Pam Spaulding has an excellent piece referencing some of the Blackwater questions I posted below. And a TWN reader who also happens to be one of America’s most distinguished former Ambassadors raised questions about the applicability of international law to the Blackwater case: Excellent questions.
The lesson that some people are taking away from the Iraq boondoggle is that values-driven foreign policy should be rejected. Since prominent neoconservatives plotted a course according to values and not interests, they say, we need to get back to pursuing interests.
This is either true — or it’s a lie. If part of a dirty tricks operation, it’s odd that John Edwards would be the target. I like and respect Huffington Post‘s Sam Stein who wrote the first thoughtful inquiry into what might be going on. Others have rushed to judgment, perhaps wrongly.
I did an interview today with National Public Radio Congressional Correspondent David Welna for All Things Considered on what may have been behind Hillary Clinton‘s decision and rationalization to vote for the Kyl-Lieberman Resolution calling for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to be designated a terrorist organization.
(Blackwater USA CEO Erik Prince) A while back, I got interested in the fact that the Pentagon has issued more than 125,000 “moral waivers” to recruits in order to continue to meet manpower requirements.
(Syrian Ambassador to the US Imad Moustapha and President George W. Bush) New York University professor Alon Ben-Meir has written an eloquent and compelling essay on why Syria’s role in any Israel-Palestine negotiation is central, not peripheral, to a serious Middle East peace negotiation.
A source has told me that Senator Chuck Hagel had a recent meeting with Russian Federation Ambassador to the U.S.
My colleagues at the New America Foundation’s HigherEdWatch — the same people who broke a whopper of a story in April on student loan officers receiving kickbacks from banks, which generated a national media firestorm, Congressional inquiries and legal settlements with many state attorney generals — have broken some more news on predatory student lending….
This article by Bob Barr today was a breath of fresh air in the debates about Iran. I don’t agree with all of it — but clearly this former Member of Congress grasps the reality of the situation.