President Obama laid out his strategy for Afghanistan last night, one that involves adding more troops and a time line for withdrawal based on the theory of leaving behind an strong Afghan government and an Afghan people willing and able to take care of themselves.
Obama proposes that this strategy can be accomplished in 18 months [...]

Worldview Thought for the Day

So, the CIA had this program that came into existance soon after 9-11 to kill leaders of al-Qaeda and they didn’t tell Congress about it. This failure to inform Congress may or may not have been a violation of the law.

Now, this decision not to tell was apparently made by former-Secretary-of-Defense-then-Vice-President Dick Cheney. Why? Apparently because there was a concern that if Congress was told about the on-again-off-again-program-that-never-became-operational, it would leak. [...]

A good round-up on what is really happening in Honduras.
The whole situation begs the question: do people still have the right to defy their government first claimed in the Declaration of Independence?
DLH

Worldview Item of the Day

Our current era of connectedness allows us an unprecedented view into international affairs, one so unprecedented that we often no longer need to trust our government to reach foreign policy conclusions on our behalf. We can evaluate the evidence and reach those conclusions on our own.

The Constitution clearly prohibits individual citizens from taking foreign policy actions on their own, but at what point does the belief by a group of citizens that the government’s foreign policy actions are wrong allow that group of citizens to act? This idea of private foreign policy is one that is growing and will likely come to plague traditional governmental systems with more frequency in the years to come. [...]

The Obama administration has decided to order the FBI to Miranda-ize high-value targets detained by military operations inside Afghanistan, essentially extending constitutional protections over foreign fighters captured in combat and making their behavior and objectives a law-enforcement, rather than a military, issue. The Justice Department has confirmed the practice is in use. [...]