Daniel Allott is senior writer at American Values, a Washington, D.C. area public policy organization.

Leonardo Clausi is a freelance Italian journalist, based in London and Rome.

Lee Ruddin is Roundup Editor at HNN. He lives in England.

Anglo-American relations are, not for the first time during the Obama presidency, strained: reports of aides to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney criticising David Cameron’s recent White House ‘love-in’ with Barack Obama can be brushed off as election talk; news that neither President Obama nor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has backed the self-determination of the Falkland Islanders is less easily so.

The Foreign Office did not take too kindly to the State Department coming out in support of direct negotiations between Great Britain and Argentina over the sovereignty of the Falklands and yet, three years on, Obama continues to ‘remain neutral’ in the dispute between London and Buenos Aires and a relative ignoramus when it comes to events 30 years ago and the liberation of British folk from Argentine occupation.

Talk of the commander in chief’s nonaligned stance being an ‘act of cowardice … in the face of Latin American [belligerence], and another slap in the face’ for her indispensable ally may appear hyperbole to some. Yet the question remains: why cannot Obama support the right of 3,000 British Falkland Islanders to live under the protection of the Union Jack? Let us not forget, Britain has lost some 414 souls (as of 14 May 2012) on the battlefields of Afghanistan and stands shoulder to shoulder with her transatlantic cousin in the wider war against Islamist terrorism.

Talking of the wider war against Islamist terrorism, the unauthorised disclosure of confidential information pertaining to the British double agent (and his role in the foiled underwear bomb plot coming out of Yemen) by unnamed U.S. officials has caused anger on the banks of the River Thames. “MI6 should be as angry as hell,” Michael Scheuer, the former Head of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit, said, and “is something that the prime minister should raise with the president.” Robert Grenier, former Head of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Centre, went further, noting that British intelligence “are often exasperated … with their American friends, who are far more leak-prone than they.” Similar thinking was uttered across the pond, with Nigel Inskter – former Assistant Chief of MI6 – posting on Twitter that “the revelations about the British agent in AQ [al Qaeda] remind us that Beltway leaking is a major security threat.”

With the serious breach of secrecy surrounding joint operations between MI6 and the CIA, officials in Whitehall and Washington must have breathed a sigh of relief recently after producers omitted to include the operational fallout between the Special Boat Service (SBS) and Delta Force in the ITV programme, The Hunt for Bin Laden.  

Students of the war in Afghanistan are acutely aware of the Pentagon’s failure to put “boots on the ground” in late 2001. The story goes that had Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reinforced Delta Force with the Tenth Mountain Division, Osama would not have been able to escape from the Tora Bora mountain complex and into the Pakistani tribal regions. What many are not cognisant of, however, is the fact that the Rumsfeldian doctrine of war – which comprised a large use of air power with a small use of ground forces – incensed the SBS who, as Jonathan Randal, author of Osama:The Making of a Terrorist, writes, ‘were convinced they had located [bin Laden] and wanted to trap or kill him, but were not told not to.’ It is worth quoting at length what the former Middle East correspondent for the Washington Post reports on this matter:

‘If no American ground troops were to be committed, the generals in overall charge didn’t want the British involved either. “Within weeks high-ranking British officers were saying privately that American commanders had vetoed a proposal to guard the high-altitude trails, arguing that the risks of a firefight in deep snow, gusty winds and low-slung clouds were too high.” Clearly, the British were intimating that those were risks their men weighed and were ready to assume. That version gave birth to another. The British force was “eager to move in,” but the American high command didn’t want the embarrassment of having even its closest ally “claim the war’s great prize.”’ (p.256)

Consumed by the (domestic) turfs war between the FBI and CIA, documentary-makers also overlook the (foreign) battles between American and British agencies and, specifically, the former’s withholding information about a “Mumbai-style” terrorist plot in the latter’s mainland out of fear that top-secret sources would be exposed in its courts. The breakdown in the intelligence-sharing relationship, for those previously unaware, came in the wake of the case concerning Binyam Mohamed (a former Guantánamo Bay detainee) which saw U.S. intelligence released and, in turn, Her Majesty’s Government forced to pay millions in compensation.

The fallout from events of recent years evidently plays on the mind of transatlantic spy chiefs (not that viewers of the 90-minute film would know) since the CIA is rumoured to have since refused a full read-out of the intelligence “cache” seized during the early hours’ raid on bin Laden’s compound. A senior British security source told the Daily Telegraph that “The urgent threat-to-life operation material is still coming, as it should. But we see strong signs of a greater reluctance to share some of the other stuff – the building blocks, the bits that let you put the jigsaw together.”

To those with a deep interest in the Anglo-American relationship, the aforementioned makes for hard reading, especially in the wake of last week’s scathing report – Anchoring the Alliance – by the Atlantic Council think tank. Published just days ahead of a crucial NATO meeting in Chicago, the author’s conclude that cuts in the British military budget threaten the “special relationship” with the U.S. Granted, the economic impact of the Coalition government’s austerity program looks ‘worrisome,’ but Islamist terrorists have far more to worry about.

I say this since, from reading between the lines, it was British intelligence that led SEAL Team Six to Abbottabad. Peter Bergen, author of Manhunt:The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden, from 9/11 to Abbottabad, but reporting for CNN, says that the ‘first really big break in finding “the Kuwaiti” came in 2007 when another intelligence service provided the CIA with the … real name [of bin Laden’s courier].’ I believe the ‘intelligence service’, in this instance, to be MI6 after AQ leader Hassan Ghul was held in Pakistan and befriended British national Rangzieb Ahmed who, after testifying about his time in the adjacent cell, was the first member of AQ to be convicted of directing terrorism in the UK. The fact that legal proceedings have now been initiated by human rights groups against civilian staff at the Government Communications Head Quarters for allegedly assisting U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan with “locational intelligence” only supports my claim of Anglo-American cooperation and should help allay authors’ fear of a ‘risk’ to the ‘operational nature of the “special relationship”’. (p.6) 

David Graham is an associate editor at The Atlantic, where he writes and edits for the Politics Channel.

...But as grotesque as the auction might be, it's hardly surprising. The still-young United States -- deprived of the bones, blood, and fading locks of centuries-old saints, as well as a state church to celebrate them -- has long made a habit of fetishizing relics from our late presidents instead. After Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865, a famous photograph of the bloodstained sheets in Washington's Peterson House where he had lain entered popular circulation, and artifacts were distributed. The bed in which he died is now in the Chicago History Museum. A stained pillow ended up in the Peterson House, and a chair went to the Henry Ford Museum. But as James Swanson wrote in Bloody Crimes, a stained coverlet in the photograph disappeared, apparently taken by souvenir hunters....

Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist and a senior editor at National Review. 

Frank Bruni is an op-ed columnist for the NYT.

One of the things I love best about political commentary is how quickly it gets ahead of itself. I speak of the Michelle 2016 drumbeat.

I don’t mean Bachmann; hence, two l’s. I mean Obama. And in truth it’s less drumbeat than flute warble, but still. It’s out there: a vague murmuring about whether the first lady might, for example, seek a United States Senate seat from Illinois.

And it’s interesting, not for its plausibility — by most accounts she’s repulsed by the rough-and-tumble of Washington — as for a question it raises about political dynasties:

Why don’t and why shouldn’t they extend to spouses as often as they do to siblings and children? Could Hillary Clinton, initially derided as a two-for-one upstart, turn out to be something of a harbinger?...

Jonathan Steele is a Guardian columnist, roving foreign correspondent and author.

George Packer became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 2003 and has covered the Iraq War for the magazine.

In one of those coincidences that get you thinking in historical analogies, President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage just a few days after the publication of Robert Caro’s fourth volume on the life of Lyndon B. Johnson, “The Passage of Power.” Obama arrived at his position in very much the way that John F. Kennedy decided to put the force of the White House behind civil rights: slowly, reluctantly, and with a big assist from his overlooked, often ridiculed Vice-President.

I spent the summer of 1980 as an intern at a legal-aid office in southern Alabama, and in the houses of poor black people I got used to seeing a sign on the wall that said, “The three who set us free,” beneath pictures of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. It always struck me as unfair that Johnson had been erased from history, not just in those homes in Alabama, but in the judgment of liberal-minded Americans all over the country. After all, it was President Johnson who got civil rights and voting rights passed, along with the entire program of social-justice legislation known as the Great Society.

Jeffrey Rosen is the legal affairs editor of The New Republic. This article originally appeared in the May 24, 2012 issue of the magazine.

...IN 2005, IN AN ARTICLE for The New York Times Magazine, I described a nascent movement of pro-business and libertarian federal judges and think tank activists who hoped to resurrect what one judge called “the Constitution in Exile.” The term referred to a series of legal doctrines that have been dormant since the New Deal but which judges could use to dismantle the post–New Deal regulatory state, including economic regulations, health and safety laws, and environmental laws.

Janice Rogers Brown has long been sympathetic to these goals. A daughter of sharecroppers, she denounced the New Deal in a series of speeches before her confirmation to the D.C. Circuit in 2005. She called 1937—the year the Supreme Court began to uphold the New Deal—“the triumph of our own socialist revolution.” In the same speech, she argued that “protection of property was a major casualty of the revolution of 1937.” During her first years on the federal bench, however, Brown was mostly quiet about her anti-regulatory views.

Then, in her April 13 opinion, she dramatically unmasked herself. Although Brown concurred with the decision to uphold the mandate because there were too many Supreme Court precedents for a lower court to ignore, she also made clear her disagreement with the past 75 years of Supreme Court cases directing judges to defer to Congress and the executive branch on economic regulation.

The milk regulation, she wrote, “reveals an ugly truth: America’s cowboy capitalism was long ago disarmed by a democratic process increasingly dominated by powerful groups with economic interests antithetical to competitors and consumers.” She added that the courts “have been negotiating the terms of surrender since the 1930s.” Brown went on to denounce landmark Supreme Court decisions issued after Franklin Roosevelt’s Court-packing plan, lamenting that “the Court abdicated its constitutional duty to protect economic rights completely.” And she decried “the political temptation to exploit the public appetite for other people’s money—either by buying consent with broad-based entitlements or selling subsidies, licensing restrictions, tariffs, or price fixing regimes to benefit narrow special interests.” (The unattributed reference to Louis Brandeis’s classic exposé of economic populism, Other People’s Money, is perverse, since Justice Brandeis supported the very Supreme Court decisions deferring to economic regulations that Brown is denouncing.)...