christopher_hallam

Not to interrupt this food fight between Andrew Sullivan and Jeffrey Goldberg, but if you’re arguing with someone not over the merits of a strike on Iran, whether it would be worth the human and diplomatic cost, whether it would actually cripple Iran’s nuclear program and not merely its nascent opposition movement, and whether such […]

The ACLU says they’ve received over 900 complaints related to the TSA’s new airline passenger screening procedures. They’ve posted some of the excerpts online, and I’d recommend reading them. Some of them are extremely graphic. You can submit your own complaints here.

John Tabin argues that the small number of Muslim hate crimes indicates that American Islamophobia is a myth. Even more to the point, the number of anti-Jewish hate crimes dwarfed again the number of anti-Islamic attacks, as they have every year since such statistics were first kept: 931 anti-Semitic incidents, compared with 107 anti-Islamic incidents, […]

Gene Healy says in a few words what I’ve tried to say in well, hundreds: Santorum and Krauthammer blame a politically correct mentality that prevents profiling. But the Christmas bomber was Nigerian; the shoebomber, a Brit with a Jamaican father. Should we just give the “freedom fondle” to anyone vaguely swarthy? Read the whole column. […]

Reihan Salam responds to my column from last week, which blamed conservatives for Americans’ general numbness to national security changes prior to the new TSA standards: The premise of this passage seems to be that conservatives were cynically “hyping the threat of terrorism,” a characterization that doesn’t comport with my admittedly limited experience. My sense […]

James Joyner isn’t so much disagreeing with the premise that conservatives endorse infringements on personal liberty as long as they don’t have to pay the price as he is justifying it: I think waterboarding Khalid Sheik Mohammed was not only legally and morally questionable but unnecessary and likely counterproductive. But I can understand why President […]

I find it genuinely odd that David Frum‘s commenters are offended by his reminding Sarah Palin that a sixth of the American people were property at the time of this country’s founding, and that some of them actually regard the fact that they weren’t citizens as a “defense” of the an erasure of slavery from […]

Over at Greg‘s place, I explain (again) that the new conservative line on TSA isn’t so much “don’t touch my junk” as it is “touch his junk.” Rick Santorum is jumping on the bandwagon: “There’s a profile of people who are conducting these activities,” he said without detailing a particular profile. “And it is not […]

One of the most dishonest characterizations of the verdict in the Ahmed Ghailani case is the idea that it was “an experiment.” Ghailani was only the latest person to be convicted for his involvement in the 1998 embassy bombings. On October 21, 2001, Judge Leonard Sand handed down sentences of life imprisonment for Mohamed al-‘Owhali, […]

It’s rather amazing that the media is already spinning former Gitmo detainee Ahmed Ghailani‘s conviction on conspiracy charges as a complete disaster for the administration, and a blow against the argument for trying terrorists in civilian court. It’s true that Ghailani was acquitted on most of the other charges, including more than 280 charges of […]