In assessing the actions of the CIA and, in particular, the program euphemistically called, Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, context is important. Nowhere is that historical context more evident than in an April 2007 interview CBS News Anchor Scott Pelley conducted with former CIA Chief George Tenet. Tenet was unusually candid and direct about the situation the United States faced after September...

A five-year Senate Intelligence Committee investigation examining the Central Intelligence Agency’s role in interrogation tactics against detainees involved in the terrorist attacks on 9/11 was released today and the evidence is damning. “Based on 6.2 million pages of documents,” TIME magazine reports (Dec.9), photos and other CIA files, the report presents evidence that the agency’s interrogation methods were brutal and...

I never became aware of the racial tension that had existed for decades until the evening of August 11, 1965. The Watts Riots continued for six, agonizing days and resulted in 34 deaths and $40 million in property damage. The last two weeks have seen protests spread from Ferguson, Missouri to New York, Seattle, Washington, and Los Angeles. Last Thursday...

Beginning with last week’s grand jury decision not to charge Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, and continuing to Wednesday night, protesters calling for fundamental change in the way police operate have gained significant momentum in major cities across the country. #CrimingWhileWhite became the unifying Twitter hashtag widely circulated since Wednesday’s decision by a New York...

And it only took 529 years to solve this “cold case” of the… millennium! According to a report in Nature (Dec. 2), DNA tests have confirmed that the skeletal remains found in a parking lot in Leicester, England in 2012, are, in fact, those of the infamous Richard III, the last king of the House of York and the last...

After a week of protests following the grand jury decision that Officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, another image and story took off on social media proving that compassion can win out against tragedy, and it took place at a rally 2,000 miles away. “In the hours after The Oregonian posted...

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.” – Atticus Finch, “To Kill a Mockingbird” There’s a moment in the film, To Kill a Mockingbird that’s particularly compelling. Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in a small...

Bill Cosby and Lance Armstrong would appear to have much in common. Both worked hard in their respective fields. Both became popular figures and spokesmen for important issues: Cosby on education; Armstrong for cancer survivors. Throughout several decades, both reached a rare level of success and celebrity. And both cultivated a position of power based on that celebrity. And now...

What’s disturbing about Lance Armstrong is not just that he used banned drugs to unfairly compete. What’s disturbing is how effortlessly, how compulsively he lied, and how ruthless he became in protecting that lie. And, in a sense, we were all complicit. “There are these two, completely opposite narratives,” Armstrong tells documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney. “The only person who can...

Pamela Hartzband and Jerome Groopman are physicians on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. Wednesday’s Op-Ed, from The New York Times (Nov. 19), discusses the corruption in medical practice, largely conducted behind the scenes, at a cost to all of us. “When we are patients, we want our doctors to make recommendations that are in our best interests as individuals....