The US and Torture: A Brazilian Perspective
Thanks to the Washington Monthly’s Nancy LeTourneau, I was alerted to another torture report that came out in recent days, this one from Brazil. That country’s National Truth Commission reported on its investigation into the 21-years of dictatorship that came ...
Read MoreCuba and the US
I have sometimes cited US-Cuban relations as an unusually pure illustration of the effects of the US presidential electoral college on policy. Cuba had been a major locus of Cold War history: the site of the US’s most embarrassing Cold ...
Read MoreTorture and Its Apologists
A notably fatuous defense of the use of torture by the Bush administration’s CIA came unsurprisingly from ex-President Bush himself, before the Senate Intelligence Committee report came out: We’re fortunate to have men and women who work hard at the ...
Read MoreIsrael: Some Corrections
In reviewing my 12/3 post on the Shavit and Blumenthal books, I discovered that in the process of pasting text from Word into my website I had accidentally omitted a key paragraph. I’ve now inserted that paragraph, so if you’ve ...
Read MoreOutrageous
As a non-lawyer, I generally shy away from commenting on judicial proceedings, especially since all relevant evidence is usually not readily accessible. But I find it impossible to say nothing about the Staten Island grand jury verdict. The non-indictment of ...
Read MoreIsrael: Triumph and Tragedy, Fear and Loathing
My recent trip to Israel prompted two reading self-assignments: Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, and Max Blumenthal’s Goliath: Fear and Loathing in Greater Israel. Both books, in truth, had been on my to-read list ...
Read MoreA Trip to Israel
A week ago yesterday my wife Celia and I got back from a week’s stay in Israel. It was a great trip. Israel is a wondrous country: for the antiquities it holds, for its uniqueness as host to some of ...
Read MoreJ Edgar Hoover RIP (Not)
We’ve known for a long time what a twisted, dangerous character J Edgar was, but this is incredible. The FBI building by act of Congress bears his name. A change in that name is long overdue. Somebody needs ...
Read MoreKristof on Our Broken Politics
It’s a long flight back from Tel Aviv, so I decided to use some of my time to react to Nicholas Kristof’s most recent NY Times column, since it nicely illustrates some of what I was saying in my last ...
Read MoreThe Radicals’ Big Win
So, the midterm elections were about as completely disastrous as could be. Progressives will try to spin the outcome with various reasonable arguments. The Republicans enjoyed significant cyclical advantages–the older and whiter midterm electorate, the traditional vulnerability of the party ...
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