Salon.com > Jordan Smith

How to unpack the Tsarnaevs’ real motives

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:31:00 +0000

What motivated the Boston bombers? That’s the question on everyone’s minds, in the face of a new report suggesting that suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev left a note in his boat attributing his alleged actions to retribution for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ultimately the debate has come down to this: Is anti-American terrorism and violence a result of anger at U.S. foreign policy, as former Salon writer Glenn Greenwald and others claim? Or does it result from religious extremism, as blogger Andrew Sullivan argues?

The answer is: both. The two are entangled. First, it must be noted that Islamists are hardly the only people in the world angry at American actions in the world. Consider that Russians have nearly as unfavorable a view of Obama’s international policies, as well as the U.S. overall, as do people in Muslim countries. Greeks disapprove of U.S. drone strikes more than anyone else in the world, including Muslim-strong countries such as Jordanians, Egyptians, Lebanese and Tunisians.

The real reason not to intervene in Syria

Fri, 03 May 2013 17:22:00 +0000

Demands by politicians and pundits for intervention in Syria have become so strong that they now seem to be influencing U.S. policy. But are they right? The most emotionally powerful arguments came from the State Department former policy planning head Anne-Marie Slaughter. The Obama administration is in danger of letting genocide akin to the one in Rwanda in the 1990s occur, she wrote, in the Washington Post. The case of Rwanda haunts Democrats. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called not saving Rwandans her “greatest regret” from her time in office, “something that sits very heavy on all our souls.” U.N. ambassador Susan Rice has similarly expressed agony over U.S. failure to intervene in Rwanda.

Right-wing journal quietly dies

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 13:00:00 +0000

When the conservative magazine Policy Review recently announced that it was ceasing publication after a 36-year run, few outside the Hoover Institution journal seemed to notice its demise. “The Hoover Institution wants to focus more on the work of its own fellows and scholars,” editor Tod Lindberg explained to Salon. Unlike the period of mourning usually observed when an elite periodical dies, no eulogies were written for Policy Review in other publications. In fact, I cannot find a single reference in a conservative outlet to Policy Review’s death.

That says little about the journal’s value and more about our era’s level of intellectual conservation. Whatever Policy Review’s failings, the magazine was well written and challenged its readers’ attention spans. Its last issue was typical: engaging multi-thousand-word essays on foreign affairs and American politics, and learned long-form book reviews examining literature. And yet, format aside, Policy Review failed to accomplish its mission: It didn’t foster a rethinking of right-wing ideas. By its end, like the rest of the conservative movement, it was incapable of challenging its own orthodoxies, no matter how obsolete they were.

Big Brother is tracking you: GPS and the 4th Amendment

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 11:01:00 +0000

This originally appeared in the Crime Report, the nation's largest criminal justice news source.

When is a search not a search?

Or, more pointedly: When are electronic or other forms of surveillance of an individual considered a search under the Fourth Amendment -- thus requiring a valid warrant to conduct such surveillance in a manner that protects the individual from "unlawful search and seizure"?

How the U.S. Supreme Court answers that question, in a case on its docket for the term starting in October, will have far-reaching implications for the power of government and for the privacy of individuals, according to lawyers and privacy rights advocates.

If the Court holds that warrants are not required for this type of surveillance, it could mean "the technological death of the Fourth Amendment,” warns Arkansas-based attorney John Wesley Hall, a leading Fourth Amendment expert who also writes a blog and runs a website.

The case before the Court concerns a 2004 investigation by a task force of FBI agents and officers of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department of a suspected drug trafficker named Antoine Jones.

Will the liberal hawks fly again?

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 15:01:00 +0000

Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, who played an outsize role in convincing many liberal American intellectuals that a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was a moral imperative, is succinct in his view of a prospective war against Iran: "It’s a very bad idea," he says. "Iranians will likely perceive the strike as an attack on them nationally and will rally around the state."

But in opposing military action against Iran, Makiya is parting ways with the very same "liberal hawks" he greatly influenced on Iraq. Those liberal hawks -- individuals who are left-wing on domestic policy but frequently support the use of American military power to intervene in conflicts around the world -- have been enormously influential in the Democratic coalition since the 1990s, when the Bill Clinton and the centrist Democratic Leadership Coalition consciously remade the party in an effort to jettison its soft-on-defense image. Politically, these liberal hawks have been represented by Madeleine Albright, Joe Biden, Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, among other Democratic Party heavyweights.

Bleed ‘em and plead ‘em: The plight of wrongly accused child molesters

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:01:00 +0000

When Michigan psychologist Demosthenes Lorandos first met former kindergarten teacher Tonya Renee Craft, he was brutally frank about her chances of beating the 22 counts of child abuse and molestation brought against her by a Georgia prosecutor.

"I told her that she was a dead woman," he recalled. "That things were over for her, that she was going to lose."

According to prosecutors, Craft had molested or assaulted three little girls, including her now-eight-year-old daughter, over a period of years, in the small town of Chickamauga, Ga., where Craft had been working as a kindergarten teacher at the local elementary school since 2005. The proof of that, they said during court proceedings, was that the children had separately complained to adults that Craft had abused them.

"The actual truth can be cruel," Catoosa County Assistant District Attorney Len Gregor had argued at the opening of Craft’s trial. "[You] may not want to believe that ... someone that works as a teacher could do such awful things to children."

As it turned out, the jury didn’t believe it. On May 11, two years after Lorandos agreed to take Craft’s case, a jury acquitted her of all charges.

The most infuential conservative publication you’ve never heard of

Thu, 13 May 2010 11:01:00 +0000

The conservative newsletter Imprimis has nearly 2 million subscribers, which is surprising because almost no one has ever heard of it. To judge by its presence on the national media radar, Imprimis is an unknown entity. But in the conservative grass roots, among the people who populate Tea Party rallies and line up for Sarah Palin appearances, Imprimis is very well known, and is often passed from person to person like a Grateful Dead bootleg. Despite existing beyond the rolodex of the mainstream for decades, Imprimis plays a crucial role in distributing conservative ideas to the rank-and-file -- ideas that can be based on information that is alarmingly inaccurate.