How do you create an atmosphere of fear without real enemies?

The communist enemy, with the “world’s fourth largest military,” has been trundling missiles around and threatening the United States with nuclear obliteration. Guam, Hawaii, Washington: all, it claims, are targetable. The coverage in the media has been hair-raising. The U.S. is rushing an untested missile defense system to Guam, deploying missile-interceptor ships off the South Korean coast, sending “nuclear capable” B-2 Stealth bombers thousands of miles on mock bombing runs, pressuring China, and conducting large-scale war games with its South Korean ally.

Only one small problem: there is as yet little evidence that the enemy with a few nuclear weapons facing off against an American arsenal of 4,650 of them has the ability to miniaturize and mount even one on a missile, no less deliver it accurately.

Appearing on the MSNBC program, “Morning Joe,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said President Barack Obama’s drone programs have been “very effective.”

We are honored to have Codebreaker as our FDL Movie Night discussion with the film’s executive producer Patrick Sammon as our guest. Nominated for the 2013 GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Documentary, Codebreaker is the story of British mathematical genius Alan Turing whose vision shaped the world we now live in, and who was prosecuted and persecuted  by the British  courts for his sexuality under the same statutes as Oscar Wilde decades earlier.

Just as America was celebrating Independence Day, a quiet pilgrimage had marked a history of loss on a stark stretch of land in California. A group of Japanese Americans came to Tule Lake, California to commemorate the detention of more than 18,000 members of their community in an internment camp there during World War II. It’s a history of the immigrant experience that is far removed from the tales of upward-strivers coming ashore and achieving the American dream–and yet it’s every bit as American.

As U.S. drones continue to take flight over Pakistani soil and that country’s restive population becomes more and more resentful of what it views as excessive foreign meddling in its affairs by various actors – the West, Al Qaeda-inspired terrorists, and its old rival India – I think the topic of empire is more relevant than ever to the two countries that I consider my own.

In midsummer 2006, while my wife and kids were on our yearly trip down to Seattle, to be with our extended Norwegian-Jewish-Cambodian-Icelandic-Swedish-Texan family, the so-called Israel-Hezbollah War was in full rage. My brother-in-law and I were watching Wolf Blitzer on CNN, as he interviewed one pro-Israel talking head expert after another, describing the war not just from the Israeli point of view, but from a right-wing Israeli standpoint.

After the program, he lamented that the voice for Israel in the American media, in public affairs and in politics is almost always from a perspective much further from the right than it should be to reflect the views of the average Israeli, or those of the American Jewish community. He longed for a new organization, based from the positions of moderates, to counter the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other hawkish pro-Israel groups.

“But,” Lee lamented, “that’ll never happen.”

Some say it has now happened.

National Journal has a fascinating article comparing the cost-benefit of the war against al Qaeda with that of other wars. It puts the cost of the war at $3 trillion–less than just the defense costs of World War II. But it didn’t bring the same kind of return.

In the wake of the decision by the Justice Department to find the OLC lawyers who wrote the torture memo guilty only of “poor judgment” not professional misconduct, we need to take a closer look at the extreme views of one of the men exonerated and what this exoneration says about us as a nation and a people.