Favorite “U.S. Takes Hooded, Shackled Detainees to Cuba,” declared the Washington Post headline on January 11, 2002. The reporters who wrote it were on the ground at Guantánamo Bay and in Kandahar, Afghanistan. I was in Washington, at my desk in the Post newsroom, where I worked as a researcher. As I read the story,…
Favorite This weekend, “60 Minutes” aired the first TV interview given by Reality Winner since she was released from prison this summer. In 2017, Winner leaked a top-secret National Security Agency analysis of Russia’s attempt to penetrate U.S. election systems around the country; she ended up serving the longest sentence ever doled out to a…
Favorite For years, the Dutch organization PAX has been issuing reports detailing the Armageddon that’s hiding in plain sight. The business of nuclear weapons — and it is in fact a business — does not for the most part take place in secret underground lairs. It is all around us, conducted by corporations and banks that might…
Favorite After two decades of unceasing warfare in the Middle East and Central Asia, the Biden administration has unveiled its first comprehensive review of the deployment of U.S. forces globally — and it envisions a virtually unchanged military footprint, with a sharpened commitment to the bipartisan policy of Cold War-style hostility toward Russia and China. The administration chose to…
Favorite Many Democrats, liberals, traditional conservatives, and even some leftists continue to tell themselves that the election of Joe Biden was the first step toward restoring U.S. standing in the world after the damage caused by Donald Trump. And in a variety of ways — many stylistic and some substantive — that perspective has merit.…
Favorite The August 29 attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed Zemari Ahmadi, an innocent aid worker, and his family has become one of the most notorious drone strikes of the war on terror. It is also rapidly becoming one of the most revealing, forcing the U.S. government to disclose more about how it makes decisions…
Favorite A man weeps during a mass funeral for the 10 members of a family killed in a U.S. drone strike, in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 30, 2021. Photo: Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images After the terrorist attack on the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, that killed more than 170 Afghan civilians and 13…
Favorite On what would be the last day of his life, Zemari Ahmadi, an employee of a U.S.-based NGO, was being watched by a remote crew piloting a Predator drone above the skies of Kabul, Afghanistan. As Ahmadi went about his work, running a series of errands across the city, the drone operators, though they…
Favorite The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2017 gave its stamp of approval to a legal maneuver that we now know the CIA was using to hunt WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. According to an explosive investigation published Sunday by Yahoo News, senior Trump administration officials — including the former president and director of the CIA — considered…
Favorite Two Chinese American scientists at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston were removed from their jobs on the same day last month, raising concerns among colleagues that they may have been targeted in fallout from the Justice Department’s controversial China Initiative. The two scientists, who are both naturalized U.S. citizens working in the biomedical sciences, were…
