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Bin Laden Won

Bin Laden Won

by | Apr 16, 2019 | ,

Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan by Scott Horton (Chicago: The Libertarian Institute, 2017); 317 pages. According to official U.S. government accounts, the body of Osama bin Laden slid off the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson into his watery grave in the Indian Ocean sometime on the morning of May 2, 2011. Nearly 10 years after 9/11, the terrorist leader of al-Qaeda responsible for nearly 3,000 murdered Americans was no more, and the rationale for the Afghan War gone with him. Fast-forward another seven years. On September 2, 2018, Gen. Austin S. Miller assumed...

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Deadly Policing in New York City

Deadly Policing in New York City

by | Mar 2, 2019 | ,

I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street by Matt Taibbi (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2017); 336 pages. On the first day of law school, Yale Professor Stephen L. Carter walks into his contracts class with a message: “Every law is violent.” He then proceeds to tell his students that they should be willing to invoke the law only if they’re comfortable with the transgressor’s dying for breaking it. The students, he says, think he’s being a crank, but Carter reminds them that even a breach of contract is eventually enforced at the end of a gun. “[If] the breacher will not pay damages, the...

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The Tyranny of the Distance

by | May 3, 2017 | ,

The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program by Jeremy Scahill and the Staff of The Intercept (Simon & Schuster, 2016); 256 pages. Last summer, the Obama administration finally made good on its promise to provide some transparency to its targeted killing program — well, sort of. On a Friday before the long July Fourth weekend, the executive branch released the number range of people killed by U.S. airstrikes between 2009 and 2015, most presumed to be by drones, far away from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. The estimated number: approximately...

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Madeleine Albright Gets in Costume in Time for Halloween

by | Oct 26, 2016 |

Last week, The Washington Post reported that the Beltway's foreign policy elite is salivating at the prospect of a more hawkish Hillary Clinton administration. Apparently, the Obama administration's reluctance to intervene directly in Syria is driving the liberal interventionalists and the neocons crazy. The out-of-power imperialists of the left and right, though, have been biding their time and doing what they do best: writing reports that only the foreign policy elite read inside the imperial city. Absurdly, or maybe the better word is frighteningly, the foreign policy elite's reports and...

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Matthew Harwood

Matthew Harwood is a writer living in northern New Jersey. His work has appeared at The American Conservative, the Guardian, Reason, TomDispatch, among others. He is senior writer/editor at the American Civil Liberties Union.


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Israel Winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War

Israel Winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War

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From the Foreword by Lawrence B. Wilkerson: “[T]he debate over whether oil was a principal reason for the 2003 invasion has waxed and waned, with one camp arguing that it absolutely was, while the other argues the precise opposite.” “Mr. Vogler, himself a former...

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