From the Archive: An Oscar frontrunner for best picture is “Argo,” depicting a little-known chapter of the U.S-Iran hostage standoff in 1979-81. Yet, while focusing on this story of six hostages escaping, “Argo” missed bigger dramas, before and after, as…
Category: Obama Administration
Honoring a Heroic Slavery-Fighter
The movie “Lincoln” was a dramatic depiction of the political fight to end American slavery with the 13th Amendment and presented a rare sympathetic portrayal of anti-slavery Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, played by Tommy Lee Jones. This offered a belated chance to…
Brennan’s Loose Talk on Iran Nukes
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s hearing on John Brennan to head the CIA focused on lethal drones, but Brennan’s loose talk lumping Iran with North Korea as nuclear threats could be even more worrisome, recalling Iraq WMD exaggerations, as Veteran Intelligence…
Retrofitting War to Global Warming
The U.S. government spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year to fight or prepare to fight wars against supposed security threats around the world. But far less money is invested in what many experts believe will be the greatest…
The Geopolitics of Pistachios
The two top producers of pistachios are the United States and Iran, which have squared off over grievances for more than three decades. Now, there’s news that Israel has a preference for the Iranian variety and Prime Minister Netanyahu has…
Get Parry’s Bush Trilogy for Only $34
As the bright new Republican stars flame out the likes of Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul the presidential focus for 2016 will shift back to Jeb Bush as a choice broadly acceptable to the GOP, and you will…
The Almost Vanunu
From the Archive: The strange saga of how Israel “disappeared” Australian-born Ben Zygier into a high-security jail as “Prisoner X” and how he died under suspicious circumstances sheds new light on Israel’s efforts to silence ex-intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe in the 1990s, as…
Drone Danger: Making War Too Easy
The lethal-drone debate’s focus on the legality of killing Americans in al-Qaeda obscures the larger problem of waging war indiscriminately and thus creating new enemies. In that view, President Obama has stretched his legal authority past the breaking point, says Independent…
Thin Line: ‘Good/Bad Guy with a Gun’
Exclusive: For years as a police officer and Navy reservist, Christopher Dorner was what the NRA would call “a good guy with a gun,” but something snapped when he was fired from the LAPD, transforming him into “a bad guy with a…
Planning for an Asteroid Threat
It sounds like a script from a science-fiction movie, a giant asteroid on a collision course with earth, threatening all life on the planet. But the existence of this existential threat is not entirely fiction and last week’s near misses…