US special forces captured an al Qaeda leader who'd been sought since 1998.
Sam Pizzigati: Today, more than ever, we need to refocus the federal "tax and spend" debate - from deficits to inequality.
President Barack Obama speaks at Prince George's Community College in Kettering, Md., Sept. 26, 2013. (Photo: Doug Mills / The New York Times)
The recent Obama-Putin tiff over American exceptionalism reignited an ongoing debate over the Obama Doctrine: Is the president veering toward isolationism? Or will he proudly carry the banner of exceptionalism? "American exceptionalism" and "isolationism" are generally understood to be tactical variants of a secular religion, with a grip that is quite extraordinary, going beyond normal religious orthodoxy in that it can barely even be perceived. Since no alternative is thinkable, this faith is adopted reflexively.
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Doubtless, there exists much reason to study disobedience, "the spark behind all knowledge," as Gaston Bachelard claims in his Fragments of a Poetics of Fire. I would argue that Albert Camus is right to claim rebellion - which, as he says, can only ever be a social project infused by notions of solidarity, rather than individualism - to be intimately related to the defense of human existence - survival, in the first place - as well as to the political task of advancing human flourishing.
It is almost a decade since stories and images started to emerge of the torture and abuse of prisoners by the US military and the CIA at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Iraq, in 2003 and 2004. Photographic and video images showed the physical and sexual torture of prisoners. As with many other episodes of prisoner abuse in Iraq by the United States and its allies, there have been few prosecutions over the past decade. For some prisoners involved, the persecution continues.
