In The Nation, Eric Alterman reminds us of Elliot Abrams’s lying on behalf of Salvadoran death squads in the Reagan years.
This was 20 years before the W. Bush administration’s “El Salvador Option” in Iraq, using the Badr Corps to hunt and kill Sunnis, which backfired, leading to Abrams’s “Redirection” policy to start tilting back toward al Qaeda.
Later he thankfully botched a coup in Venezuela.
Recent
Preemptive pardons used to sound like a fringe fear. Now they’re getting floated like standard operating procedure, and we dig into what that says about the health of the American system. We talk through why “blanket” or “preemptive” pardons feel like an admission of...
Raul had been a police man for most of his life, since the age of nineteen. He was now fifty-six. His first arrest was a thief, an old man who had stolen a neighbours cow. He had since thrown trade unionist into prison, had beaten starving wives as they begged for...
War isn’t distant when it’s priced into every gallon of gas. Dave Benner from Liberty Vault joins us for a blunt end-of-week rundown on the war in Iran, the midterm backlash building around it, and why the administration’s promise that it won’t become a forever war is...
