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The United States in Talks to Return the 17 Afghan Prisoners in Guantánamo

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Earlier this year, there was much discussion in the U.S. media about the possibility that, as part of negotiations aimed at securing peace in Afghanistan, the United States would release five high-level Taliban prisoners in Guantánamo to Qatar, where they would be held under a form of house arrest. Those plans came to nothing, but last week the Associated Press reported that the Obama administration was “considering a new gambit to restart peace talks with the Taliban.” The new gambit would involve transferring some — or all — of the 17 remaining Afghan prisoners still held in Guantánamo to Afghanistan to be held in the Parwan Detention Facility near Bagram. Parwan is the huge prison established to replace the original prison at Bagram, where several prisoners were killed in the early years of the “war on terror.” As part of the Obama administration’s 2014 deadline for withdrawing forces from Afghanistan, the Parwan Detention Facility is scheduled ...

Mexico’s New President

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Mexico has a new president, 45-year-old Enrique Pena Nieto, who is a member of the PRI, the political party that once held the Mexican people in a monopolistic iron grip for some seven decades. In 2000, with much hope and change, voters rejected the PRI candidate and elected Vicente Fox, a member of PAN, thereby busting Mexico’s one-party system. Naturally, the Mexican people figured that such a revolutionary political change would finally bring an end to the deep economic impoverishment that has characterized Mexico for centuries. But it was not to be. The cast had changed, but the results were the same — continued poverty and, even worse, for the past six years a massive death toll of some 60,000 people resulting from Mexico’s military crackdown in the war on drugs. So, Mexicans have now returned to the PRI by electing Pena. Will anything change? Nope, at least not until the Mexican people finally change their economic system. Until that happens, it won’t matter ...

We’re All Socialists Now, Except for Libertarians

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The Sunday edition of the New York Times published an interesting article that is certain to make some Americans who read it uncomfortable. Why is that? Because the article, which is entitled, “What’s a Socialist?” makes a point that many ordinary Americans hate hearing: that by adopting the welfare state, Americans in principle became socialists, just like Europeans. European Joschka Fischer, a spokesman for the Green Party, points out, “Even in the United States, you have a sort of welfare state, even if you don’t want to admit it — you don’t allow people to die on the street.” According to the article, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who used to be called “Dany the Red” but who is now known as “Dany the Green,” points out that modern socialism is characterized by more reliance on the state and higher taxes on the wealthy. The article also points out that European Bernard-Henry Levy observes that European socialists are like American Democrats. Levy, however, ...

Romney Is a Disaster on Education

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What a disaster conservatives are. They preach their old 1950s mantra “free enterprise, private property, and limited government” while embracing every socialist and interventionist program that comes down the pike. A recent example is Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s plan to fix America’s educational woes. Needless to say, you’d never find a conservative calling for the end of public schooling, ...