Can homeland security officials really, really be this dumb? They keep piling on airline travel restrictions as a response to attempts at terrorism, and they don’t work. At the risk of drawing the wrath of safety officials around the world, I’m going to explain how terrorists think: Whatever the restrictions are, they try something different.

Twitter, the blogosphere and conservative media in general are hopping with unfounded and irresponsible allegations of hypocrisy by President Barack Obama, comparing what he said about shootings at Fort Hood with what he said after the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Transportation Security Officials had said they were “confident” airport restrictions on large containers would end this year as they rolled out technology to detect explosives in liquids and gels. Actually, they were overconfident, just as they’ve been about the three-ounce rule all along, and the rule will stay in place.

President Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize makes sense from an international point of view when looking at the language the committee uses in its announcement: It applauds that “multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position.” It’s the “You’re not George W. Bush award.”

To their credit, the editors of the conservative National Review have written and syndicated an essay attempting to end the “birther” controversy. This is the theory Barack Obama can’t be president because he isn’t a “natural-born” U.S. citizen as requ …

Stephanie Skier holds a pipe end that will drop if something goes wrong during a July 23, 2009, waterboarding administered by co-actor Nadeem Mazen at the YMCA Theater in Cambridge's Central Square. (Photo: Zahra Syed) There are such powerful ideas …

Nadeem Mazen and Stephanie Skier are waterboarded for "Water Board: A Play About Torture," playing Thursday at the YMCA Theater in Central Square. (Photos courtesy the Institute for Intermediate Studies) Watching someone get waterboarded is n …

Raul It is bewildering. President Bush stood before hundreds of soldiers on Veterans Day and told them, and the world, that opponents of the Iraq war must remember that “intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam H …

It was on the 11th hour of the 11th day of November 1918 that President Woodrow Wilson inaugurated the celebration we know as Veterans Day. It was called Armistice Day and intended as a paean to the heroic deeds of the soldiers who died in World War I. …

I have recently come back from a tour in Iraq. I was very moved by the page listing the names of soldiers killed in Iraq (Nov. 2,2005). But I was also bothered by the fact that it is much like the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial in Washington, D.C., and …