Portside

The U.S response to 9/11, which began with the Bush Administration’s shock-and-awe air strikes and invasions and continued through the Obama Administration, cost ten of thousands of civilian lives and trillions of dollars, and bombed and missiled a world of Islamist terror outfits into existence. At 15 years and counting the U.S. air campaign has spread across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa and shows no sign of ending, despite its spectacular failure.

Duke law professor Curtis Bradley and Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, both Bush administration alumni, warned, "If the United States reduces the immunity it accords to other nations, it exposes itself to an equivalent reduction in its own immunity abroad."

Art as politics in the powerful new exhibit at the Whitney Museum in New York by Laura Poitras. Museum director Adam Weinberg sets the show "in the tradition of socially and politically engaged artists - progressive artists such as Ben Shahn and Alice Neal." He said, "The aim of the projections is to provoke moral and ethical responses." Indeed, they do. Or they should.

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Fourteen years after 9/11, the World Trade Center Health Program is scheduled to end next month. And the Victim Compensation Fund is set to expire in October 2016. Unless Congress pledges more money, funding for both programs will end just as scientists and doctors are on the verge of finding a definitive link between the incident and various cancers. Not only would 9/11-related cancer treatment and compensation end, but all research would be discontinued as well.

The case, filed in 2002, was the first broad legal challenge to the policies and practices that swept hundreds of mostly Muslim men into detention on immigration violations in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks. The defendants include John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, and Robert S. Mueller III, the former F.B.I. director. Orders came from officials at the highest levels of government. Now we have the chance to ensure that they are held accountable.

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