One Utah

Today our friend and fellow blogger Frank Staheli, with a little help from HBO, reminded me of something important– what used to be the foundation stone of American foreign policy, in fact. Frank coined a term, “the Radical Islamic Monster,” in an attempt to somehow explain who our nation is supposed to be fighting [...]

Today, we learned about a new report on the Iraq fiasco, Choosing War: The Decision to Invade Iraq and Its Aftermath (PDF) from the Institute for National Strategic Studies of the National Defense University. The author is Joseph Collins, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Stability Operations.
Here are the first two paragraphs of [...]

The Government Accountability Office released a report (PDF) today concluding that the United States has no plan to combat al Qaeda and other terrorist threats in Pakistan. The GAO found that “[t]errorists are still operating freely in Pakistan along the country’s Afghanistan border, despite the U.S. giving Pakistan more than $10.5 billion in military and [...]

From ABC News:
In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved the torture of prisoners held by the Central Intelligence Agency. The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, which in 2002-2003 included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor [...]

If thousands of people weren’t being killed, this would be funny. Our politicians can’t keep track of America’s many, ever-changing enemies in Iraq. President Bush has never made it very clear who we’re fighting. It’s “a combination of terrorists, elements of former regime criminals and sectarian militias,” he said in October 2006, [...]

President Bush and the rest of the right wing never get tired of telling us that America is hated by religious fanatics who can’t stand the ideas of freedom and democracy. Considering how many right-wingers are religious fanatics themselves, they may be projecting their own intolerance on others.
Although there are a minority who truly [...]

Via DailyKos, Pulitzer Prize winning author Steve Coll speculates that Osama bin Laden (OBL) might be found before the November elections. His reasoning goes like this:

Pakistan’s Musharraf regime believed that their $10 billion aid package might be reduced if they tracked down too many al Qaeda leaders
Key elements of the regime had close ties [...]

The March 20 U.K. Guardian features an Iraq war commentary by former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix that for its trenchant economy could serve as an object lesson for every contributor to this blog.
As Blix says–and he would know–there was NO rational justification for this war EXCEPT the elimination of a brutal [...]

This post is part three in my series on good and evil.
In The Lucifer Effect Philip Zimbardo explores the way in which situational factors play a role in individual behaviors. 
Zimbardo sums up his argument:
“Bad systems” create “bad situations” create “bad apples” create “bad behaviors” even in good people.
The point of course is simple - I [...]

The Stanford Prison Experiment strongly suggests that moral and immoral behavior are hugley influenced by environment. It’s not so much that we change our morals from setting to setting but that the setting in which we function has the power to put our morality into neutral.
The Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by Philip Zimbardo, suggested that in [...]

The hardest thing about being a Democrat these days is that people are always saying there’s no difference between the two major parties in this country of ours. If you say you’re mad at the Republicans for making a mockery of the constitution and giving their illegitimate and foolish “president” the authority to lie us [...]

Remember the Bush administration’s Big-Brotherish Total Information Awareness (TIA) program? It was the brainchild of Admiral John Poindexter, who is probably best known for his part in the Iran-Contra conspiracy. When TIA became public knowledge, it was immediately obvious that everything about it was unconstitutional and even totalitarian. In February of 2003, [...]