On November 9, New America screened a new
documentary film directed by filmmaker Polly Nash and journalist Andy
Worthington called "Outside the Law: Stories from
Guantánamo," which follows the stories of three current or former
detainees from Guantanamo Bay and tells the story of Guantanamo, including
segments on extraordinary renditions and secret prisons. With just over two months until President Obama's
deadline for the closure of Guantánamo, and with the administration set to
This conference examined the civilian dimensions of counterterrorism, and took place on October 21, 2009, at the
Mayflower Hotel. A full program agenda is below, as are video recordings from the webcasts of each discussion.
Higher resolution video and an MP3 audio recording will be added here as they become available.
David Loyn, developing world correspondent for the BBC and
author of In Afghanistan: Two Hundred
Years of British, Russian, and American Occupation, expounded upon 200
years of Afghan history as being useful in understanding the problems the U.S.
and NATO currently face there. After declaring that clear thinking is needed on
Afghanistan, and apparently
not currently forthcoming from the Obama Administration, Loyn described his own
ten points the U.S.
must consider when planning its next move in the country. The two primary
At today's launch event for the AfPak Channel, a joint
project between the New America Foundation
and Foreign Policy magazine, a panel
of journalists who have often traveled to the region that U.S. President Barack
Obama has made the focal point of his foreign policy shared their experiences
reporting from Afghanistan
and Pakistan.
On July 23 Seth Jones, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation, joined the New America Foundation and Peter Bergen, senior fellow and co-director of the New America Foundation's Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative, to discuss Afghanistan and Jones' recently published book, In The Graveyard of Empires.
Unlike the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) has no mechanism to ensure compliance and verification.
Given the dramatic advances in the life sciences over the past decade, the international community urgently needs to discuss strengthening the BWC.
An exclusive national poll taken ahead of Iran’s presidential election is discussed by Ken Ballen, Azadeh Porzand, and Flynt Leverett. Steve Clemons moderated the discussion.
Will China and the Gulf oil states have the U.S. over the proverbial barrel, or will the world's leading capitalist economy get lucky once again? On May 26, 2009, two of the New America Foundation's leading experts on geopolitics and the global economy joined with Foreign Policy magazine to debate which countries will emerge relatively stronger in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
On May 14th Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign relations, discussed his new book War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars with Steve Coll, President of the New America Foundation. Richard Haas described his role in the lead up to the war in Iraq and how the most recent Bush administration failed to properly calculate and prepare for the war.
Join us as journalist
Nick Schmidle, who was deported
from Pakistan in January 2008 after writing a controversial New York Times Magazine article entitled
As the U.S. engages in a simmering war as well as in continued attempts at building infrastructure, the conference will consider a wide-ranging set of questions in order to clarify policy choices regarding both military and civilian investment in the country. What is the current state of the Taliban? What might the reversion of Afghanistan into failed-state status mean? How prevalent -- and how effective -- has counterinsurgency been in the country? What are the possibilities for increasing the size… more
Frances
Fragos Townsend noted that
the two foiled Al-Qaeda plots in 2004 and 2006 prove that Al-Qaeda ought to
still be taken seriously. She stated that “North Africa is more significant
than most people talk about…[and] is a threat to the U.S.
because of immigration through Western Europe.”
The recent attacks on the Marriot Hotel in Islamabad,
The next U.S. president, whether it is Sen. John McCain or Sen. Barack Obama, should reorient American policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran as fundamentally as President Nixon transformed American policy toward the People's Republic of China in the early 1970s.
This is the argument put forth by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett in "Time for a U.S.-Iranian Grand Bargain," the third proposal in New America's Big Ideas series. Their idea is also explored in… more
In May, terrorism experts Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank released an article titled, "The Unraveling: The jihadist revolt against bin Laden." The article was republished in media outlets around the world and became the subject for discussions on the current state and future of Al Qaeda. In this panel discussion, Messrs. Bergen and Cruickshank will discuss their continued research into the issue, with additional perspectives from panelists Contribuing Expert Evan Kohlmann and Stephen Coughlin and special guest… more
The following are highlights of the event, while an MP3 audio recording of the full 90-minute event can be downloaded below and video can be viewed at right.
Karen Kornbluh“The Platform Committee itself was almost evenly divided between supports of Senator Clinton and Senator Obama…so what I was warned about is you really don’t want to have a minority report… but this process despite about all that went so smoothly and there was so much unity there was actually in… more
On Thursday the New America Foundation hosted Ward Wilson, winner of the 2008 Doreen and Jim McElvany Nonproliferation Challenge, to examine the underpinnings of nuclear deterrence theory. Joined by Jeffrey Lewis, Director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative, Wilson challenged the belief that nuclear weapons continue to serve a useful purpose in the world. An MP3 audio recording can be downloaded below, while video is available at right.
Wilson's argument framed nuclear weapons in the… more
One of the more infamous adages to come from the Vietnam War said that, in waging counterinsurgency in the Vietnamese brush, American policy was to "burn the village to save the village," from communism. This sentiment did not die with Vietnam, however, and has found a clear place in the Bush administration's regard to traditional civil liberties, as described by New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer at the New America Foundation on July 15. An MP3 audio recording can be downloaded… more
