Sheehan's remarks served as a defense of the military's current drone strike policy. While the majority of U.S. drone strikes are carried out by the CIA and authorized by the president directly, the Pentagon oversees strikes in Pakistan and will take increasing control of U.S. drone programs. Sheehan also defended the current structure of the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Act (AUMF), passed after 9/11, which, in its present iteration, grants the president wide-ranging powers to wage drone wars. “At this point we’re comfortable with the AUMF as it is currently structured,” said Sheehan. He admitted that there was no expiration date or geographic boundary to the War on Terror.

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To that end, the several days since the bombing of the Boston Marathon showcased a mesmerizing display of reality television mediated by the unquestioning officiousness of the fourth estate. On vivid display was “proof through performance,” a validation that the laws passed and massive expenditures incurred over the last decade were essential to the state’s “protection of the public.”

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Pardiss Kebriaei, a lawyer representing Ghaleb Al-Bihani, a Yemeni detainee, told Agence France-Presse, "My client and other men have reported that most of the detainees in Camp 6 are on strike, except for a small few who are elderly or sick."

Robert Durand, director of public affairs for the Joint Task Force Guantanamo, has however denied claims of a mass hunger strike. He told AFP that although the detainees are refusing to take the meals delivered, they continue to eat food kept in their cell blocks."Refusing delivered food does not make a detainee a hunger striker, not eating does," said Durand, noting that nine detainees were engaged in hunger strikes, five of whom were being fed through tubes inserted into their stomachs.

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In the last decade, I didn’t travel to distant refugee camps in Pakistan or destroyed villages in Afghanistan, nor did I spend time in besieged cities like Iraq’s Fallujah or Libya’s Misrata. I stayed in Great Britain. There, my government, in close conjunction with Washington, was pursuing its own version of what, whether anyone cared to say it or not, was essentially a war against Islam. Somehow, by a series of chance events, I found myself inside it, spending time with families transformed into enemies.

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Consider: while four American citizens are known to have been killed by drones in the past decade, the strikes have killed anestimated total of 2,600 to 4,700 people over the same period.

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The very phrase “world peace” has become something of a synonym for naiveté. Yet in recent years, compelling evidence has emerged to suggest that at least one important aspect of world peace, the absence or rarity of war between countries, may in fact be close to a reality.

Scholarly work on what might be called the “decline-in-violence” phenomenon emerged following the conclusion of a surprisingly peaceful Cold War, but it has lately drawn greater popular and scholarly attention.

In a world replete with dangers, the decline-in-violence proposition is often treated with skepticism. But it is time for the international security community to think seriously about preparing for a durable world peace instead of the constant threat of world war.

To be clear, we cannot expect a violence-free world any time soon. Instead, the data suggest that certain kinds of violence, most notably inter-state warfare such as the two world wars, are becoming less common even as other forms of conflict increase.

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Back in the early twentieth century, a similar red-hued map was used to indicate the global reach of the British Empire, on which, it was said, the sun never set.  It seems that, between 9/11 and the day George W. Bush left the White House, CIA-brokered torture never saw a sunset either.

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The reason for this, according to Friedersdorf, is that everyone hated Bush and knew he was incompetent, but people like Obama because he's clearly smart and conscientious, which causes people to defend actions they would have criticized under his predecessor:

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Indeed, watching the Brennan hearing, and then struggling through the troubling Justice Department “white paper” spelling out the legal justification for the drone killings of American citizens (which was recently acquired and released by NBC News), left me with quite a different feeling. In large part, this was the feeling that our government’s imperial creep continues uninterrupted, that most people simply don’t care (irrespective of their supposed political views) and that almost everyone involved in this charade, especially those of us in the media who are supposed to serve as the watchdogs, has agreed to ignore the most obvious and glaring questions.

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The report directs blame at the Bush administration for the rendition program, but stresses that the dozens of other governments covertly supporting the activities must also be held to account:

There is no doubt that high-ranking Bush administration officials bear responsibility for authorizing human rights violations associated with secret detention and extraordinary rendition, and the impunity that they have enjoyed to date remains a matter of significant concern.

But responsibility for these violations does not end with the United States. Secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations, designed to be conducted outside the United States under cover of secrecy, could not have been implemented without the active participation of foreign governments. These governments too must be held accountable.

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"I believe it to be one of the most significant oversight efforts in the history of the United States Senate," said chair of the intelligence committee Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.  She noted that the report is "a comprehensive review of the CIA’s detention program that includes details of each detainee in CIA custody, the conditions under which they were detained, how they were interrogated, the intelligence they actually provided and the accuracy — or inaccuracy — of CIA descriptions about the program to the White House, Department of Justice, Congress and others."

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Khaled El-Masri was kidnapped in Macedonia by the authorities there and handed over to U.S. custody. He was flown to Afghanistan in December 2003 and interrogated there until his release in May 2004, when he was dumped on a mountain road in Albania. Thursday's European court decision focused on Macedonia's role, ruling that the government must pay El-Masri 60,000 euros in damages, but carries important implications for U.S. accountability over the use of torture in its war on terror.

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“Ah, sì,” I replied in my barely passable Italian.

“Bene,” he answered. Good.

In front of us, a backhoe’s guttural engine whined into action and empty dump trucks rattled along a dirt track. The shouts of men vied for attention with the metallic whirring of drills and saws ringing in the distance. Nineteen immense cranes spread across the landscape, with the foothills of Italy’s Southern Alps in the background. More than 100 pieces of earthmoving equipment, 250 workers, and grids of scaffolding wrapped around what soon would be 34 new buildings.

We were standing in front of a massive 145-acre construction site for a “little America” rising in Vicenza, an architecturally renowned Italian city and UNESCO world heritage site near Venice. This was Dal Molin, the new military base the U.S. Army has been readying for the relocation of as many as 2,000 soldiers from Germany in 2013.

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Why, then, has his base of support not been eroded decisively? Why have so many on the left fallen silent, after railing against George W. Bush’s rights violations, as Obama has prolonged and codified most of the same practices? And why have so few on the right, riding a groundswell of resentment toward big government, failed to resent the biggest governmental intrusions into personal privacy since the FBI’s domestic spying during the Cold War?

The facts are not in dispute. While Obama has ordered an end to CIA kidnapping and torture, he has personally approved kill lists containing the names of American citizens to be targeted by drones. While he has tried to move the accused masterminds of 9/11 and others from Guantanamo to civilian courts (only to be blocked by congressional Republicans), he has also embraced military commissions and indefinite detention. He voiced misgivings about a bill subjecting suspected terrorists to military arrest — whether foreigners or Americans, whether in Afghanistan or Alabama — and then signed it into law.

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Will a reelected Obama simply hold down the fort, protecting the domestic achievements of his first term and working to block the excesses of an activist Republican Congress? Or will he be in Grand Bargain legacy-establishing mode, desperate to cut bipartisan deals on as many issues as possible? If his foreign anti-terror campaigns are shown to be inspiring the sorts of attitudes that cause people to become terrorists in the first place will he reconsider his strategy or will we continue to act as though we can kill each terrorist (and only each terrorist) in the world one by one until there aren't any anymore? Will Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton finally switch jobs?

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So convinced was Isaac that a President Obama would restore habeas for detainees that in February 2008 he published a blog called Habeas Lawyers for Obama, composed of one impassioned post, signed by 132 habeas lawyers, and posted just before Super Tuesday in the Democratic primaries. It concluded:

The writ of habeas corpus dates to the Magna Carta, and was enshrined by the Founders in our Constitution. The Administration's attack on habeas corpus rights is dangerous and wrong. America needs a President who will not triangulate this issue. We need a President who will restore the rule of law, demonstrate our commitment to human rights, and repair our reputation in the world community. Based on our work with him, we are convinced that Senator Obama can do this because he truly feels these issues "in his bones."

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The three — a Russian, a Russian of Chechen descent and a Turk, according to Spanish police — were detained Wednesday. The Turk was arrested in the southern city of La Linea bordering the British colony of Gibraltar, while the other two were picked up near the central city of Ciudad Real as they traveled toward a northern Spanish town near the border with France.

Enough explosive material was found in the house in La Linea where the Turk lived to blow up a bus, and the material could be especially dangerous if combined with shrapnel, Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz said.

Investigators found no indications that the three were targeting Gibraltar, he said, declining to offer specifics on possible targets, except that "there are clear indications they could have been planning an attack in Spain and/or another country."

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