This week marked the beginning of the trial of Anders Breivik, charged with the killing of 77 people in a bombing and shooting spree last July in Norway. The attacks, in Oslo and nearby Utøya Island, attacked a government office and a youth camp run by the left-leaning Norwegian Labor Party. Every day of the trial has come up with a new revelation or twist from the admitted killer. He has said that he does not respect the authority of the courts...
...aw. “I can’t imagine a time when the need for diversity will ever cease,” said Holder, noting he had experienced the value of a diverse educational environment at Columbia. In response to a question about whether detainees at Guantanamo Bay would ever be brought to justice, Holder answered that the Department of Justice has been prevented from prosecuting the detainees because “Congress won’t let us.” To other audience questions, Holder affirmed...
.... In 2008, Obama consistently stayed on message and focused on the issues (at the time, the issue on everyone’s mind was also the in-the-toilet economy). Even though he ended up breaking many of his campaign promises (closing Guantanamo Bay, not raising taxes on the middle class, and others), Obama ran a brilliant campaign that showed how he would be different than Bush and McCain. Obama was able to redirect widespread public discontent with the...
...ter 9/11, he came up on our shoot-to-kill list, so to speak, our target deck, and the Pakistanis picked him up. Instead of delivering him to Libya (he’s a Libyan national), they handed him over to the Americans. We put him in Guantanamo, and later we cut a deal with El-Qaddafi as our relations warmed with him and we started to cooperate with him on counterterrorism initiatives in North Africa. But we handed Qumu over to El-Qaddafi, and then El-Qa...
...troversial legislation. In this regard, President Obama’s record is mixed; he has kept some of his campaign promises, such as ending the War in Iraq, and he has broken some, such as his promise to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. Running as the challenger to the incumbent, Romney needs to start explicitly clarifying what his promises are; he needs to separate them from the campaign rhetoric and purely ideological stances. For example,...
...sources. To this point, those who follow international affairs might object that such abuses of human rights and international law are typical of powerful states: Consider the United States’ reliance on torture of captives at Guantanamo Bay or on drone strikes in unstable countries. “Might makes right,” the saying goes, and that’s just the way it is. Such objections would be valid, were it not for the fact that Chevron is not a state. Rather, it...
In 2008, President Barack Obama had a clear idea for Latin American foreign policy. The Bush administration, distracted by events in the Middle East, had pursued a harmful hemispheric policy of blustering unilateralism and neglect; Obama, conversely, would pursue a “new partnership” with the Americas, one marked by cooperation and mutual interests. His subsequent election was heralded throughout Latin America as an opportunity to repair the dam...
...as actually distinctly American—that what the photos gave us was precisely an insight into American values. Mark Danner writes, “what Americans did at Abu Ghraib was ultimately tied to what they had been doing in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and elsewhere in the ‘war on terror’—and, finally, to what officials had been deciding in Washington.” And perhaps the most compelling evidence that Abu Ghraib was a collective, not an individual, breakdown is sp...
...ewer as No End in Sight-lite. For better or for worse? It’s a matter of personal opinion. In his sophomore attempt as a documentary director, Gibney examines the torture practices of the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. The film opens with the image of a warm, orange sun setting beyond the hills and a single car driving through a halcyon desert: it is 2002 in Afghanistan, at the start of the debacle we now know as the “War o...
...o America and been detained and interrogated; the young boy from Afghanistan who still harbors affections for America from his one year here; the lawyer who helps the detainee who eventually carves a path that gets him out of Guantanamo – all of those things are about people taking charge at this moment in history, and of themselves, and it is the actions they take in this book that is hopeful. CPR: When writing Confidence Men, what was your perc...
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