Posts by Spencer Ackerman

As President Obama and his advisers debate strategy for the Afghanistan war and its related crisis in Pakistan, a factor that so far has not intruded on their discussions is emerging: the antiwar movement is showing signs of strength.

As reports of political violence in Iran intensified after Friday’s fiercely disputed election, the Obama administration insisted that it would not interfere with the struggle for power between regime-backed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the thousands of demonstrators who contend the election was stolen.

“As a general deal,” President Barack Obama said Tuesday about Bush administration officials who shaped the post-9/11 interrogation and detention regime, “I think that we should be looking forward and not backwards.” But it might be hard to determine the difference.

A wealth of new details emerged Tuesday about how techniques designed to help captured U.S. troops resist torture formed the basis for the post-9/11 interrogation policies of the Bush-era Pentagon.

Despite last week’s release of four Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel memos relating to extreme interrogation methods, at least one Department of Justice opinion is still undisclosed.

Naval reformers think the successful rescue of Maersk Alabama captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates may have highlighted structural imbalances in the U.S. Navy’s ability to handle irregular warfare.

During his first 45 days in office, President Obama has made several sharp departures from the foreign policies of the Bush administration that were shaped in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. And the response from the conservative movement and the Republican Party — which turned or sought to turn every election after 9/11 into a referendum on foreign policy and national security — has largely been either silence or agreement.

Both civil libertarians and ex-CIA officials involved in interrogations and detentions policies welcome the changes.