Harper's Magazine, one of the best publications in America today, continues to expose hypocrisy in American government and the violence that is integral to our country today.  Read Scott Horton's shocking investigation into the deaths of three detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Naval Base.  These three men each "committed suicide" in one night, in the same way:  by first (somehow) stuffing rags down their own throats and then (improbably) hanging themselves.

By Norman Kelley With America deeply involved in two wars and with our troops spread all over the world, is it time to dust off the idea of a military draft?  Soldiers, sailors, and airmen and women are being sent back time and again to Middle East danger zones, with an increasing number of suicides attributed to the stress of these constant rotations.  All this is unfolding despite the existence of a massive list of possible replacements – the 14 million names collected and tracked by the U.S. Selective Service System (SSS). Finding replacements through the Selective Service would mean reviving the draft, an idea that now sounds more like a distant echo of the 1960s than a real tool of U.S. policy.  Yet taxpayers are paying $24 million per year to keep the Selective Service System, and its 2000 draft boards around the country, at the ready in case of a draft.  When billions and trillions of dollars are the stuff of daily headlines, $24 million may not seem like much.  But is there any reason for the continued existence of the Selective Service System?

The Washington Post's Peter Finn had a provocative piece yesterday pointing out that federal supermax prisons feature even worse living conditions than the bleakest cell at Guantanamo Bay. With torture no longer going on, even prisoners at Guantanamo's Camp 7, where the most dangerous suspected terrorists are held, get ...

Peter Finn of the Washington Post has a good piece about retired military officials who want to shut down Guantanamo Bay. The officials are baffled that Congress and the Obama administration wouldn't work to close the detention camp, which they say are giant recruiting tools for terrorists. But the ...

The Washington Post's Anne Kornblut and ProPublica's Dafna Linzer write something resembling a postmortem on the Obama White House's effort to close Guantanamo Bay. Announcing a Jan. 20, 2010 deadline to close the detention camp was White House Counsel Gregory Craig's idea. And this hard deadline was politcally dumb, ...

The New York Times'  David Johnston and Elizabeth Bumiller give a good, clear layout of what the situation is now in regard to closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay:

In the preparations to close the prison, an administration detainee task force composed of ...

Barack Obama will not re-settle any of the 232 Guantanamo Bay detainees in the United States, reports Peter Finn of the Washington Post. Some detainees could stand trial in the U.S. -- and it's not clear what would happen to them ...

The dilemma of what to do with 17 Chinese Uighur Muslims detained at Guantanamo Bay who even George W. Bush said weren't dangerous might have a happy ending. Mark Landler of the New York Times' reports that the Uighurs will be re-settled ...

With Barack Obama and Defense Sec. Robert Gates vowing to roll back whiz-bang weapons systems with little practical use, what is the future of military combat? Well, based on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, unmanned aerial drones -- planes that Air Force personnel command ...

Like any red-blooded American, I'm deeply concerned that Iran or another Middle East nation will develop long-range missile capability and then immediately launch an attack on the Czech Republic. In such an event, it will be crucial that the Czech Republic has a ballistic missile defense system from the U.S. ...