From the category archives:

Bush Administration

America and Iran: strikes, sanctions and scapegoats

August 12, 2010

Gary Sick writes:
For the pundits, there are only two questions about U.S.-Iran relations that are of any importance: (1) Will Israel and/or the United States attack Iran? and (2) will the new sanctions have enough bite to persuade Iran to change its nuclear policy? Despite all the printers ink spilled on these two issues, the [...]

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Looking back at torture

August 4, 2010

President Obama has so far refused to look back at the previous administration’s use of torture, but David Cole says: “on this issue, we cannot move forward without looking back. Unless we acknowledge that what the United States did was not just a bad idea, but illegal, we risk treating torture as simply another policy [...]

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The American way of war; how Bush’s wars became Obama’s

July 23, 2010

On September 11, 2001, America froze in shock and the shock was followed by a mix of fear, anger and bewilderment.
Yet for some, the first response was also the enduring response: a knowing dread that what followed would be far worse than what just happened; that America’s reaction would be wildly disproportionate and vastly more [...]

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The terrorist-naming game

June 28, 2010

On September 11, 2001, George Bush changed the way Americans look at the world and the success with which he accomplished this feat is evident in the fact that his perspective largely remains unchallenged — even among many of his most outspoken critics. Bush’s simplistic for-us-or-against-us formula was transparently emotive yet utterly effective.
For almost a [...]

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Grave injustice: Maher Arar and unaccountable America

June 27, 2010

At Middle East Report Online, Lisa Hajjar writes:
On June 14, the Supreme Court buried the prospect of justice for Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian origin who was “extraordinarily rendered” by the United States (via Jordan) to Syria in 2002. Arar was suing the US officials who authorized his secret transfer, without charge, to [...]

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An empire decomposed: American foreign relations in the early 21st century

April 16, 2010

A must-read speech on the militarization of American diplomacy, by Chas Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and the first casualty in the Israel lobby’s efforts to rein in what in its early days might have looked like a dangerously independent Obama administration.
Americans are accustomed to foreigners following us. After all, for forty years, [...]

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The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

March 6, 2010

In Harper’s, Scott Horton writes:
When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great.” Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo Naval Base “shall be closed as [...]

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The new McCarthyism

March 5, 2010

In The American Prospect, Adam Serwer writes:
The “Gitmo Nine” aren’t terrorists. They weren’t captured fighting for the Taliban. They’ve made no attempts to kill Americans. They haven’t declared war on the United States, nor have they joined any group that has. The “Gitmo Nine” are lawyers working in the Department of Justice who fought the [...]

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Are we living in the post-moral age?

February 20, 2010

Rafi Eitan, an Israeli elder statesman and former intelligence officer is perhaps best known for having led the Mossad operation that captured Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust, and brought him back to face trial and execution in Israel in 1962.
In an interview with Haaretz this week, Eitan summed up the Zeitgeist in which we [...]

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The crime of not “looking backward”

January 20, 2010

The crime of not “looking backward”
By Glenn Greenwald, Salon, January 19, 2010
The single biggest lie in War on Terror revisionist history is that our torture was confined only to a handful of “high-value” prisoners. New credible reports of torture continuously emerge. That’s because America implemented and maintained a systematic torture regime spread throughout [...]

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What’s the difference between Obama’s anti-terrorism policies and Bush’s?

January 8, 2010

What’s the difference between Obama’s anti-terrorism policies and Bush’s?
By Jacob Sullum, Reason, January 6, 2010
If Obama is pretending we are not at war, he is not doing a very good job of it. “Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred,” he declared in his inaugural address. “I don’t think [...]

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War in the Age of Terrorism

January 4, 2010

War in the Age of Terrorism
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, January 4, 2010
This is change: we’ve gone from change we can believe in, to a change in the mood music.
If Dick Cheney was the éminence grise behind George Bush, one could now be forgiven for thinking that George Bush himself has quietly taken on [...]

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President Obama takes the heat President Bush did not

December 30, 2009

President Obama takes the heat President Bush did not
By Josh Gerstein, Politico, December 29, 2009
Eight years ago, a terrorist bomber’s attempt to blow up a transatlantic airliner was thwarted by a group of passengers, an incident that revealed some gaping holes in airline security just a few months after the attacks of Sept. 11. But [...]

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