It is a telling reflection of the priorities of the last president that one of the few civil rights cases before the nation’s high court this year is a reverse discrimination case. It concerns a group of white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., who say they were unfairly denied promotion as a result of affirmative action gone awry. The Obama Justice Department came out in favor of New Haven in the case, a sharp departure from the past eight years, which saw the government pursue a growing number of these reverse discrimination cases, even as traditional civil rights cases declined. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t expect even a brewing international flu crisis to silence partisan rancor inside the beltway. With hospitals in Mexico, Spain, Canada, New Zealand, Israel, and the United States confirming that patients have contracted swine flu, lawmakers in Washington continue to lob accusations across the aisle. Read the rest of this entry »

The word torture has tripped awkwardly off tongues throughout Washington ever since the Obama administration’s release of legal memos justifying the CIA’s use of brutal interrogation measures. It isn’t news, of course, that the CIA was playing tough with terrorist suspects. But the lengthy memos included vivid details that belied earlier Bush administration claims that so-called enhanced interrogation techniques were applied sparingly. Read the rest of this entry »

For a young CIA analyst in the fall of 1962, it was a heady assignment. With President John F. Kennedy contemplating an invasion of Cuba to neutralize the threat of Soviet nuclear weapons on the island, the CIA began planning. At age 27, Charles Allen was a junior intelligence analyst tracking the names of Soviet missile technicians. “I was put on a team assigned to plan a new Cuban government, which would be put in power after the U.S. invasion,” says Allen. He quickly began sorting through dossiers to determine which Cubans would be suitable to place in power. Read the rest of this entry »