Weekly Digest – 4/6/2010
Last month marked the 30th anniversary of Congress passing the Refugee Act. It’s a good time to examine gaps in our refugee policy, especially as we prepare for an influx of refugees from Darfur. [more]
The dew had barely dissipated from Barack Obama’s inaugural as the four senior men slipped into the Oval Office. The executive precincts were intimately familiar to all four – former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Sen. Sam Nunn, and former Defense Secretary William Perry. The president engaged the four men on his own. The topic was a project to eliminate nuclear weapons, which the elder statesmen feel ardently about. [more]
Just one week into his presidency, on Jan. 27, 1969, Richard M. Nixon got an eye-opening briefing at the Pentagon on the nation’s secret nuclear war plans — the Single Integrated Operational Plan, as it was known then. “It didn’t fill him with enthusiasm,” Henry Kissinger, the national security advisor, said later. The briefers walked Nixon through the absolutely excruciating decision a president would face upon receiving an alert of impending attack: whether to launch nuclear missiles. [more]
The Obama administration has authorized operations to capture or kill a U.S.-born Muslim cleric based in Yemen, who is described by a key lawmaker as Americas’s top terrorist threat, officials said on Tuesday. [more]
Weekly Digest – 3/30/10
We’ve been scanning through the news coverage of the Hutaree militia, nine of whose members were arrested by federal officials this week, and we’ve noticed an almost complete absence of the use of the words “terrorism” or “terrorist.” [more]
President Obama showed courage in going to Afghanistan to talk to the troops, but he’s just getting the U.S. in deeper over there. The rhetoric he used on Sunday was at times distorting, and the thrust was distressing. Like Bush, he summoned the 9/11 attack, saying, “We did not choose this war.” And he added: “This is the region where the perpetrators of that crime, al Qaeda, still base their leadership.” [more]
It’s official. The first big post cold war strategic arms control treaty will be signed on April 8, in Prague, Czech Republic, where a year ago President Barack Obama opened his campaign for a nuclear weapons-free world, amid surging hopes that the US-Russian example will lead to fresh progress in limiting the spread of atomic weapons and encouraging other nuclear-armed states to reduce their arsenals. [more]
Barack Obama promised during the 2008 campaign that he would rebuild America’s image abroad and restore our ties to nations around the world. Now, more than a year later, we can take stock of the result. [more]
Weekly Digest – 3/24/10
In New York City, Mexican immigrants’ articulations of rights are neither uniform nor straightforward, suggested Alyshia Gálvez at a recent talk co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Working Group on Anthropology and Population. Assistant Professor of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College, Gálvez described two projects of ethnographic research that testify to the diverse ways in which Mexican immigrants navigate, and in some cases look beyond, American political and economic structures. [more]
Mark Perry is a journalist and author who focuses on the military and the intelligence community and particularly on their engagement with the Middle East. I put six questions to him about his new book, Talking To Terrorists, which tells the story of the efforts by a group of senior Marines in Iraq to launch a dialogue with Sunni Arabs in the country’s west and suggests the applicability of their strategy to other conflicts in the region. [more]
The United States and Pakistan sought on Wednesday to turn a page in a relationship soured by years of mistrust and tensions over nuclear cooperation, security and anti-American sentiment. [more]
One of the most dangerous aspects of today’s nuclear debate is the deeply skewed ratio of fact versus opinion. Disarmament advocates, many with a poor understanding of nuclear game theory, operational concepts, even basic weapon capabilities, too often posture themselves as experts in a debate that’s clearly over their heads. [more]
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