—Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Lob der Faulheit (1747), reproduced in Werke, vol. 1, p. 77-78 (G. Göpfert ed. 1970)(S.H. transl.) . . .

Michael Hastings’s Polk Award–winning Rolling Stone article, “The Runaway General,” brought the career of General Stanley McChrystal, America’s commander in Afghanistan, to an abrupt end. Now Hastings has developed the material from that article, and the storm that broke in its wake, into an equally explosive book, The Operators, which includes a merciless examination of relations between major media and the American military establishment. I put six questions to Hastings about his book and his experiences as a war correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan: . . .

On Friday, a judge from Spain’s national security court, the Audiencia Nacional, issued a decision directing the resumption of criminal proceedings relating to the torture and mistreatment of three prisoners held in the American detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. El País reports (my translation): . . .

The emergency we now face is economic, and it is a desperate and worsening situation. For the 35 million poor people in America—not even to mention, just yet, the poor in other nations—there is a kind of strangulation in the air. In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income. You are in substance saying to that man that he has no right to exist. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society. Now, millions of people are being strangled in that way. The problem is international in scope. And it is getting worse, as the gap between the poor and the “affluent society” increases… . . .

—John Donne, conclusion from An Anatomy of the World, Wherein, by occasion of the untimely death of Mistress Elizabeth Drury, the frailty and the decay of this whole world is represented. The First Anniversary (1611) . . .

On January 11, 2002, the first prisoners from the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror” were landed at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, a forty-five-square-mile enclave at the eastern end of Cuba that America secured in a 1903 treaty and has held ever since. Today marks the tenth anniversary of U.S. detention operations there. In the intervening years, the prison population swelled, with a total of 779 prisoners having been held there at some point. Some 600 were released (mostly by the Bush Administration), and of the 171 still held there, a majority have actually been cleared for release. These eighty-nine men are something of a political ping-pong ball between Republicans, who continue to do everything in their power to keep Gitmo open and to block the prisoners’ release, and the Obama White House, which seems intent on keeping questions surrounding Gitmo out of the headlines. Obama pledged during his campaign to close Gitmo within his first year as president, but this pledge has gone unfulfilled—in part because he was slow to act, but largely as a result of congressional obstruction. . . .

The last decade was clearly something of a Hobbesian moment in American history. Now, political philosopher and Hobbes scholar Ted H. Miller has written a book entitled Mortal Gods: Science, Politics, and the Humanist Ambitions of Thomas Hobbes, in which he examines the English philosopher’s work and its relationship to court politics, absolutist rule, and the seventeenth-century fascination with practical mathematics. I put six questions to Miller about his new book: . . .

On New Year’s Eve, as most Americans were focused on parties and football games, President Barack Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012. He issued a significant signing statement in the process: . . .

Так вот почему такая милая умница, как Григорьев, мало интересен для меня. Правда, что если бы не было совсем критики, то тогда бы Григорьев и вы, понимающие искусство, были бы излишни. Теперь же, правда, что когда 9/10 всего печатного есть критика, то для критики искусства нужны люди, которые бы показывали бессмыслицу отыскивания мыслей в художественном произведении и постоянно руководили бы читателей в том бесконечном лабиринте сцеплений, в котором и состоит сущность искусства, и к тем законам, которые служат основанием этих сцеплений. . . .

An internal Department of Defense review has concluded that a Rumsfeld-era program under which retired military officers who appeared on American broadcast media were given special briefings and access was consistent with Pentagon rules. The New York Times reports: . . .

In an important ruling that sheds light on the complications that American torture and abuse of prisoners presented for NATO allies attempting to support U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, the English Court of Appeal has issued a writ of habeas corpus requiring the return to British custody of a prisoner it concluded was being held illegally by American forces. Yunus Rahmatullah, who was once thought to be connected to the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, was captured by British troops in Iraq, then turned over to American forces and brought to Bagram prison in Afghanistan in the spring of 2004. I discussed the Rahmatullah case previously, when British parliamentary inquiries first made public the underlying facts. The British legal charity Reprieve brought the habeas petition on Rahmatullah’s behalf. . . .

In the wake of September 11, Glenn Greenwald emerged as the nation’s premier chronicler of the war that U.S. officials waged on the nation’s civil liberties under the pretext of battling terrorists. Persistent and technically skilled, he played a key role in unmasking shameless betrayals by government attorneys of their oath to uphold the law—exposing those who enabled the torture of prisoners, the introduction of a massive warrantless surveillance system, and the merciless war against loyal Americans who attempted to blow the whistle on such abuses. I put six questions to Greenwald about his new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, which examines the emerging doctrine of impunity for politically powerful elites in the United States: . . .

In December 2001, Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, with strong U.S. backing consisting of special-forces units and CIA paramilitary operatives, were close to consolidating their control over the country. Kabul was occupied, and Kunduz, the last major Taliban stronghold in the north, had been crushed. Large numbers of Taliban forces and their allies had surrendered. . . .

Reporters for German network ARD’s Panorama newsmagazine and the Associated Press have pieced together key details surrounding the CIA’s operation of a black site in Bucharest, Romania. AP’s Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo write: . . .

Dafna Linzer and some of her colleagues at ProPublica have published a two-part feature in the Washington Post based on their year-long study of the American presidential-pardons system. The story’s conclusions are depressing, but they will surprise no one who has closely studied the Department of Justice in recent years: . . .

On Monday, Admiral Denis Blair, former National Intelligence Director for President Obama, presented remarks concerning military readiness and potential defense budget cuts at a function hosted by the Aspen Institute. In response to a question from Fox News’s Catherine Herridge about the development of drone policy, Blair offered a surprisingly forceful critique of the CIA’s drone war in Pakistan: . . .

The German newsweekly Spiegel takes the latest disclosures concerning Herman Cain and the rise of Newt Gingrich as an opportunity to offer a foreign bird’s-eye view of the current Republican Party and the American media froth around it. My translation: . . .

On May 14, 2011, the then-director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, had a six-minute encounter with a chambermaid at the Sofitel Hotel in midtown Manhattan. The brief interaction had momentous consequences. Before, DSK was widely believed to be cruising toward becoming the Socialist Party’s candidate to challenge France’s vulnerable incumbent president, Nicolas Sarkozy. After, DSK was forced to resign his IMF post and saw his political career go up in smoke, as the Manhattan district attorney brought criminal charges that characterized the hotel incident as a violent sexual assault. The case imploded when prosecutors lost faith in the credibility of the chambermaid, and gradually the case faded from the headlines. . . .

Les loix naturelles et fondamentales des sociétés sont la règle souveraine et decisive du juste et de l’injuste absolu, du bien et du mal moral, elles s’impriment dans le cœur des hommes, elles sont la lumière qui les éclaire et maîtrise leur conscience: cette lumière n’est affaiblie ou obscurcie que par leurs passions déréglées. Le principal objet des loix positives est ce dérèglement même auquel elles oposent une sanction redoubtable aux hommes pervers: car en gros de quoi s’agit-it pour la prospérité d’une nation? De cultiver la terre avec le plus grand succès possible et de preserver la société des voleurs et des méchans. La première partie est ordonnée par l’intérêt, la seconde est confiée au gouvernement civil. Les hommes de bonne volonté n’ont besoin que d’instructions qui leur dévelopent les vérités lumineuses qui ne s’aperçoivent distinctement et vivement que par l’exercice de la raison. Les lois positives ne peuvent suppléer que fort imparfaitement à cette connaissance intellectuelle, leur injonction trop servilement assujettie à la lettre interdit plus aux hommes l’usage de la raison qu’elle ne les instruit. . . .

With the predictable failure of the “Super Committee,” Washington is now coasting toward mandatory cuts to the holiest of holies within the Beltway: the defense budget. Against this backdrop, David Trilling’s excellent investigative piece in Foreign Policy, entitled “Propagandastan,” uncovers one of the most ridiculous wastes of taxpayer funds ever: the payment of tens of millions of dollars to a subsidiary of the massive defense contractor General Dynamics for the purpose of whitewashing the human rights records of dictators in Central Asia. How does this advance America’s national security? Presumably the Pentagon will get around to explaining that, someday. . . .