Foreign Policy In Focus

Former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra received his verdict on February 26. The Supreme Court stripped Thaksin of $1.4 billion dollars in assets from his telecommunications firm. One day later, several members of the ruling coalition declared that Thaksin Shinawatra should leave politics forever. The present government came to power in semi-democratic elections following the military coup that toppled Thaksin in 2006.

In the popular virtual game Civilization, you can build an empire and take over the world in a matter of hours. In other words, you can compress thousands of years of history into one long session in front of your computer. This is the gaming equivalent of time-lapse photography, which allows us to watch the blooming of a flower or the entire life-cycle of a caterpillar in a matter of seconds. Thanks to computer technology, Civilization gives you the illusion of experiencing and controlling epochal change.

President Obama's call for a nuclear-weapons-free world in Prague last April unleashed a great outpouring of support from international allies and grassroots activists demanding a process to actually eliminate nuclear weapons. One recent and unexpected initiative has come from America's NATO allies. Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Norway have called on NATO to review its nuclear policy and remove all U.S. nuclear weapons currently on European soil under NATO's  "nuclear sharing" policy. Despite U.S. insistence on strict adherence to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which prohibits the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear weapons states, several hundred U.S. nuclear bombs are housed in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Turkey.

Citizens on both sides of the political divide are outraged at the recently released Department of Justice report on the Bush administration’s torture memos, and what it shows about the lawyers who compiled those legal weapons and subverted the law. But while debate rages over whether or not legal pugilists John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee ought to be subjected to disciplinary action for their loose interpretation of laws prohibiting torture, the media is ignoring an equally disturbing issue. Buried in the weighty study from the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility is evidence that points directly at the Central Intelligence Agency. When it came to “enhanced interrogation techniques” — the carefully parsed phrase for torture — the lawyers at Langley don’t seem to have applied a sniff test to these controversial policies.