Obama’s Crackdown on Whistleblowers By Tim Shorrock The Nation Since 2009, the World War I-era Espionage Act has been used to prosecute whistleblowers in the name of national security. Shorrock focuses on four NSA whistleblowers — Thomas Drake, William Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe and Edward Loomis — who exposed the failed system called Trailblazer. My […]
There are major dents in the president’s foreign policy claims A spate of new books offers critical appraisals of President Obama’s stewardship of national affairs. Bob Woodward’s latest volume, “The Price of Politics,” draws an unflattering portrait of his management of fiscal policy, echoing themes in Ron Suskind’s “Confidence Men.” On foreign policy, Ahmed Rashid’s […]
When it comes to prognosticating, the most dangerous game political scientists play (game theory can be quite scary though), about Afghanistan’s future, you could do a lot worse than Central Asian analysts Joshua Foust and Ahmed Rashid. In two recent pieces, Foust in the New York Times and Rashid in a lecture in Philadelphia, each […]
Rashid, a highly touted Pakistani journalist, begins the final chapter of his 2000 ‘Taliban’ by calling the country one of world’s ‘orphaned conflict’s’. The country would quickly change from being orphaned to a month after 9/11 being the center of global politics, as the United States uprooted the Taliban government and sent them packing, unfortunately […]