraq. Throughout 2006, until Election Day in early November, this kind of story will be a frequent media

Etienne Sakr: The Politics and Liberation of Lebanon

[Etienne Sakr, known as Abu Arz, was born in the village of Ayn Ebel in south Lebanon. Sakr founded the Guardians of the Cedars Party in 1975 and initiated the Lebanese Front in 1976. From 1989-90, he was associated with General Michel Aoun and the "war of liberation" against Syrian occupation, founding the Broad Front for Liberation and Change. His Guardians of the Cedars Party was, however, not involved in the military struggle that ensued between General Aoun and Lebanese Forces com

Vladimir Bukovsky: Torture's Long Shadow

[Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent nearly 12 years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals for nonviolent human rights activities, is the author of several books, including "To Build a Castle" and "Judgment in Moscow." Now 63, he has lived primarily in Cambridge, England, since 1976.] One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe

Art Buchwald: How Bush will be viewed by history

To ward off his low popularity numbers, President Bush recently said history would vindicate him. Fifty or 60 years from today, a U.S. president will say, "Thank goodness a generation of Americans rose to the challenge and helped people be liberated from tyranny." It was a smart idea, laying his present problems on history rather than himself. The speech was given at a fundraiser in Minneapolis, so we have no idea how history will judge Bush. T

WSJ Editorial: Thank you Mr. President for wiretapping

Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold wants to be President, and that's fair enough. By all means go for it in 2008. The same applies to Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who's always on the Sunday shows fretting about the latest criticism of the Bush Administration's prosecution of the war on terror. But until you run nationwide and win, Senators, please stop stripping the Presidency of its Constitutional authority to defend America. That is the real issue raised by the Belt

Bruce Schneier: Uncle Sam is listening

[Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and the author of "Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World."] ... Illegal wiretapping of Americans is nothing new. In the 1950s and '60s, the NSA intercepted every single telegram coming in or going out of the United States. It conducted eavesdropping without a warrant on behalf of the CIA and other agencies. Much of this became public during the 1975 Church Committee hearings and resulted in the now fa

Joseph Epstein: What Tocqueville can contribute to the discussion of the Iraq war

I have been writing a little book on Alexis de Tocqueville, the Frenchman who, after a mere nine-month visit in 1831, wrote "Democracy in America," which remains the best book written about the U.S. Tocqueville is famous for his powers of prophesy: One of his best calls was predicting the future struggle for world hegemony between the U.S. and Russia. But his power for prophesy dims beside his flair for generalization. Although he could scarcely have known this, much of the pleasure pr

William J. Stuntz: Brief wars rarely produce lasting results. Long wars often do.

[William J. Stuntz is a professor at Harvard Law School.] In 1861 Abraham Lincoln led what was left of his country to war to restore "the Union as it was," to use the popular phrase of the time. Free navigation of the Mississippi River, the right to collect customs duties in Southern ports, the status of a pair of coastal forts in South Carolina and Florida--these were the issues over which young American men got down to the business of killing one another that sad summer.

James Johnson and Robert Zarate: A Slow Pearl Harbor

[James Johnson and Robert Zarate are writing a biography of the strategist Albert Wohlstetter, Roberta Wohlstetter's late husband.] SIXTY-FOUR YEARS AGO, Japan stunned our nation with a daring raid on Pearl Harbor, killing 2,400 Americans and crippling the Pacific fleet. That same day, Japan also attacked U.S. forces in Manila, Midway and Wake Islands, and Guam, as well as British forces throughout East Asia. American leaders had anticipated attacks on the latter targets, but not on

Orhan Pamuk: On Trial in Turkey

In Istanbul this Friday—in ?i?li, the district where I have spent my whole life, in the courthouse directly opposite the three-story house where my grandmother lived alone for forty years—I will stand before a judge. My crime is to have “publicly denigrated Turkish identity.” The prosecutor will ask that I be imprisoned for three years. I should perhaps find it worrying that the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was tried in the same court for the same offense, under Article 301 of the same

Robert Kennedy Jr.: America's anti-torture tradition

IT IS NICE THAT the Bush administration has finally been pressured into backing a ban on cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners. But what remains shocking about this embarrassing and distasteful national debate is that we had to have it at all. This administration's newfound enthusiasm for torture has not only damaged our international reputation, it has shattered one of our proudest American traditions. Every schoolchild knows that Gen. George Washington made extraordinary effor

Pankaj Mishra : Secular Democracy Goes on Trial

[Pankaj Mishra is the author, most recently, of "An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World."] WHEN in 1989 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran sentenced Salman Rushdie to death, saying he had blasphemed the Prophet Muhammad in his novel "The Satanic Verses," it was seen even in the Islamic world as an act of political opportunism, intended to boost Iran over its rival Saudi Arabia as the beacon of global Islam. It garnered little support among the clergy outsi

Colonel Jiyul Kim: Pan-Korean Nationalism and Anti-Great Power-ism

[Colonel Jiyul Kim is the Director of Asian Studies at the U.S. Army War College. This article does not represent the views and policies of the U.S. Government, the Department of Defense or the U.S. Army.] ... Pan-Korean nationalism and anti-Great Power-ism are closely associated with changing notions of identity and nationalism. These are ideological forces that are driven by cultural factors such as the symbolism of historical experience or, more precisely, memory of that history.

David McNeill: Should Japan Retain the Emperor?

[David McNeill is a Tokyo-based journalist who teaches at Sophia University. A Japan Focus coordinator, he is a regular contributor to the London Independent and a columnist for OhMy News.] ... How then does Japan benefit from the imperial presence? Supporters tend to cite the emperor’s diplomatic role as an ambassador for Japan abroad, although his father’s controversial role in the Pacific War means the institution is forever tainted in Asia. Like their British count

Ambassador Gerald B. Helman: Secretary of State Rice and the New Truman Doctrine

[Helman"was United States Ambassador to the European Office of the United Nations from 1979 through 1981.] In an op-ed piece published in the December 11 Washington Post , Secretary of State Rice provides an important statement of the Administration's global strategic posture. She underscores its importance by comparing the international environment the Administration confronted when it took office to

Jeff Greenfield: The President, the War, and the Military Base

A well-known psychology test demonstrates that when we hear a list of words associated with a concept like sleep—bed, pillow, night, rest—we recall the word sleep even if that word isn't on the list. That may explain why many journalists—myself included—thought we saw a link between President Bush's recent Iraq speeches to armed forces audiences and an earlier president struggling with an unpopular war. When Bush spoke at the U.S. Naval Academy, at an Army depot in Pennsylvania, and

Jonathan Freedland: Jew Hatred, The sickness bequeathed by the west to the Muslim world

There were few memorable moments in the election campaign of 2005, but there's one I won't forget. It came when I was interviewing a group of Muslim voters in Edinburgh, asking how the Iraq war had unsettled their political allegiances. One older man began telling me that he did not blame Tony Blair or even George Bush for the way things had turned out, because they were mere dupes of a more powerful force. The calamity of 9/11 was not all it seemed: the authors of that event were not the 19 hij

Norman Podhoretz: The Panic Over Iraq

... Mark Twain once famously said that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. So it was, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with the post-Vietnam syndrome. During those early weeks, a number of commentators were quick to proclaim the birth of an entirely new era in American history. What Dec. 7, 1941 had done to the isolationism of old, they announced, Sept. 11, 2001 had done to the Vietnam syndrome. Politically speaking, it was dead, and the fallout from the Vietnam War--namely, the ho

Austin Cline: Christmas Wars & Conspiracies: Conflicts over the Meaning of Christmas Season

What are the Christmas Wars?: In his infamous tract “The International Jew,” Henry Ford wrote “The whole record of the Jewish opposition to Christmas, Easter and other Christian festivals, and their opposition to certain patriotic songs, shows the venom and directness of [their] attack.” The John Birch Society complained that the “Godless UN” was conspiring against Christmas. Today, conservatives claim that secularists and liberals are trying to replace Christmas. The enemy changes, but