War / Peace

Johnnie Thomas, a seventy-year-old African-American woman, can't board an airplane these days without a lengthy hassle. Her name appears on a "master terrorist list" because it happens to resemble one of the aliases used by a blond, blue-eyed man accused of murdering his wife who has already been captured and is sitting in jail. She has spoken with the FBI, FAA and other government acronyms, and no one knows how to take her name off the terrorist list.

William Nash, a retired U.S. Army major general, was one of the members of the United Nations fact-finding mission assigned to investigate what happened in Jenin during the Israeli incursion into the Palestinian refugee camp last month. Unfortunately, the team never got a chance to do its work. "Israel's need for clarification turned to obstruction and then to blockage. Our mood in turn changed from bemusement to frustration to anger," Nash writes.

If you can dismiss someone as "crazy," you don't have to address the substance of what they're saying, which is why dime-store psychoanalysis is a frequent propaganda tactic used by political pundits. Spinsanity.org, a website that analyzes manipulative rhetoric in politics, examines National Review's use of this tactic to disparage critics of Israel in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

U.S. Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs chief Charlotte Beers told a House subcommittee she needs $595 million to "improve and magnify the ways in which we are addressing people of the world--not necessarily other world governments--but people," O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports. Her request represents a five percent increase for the public diplomacy budget. "That outreach is especially targeted at 'disaffected populations' in the Middle East and South Asia, where a poor perception of the U.S.