By John Solomon
How the government's punishing of the exposure of official wrongdoing can linger for years
As Washington surveys the landscape of the Middle East in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, it becomes clear that the ensuing chaos resembles something closer to a long, harsh winter than a hopeful beginning.
Remember when President Obama used to warn Syria's Bashar Assad to stop his mass killing and step down?
Most Americans look at Iran with a mixture of revulsion and fatalism. The regime is about as bad as repressive regimes get, just behind North Korea. Like North Korea, it is working hard to develop a militarily useful arsenal of nuclear weapons in defiance of the international community.
Analysts agree that the erosion of the Syrian regime’s capabilities is accelerating, that it continues to retreat, making a rebel breakthrough and an Islamist victory increasingly likely.
Analysts agree that the erosion of the Syrian regime's capabilities is accelerating, that it continues to retreat, making a rebel breakthrough and an Islamist victory increasingly likely. In response, I am changing my policy recommendation from neutrality to something that causes me, as a humanitarian and decades-long foe of the Assad dynasty, to pause before writing: Western governments should support the malign dictatorship of Bashar Assad.
At the end of her 49-day hunger strike, Iranian activist Nasrin Sotoudeh smuggled a letter from her Evin prison cell letting the world know about the 36 other female political prisoners incarcerated with her in Evin.
The Arab Spring is showing its true winter colors. Egypt, a former U.S. ally, is rebranding its nascent democracy with oppressive Islamist cant. No one should be surprised.
The situation was dire. Unbearably tense. Three months after the late-1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran by Iranian revolutionaries, six American diplomats who had secretly escaped the compound were attempting to flee the country.
The leader of an Iranian militant group that was taken off the U.S. terror list on Friday says the move will change her group's "balance of power" with the world — predicting a higher profile in politics, fundraising and diplomacy and increased anti-regime activity in Iran.
Member states of the United Nations should ponder an alarming statistic: According to a just-released Pew Research Center study, 75 percent of people live in countries where a bedrock human right is endangered.
Just hours after news of the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the American ambassador and three aides and the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Iranian leaders sought to capitalize on the unrest by inciting worldwide riots against America.
Salman Rushdie is dismissing the latest threat against his life as just talk.
Salman Rushdie is dismissing the latest threat against his life as just talk.
Israel will be obliterated by chemical, microbial and nuclear bombs, Iran is warning, but those weapons of mass destruction will be used first on Tel Aviv by Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad at the start of a decades-old Muslim dream of destroying the Jewish state.
For all their ideological fervor, revolutions in practice tend to be fairly predictable affairs. More often than not, when the initial groundswell of popular discontent recedes, the best-organized and most ideologically cohesive political factions assume power and proceed to run the show according to their own preferences.
"America can do nothing," he said.
Early on in the 1970s revolution, not long after well-organized "students" seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sneered at aides who urged him to release the hostages.
