If George W. Bush was the torture president, Barack Obama's pet human rights violation is extrajudicial killing.
If George W. Bush was the torture president, Barack Obama's pet human rights violation is extrajudicial killing.
Lost in the headlines about the mind-numbing debt ceiling debate and Japan's Women's World Cup victory, the unemployment rate for new veterans jumped to 13.3 percent in June, 4 percent higher than the national average. In real numbers, that's only about 260,000 new veterans struggling to find work. That's a number small enough that if our nation really focused on it, we could make a real dent. It is up to Congress to legislate employment assistance for vets. And it is up to our president to make the case that hiring a veteran is more than just charity, it's a smart business investment.
A war on any noun is usually one doomed to failure; so far the war on terror is not proving to be the exception to the rule and probably the reason why the term has been dropped by the Obama administration. While those in the East suffer the most from the rise in Al-Qaeda inspired terrorism, those in the West are also constantly at risk. As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 looms closer perhaps it is a good time to reflect and evaluate the effectiveness of our approach in tackling this threat. Only with the Muslim community leading from the front will we defeat this scourge of global terror and replace hate with hope.
The Radio-in-a-Box is a source of news for the locals of Safar, a village in Helmand Province. Music was banned under Taliban rule, so listening to the radio is in a way an act of defiance against the recently departed regime.
My sense that there's an inverse relationship between the draft and war -- more of the former produces less of the latter.
While some secrecy is obviously necessary in the conduct of a war, the U.S. government's extreme secrecy about its detention of thousands of Afghans without charge or trial at the U.S.-run Bagram Air Base is actually creating a threat to U.S. troops, not alleviating one.
Our utopia is one where "swords will be beaten into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks." Yet, misplaced pity and reluctance to face an enemy can result in the greatest death and destruction.
The Arab Spring and killing of Osama bin Laden are both events which have led many to observe that al-Qaeda is a spent force. However, the real outcomes of the wave of change remain far from certain.
Violence in Afghanistan is at the highest levels observed in the 10-year conflict. The simple fact is that security for Afghans is worse now than it was before the Obama Administration's repeated escalations. Nothing General Petraeus can say will change this fact.
Midday on Wednesday, June 29, France erupted in an "explosion of joy" on learning that Hervé Ghesquière and Stéphane Taponier had been released by ...
Leon Panetta told the embarrassing truth: 9/11, day of unspeakable tragedy, was a goldmine for the Pentagon and the corporate war interests and was quickly used to launch two wars.
The rancorous debate over the debt belies a fundamental truth of our economy -- that it is run for the few at the expense of the many.
I can't remember a time when the U.S. military has been stuck in so many war quagmires at once. Some political leaders must recognize that an empire enforced by war is counterproductive to economic and national security.
As the first journalists to enter Kabul in 1981 following the expulsion of the Western media, we continue to be amazed at how the American disinformation campaign between Hollywood, Washington and Wall Street built around the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan lives on.
Our civil affairs Marine needed to speak with the sharwal (town mayor) at our base, Combat Outpost (COP) Rankel, and a public radio message was the best way to get him there. There's no tweeting in Safar, Garmser District, Helmand Province, Afghanistan.
"After a 93-year quest," Johnson's supporters believe they have finally built an "ironclad case" to award the Medal of Honor posthumously to Sgt. Henry Johnson, an African-American hero who "fought with uncommon bravery in World War I."
The facts unequivocally illustrate that the drone program is steering the U.S. away from achieving its national security objectives in the region.
Americans seem to have turned the page on Bush and his cronies. They may have disappeared from our lives, but the post-9/11 world they had such a mad hand in creating hasn't.
Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America's expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry.
Instead of winding down in its death toll, last year was the bloodiest year of the war, taking as many American lives as 2001-04 combined. That has people asking, "How do you know a war is over, and how do you know when it's time to come home?"