Today we came away stunned, shocked and almost numb from our trip to East Jerusalem with Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. And when I say we, I mean my family—my wife and two children, 19 and 21. We have spent the last 10 days trying to get into Gaza from Egypt; [...]

Almost a year ago, on the celebration of Martin Luther King’s birth and just as the Israeli military assault on Gaza was coming to a close, I wrote a piece titled, Israel in Gaza: A Time Comes When Silence is Betrayal.[1] In that piece I spoke of the role of American Jews and of Americans [...]

At a reception I attended the other day a progressive acquaintance came up to me and said the left “must stop bashing Obama. Keep doing it and he will lose the election. We should be thankful for what we have.” I am not sure he thought that I was one who bashed Obama or he [...]

Michael Smith and I have been reading John Gerassi’s new book, Talking with Sartre, Conversations and Debates.[1] The book is a shortened form of three years of on and off conversations Gerassi had with Sartre in the early 1970’s.  The book is utterly remarkable. It is as if you are  seated at the table with [...]

You may recall the case. The CIA was accused of a 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric, Abu Omar, from the streets of Milan, Italy. He was rendered to Egypt where he was tortured. A courageous Italian prosecutor, Armando Spataro, had been pursuing the case since that time over the objections of the Italian government.

On Tuesday, November 3, Congress is poised to vote on H.Res.867, which calls on the “President and the Secretary of State to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the `Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict' in multilateral fora.’ ”

Today I awoke to read that a number of human rights type groups have called on President Obama to create a commission of accountability to investigate and report publicly on torture and the cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees. There is not a word in the petition about criminal prosecutions of the torture team. Yet, [...]

On the celebration of King’s birth I often read or listen to the anti-war speech that he gave at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967—"A time to break the silence". It was a powerful statement of his opposition to the Vietnam War. He spoke of how he was told to not oppose the war because [...]

In his first nationally televised interview, President-elect Barack Obama made this promise: "I have said repeatedly that America doesn't torture. And I'm gonna make sure that we don't torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America's moral stature in the world."
Let there be no doubt that we have been a country [...]

When I awoke this morning I saw the New York Times headline: "Post-Guantanamo: A New Detention Law?" (Nov. 15, 2008) I was afraid to read the article for I knew what was coming: some on the Obama team supported by a few liberals were considering a preventive detention law. I had feared this moment for a [...]