christopher_hallam

Torture is, essentially, vigilantism masquerading as an interrogation technique. The emotional appeal of torture is that it acts as a kind of extrajudicial collective punishment against scary Muslims.The Rasmussen poll is actually revealing in this sense: People still want alleged underwear bomber Umar Abdulmutallab to be waterboarded even though the authorities are reportedly having no […]

A little more than a year after the left derailed his candidacy for leadership of the CIA because of his support for torture and extraordinary rendition, White House counterterrorism official John Brennan has emerged as one of the most effective defenders of the Obama administration’s national security policies. In August of last year, Brennan repudiated […]

An ice sculptor carves out a nearly ten foot ice sculpture of a Maasai warrior outside the UN Conference Center in Copenhagen, where the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference is taking place. OxFam is intends the sculptures to “highlight the human cost of climate change” by drawing attention to the effect climate change has had […]

Here’s Michael Goldfarb‘s op-ed on hypothetically trying Osama bin Laden, in which he argues that it would be better for OBL to remain “in limbo”, never caught or killed: For example, would America or Pakistan actually want to capture him and put him on trial? Consider the security risk — particularly to the latter — […]

Over the weekend, both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that Special Operations forces in Afghanistan are running a “black jail” where detainees denied access to the International Committee of the Red Cross have been abused and are held seperate from the main facility at Bagram prison in Afghanistan. This wouldn’t be […]

Steve Teles traces the history of “compassionate conservatism”: In the mid-1970s, a young Republican congressman from Buffalo, Jack Kemp, sought to succeed where Nixon had failed, bringing conservative outreach to the poor and racial minorities into the mainstream of party thinking. Unlike Nixon‘s effort to out-liberal liberalism, Kemp argued that Republicans could attract votes from […]

I’m just fixated on one element of Wes Pruden‘s screed that I think needs extra parsing: It’s no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of “the 57 states” is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men […]

That’s what the headline of this Ha’aretz piece says. It goes onto explain that: According to a Central Bureau of Statistics report published on, about 90 percent of Ethiopians – 93 percent of men and 85 percent of women – marry within their community. Is that the result of Ethiopian Israelis “resisting” interracial marriage? It’s […]

For a while now, I’ve been seeing statements from both sides of the debate on trying terrorism suspects in civilian courts purporting to speak for “the 9/11 families” on the issue. Liz Cheney‘s “Keep America Safe” released a statement last week saying: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators are asking to plead guilty, now, before […]

Jon Chait has a new piece up at TNR about Rush Limbaugh, riffing off of Conor Friedersdorf’s piece which I criticized for being more concerned with curtailing accusations of racism than actual racism. An accusation of racism is a tricky thing. No consensus exists as to what actually constitutes racism anyway. Is it a hatred […]