Journalism watchdog Reporters Without Borders recently made headlines when it demoted the United States in its annual rankings of press freedom for an alleged “crackdown” on reporters covering Occupy Wall Street. Not only was that downgrade deeply tendentious, but it served to obscure a far graver threat to press freedom: the ongoing assault on independent media in Latin America.

The rise of populist left-wing leaders in Latin America has been an unmitigated disaster for the independent press. For all their appeals to democracy, strongman leaders like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega have been unwilling to submit to democratic scrutiny from the media. Intolerant of dissent, they have launched crackdowns on journalists and media owners with the ultimate goal of curtailing the influence and independence of the press and eliminating one of the few remaining challenges to their power. To a troubling extent, they have succeeded.

Hugo Chavez has long been on the frontlines of the war against the media. Since becoming president in 1999, Chavez has worked to build up a loyalist media empire that would drown out independent and critical media – or, in Chavez’s neo-Marxist parlance, free him from the “media dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.” In 2005, for instance, he set up TELESUR, a state-run network that functions as his personal propaganda outlet. If there is to be a media dictatorship in Venezuela, Chavez clearly intends to run it himself.

At the same time, Chavez has tried to crush the country’s independent media. Government regulations have forced the closure of radio and cable television stations critical of his government, while independent media outlets have been forced to shut down after the government denied their broadcasting licenses. Such has been the fate of Venezuela’s oldest private channel, Radio Caracas Television. RCTV was forced off the air in 2007, after the government refused to renew its license because it did not toe Chavez’s party line. That left just one independent channel in Venezuela, Globovision, a problem the government solved in December 2010 by becoming a minority shareholder in the company and forcing a Chavez crony onto Globovision’s board of directors. In this hostile environment, journalists and media directors understandably have chosen self-censorship rather than risk losing their job by angering the Chavez government.

Chavez isn’t alone in seeing independent media as a threat to his regime. In Ecuador, the leftist President Rafael Correa has taken his Venezuelan ally’s strategy of media intimidation and politically driven censorship even further. Given that Correa hails from academia, where he was a professor of economics, there was early hope that he would take a more lenient view of press independence. Instead, in what the Washington Post has called “the most comprehensive and ruthless assault on free media underway in the Western Hemisphere,” Correa has tried to deploy Ecuador’s laws and the judiciary to bring the media to heel and to silence his critics, all while subjecting journalists to legal and personal harassment.

One recent example of these tactics is Correa’s campaign against the Ecuadoran newspaper El Universo. The campaign traces its origins to September 2010, when Correa tried to enter a police station in the capital of Quito to calm police officers angry about a new government law limiting bonus pay and extending the time required for promotions. When the angry police officers rioted, Correa sought safety in a police hospital and ultimately had to call in the military to come to his aid. Shots were fired in the ensuing rescue. The incident prompted a column from El Universo editorial page editor Emilio Palacio, in which he called Correa a “dictator” and implied that Correa had ordered the military to fire on the hospital, putting civilians’ lives at risk. Outraged, Correa denied the charges and claimed that the column was defamatory. Spurning the paper’s offer to publish a statement in response, Correa instead filed suit against Palacio and the paper’s owners, citing “aggravated defamation of a public official.” In July of 2011, Palacio and the owners were sentenced to three years in jail while the paper was hit with $40 million in fines. Suspiciously, five different judges presided over the case. The defense also presented evidence that the harsh verdict, issued in just 24 hours by yet another surrogate judge, was ghostwritten by Correa’s personal lawyer. Whatever the truth, critics have pointed out that the Ecuador’s strict libel laws will inevitably lead to more media self-censorship.

The Obama administration’s position on Syria is clear. Administration officials have said that Bashar Assad’s days are numbered and affirmed that the goal is a “democratic transition” that would see Assad deposed from power. President Obama has added moral urgency to the situation, condemning Assad’s brutal 11-month crackdown on dissent and vowing that “cruelty must be confronted for the sake of justice and human dignity.” For all the forcefulness of its intentions, though, the administration has yet to spell out a concrete course for ousting Assad and ending the violence.

Diplomacy seems to be the administration’s preferred strategy for regime change, at least judging from the desperate way in which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to win Russian support for a UN Security Council resolution backing Assad’s exit. But as Russia and China’s obdurate refusal to part ways with Assad shows, there will be no such unanimity at the UN. Neither country seems to have been moved by Syria’s humanitarian crisis, as UN ambassador Susan Rice’s admonition that both countries “will have any future blood spilled on their hands” plainly has fallen on deaf ears.

Russia and China’s backing isn’t necessary to tighten sanctions or to seize the regime’s finances abroad, but these measures may have reached diminishing returns. Switzerland and the EU have already frozen Assad and his lieutenants’ assets and it’s not clear how much more can be done on this front. Powerful economic sanctions have already been pushed through by the European Union, Turkey, and the Arab League, meanwhile, and while their impact will certainly be felt in Damascus it’s unlikely to be decisive. As international sanctions expert Daniel Drezner points out, sanctions alone rarely collapse regimes as determined to hold on to power as Assad’s.

The administration’s least-preferred option – the use of force – is also unlikely. Although the Department of Defense has said that it is reviewing all options for Syria, the administration has been at pains to stress that it has not been considering a Libya-style military intervention. Speaking with NBC’s Matt Lauer last Sunday, President Obama stressed that it is “very important for us to try to resolve this without recourse to outside military intervention.” Obama added that he thought that was “possible.”

This reluctance may seems strange coming from the Obama administration, particularly considering its willingness to use force in Libya, where Moammar Qadaffi only threatened the kind of collective punishment and humanitarian disaster that Assad has already inflicted on Syrians. But according to national security reporter Laura Rozen, the administration considers Syria a different case for several reasons.

First, Syria’s location matters more than Libya’s. Syria’s neighbors – Iraq, Israel, Turkey – make the threat of regional instability arising from military intervention far more worrying. There is also the matter of Syria’s internal sectarian divisions and its fractured political opposition. Not only are there long-running tensions between the majority Sunnis and the Alawaite sect of Assad, but there is feuding even among the two leading opposition groups, the Syrian National Council and the National Coordination Body, who fell out most recently after disagreeing about the use of foreign force against Assad.

One upon a time, the mainstream media reigned unchallenged. Posing as impartial news gatherers, the institutions of the elite media filtered politics through the decidedly left-wing-lens of most journalists even as they pronounced themselves above the concerns of partisanship. But the mainstream media monopoly on the news – and, just as crucially, the context in which it is set – is under siege like never before. With the rise of FOX News and the Internet, a new generation of combative conservative journalists has begun to challenge the media’s grip on conventional wisdom. The journalistic right’s latest venture is the Washington Free Beacon, an online conservative magazine launched this week. FrontPage magazine caught up with the Beacon’s editor-in-chief, Matthew Continetti. Prior to joining the Beacon, he was opinion editor of the Weekly Standard, where he remains a contributing editor. The author of The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine (Doubleday, 2006) and The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star (Sentinel, 2009), he joined Front Page to discuss his new magazine, the state of the media, and “taking the fight to the left.”

FP: In your introductory essay, you describe what the Washington Free Beacon will be doing as “combat journalism.” What is combat journalism and why is it needed?

MC: Simply put, combat journalism is research, reporting, and writing that takes no prisoners. The more closely one follows the news, the more one notices that the mainstream media apply a far different standard to conservatives and Republicans than to liberals and Democrats. Most liberal reporters—but I repeat myself—believe that conservatives and Republicans, whatever the charge, are guilty until proven innocent. They happily impugn the motives and actions of individuals who do not share their politics while turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to those who do. The WFB’s mission is to flip the terms of the debate—to report intensely and accurately and actively, but with a different set of assumptions, and a different group of targets, than the establishment press.

FP: On the WFB‘s homepage, you write: “At the Beacon, we follow only one commandment: Do unto them.” Can you explain what you mean by that?

MC: It’s our modification of the golden rule: We will do unto the left as they have done unto the right.

FP: What kinds of stories do you want to see the Beacon covering?

MC: We’ve assembled a fantastic team of reporters who will cover the administration, the Democrats in Congress, the institutional basis of the progressive movement, the weakness of liberal internationalist foreign policy, the cronyism endemic to the “green jobs” crusade, the rising threats of Iran, Russia, and China, and the overall hypocrisy and self-dealing of the elite.

When Russia joined China this weekend in vetoing a U.S.-backed resolution calling for  Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down, it was more than a gambit to protect a fellow authoritarian regime and a lucrative market for Russian arms. The lifeline to Assad also was an attempt to boost Vladimir’s Putin’s flagging domestic popularity by casting Russia as a major player in world affairs and a defiant rival to the United States.

Considering that Putin has spent the past decade stamping out Russia’s fledgling democratic reforms and consolidating his control over Russian politics, one might think that he wouldn’t need to engage in such crudely symbolic politicking. But stung by the rebuff of the December 4 elections, when his United Russia failed to win a decisive parliamentary majority despite rigging the results, and apparently shaken by the growing disaffection of urban middle-class Russians, who have poured out in record numbers to take part in anti-Putin demonstrations, Putin has sought to shore up his tarnished domestic standing by resorting to the familiar tactic of anti-American incitement.

If recent developments are any guide, anti-Americanism will feature centrally ahead of the March 4 presidential election, which is intended to restore Putin to the presidency. Russia’s state-run television networks, having caused a sensation by providing surprisingly balanced coverage of the recent anti-Putin demonstrations, have again fallen into line by cranking up the dial on anti-American programming. Last week, for instance, Russia’s leading government channel aired “A Bridge Over the Abyss,” a documentary film that, according to the Wall Street Journal, depicts Putin as Russia’s savior following the fall of the Soviet Union while the U.S. and the West are portrayed as villains trying to impose their will on Russians. Putin, who was interviewed for the documentary, complains about these “foreign” bullies. ”It seems to me our [foreign] partners don’t want allies, they want vassals,” Putin says in the film. “They want to direct things, but Russia doesn’t work that way.”

This self-serving narrative dovetails neatly with Putin’s version of a Russia put-upon by hostile foreign forces. Yet it’s hard to argue that outside influences are to blame for Putin’s political woes when much of the opposition comes from inside Russia. Since the December 4 elections, there have been three massive anti-Putin demonstrations, each of which has provided an opportunity for Russians to protest the government’s rank corruption and to demand a “Russia Without Putin.” The latest of these took place this past weekend and reportedly involved some 120,000 people, who braved Moscow’s arctic temperatures to make their voices heard. While the government expected the demonstrations to peter out with the approach of winter, the organizers of this weekend’s protests claimed that this was largest turnout yet. Bone-chilling cold or not, the demonstrators will not simply disappear.

Confronted with such impressive evidence of internal discontent, Putin has tried to play the anti-American card. Ever since he accused Hillary Clinton of sending “a signal” to demonstrators to oppose the December election results, the government has ratcheted up the conspiracy theory of foreign manipulation. Thus the government has made a concerted effort to smear the new American ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, as an agent of American subversion who is personally supporting the Russian opposition movement. Russian television has gotten in on the act, most recently when it screened a documentary called “Foreigners Will Help Them.” The documentary purports to show secret video of Russia’s opposition leaders receiving instruction from U.S. officials. Most brazenly, Russia’s top investigative agency, the Investigative Committee, has claimed that the widespread video evidence of fraud and ballot stuffing during the parliamentary elections was actually faked by American saboteurs – a claim that is hard to square with credible accounts of 140 percent turnout in some regions during the recent elections and findings such as the one from a local electoral commission that discovered 6,000 “dead souls” on the ballot.

As Syria’s regional and international standing has deteriorated amidst a bloody and brutal crackdown, one country has stood steadfastly in President Bashar al-Assad’s corner. Condemned by the international community and ostracized by the Arab League, Syria’s dictatorship has found a staunch ally in Russia.

Efforts to hold Syria to account have repeatedly run up against Russian opposition. Last October, Russia, backed by China, used its veto on the UN Security Council to block a resolution condemning Assad’s government for its suppression of anti-government opposition. Even when Assad stepped up the violence against his own people, Russia refused to spurn the regime. In December, Russia again blocked a UN resolution to hold Syria accountable for the violence. Just last week, Russia insisted that a draft U.N. Security Council resolution calling on Assad to step aside violated Russia’s “red lines.” While the U.S. and its Arab and European allies press for a resolution calling for Assad to step aside, Russia continues to champion his cause.

Russia’s support for Syria has been striking, not least because it is essentially alone in that support, but it’s not new. Russo-Syrian ties extend back to the Cold War, when the Soviet Union relied on Syria, then ruled by Assad’s father Hafez Assad, as a key sphere of influence. Situated just 400 miles from the Soviet Union’s southwestern border, Syria provided its Soviet patron with strategic and economic benefits. Access to Syrian ports at Tartus and Latakia ensured that the Soviet Union would have a direct link to the Mediterranean Sea. That strategic alliance was further forged with military sales. Between 1956 and 1985, Syria received $16.3 billion in Soviet military equipment, more than any other country in that time period.

Although the Soviet Union is no more, Russia remains a leading weapons supplier for Damascus. By some estimates, at least 10 percent of Russia’s global arms sales go to Syria. Current military contracts are estimated to be worth between $1.5 and $4 billion. Russia also retains its Soviet-era naval base in the port of Tartus. In a symbolic throwback to that era, just last month Russia’s sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, anchored at the port. Syrian authorities welcomed the public relations opportunity, hailing the ship’s arrival as a “show of solidarity with the Syrian people.”

Russia also has other investments in Syria, including some estimated $20 billion in Syria’s infrastructure and energy sectors. The Russian engineering company Stroytransgaz has contracts with Syria’s state-owned gas company to develop technical equipment, build roads and lay miles of pipeline in Syria’s central region. Stroytransgaz is also building a natural gas refining plant just east of the Syrian city of Homs. It would not have escaped Russia’s notice that Homs in recent days has been the site of some of the most intense fighting between Syrian government forces and rebels, with an oil pipeline feeding a Syrian refinery among the casualties.

Oil is not what binds Russia to Syria, however. As the world’s largest oil producer and second largest exporter, Russia is not dependent on the Arab world for its energy consumption. Arguably even more than an economic interest, Syria is a status symbol for a country that has never fully abandoned its superpower designs. The collapse of the Soviet Union spelled the end of Russia’s ability to project power and influence through its client states but not its desire to do so. Deprived of its satellites, Russia made its mark by backing anti-Western regimes, whether it was Slabodan Mioslevic in Seria and the Saddam Hussein in Iraq. But as those regimes fell to U.S. and NATO interventions, Russian allies have become a rare commodity. ”With the exception of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Venezuela, there are practically no countries that may be called our friends,” Russian political analyst Alexei Vorobyov recently told the BBC. One could well add Syria to the small list of exceptions.

If you followed the mainstream media’s coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests earlier this fall, you might have a number of concerns about the state of the American press. For instance, you might be concerned about what the media’s fawning coverage of OWS, which included whitewashing racism and anti-Semitism on the part of OWS participants, says about the press corps’ ability to provide fair and politically dispassionate coverage. Similarly, you might wonder if the volumes of newsprint devoted to an anarchic and often-violent campaign that had no coherent or cohesive agenda might indicate badly confused priorities on the part of media gatekeepers.

One thing you likely would not think is that the extensive coverage of OWS indicated a dramatic decline in American press freedom. That is, unless you were the France-based journalism watchdog group Reporters Without Borders (RWB). In the latest version of its annual report on global press freedom, RBW downgraded the U.S. 27 spots, to number 47 in the world. To put this in perspective: By RWB’s measure, the United States, home of the First Amendment, sits just a few notches above Haiti.

RWB’s justification for the dramatic markdown is an alleged “crackdown” on reporters covering OWS. As RWB’s report puts it, the U.S.’s precipitous fall in the rankings reflects “the crackdown on protest movements and the accompanying excesses” that “took their toll on journalists.” In two months, RWB’s report says, “more than 25 [journalists] were subjected to arrests and beatings at the hands of police who were quick to issue indictments for inappropriate behavior, public nuisance or even lack of accreditation.”

As others have noted, this justification is patently ridiculous. In any meaningful comparison, the United States is unrivaled in the freedom it affords its press. But you would hardly know it from the RWB report, which holds the U.S. to a standard imposed on no other nation. Thus, Hungary’s ruling party passed a law granting the government direct control over the media, in effect killing the country’s independent press, yet Hungary fell fewer spots in RWB’s rankings than did the United States. Meanwhile RWB singled out for praise a country like Niger, which came in at 29th in the world in press freedom – this despite the fact that journalists in the country are routinely harassed by state security agencies, the government has a commanding control of broadcasting services, and a corrupt judiciary ensures widespread self-censorship by the press. Despite that, the U.S. still fares worse in RWB’s rankings.

These comparisons are bad enough. Even evaluated on its own terms, though, RWB’s claim that journalists covering OWS were the victims of a “crackdown” fails to withstand serious scrutiny. While it’s true and regrettable that some professional journalists were arrested amidst police crackdowns on OWS protests, those arrests were inadvertent. In making these arrests, police frequently were unable to distinguish between professional journalists and so-called “citizen journalists,” who were, in effect, OWS activists.

At New York’s Zuccotti Park, ground zero of the OWS protests, one of the first journalists to be arrested by police was John Farley, a reporter for local online magazine MetroFocus, who was swept up by police with other protestors. Although justifiably unhappy to be arrested, Farley wondered how “in a sudden burst of urban chaos” can “the police distinguish between passersby and protesters who may be committing civil disobedience or any other type of punishable offense? Or between citizen journalists and professional journalists?”

Unfortunately for some reporters, police couldn’t always make that distinction. The police’s ability to discern between journalists and activists was further complicated by the fact that even many professional journalists, including Farley, were not carrying NYPD-issued accreditation. One can sympathize with the plight of these arrested reporters while recognizing that neither they nor the press generally were the police’s intended targets.

You wouldn’t know it by talking to the soft-spoken, invariably polite Texan, who addresses his interviewer as “sir,” but Chris Kyle is the deadliest man in American military history. The now-retired Navy SEAL sniper has 255 kills to his credit, 160 of which have been confirmed by the Department of Defense. That distinction earned him the nickname “the legend” among his fellow SEALs, Marines and soldiers, while Iraqi insurgents, for the same reason, dubbed him “the Devil of Ramadi.” Kyle’s deadly accuracy is only part of his story, however. In his ten years of service in the Navy SEALs, from 1999 to 2009, Kyle served four tours in Iraq, was shot on six occasions and involved in six different IED explosions. A fearsome marksman, he was a constant threat to insurgents, even recording a kill from 2,100 yards away. For his service, Kyle was awarded two Silver Stars and five Bronze Stars with Valor. Kyle joined FrontPage to discuss his new book, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History.

FP: The Pentagon credits you with 160 kills as a sniper, which is more than any other American service member, past or present. In American Sniper, you write that the overall number is not important to you. But are there any kills that stand out in your mind as especially significant or memorable?

CK: Probably the most memorable was in Ramadi. My SEAL platoon was providing cover for Marines as they searched abandoned houses for insurgents. That’s when they came under attack. Soon they were engaged in a draining firefight. I was in a building about 200 yards away, trying to catch out the bad guys whenever they came into view. At one point in the battle, the Marines moved out to clear some houses. It was then that I saw an insurgent armed with a rocket-propelled grenade emerge and head toward them. I’m not sure if the RPG would have gone off, but if it had, the Marines would have been in trouble. They couldn’t see him coming. I took my shot, right over the head of the Marines, and took him down. With all the shooting going on, the Marines didn’t know what was happening. One of the Marines got on the radio and asked why the hell I was shooting at them. I got on the radio and responded, “I’m not shooting at you dumbass, I’m shooting over your head! Look down the street!” Afterwards, the Marines were asking who had been shooting over them. I spoke up and said it was me. Then one of the Marines took his gloves off. He was the one who I’d called a dumbass on the radio. I figured I was in trouble at that point. Instead he said, “I want to shake your hand. You saved my ass out there!” I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more grateful Marine.

FP: Iraqi insurgents nicknamed you “Al-Shaitan Ramad,” or the “Devil of Ramadi” and offered an $80,000 bounty for killing or capturing you. How did that nickname come about and how did it make you feel to be singled out with a price on your head?

CK: It made me feel pretty good. So much of warfare is getting into the psyche of your enemy. That’s why the military invests so much in psychological operations. When they put a price on my head, I thought, “I’m actually having an effect on the war.” As for the devil part, I think it was a confirmation that I was a pretty lethal sniper. I took at it as proof that I was raining devastation down on the enemy. The only thing with that is the insurgents put out a picture so I could be identified. But when I saw the picture, it turned out to actually be a buddy of mine. I thought, “Good, I’ll let him take the rap!”

FP: You write that you have a clear conscience about doing your job as a sniper. Indeed, you wish that you had killed more insurgents while in the line of duty. In our politically correct age, that might sound like a shocking admission. Can you elaborate on what you mean? What is it about the day-to-day work of gunning down enemy insurgents that inspired you, that drove you on?

CK: Well, like you said earlier, I didn’t care about numbers. It’s not about how many insurgents I killed. It’s not killing for the sake of killing. I saw my role more as a guardian angel if you will. I was protecting the guys on the ground. I saw guys go down under insurgent fire, and my only thought was to stop that from happening. I still wish I could have done more. I wish I could have taken out more of the enemy before they had a chance to fire a shot. If I had managed to do that, maybe more Americans would have come home. And not just American troops. There were also other coalition forces, plus Iraqi civilians that we were trying to protect. That responsibility is what inspired me.

FP: As you say, a key job of a sniper is protecting his fellow soldiers from enemies of whose presence they are often unaware.  How did you cope with the life-or-death pressure of being your comrades’ crucial and sometimes last line of defense?

CK: To be honest, it really gets to you. Seeing guys come home in body bags brings you down. At one point, while serving in Iraq, I called my wife back home on a satellite phone and I just broke down crying. I felt that I hadn’t done enough, that more guys would have come home if I had done more. But that’s also what kept me going. Whether it was the guys on the left or the guys on my right, my job was to make sure they came home safe. That’s what being a sniper is all about.

FP: Your preferred weapon reportedly is the .300 Winchester Magnum custom sniper rifle. Why that particular rifle?

CK: At the time I was serving, it was the most accurate rifle available to me.

FP: Your most storied kill happened in Baghdad’s Sadr City in 2008, when you killed an insurgent armed with a rocket launcher from over 2,100 yards away just as he approached an Army convoy. What does it take to be that accurate from that distance?

CK: A lot of luck. I got very lucky on that shot. To hit a guy from that distance, everything has to fall into place. You have to concentrate. There can be no vibration in your rifle. You have to calculate the wind speed and the wind direction and control for the effect that would have on the trajectory of your bullet. You have to adjust for elevation. You have to control your heart rate – it has to be slow and steady – and squeeze easy on the trigger. As far as that shot goes, as I write in the book, “God blew on that bullet and hit him.”

FrontPage Interview’s guest today is Brooke Goldstein, a New York City-based human rights attorney, author and award-winning filmmaker. She serves as director of The Lawfare Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness about and facilitating a response to the abuse of Western legal systems and human rights law. Her award-winning documentary film, The Making of a Martyr, uncovers the illegal, state-sponsored indoctrination and recruitment of Palestinian children for suicide-homicide attacks. To view the trailer, click here. Goldstein is the co-author, with Aaron Eitan Meyer, of the recently published Lawfare: The War Against Free Speech: A First Amendment Guide for Reporting in an Age of Islamist Lawfare.

Goldstein will be speaking at the Philadelphia Chapter of the David Horowitz Freedom Center at The Office of Duane Morris, LLP. 30 South 17th Street, 12^th Floor, Philadelphia, PA  19103, on February 2nd from 5:00 to 6:30pm. To register for that event, click here.

FP: You run an organization that focuses on it and you’ve recently written a book about it, but for the benefit of the uninitiated reader, what is “lawfare” and what is it designed to accomplish?

BG: Lawfare is the use of the law as a weapon of war. More specifically, it is the manipulation of international human-rights law, the laws of armed conflict and legal terminology leading to their misapplication. Lawfare has basically three strategic goals. First, to frustrate and hinder the ability of democracies to fight terrorism. Second, to undermine the rights of sovereign nations, including the rights to defend their citizens against imminent threats and exert sovereign control over their territory. And third, to punish and silence free speech about real national-security threats such as militant Islam, Islamist terrorism and terror financing.

FP: How does lawfare help to stifle free speech about the threats we face? And how did you become engaged in this subject?

BG: I’m a Canadian by birth but I moved to this country because I wanted to practice law and have a tremendous respect for the American Constitution.  In the United States people enjoy more rights then ever recognized by a governing authority in the history of civilization. Yet there are many Americans who do not know what their rights are under the First Amendment and who don’t understand the implications of its guarantor of free speech. For instance, I get calls and emails from people who don’t know that blasphemy is not a crime in this country, or that free speech encompasses the right to speak and write truthfully about religion. I’ve gotten into discussions with bloggers who thought that hate speech was a crime in this country, which it’s not. American citizens have a right to speak freely and critically about their government and about religion.  That principle is the cornerstone of liberal democracy and what the founding fathers based the First Amendment on.

You don’t have to be a lawyer to understand these rights and people who did not receive a legal education still want to be active citizens. They want to write a blog or an article about, say, their local Muslim Brotherhood-connected chapter or about the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) or about the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). But they’re afraid  they’re going to be targeted with a lawsuit strategically designed to silence their speech.  And lawsuits, as we know, are expensive.

I co-wrote Lawfare to encourage journalists, bloggers, members of the media and American citizens at large to exercise their rights and speak freely about the most important issues of our time.  The goal of the book is to arm American citizens should they fall victim to such “libel lawfare.”  To counter the “chilling effect” on free speech about militant Islam.  The book serves as a very accessible primer on the First Amendment and as an overview of U.S. libel law versus foreign libel law.  It provides case examples of  the brave men and women who have been targeted with malicious lawsuits for publishing works exposing the financiers of terrorism and even for parodying religion (like the Danish cartoons of Mohammad.) There is no place in a free society for such stifling of public dialogue, especially when the speech is related to national security issues. I was not prepared to stand by while groups like the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC)  lobby the U.N. and the U.S. for the resurgence of blasphemy laws.  I recommend the book to anyone who may be remotely in lawfare’s harms way or who wants to maintain our precious standards of freedom.

FP: Let’s say I am an independent writer who wants to publish something about Islamic radicalism. What I should I do to protect myself from these lawsuits?

BG: Number one, get yourself media liability insurance. Everyone who publishes should have media liability insurance, regardless of the fact that what you may write about is true. The whole point of lawfare is to file a frivolous lawsuit, so that even if you win, in the end you still lose time and money spent defending your rights. Media insurance can cost you  around $1,500 a year, depending on your risk-liability, but it’s super-important and an expense well-spent. Number two, always have a second pair of eyes, preferably an attorney, read over your article with the goal of spotting any potentially libelous statements. And always cache websites. Often people put up information that can be used against them on the web and when they realize that they take it down. If you rely on internet articles you need to cache the articles in case those pages are taken down. If you have any concerns, you should call us at The Lawfare Project. We operate as a non-profit and one of our activities is to hook people up with legal counsel if they need it. We also perform libel review, though we always recommend that people get an attorney to represent them, as we are not a law firm, nor do we take on clients. And finally, you should read our book. It provides really simple examples of people who have been sued in the past, how they won, and what you need to do to protect your rights.

FP: What is the state of free speech in this country as it concerns discussion of Islam and Islamism?

BG: I think this country affords the greatest free speech protections that have ever been afforded in organized civilization. But there have been a couple developments that are very troubling and that point to the stifling of healthy dialogue and debate. The first thing is the chilling effect created by the libel lawfare suits. We have witnessed situations where Yale University Press publishes a book called Cartoons That Shook the World about the Mohammed cartoons, and yet doesn’t publish the cartoons at issue. I think it’s a problem when Comedy Central allows the creators of South Park to defame every religion except for Islam. It’s a problem when you have Random House refusing to publish a fiction novel – The Jewell of Medina by author Sherry Jones – because it is afraid that publishing any fiction about Mohammed’s child bride Aisha will be denounced as “Islamophobic.”

The other major challenge to free speech comes from the Obama administration. The administration has co-sponsored UN Resolution 16/18, which follows a series of resolutions spearheaded by the OIC, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, aiming to outlaw the blasphemy of religion in international law. The OIC is 57-member voting block at the UN that has hijacked the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council. That resolution is now being implemented by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. They are wiping out all references to Islam and Islamic terrorism in counterterrorism training manuals. They’ve created a blacklist of seasoned FBI officials, some of whom have been there for over ten years, who are no longer allowed to brief on Islamist terrorism the very men and women tasked with protecting us from Islamist terrorism. The Department of Defense’s report on the Fort Hood shootings omitted the word Islam and made no mention of the killer, Nidal Malik Hasan’s, well documented jihadist sympathies such as his speech on suicide bombing and an essay arguing for the painful punishment and liquidation of non-Muslims.  So now we are not just stifling public debate but  we’re stifling the ability of people in our national security apparatuses to protect us. It’s a serious problem.

That said, I’m much more worried about the status of free speech in Europe and in Canada. In the Netherlands they put Geert Wilders, a democratically elected official, on trial for hate speech against Muslims because he spoke to his constituents about the threat of Islamist terrorism. Just recently, an Austrian citizen, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff,  was  fined for the crime of blasphemy against Islam, in Austria! The Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) has gone after the author Mark Steyn and the television personality Ezra Levant for writing a book on Muslim demographics and republishing cartoons of Mohammad, respectively. Even though neither of the CHRC’s quasi-legal proceedings have been successful, they send a message that there are legal loopholes that can be taken advantage of by people who don’t want us to talk about Islam. And if we can’t talk about and understand Islamist terrorism, how can we defeat it?

Coming during an election year, President Obama’s State of the Union address was supposed to be a kinetic affair, the opening salvo in Obama’s battle to retain the White House. While making the case for his reelection, the president was expected to offer a bold political vision for leading the country. But the remarks he offered last night were surprisingly tame, an aimless blend of populist gimmicks, class warfare, and outright contradictions that made the soaring oratory of Obama’s 2008 election seem like a distant memory.

Rather than the politics of renewal, Obama dealt in the politics of envy. At the heart of his speech was the theme of economic unfairness. As the president told it, the rich are not paying their fair share. The result is a “country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by.” The claim came courtesy of billionaire investor Warren Buffet, who has repeatedly bemoaned the fact that he pays a lower tax rate than his personal secretary. But what might have been simply a tendentious talking point has apparently become the heart of Obama’s reelection campaign, as the president paid symbolic debt to Buffet by seating his secretary, Debbie Bosanek, in the gallery with First Lady Michelle Obama. That set the stage for Obama to voice his support for the so-called “Buffet rule,” which would require Americans making over $1 million a year to pay a minimum tax of 30 percent.

The idea that secretaries are paying more in taxes than their billionaire bosses is certainly sensational. It’s also, for the most part, false. Under America’s progressive tax structure, the overwhelming majority of high-income earners pay the top rate of 35 percent. True, there are some minor exceptions, such as the case of Buffet. Not unlike Mitt Romney, most of Buffet’s income comes from investments like capital gains and dividends, which are taxed at 15 percent. That might seem to be a lower rate that Buffet’s secretary pays. In reality, however, most investment income is taxed twice. For most high-earners, the 15 percent capital gains tax on investments comes in addition to a corporate tax rate of 35 percent. Altogether, the effective tax rate for investment income in America is a sizeable 44.75 percent. Given that low-income earners pay little to nothing in taxes, it should come as no surprise that, according to the Tax Policy Center, a full 60 percent of Americans pay a lower effective rate than Buffett does. That includes most secretaries.

Obama did his best to distort that reality.  He insisted, for instance, that he was simply asking a “billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes,” which he called “common sense.” A better description might be “extremely misleading.” Quite apart from the fact that tax rates for the rich are not as low as the president suggests, it’s ludicrous to claim that billionaires are not paying as much in total taxes as their secretaries. Not even Warren Buffet has suggested anything of the sort. It is surely a sign of the shallowness of the president’s domestic policy agenda that he sees stoking class resentment as his best appeal to American voters.

And not just class resentment. When not assailing the rich, Obama lashed out at America’s global competitors, most notably China. His affirmations of American greatness were interspersed with crude protectionism that left one to wonder whether he truly believed in America’s ability to succeed in the free market. Thus he announced the creation of a Trade Enforcement Unit to monitor Chinese goods entering the United States, applauded his administration for slapping a tariff on Chinese tires, and condemned companies for outsourcing jobs. To be sure, that rant did not prevent Obama from calling for the emergence of “the next Steve Jobs.” That would be the same Steve Jobs whose Apple has long outsourced jobs to China.

The standout moment of this week’s South Carolina debate featured Newt Gingrich confronting moderator Juan Williams over the latter’s charge of racial insensitivity. Pressed by Williams to defend his statements that “black Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps” and that Barack Obama is the “Food Stamp President,” Gingrich boldly took up the challenge. Rejecting Williams’s suggestion that such statements “belittle the poor and racial minorities,” Gingrich offered up a full-throated defense of the ennobling value of menial work and pointed out that food stamps have soared during Obama’s presidency.

In a less crudely partisan media climate, Gingrich’s response might have led to a civil discussion about the problems facing the black underclass and the proper scope of the social safety net. Instead it unleashed howls of outrage from the left and the media elite, which rose up on cue to denounce Gingrich as a “racist.”

“Hardball” host Chris Matthews kicked off the smear campaign, insisting that Gingrich was sending dog-whistle signals to racists. In Matthews’s conspiratorial telling, “this whole conversation isn’t about poverty, but about race. It’s about a candidate [Gingrich] who knows just how to make his point to appeal to a certain kind of voter.” Lest this seem too subtle, the New York Times soon weighed in with an editorial accusing Gingrich of stoking “racial animosity.” Not to be outdone, the Economist chimed in that Gingrich was pandering to “bigots.” Al Sharpton, in the ultimate pot-and-kettle act, blasted Gingrich for engaging in “racial demagoguery.”

All of this was predicable. Equally predictable was that none of Gingrich’s overheated critics could offer a substantive explanation for why he was wrong, let alone why anything he said amounted to racial bigotry. For instance, as Gingrich has noted in the past, the unemployment rate for black teenagers hit 43 percent last year. That amounts to a serious social problem, since early employment has been shown to cultivate the social skills and the ethos of professional responsibility and discipline that is so critical in job success later in life. Yet Gingrich’s critics seem more interested in condemning the former speaker for calling attention to this problem than in examining its consequences for black Americans.

That’s not to say — as Gingrich did not — that teen unemployment is exclusively a problem for the black community. Department of Labor Statistics show that overall unemployment among teenagers reached 27 percent in 2010, the highest since the government began tracking such statistics after World War II. Gingrich himself alluded to the wider implications of teenage unemployment when he cited the beneficial experience of his daughter Jackie, who worked part-time as a janitor at a church when she was 13. But acknowledging the fact that teenage unemployment is a national problem does not alter the grim reality that it is particularly destructive for the black community. To dismiss Gingrich’s point about black teenage unemployment as simple racism is not only intellectually vulgar and specious, but it glosses over a real and pressing social ill.

But then, Gingrich’s detractors aren’t interested in actually having a conversation about these realities. The New York Times descended into almost comic pettiness when it complained that, contra Gingrich’s claim, President Obama had not personally put anyone on food stamps. Even the White House got in on the act, dismissing the “Food Stamp President” label as “crazy.”

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama energized his left-wing base with promises of “comprehensive immigration reform” – aka amnesty for illegal immigrants. As president, Obama shelved those plans, instead courting the ire of Hispanic and open-borders activists by stepping up deportations of illegal immigrants. But as he kicks off his reelection bid – which will hinge on success in swing states with large Hispanic voter populations like Florida, New Mexico, and Colorado – Obama is trying to woo back his disaffected base, starting with his appointment this week of Cecilia Munoz as director of his Domestic Policy Council.

On the face of it, Munoz, the daughter of Bolivian immigrants, would appear a good fit to bolster Obama’s tarnished standing among Hispanic supporters of illegal immigration. For one thing, she has solid credentials on open-borders. Before joining the Obama administration in 2009, Munoz served as Vice President of the National Council of La Raza. Since its humble origins in the 1960s as the voice of Chicano radicalism, La Raza, Spanish for “the race,” has emerged as the country’s leading open-border advocacy group. Today, La Raza lobbies for everything from racial preferences, to mass immigration and amnesty for illegal aliens. Munoz shares those views, as she confirmed recently when she revealed that “Ultimately, my career is about making sure the doors are open in this country for everybody.” Presumably, that means illegal immigrants, too.

Munoz has in fact proved an effective insider for La Raza. That is particularly true when it comes to securing government funding for the group. An investigation by Judicial Watch found that federal funding for La Raza surged after Munoz joined the Obama administration, spiking from $4.1 million in 2009 to a whopping $11 million in 2010. Pro-illegal-immigration groups also regard Munoz as a point person for their agenda, and her appointment this week was cheered by everyone from government unions like the  SEIU to progressive activist groups like the Center for American Progress.

Not everyone is pleased with her job performance, however. If Hispanics and other backers of open-borders expected Munoz to deliver amnesty, they have been sorely disappointed. Despite Obama’s rhetorical promises, the administration has not attempted to pass “comprehensive immigration reform.” Even more galling is that the administration has aggressively increased deportations of illegal immigrants. Since 2009, according to the Department of Homeland Security, some 400,000 illegal immigrants have been deported annually. That number is double the annual average during President George W. Bush’s first term and 30 percent higher than when Bush left office.

To be sure, DHS’s numbers may be inflated. After crunching the numbers, analysts at Syracuse University recently reported that “many fewer individuals were apprehended, detained and deported by the agency than were claimed in its official statements.” Yet that has not appeased Munoz’s critics in the Hispanic community, who view her tenure inside the administration as a betrayal. Earlier this fall, for instance, the grassroots Hispanic group Presente.org launched a petition drive demanding that Munoz “return to her roots” by denouncing the Obama administration’s immigration policy and resigning. Roberto Lovato, the group’s co-founder, was scathing in his appraisal. “Cecilia Munoz has made a 180-degree move from being a champion for immigrants to being the No. 1 defender of a horrendous immigration policy,” he charged.

Earlier this week, the FBI announced the arrest of Sami Osmakac, a 25-year-old Muslim man from the former Yugoslavia. In the process, the agency thwarted what might have been a horrific terror spree targeting populous civilian and commercial areas in Tampa, Florida.

According to the FBI’s criminal complaint, Osmakac, a naturalized American citizen, had been planning a massive terror attack targeting everything from businesses to nightclubs and bridges with the aim of killing and injuring as many people as possible. As part of the attack, he intended to set off a weapon of mass destruction planted in a parked car, then capping off the attack by detonating a suicide belt. Instead, Osmakac’s plans were foiled by a masterful FBI sting operation. Undercover agents tracked the would-be terrorist for months, monitoring his every move and even supplying him with the (secretly non-functional) weapons that he had planned to use before moving in this week to make a decisive arrest.

But what should be an open-and-shut counter-terror success is now being called into question by groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and further obfuscated by academic apologists for Islamic radicalism. No sooner was Osmakac in handcuffs than CAIR spokesman Hassan Shibly suggested that the FBI was more culpable in the case than the jihadist in their custody. “The weapons and explosives were provided by the government. Was he just a troubled individual, or did he pose a real threat?” asked Shibly, before expressing his “concern about a perception of entrapment.”

A closer look at the facts of the case shows this perception to be wholly unfounded. While it’s true that the FBI provided the weapons, the fact remains that it was Osmakac, an al-Qaeda-sympathizer, who had sought them out. Moreover, according to an FBI affidavit, the undercover FBI agent who sold Osmakac his non-working arms had repeatedly tried to convince him to give up his plans and seek a normal life. In one recorded conversation, the agent urged Osmakac to consider getting married and having a family rather than going ahead with his plan. That is the opposite of entrapment. In the event, Osmakac refused, insisting that he would be rewarded by Allah in paradise for carrying out his attack. Given his intention of doing just that, it’s to the FBI’s great credit that the agency made sure Osmakac never had access to anything but defective arms.

Osmakac’s clearly expressed conviction that Allah required him to commit terrorism points up another emerging and equally misguided assessment of the case – namely, that religion had nothing to do with Osmakac’s motives. “I don’t think his Islamic religion has anything to do with what’s going on,” claimed Dr. Barbara DeGeorge, identified by local Florida media as an  “Islamic studies expert,” following the arrest. Even the FBI made a concession to political correctness, with the head of the agency’s Tampa Bay division assuring the press that Osmakac’s case “is not about the Muslim religion.”

This is not how the New Year was supposed to begin for Vladimir Putin. The official script was clear enough. After presiding over his United Russia party’s now-routine rigging of the December 4^th parliamentary elections, Putin was supposed to sail to victory in the coming March presidential race, resuming the office that he never truly relinquished to his longtime deputy, Dmitry Medvedev, while a passive Russian public looked on. But that script, so familiar in recent years, has been rejected by an unlikely source: a fed-up and suddenly politically conscious Russian middle class.

Anger at Putin has been simmering ever since his September announcement that he would be swapping jobs with Medvedev in a pre-agreed deal, a brazen admission than made a mockery of what remained of Russia’s damaged democratic process. The more immediate source of the public’s outrage is the December 4^th parliamentary elections, which saw United Russia triumph in its usual style, complete with widespread fraud and ballot stuffing, but without its usual mandate. That Putin’s party failed to capture its standard majority was unexpected. But arguably more shocking has been the post-election surge of civic participation in a country that was written off as apolitical and even indifferent to the dissolution of civil liberties and the rule of law during Putin’s 12-year reign.

If the events of the past few weeks have proven anything, it’s that this view of the Russian public requires reassessment. On December 10^th, some 60,000 people in Moscow and thousands more across the country poured out into the streets in a display of anti-government protest unprecedented in recent Russian history. Demanding a “Russia without Putin!” they called for the annulment of the elections and a new vote.  Putin’s initial response was to dismiss the demonstrators’ concerns and to portray them as puppets of foreign powers. That had the unintended effect of galvanizing the protestors, who again took to the streets on December 24^th, this time with as many as 120,000 people in Moscow alone. The message rang loud and clear: Russians were angry and they weren’t willing to stay silent.

Russia’s budding protest movement underscores several important changes inside the country. The first is the emergence of a politically active middle class. This has come as something of a revelation. For much of the Putin era, it was assumed, not least by Putin himself, that Russians didn’t particularly care about politics. What Russia’s middle class wanted was political stability and rising living standards. But the new generation wants more. The mostly young, urban professionals who have made up the recent protests are not content with stability at the expense of democracy and they chafe at the government’s blatant corruption. “We’ve been assured for decades that we are sheep,” says Ilya Yashin, the leader of the liberal democratic Solidarnost movement. But “we have shown the whole country, the whole world, that we are a free and proud people.”

Indeed, defiance has been the dominant attitude of the protests. After Putin mockingly likened the protestors’ white solidarity ribbons to condoms, they responded at the most recent demonstration by waving condoms like balloons. Their signs have been scathing, branding United Russia as the “party of crooks and thieves,” the phrase coined by the popular opposition activist and blogger Alexei Navalny. And their demands have been uncompromising, best captured by the movement’s emerging slogan: “Not a single vote for Putin!”

Ten years on from the invasion of Afghanistan, America has grown weary of war. President Obama, having realized his long-held target of withdrawing from Iraq, is trying to wind down the war in Afghanistan with the aim of ending American involvement by 2014. As Washington has lost faith in the war effort, so too has the broader public. Skeptical of success and encouraged in their doubts by the political establishment, Americans increasingly want the war, like a tiresome, too-long movie, to end at last. This national resignation is fraught with peril – for America’s counterterrorism objectives, for our strategic allies – but perhaps most of all for the soldiers who did the fighting. The U.S. military has a policy of leaving no man behind.  But as the country turns its attention away from the warfront, it risks forgetting the servicemen who fought so valiantly on its behalf, and who have returned home bearing the wars’ indelible marks.

The official end of the Iraq war this month is an occasion to reflect that, for many of America’s wounded veterans, the war will never be over, that they will always carry its scars. Over 32,000 servicemen have been wounded post-9/11, spanning all branches of the military. In the sands of Iraq, and in the mountains of Afghanistan, they have suffered horrific injuries, of which the most painful often left no outward mark. Limbs lost, lives turned upside down, futures permanently altered. For those of us safe in the comforts of civilian life, the enormity of their sacrifice is utterly beyond comprehension.

Just as awe-inspiring, though, is their resilience, their relentless determination not to surrender to the hardships imposed by their injuries, mental or physical. Where lesser spirits might have yielded, they have worked to embrace life, going to school, finding jobs, raising families. While others their age were playing at rebellion on the streets of New York and Oakland, they, who have so many reasons to complain, refused to turn their personal struggles into a public spectacle. They’re not the protesting kind. For these daily acts of heroism, no less than for the heroism they showed in battle, America’s wounded warriors are Front Page Magazine’s “Man of the Year.”

They are men like Army Sergeant First Class, Leroy Petry. The product of a military family, Petry enlisted in the Army Rangers in 1999, at the age of 20, inspired by their motto: “Rangers Lead the Way.” Petry did just that in May 2008, when he and his platoon found themselves in the midst of a deadly firefight while attempting a raid on a Taliban compound in Afghanistan’s remote Paktia province. Inside the compound’s courtyard, Petry and a fellow Ranger, Private First Class Lucas Robinson, were pinned down by heavy fire from Taliban fighters when a bullet round pierced both of Petry’s legs. As the Rangers battled back, a live enemy grenade landed just a few feet away. Acting on instinct, Petry lunged at the grenade to throw it back, but could not release it fast enough. The blast blew off his right hand at the wrist. Undaunted, Petry placed a tourniquet on his arm and called in by radio that he and two other Rangers had been wounded. Then he added, “And I also lost one of my hands.” Not until the Taliban fighters were killed would Petry allow himself to be evacuated. During his recovery, Petry received a prosthetic hand and arm. To his new arm, author Peter Collier recounts, Petry added a plaque listing the names of the fallen Rangers in his unit.  For his bravery, Petry this July was awarded the Medal of Honor, becoming only the second living recipient of the medal for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The medal did not mark the end of Petry’s military career. He recently re-enlisted for another eight years of service in the Army.

Marine Staff Sergeant Chad Brumpton was serving in Iraq when an improvised explosive device blew up the tank he commanded in 2005. “Both my legs from the knee down were shattered to little pieces,” Brumpton recalls. “My left hand, thumb, and wrist were shredded up and broken. I received four compression fractures in my lower back.” For two years, Brumpton went from one surgery to the next, undergoing 19 in all. He required heavy dosages of medication just to get out of bed. In the end, his legs could not be saved. Yet, Brumpton is anything but a broken man. Newly mobile on prosthetic legs, including a pair for running, he continues to defy his physical constraints. As he puts it: “I won’t let anything hold me down, especially my disability. After the explosion, doctors told me I’d never walk again, but on the day I was discharged from the hospital, I walked out. There was no way I was going to let anything stop me.”

Army Spc. Brent Whitten exhibits the same single-mindedness as he tries to move on with his life. Whitten was 20 years old when his Humvee was struck by a suicide bomber in eastern Baghdad in 2006. Flames engulfed the Humvee, but Whitten couldn’t move his legs to escape. Eventually, he managed to roll out of the Humvee’s roof and onto the street, where a rescue unit picked him up. Whitten’s pelvis was fractured and he suffered second-degree burns to his arms and face, but he still mustered the strength to call his wife back in Kansas and tell her not to worry. Now a broadcasting student at the University of Kansas, he urges other wounded veterans to look upon their injuries as a new battle to be won. “When I think of my recovery, my message to other wounded warriors is this: Your recovery is your new mission. You have to get victory. You’re still a soldier, so you have an obligation not to surrender. Your family is counting on you.”

Marine and machine gunner Mike Heller knows how difficult that recovery can be. When his Humvee hit a landmine in Iraq in 2005, Heller was violently ejected, seriously injuring his spine. But his immediate concern was not for himself but for his unit’s team leader, Cpl. Joseph Tremblay, who was badly injured in the explosion. For the next three hours, as they made their way to the hospital, Heller tried to keep Tremblay calm and divert his attention from his bleeding wounds. Tremblay did not make it to the hospital. Heller survived, but today he suffers from chronic back pain and the awful thought that he failed to keep his comrade alive. It has taken time and treatment for Heller to realize that he could not have changed what happened, that he could not have done more to save his friend. He is still working to come to terms with his memories. But he is also getting on with his life, raising his daughter, working as a stock analyst, and pursuing a business degree.

Given Hollywood’s history of kowtowing before left-wing dictators, from Fidel Castro to Hugo Chavez, it’s novel for a silver-screen celebrity to make news for confronting a repressive communist regime. But “Batman” star Christian Bale stirred up a worthy row recently when he clashed with Chinese security forces after attempting to meet with Chinese civil-rights activist Chen Guangcheng.

Backed by a CNN camera crew, Bale tried to make his way to Chen’s house in the village of Dongshigu. That proved unacceptable to the government security guards who keep Chen under house arrest. After blocking Bale’s path and assaulting his crew, the guards chased them from the village. Rapid economic growth has brought China positive press in recent years, but Bale’s experience is a reminder that, despite its new capitalist face, China remains a quintessentially communist county in its rigid intolerance of dissent.

Chen Guangcheng’s story is a prime example. His crime in the eyes of Chinese authorities is exposing the government’s often-brutal strategies for population control in the country’s rural areas under its notorious one-child policy. Chen collected evidence showing that the government has resorted to everything from forced late-term abortions to compulsory sterilization to enforce the policy, giving the lie to the frequent denials of Chinese leaders  that such a policy exists.

For bringing the state’s cruelties to light Chen, a self-taught lawyer who has been blind since infancy, has been the victim of an unrelenting government harassment campaign. In 2006, he was “disappeared” for three months, resurfacing from an unidentified detention center just in time to face a trial on trumped up charges of “damaging property and organizing a mob to disrupt traffic.” After just two hours, he was sentenced to four years in jail. When he challenged the verdict at a subsequent retrial, key witnesses for his defense disappeared, one by one. The court upheld the verdict anyway.
Officially, Chen is now under so-called “soft-detention.” But that’s an absurd description of someone who is unable to leave his house, even to visit a hospital for treatment, and who is beaten and abused by government security. And, as Bale discovered, no one is permitted to meet with him.

The irony is that Bale was in China to make a film that, according to early reviews, is effectively pro-China propaganda. “The Flowers of War,” in which Bale stars, tells the story of the 1937 massacre of the Chinese city of Nanjing (formerly Nanking) by Japanese troops. In the horrific six-week siege, Japanese soldiers systematically raped, tortured and killed Chinese civilians. The final death toll was estimated to be between 250,000 and 300,000. The atrocity has long soured Sino-Japanese relations, but since the 1980s the Chinese government has sought to use it for political advantage, as a way to promote nationalist and patriotic sentiment. Whatever its merits as a film, “The Flowers of War” seems intended to compliment that propaganda effort. Partially funded by the Chinese government, the film takes a one-dimensional view of the Japanese, portraying them as “monochrome monsters,” as the Wall Street Journal described it.

The defining image of North Korea under Kim Jong-Il, who died on Sunday, may not be any of the 34,000 public monuments to Kim’s father, the “eternal president” Kim Il-Sung — a small army of grandiose statuary that keeps alive the Kims’ Stalinist personality cult. Nor is it necessarily that endless gift to satirists, the photographs of the diminutive Kim Jong-Il, complete with trademark bouffant, large-framed glasses and Maoist zip-up jacket, looking every bit the part of a villain from the James Bond films he adored. It is not even North Korea’s annual military parades, a fearsome throwback to the Cold War and the nearest thing the country has to a thriving industry.

Rather, it may be a satellite map of the Korean Peninsula. In it, a sea of lights illuminates South Korea. Directly above lies a night-black expanse dotted by the solitary light of the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. It is a fitting symbol of Kim Jong-Il’s totalitarian rule, which turned the country into a pariah state, starved millions of North Koreans, killed untold thousands of others, and plunged the nation into darkness.

Official accounts – the only kind tolerated – depict Kim Jong-Il’s birth as a miracle. Supposedly, a double rainbow and a new star appeared in the heavens to mark his arrival in Mount Paektu, in northern Korea, in 1942. Not even the non-miraculous details of this biography are true. Soviet records have shown that he was actually born in 1941, in a village near the Russian city of Khabarovsk on the Chinese border, where his father was then serving as the commander of a Red Army battalion of Korean and Chinese exiles. But the mythmaking was in keeping with Kim’s self-professed image as a god among men, an image the “Dear Leader” formalized in one of his many preferred honorifics: “The guardian and deity of the planet.”

A rare title Kim Jong-Il did not claim for himself was “president.” His father Kim Il-Sung retained that office, even after his death in 1994. The father-son portraits that hang in every building in North Korea are intended to remind North Koreans that, even in death, he continues to watch over them.

Not that Kim Il-Sung’s presence was required to terrify North Koreans. Indeed, the son achieved the unlikely feat of being even more repressive than his father. Where Kim Il-Sung was said to at least consult occasionally with advisors on matters of state, his son demanded absolute control and cracked down on anyone suspected of dissent. Unfortunately for North Koreans, that was just about everyone.

The ghastly monument to Kim’s repression is the kwan-li-so, the system of forced labor camps that the country has had for 50 years but which became particularly brutal under Kim Jong-Il. According to the most recent estimates, there are 200,000 people in these camps, among them men, women, and children. Imprisoned without trial, many are guilty of not just alleged wrongdoing — a crime that could include nothing more than stealing some food to stave off starvation — but also of the Orwellian crime of “wrong-thinking.”

As the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry might be expected to be wary of bestowing legitimacy on Islamic extremists. But no such caution was in evidence last Friday, when the Senator met with three of the top officials in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP). What makes the meeting all the more notorious is that the three officials – FJP Vice-Chairman Essam El-Erian, FJP Secretary-General Mohamed Saad Katatni, and FJP chairman Mohamed Morsi – are outspoken Islamists who belie the Brotherhood’s much-cultivated image of tolerance and moderation.

Take Mohamed Morsi. He has been quoted on the Brotherhood’s website calling Israel a “Zionist usurper” that “has been created by the international terrorism and injustice.” Morsi also believes that Israel, and any nation that supports it, is perpetrating “genocide” against the Palestinians. Both Essam El-Erian and Mohamed Saad Katani, meanwhile, have made it clear that they wish to see Sharia become the law of the land. “If you want to know what principles guide our party let me tell you: the principles of the Islamic Sharia law,” Mohamed Saad Katani told Aljazeera in November. El-Erian has gone further, echoing Egypt’s Salafists by declaring: “No one dares oppose the application of Sharia law.”

If Kerry was aware of his interlocutors’ views, he did not show it. Instead, he heaped praise on the recent Egyptian elections, which saw the FJP win nearly 40 percent of seats, as a model of transparency and integrity. Kerry also pledged American support for Egypt’s new Islamist government and called for the U.S.-funded International Monetary Fund to shore up the government with financial support. Not only did Kerry not take the opportunity to challenge the Brotherhood’s more extreme views, but he rewarded them with the promise of additional assistance.

Kerry’s diplomatic blessing of the Brotherhood dovetails with a growing courtship of the Islamist group by the Obama administration. Last February, the administration’s national intelligence chief bizarrely described the Brotherhood as “largely secular.” This November, the administration further tried to smooth the course for outreach to the Brotherhood when William Taylor, the U.S. “special coordinator for transitions in the Middle East,” said that the U.S would be “satisfied” if Egypt’s elections produced a victory by the Brotherhood. Now it seems the administration is expanding its contacts to the Islamist group. Accompanying Kerry to the meeting was Anne Patterson, the U.S. ambassador to Egypt. The sit-down marked the third time in as many months that an American official has met with the FJP.

Ironically, this outreach comes a time when the mask of moderation that the Brotherhood donned in the run-up to the elections appears to be slipping. After conducting a series of interviews with Brotherhood leaders in recent weeks, New Republic correspondent Eric Trager reported: “Far from being moderate, these future leaders share a commitment to theocratic rule, complete with a limited view of civil liberties and an unmistakable antipathy for the West.”

The race for the Republican nomination has defied handicapping, but one thing seems certain: If Mitt Romney becomes the nominee, Democrats will seek to exploit his background in Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney headed from 1984 to 1999, to depict him as a soulless capitalist who put profits over people.

That smear campaign is already underway. Americans United for Change, a labor-union funded left-wing group, has launched a campaign to brand Romney as Gordon Gekko, after Michael Douglas’s villainous character from the movie “Wall Street.”  A companion website, RomneyGekko.com, describes Bain Capital’s modus operandi as taking over companies and “sucking profit out of them by any means possible that often resulted in a stack of pink slips for everyday Americans.”

Demonizing capitalism and its successful practitioners as enemies of working Americans is standard procedure for the left. But Romney’s Republican rivals have also gotten in on the blame-Bain act. John Huntsman’s campaign has tried to capitalize on the image of Romney as an out-of-touch rich guy by touting a much-circulated photo of the young Romney and his Bain Capital colleagues posing flush with cash. (Never mind that Huntsman, the son of a billionaire businessman, is not exactly a model everyman.)

That was mild stuff however next to Newt Gingrich’s stunning attack on Romney this week. After being challenged by Romney to return his $1.6 million payout from government-backed mortgage giant Freddie Mac, Gingrich shot back: “If Governor Romney would like to give back all the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years, then I would be glad to then listen to him.”

As commentators were quick to note, Gingrich’s charge was not only a standard piece of anti-capitalist cant but it reprised the line of attack that Ted Kennedy successfully deployed when he defeated Romney in the 1994 Massachusetts Senate race. The cheap shot was all the more notable because Gingrich had just promised to run a “relentlessly positive” campaign.

Democrats have been understandably delighted to see Gingrich make Romney’s record at Bain Capital a campaign issue. Liberal blogs have been abuzz with the prospect of using Gingrich’s remarks in attack ads against Romney. Even Republican operatives have begun to fret that Bain could become a political liability in economically depressed swing states should Romney top the GOP ticket. But it may be that both the Democrats’ giddiness and Republicans’ grumbling are misplaced. A closer look at Romney’s time at Bain Capital reveals that the company’s work was far more defensible than the left, and some opportunistic Republicans, seem to think.

As a private equity firm, Bain Capital specialized in taking over troubled startups and companies, streamlining them, and making them profitable. Not every takeover was a success, but the record shows that Bain was more successful than not. A Los Angeles Times  report points out that during the 15 years Romney led Bain, the company acquired more than 115 companies and posted annual returns more than five times the Dow Jones Industrial average over the same period. Contrary to the charge that it simply slashed jobs and forced bankruptcies, Bain Capital’s acquisitions often revitalized moribund and struggling companies.

One of Bain’s more impressive successes was taking over a little-known startup called Staples. In 1986, Staples consisted of a single store and was facing growing competition from emerging office-supply sellers like Office Depot. But it received crucial backing from Bain, which stepped in with a $2 million investment. The investment proved profitable for Bain, which eventually earned a $13 million return. But it was even more lucrative for Staples. Now an office supply empire, Staples’ 2,000-plus stores in America and Europe bring in $24.5 billion in annual sales and employ some 90,000 people. Not surprisingly, the company views Romney warmly. When Gingrich disparaged Romney’s work at Bain, the Romney campaign turned to Staples founder Tom Stenberg to mount a defense of the candidate.

Democracy has been little in evidence throughout Vladimir Putin’s repressive rule, but this weekend saw a rare instance of popular civic participation, as Russians rallied in a massive display of discontent with Putin’s corrupt government.

Tens of thousands of people across Russia marched in protest of last week’s rigged parliamentary elections, demanding Putin’s resignation and calling for a new election. In Moscow alone, as many as 100,000 people reportedly turned out to make their voices heard – the largest such demonstration since the short-lived democratic efflorescence of the early 1990s.

The protests were all the more notable for their boldness in criticizing Putin and his ruling United Russia party. Thanks to state control of Russian’s main television stations, the source for most of the country’s news, the government has largely succeeded in projecting an image of popular approval, bolstered by polls purporting to show Putin’s widespread popularity. The weekend rallies undermined that carefully constructed image. Signs carried by protestors declared that “Putin is a thief” and called for his ouster. Still others proclaimed that “146 percent of Muscovites are for free elections,” a reference to the massively inflated voter turnout that United Russia claimed in the recent election. Yet another sign read: “I did not vote for these bastards. I voted for other bastards. I demand a recount.” Among the protestors, there was a sense that even Putin could not ignore the sight of so many people protesting him and his government.

That remains to be seen. Based on its initial reaction, the Russian government’s view of the protestors seems to be one of strategic tolerance. Contrary to its thuggish response to the protests that immediately followed the December 4^th elections, when police cracked down on and imprisoned opposition activists and bloggers, the government chose to let this weekend’s demonstrations unfold without police harassment. Despite the immense turnout in Moscow, there were no reported arrests. Government officials even professed concern for the protestors’ grievances. United Party boss Andrei Isayev said that their “point of view is very important and will be heard by the media, the state and society.”

That concern is demonstrably insincere. Otherwise, Putin and his surrogates would not have rigged the elections as blatantly as they had; nor would they have spent the past week alternately dismissing the concerns of voter fraud as trivial and demonizing the protestors as agents of subversion instigated my Western powers, notably the United States.

How then to explain the government’s refusal to crack down on this weekend’s demonstrations? The consensus among Russian analysts seems to be that the government believes the protests to be unsustainable and expects them peter out without having to be suppressed by force. There is ample evidence to support that view. While it would be encouraging to view the protests as a sign of budding democracy in Russia, it does not square with the public’s views. Polls have consistently shown that Russians do not rate democracy as their top priority, with most favoring stability and order above political reform.

Another problem for the protests’ sustainability is the lack of an organized political opposition. This weekend’s demonstrations were a case in point. Everyone from liberals, to nationalists, to communists to anarchists took part, and while they were respectful of each other they were hardly united in any one coherent political platform. Finally, the government has a timely ally in the weather. With the chilling winter months looming, Putin and his cohorts may figure that the protestors will not take to the streets for the foreseeable future.

So much for the Obama administration’s famous “reset” button.

The latest evidence that the U.S.-Russian relationship can’t be mended with mere slogans is Vladimir Putin’s vitriolic attack on Hillary Clinton this week, in which the current prime minister and soon-to-be president essentially accused the Secretary of State of fomenting an internal revolution inside Russia by directing opposition protestors to rally against this weekend’s sham parliamentary election results. “She set the tone, gave the signal, and the signal was heard by certain activists,” an angry Putin charged. “They heard this signal and with the help of the State Department, they started active work.”

Clinton’s crime? Expressing doubts about the fairness of Russia’s elections this weekend and insisting that Russian voters “deserve a full investigation of electoral fraud and manipulation.” As Clinton was quick to note, she was hardly alone in these concerns. No less than Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet premier and General Secretary of the Communist Party, has said that the election results were “a lie” and should be annulled.

There can be little doubt the election results were fraudulent. For starters, all but fringe or Kremlin affiliated parties were banned from participating. Meanwhile election monitors like Golos, Russia’s sole independent election watchdog, where subjected to a sustained campaign of harassment by security officials and state-run television organs. Despite that, and despite Putin’s evisceration of most independent media over the past decade, numerous reports surfaced of election fraud, with confirmed accounts of young people being ferried to different election stations to vote multiple times. Amateur videos captured election officials stuffing ballot boxes. Incredible voting tallies – including the 99.5 percent of the vote that Putin’s United Russia party received in places like Chechnya – all pointed toward a rigged result.

All of this has become the norm in Russian elections. What might explain Putin’s temper tantrum is that, despite being rigged, the elections still resulted in losses for Putin’s party, which won less than 50 percent of the vote – a significant drop from the 64 percent United Russia claimed as recently as 2007.

The most hopeful interpretation of that unexpected result is that another corruption-plagued election, combined with the prospect of Putin’s return as president for another 12 years, has proved too much for even the previously passive and politically fragmented Russian public. Thus, recent days have seen thousands of demonstrators turn out in the streets of Moscow and other major cities to protest the election result and to demand a “Russia without Putin.”

The official response has been typically severe. In Moscow, the government ordered some 52,000 police and paramilitary troops to crush the nascent protests. The government also launched a crackdown on activists and opposition leaders, most prominently the popular anti-corruption crusader and blogger Alexei Navalny. Navalny, whose description of United Russia as the party of “crooks and thieves” has become a rallying cry among the opposition, was among the hundreds of activists arrested this week.