Category: Obama Administration

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…

Hezbollah Link to Bombing Doubted

In assessing murky terrorism cases in the Middle East, one must take into account the political pressures on investigators and journalists to push the conclusion in a favored direction. That truism has surfaced again in a bombing at the Bulgarian resort…

Locking In the Abuses of War

After the 9/11 attacks, the smart response might well have been to denounce the killings as a monstrous crime and treat al-Qaeda as outlaws to be brought to justice. But President Bush’s tough-guy response was to declare the crime a…

The SEC’s Golden Revolving Door

Many Americans are still shocked that Wall Street bankers who ruined the economy escaped any serious punishment from government regulators. But one problem is that many of those regulators, including the new choice to head the SEC, have been rotating…