The Senate Intelligence Committee report on what happened in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, is, in many ways, a catalogue of what can happen when one decides to act as though a situation is what one wishes it to be, not what it is. Benghazi, the report sensibly points out, was a dangerous place, and a lot of people knew it. But it was also supposed to be an enchanted place, the birthplace of a rebellion America had generously fostered and the home of scrappy militias who were grateful to us. We had, supposedly, already arrived at the happily-ever-after part of the Libyan tale. Maybe that’s why the Obama Administration, in particular the State Department—led by Hillary Clinton—didn’t consider all the ways the plot could turn, or that the epilogue might involve the attacks on an American diplomatic installation and a C.I.A. annex. According to the report,

the Committee believes the State Department should have recognized the need to increase security to a level commensurate with the threat, or suspend operations in Benghazi. However, operations continued with minimal improvements in security and personnel protections.

The majority members of the committee—the Democrats—concluded that the attacks “were likely preventable.”

An abortion case that might have given the Supreme Court a chance to rethink Roe v. Wade won’t get that far: the Justices said Monday morning that they didn’t want to hear it, and that they would let stand an appeals-court ruling, in Isaacson v. Horne, that an Arizona law banning all abortions after twenty weeks, except in the case of a medical emergency, was unconstitutional. But the Arizona case wasn’t the only one; the challenges are coming as fast as local statehouses can pass laws limiting one element of women’s access to abortion or another—and that, in the past couple of years, has been faster and faster.

The Arizona law, though now defeated, provides a good catalogue of approaches that have been taken to limit women’s reproductive rights. It crowded women in at every turn in the language. Something would only have counted as a “medical emergency” if a woman was actually going to die, or it looked like she would be left impaired—not just a little impaired, but with a “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” Who would have adjudicated that? The American College of Obstetricians wrote in a brief that the law “fail[ed] entirely to protect women for whom pregnancy poses serious health risks” by requiring doctors to wait until a woman’s life might be on the edge before acting.

Any fears that the 2016 Republican field will be lacking in cruel absurdities can now be dismissed. The Bergen Record got a set of e-mails and texts sent within New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s political circle. They speak to the question of whether his office really made a direct move to punish an insufficiently loyal mayor by shutting down lanes to the George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee, and then lied about it; the answer is yes. Here is Bridget Anne Kelly, Christie’s deputy chief of staff for legislative and intergovernmental affairs, writing to David Wildstein, one of Christie’s people at the Port Authority, at 7:34 A.M. on August 13th:

Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee

“If I believe I am being gamed…,” President Barack Obama said, in a “blast” at an unhappy meeting about Afghanistan in March, 2011; that’s how Robert Gates, the former Secretary of Defense, remembers it, according to early reports on his memoir. (Bob Woodward and Greg Jaffe at the Washington Post and Thom Shanker at the Times got their hands on copies of the book, which comes out next week.) “I was pretty upset myself,” Gates continued:

As I sat there, I thought: the president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand [Afghanistan President Hamid] Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

Should we just stop talking about any form of amnesty for Edward Snowden, because he swore an oath and broke it? In a piece for Slate titled “Why Snowden Won’t (And Shouldn’t) Get Clemency,” Fred Kaplan mentions my suggestion, in a piece for the site, that Jimmy Carter’s pardoning of Vietnam draft dodgers offers “a useful parallel” when thinking of the legal situation of Edward Snowden. Kaplan writes:

This suggestion is mind-boggling on several levels. Among other things, Snowden signed an oath, as a condition of his employment as an NSA contractor, not to disclose classified information, and knew the penalties for violating the oath. The young men who evaded the draft, either by fleeing to Canada or serving jail terms, did so in order to avoid taking an oath to fight a war that they opposed—a war that was over, and widely reviled, by the time that Carter pardoned them.

There are no such extenuating circumstances favoring forgiveness of Snowden.

This is an odd and flawed argument—logically and legally, but also historically and factually. The errors illustrate how we tend to misremember the past, and misjudge its passions when comparing them to our own.

It is hard to describe the suit that a charity run by Colorado nuns has brought against the Affordable Care Act without wondering if one has been closed into a small room with reflecting walls. The Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged, in Denver, has challenged the law’s contraceptive-coverage mandate; this might make more sense if the nuns did not already have a way around the mandate: they just have to fill out a form saying the home has a religious mission and objection to paying for contraceptives. The essence of their challenge is that, by saying so, they become complicit—because then others will make sure that their employees have coverage. (The insurance company pays for it, with some help from the government.) They asked for an emergency stay from the Supreme Court before the mandate was to go into effect on January 1st, after losing an appeal, writing in their filing,

Without an emergency injunction, Mother Provincial Loraine Marie Maguire has to decide between two courses of action: (a) sign and submit a self-certification form, thereby violating her religious beliefs; or (b) refuse to sign the form and pay ruinous fines.

Do we care what Al Qaeda is? And do we care who gets guns from the American government? One can’t avoid those questions when reading the responses to David Kirkpatrick’s excellent piece in the Times on the attack on an American diplomatic installation in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Four Americans died there. Kirkpatrick managed to use shades of gray in his rendition of what happened, which is rare:

Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.

Two federal judges—Richard Leon, in the District of Columbia, and William H. Pauley III, in the Southern District of New York—have now ruled in conflicting ways on the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephony metadata, or call records. Leon found that it almost certainly violated the Fourth Amendment; Pauley found that it clearly did not. Both look to Smith v. Maryland, a 1979 Supreme Court ruling on the phone records of a robbery suspect, often cited by the N.S.A.: Leon finds that the circumstances and even the meaning of the word “telephone” have changed so much that Smith is not helpful here; Pauley regards it as decisive, and says that unless it is overturned the N.S.A. can pretty much do what it will with telephony metadata. The differences between the judges’ rulings did not have to do with the subjects of each case, which were similar, or the quality of the plaintiffs—Larry Klayman, the conservative activist, before Leon; the American Civil Liberties Union before Pauley—or their arguments. Instead, it had to do with each judge’s choice of awe or skepticism toward the government, tendency to have his mind clouded by words like “terrorism” and “technology,” and grasp of basic math.

President Obama’s advisory committee on the N.S.A.’s practices has given him a report, released by the White House on Wednesday, that is three hundred pages long and includes forty recommendations. Some of the recommendations include specific steps to be taken or suggest changes to structures and procedures—that there be a public-interest advocate to “represent privacy and civil liberties interests before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court”; that phone records be held by phone companies and not the government; that tech companies not leave vulnerabilities in their products that allow the N.S.A. slip in—but most of all it argues for a change in thinking. The thirty-page executive summary might be further condensed to a few sentences: Don’t do things just because you can. Tell people what the rules are. Remember that “security” doesn’t just mean chasing terrorists—it “refers to a quite different and equally fundamental value,” spelled out in the Fourth Amendment: “The right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” Stop shutting down debate by muttering about a “balance” that needs to be struck between security and freedom—they are not on opposite sides of the scale. Start thinking about privacy.

“Suppose, for instance, that there is a person living in New York City who has a phone number that meets the RAS standard and is approved as a ‘seed,’ ” Judge Richard Leon writes in a broad opinion finding that the National Security Agency’s “telephony metadata” program is likely unconstitutional. An R.A.S. is a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that someone might have something to do with terrorism; a seed is a search term, perhaps a telephone number, that the N.S.A. plugs into a database of hundreds of millions of phone records it has collected indiscriminately. “And suppose this person, who may or may not actually be associated with any terrorist organization, calls or receives calls from 100 unique numbers, as in my example. But now suppose that one of the numbers he calls is his neighborhood Domino’s Pizza shop,” Judge Leon continues:

The Court won’t hazard a guess as to how many different phone numbers might dial a given Domino’s Pizza outlet in New York City in a five-year period, but to take a page from the Government’s book of understatement, it’s “substantially larger” than the 100 in the second hop of my example, and would therefore most likely result in exponential growth in the scope of the query and lead to millions of records being captured by the third hop.