Editorials

‘America at its worst’

by Paul Woodward 05.11.2013

The Boston Globe reports: The secret transport of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s body from Worcester to a small community near Richmond, Va., was set in motion by a woman who said she was upset to hear about protests to his burial and wanted to see an end to the weeklong burial saga. Martha [...]

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The ongoing campaign to cover up Obama’s indiscriminate killing program

by Paul Woodward 05.10.2013

Micah Zenko writes: Like many former senior Obama administration officials, Harold Koh has expressed his concerns about U.S. drone strike policies. As the former State Department legal adviser, he played an essential role in articulating and defending the international legal principles that supported “U.S. targeting practices, including lethal operations conducted with the use of unmanned [...]

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The American papacy

by Paul Woodward 05.08.2013

Robert E. Hunter, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, writes: [T]he president can be said to have painted himself into a corner with Syria on two occasions, initially as early as August 2011, and repeated since, by declaring that “Assad must go.” Of course, Assad has not gone, thus demonstrating once again the first rule [...]

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How did ‘national interest’ become a politically neutral term?

by Paul Woodward 05.06.2013

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 [...]

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Why are Buddhist monks attacking Muslims?

by Paul Woodward 05.03.2013

Cynical as it might sound, religious teachings are marketing tools — indeed, there is nothing in commerce that makes claims as grandiose as those made by any religion. The success of religious marketing is always evident when something happens that seems to expose a glaring gap between a religion and the behavior of some of [...]

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Faith-based skepticism on chemical weapons

by Paul Woodward 04.28.2013

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 [...]

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Is American credibility really on the line?

by Paul Woodward 04.28.2013

By claiming that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a “game changer,” President Obama seems to have boxed himself in and made intervention in Syria inevitable — or his word becomes worthless. Anne-Marie Slaughter writes: U.S. credibility is on the line. For all the temptation to hide behind the decision to invade [...]

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Guantánamo reveals America’s true character — how one cowboy president was replaced by another

by Paul Woodward 04.26.2013

“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 [...]

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Time to talk about the war on Islam

by Paul Woodward 04.24.2013

A 60 Minutes report which aired on Sunday provided a glimpse of the 9/11 Museum in New York, currently under construction and scheduled to open next year. The report underlined the degree to which 9/11 has become a pillar in America’s national mythology. For many Americans the events of that day clearly hold more significance [...]

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Searching for future terrorists… and unicorns

by Paul Woodward 04.23.2013

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 [...]

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How Boston exposes the frailty of American democracy

by Paul Woodward 04.22.2013

In the aftermath of 9/11, there were many political leaders and commentators who said that the attacks should serve as a warning that terrorists had the potential to cause even greater harm — in the most alarmist scenarios through the use of nuclear weapons. All the evidence over the last decade suggests however that as [...]

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Why always YouTube? Which were the terrorists’ Netflix picks?

by Paul Woodward 04.21.2013

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, [...]

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America’s willingness to be terrified by terrorism

by Paul Woodward 04.20.2013

Numerous times this week, the question has been raised about whether the perpetrators of the Marathon bombing might have been inspired by Inspire — the online magazine published by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Perhaps a more pertinent question is this: in what ways might events of the last few days provide inspiration to the [...]

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Both Boston Marathon bombers lived in the U.S. from childhood

by Paul Woodward 04.19.2013

(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 [...]

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The Boston Marathon bombing suspects — a few thoughts (updated)

by Paul Woodward 04.18.2013

Update: Early hours Friday morning — “One suspect in custody, another remains on the loose” — sounds like this story will become much clearer in the next few hours. At this time, the New York Post’s editor, Col Allan, shown on the left in the photo above, has not been identified as a suspect involved [...]

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Life before Earth

by Paul Woodward 04.17.2013

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, [...]

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Waco and mainstream America

by Paul Woodward 04.17.2013

April is the month when right-wing extremists seem to come out of the woodwork in America and nothing symbolizes the divide between the far-right and the establishment more potently than Waco. As portrayed in the media, the followers of David Koresh were seen as cultists who became the victims of their own blind and misguided [...]

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Speculating about the Boston bombings

by Paul Woodward 04.16.2013

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 [...]

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Guantánamo has become a monument to American cowardice

by Paul Woodward 04.15.2013

Here’s a glimpse of how dangerous one of the detainees at Guantánamo can be: A 2008 Department of Defense report on Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel (who was claimed to have been one of Osama bin Laden’s body guards) described the kind of trouble he had caused while under detention: He currently has 19 Reports [...]

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The weak regulations giving industry the freedom to poison Americans

by Paul Woodward 04.15.2013

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 [...]

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The new slavery: How patent law is being used to turn life into property

by Paul Woodward 04.12.2013

Mastercard stole the word priceless. But even if they hadn’t, the ideas of uniqueness and unquantifiable value only skirt around the edges of intrinsic value. I think it was the saxophonist, Wayne Shorter, who once said: “You don’t dance to get somewhere.” And that’s the point: intrinsic value has no reason; it is beyond means [...]

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Syria’s pragmatic revolutionaries

by Paul Woodward 04.12.2013

“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 [...]

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How Obama justifies murder

by Paul Woodward 04.09.2013

The scene above, which comes from Steven Spielberg’s Munich, depicts the murder of Wael Zuaiter, a Palestinian intellectual and representative of Fatah who was not known to have any connections to terrorism. He was shot in Rome by Israeli secret service agents on October 16, 1972, in revenge for the killing of 11 Israeli athletes [...]

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Sam Harris isn’t a racist — his hatred is very discerning

by Paul Woodward 04.04.2013

“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 [...]

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