Editorials

Daniel Larison writes: Bill Keller confirms that he has not really learned any of the lessons of the Iraq war: Of course, there are important lessons to be drawn from our sad experience in Iraq: Be clear about America’s national interest. Be skeptical of the intelligence. Be careful whom you trust. Consider the limits of [...]

Faith-based skepticism might seem like a contradiction in terms and thus it never fails to amaze me the frequency with which doubt and blind faith are conjoined in some people’s minds when they think about Syria. The latest example comes in response to claims that chemical weapons have been used. If U.S. government officials assert [...]

“I don’t want to just end the war, I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place,” Barack Obama said referring to Iraq while campaigning in January 2008. On January 22, 2009, two days after taking office, Obama appeared to be making good on that aspiration as he signed [...]

A future terrorist is as real as a unicorn, yet I guarantee if Homeland Security went to a Congressional appropriations committee and asked for additional funding to improve their ability to find future terrorists, legislators would approve the request and double the amount. To imagine that there could be such a person as a future [...]

It has become so commonplace, no one gives it a second thought: nothing tells us more about a terrorist’s radical leanings than the jihadist videos and extremist sermons that show up on a playlist of an individual who turns to violence, or so we are told. As the Washington Post reports: In a few months, [...]

(Updates below) Aside from the names themselves, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, aged 26 and now dead, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, aged 19 and at this time on the run, the other detail about the brothers linked to the bombings that will receive greatest attention in the media today is their connection to Chechnya. USA Today already has a [...]

Panspermia — the hypothesis that life exists throughout the universe — has been kicking around among astrophysicists for decades, one of its most recent and prominent proponents being Stephen Hawking. A couple of geneticists, Alexei Sharov of the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, and Richard Gordon of the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida, [...]

During the first hour after the atrocity in Boston, journalists and others were quick to exercise what I would call zealous caution: don’t talk about bombs — all we know is that these were explosions. Sure, we didn’t know. But anyone could reasonably talk about what appeared to be explosions caused by bombs. I understand [...]

Anyone who’s bothered reading the small-print warnings on a can of paint will have come across lines like these: “Contains solvents which can cause permanent brain and nervous system damage… This product contains chemicals known to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.” You have been warned and thus — hopefully — take [...]

“This is as far as possible from a popular revolution in Syria. Who can deny this is a US-run proxy war?” Ali Abunimah tweeted a week ago. Yes, I can picture John McCain, George Soros, and Gene Sharp, huddled in the basement of the White House, planning attacks against Syrian government forces and handling the [...]

“There is no such thing as ‘Islamophobia.’ This is a term of propaganda designed to protect Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia.” — Sam Harris in an email exchange with Glenn Greenwald. Let’s unpack that statement. To establish whether there is indeed no such thing [...]