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Over the summer, Fidel Castro, Cuba’s aging former president who’s spent the past four years out of sight (if not out of mind), appeared on Cuban television and radio to sound the alarm about his view that the United States and Iran are leading the world to nuclear conflagration.

Weeks later, The Atlantic magazine happened to run “The Point of No Return,” an insider’s account of the persistent consternation in Israel over a possible Iranian “nuclear breakout” now matched by a growing conviction, at least within some quarters of official Tel Aviv, that they will have to act alone (read: preemptive air strike) to halt the pesky, over-ambitious Iranians.

Fidel -- whose fondness for the ever-illuminating Atlantic apparently rivals The Wire’s Brother Mouzone’s insatiable appetite for Harper’s -- read the article “carefully” and, being a man accustomed to having his wishes granted, promptly called on his Washington ambassador to invite Jeffrey Goldberg, the article’s author, to Havana for a few days of chats with the Cuban leader.

Fortunately for Cuba watchers and fans of satire everywhere, Goldberg found the invitation too good to turn down and since returning from Havana has been posting the eyebrow raising highlights of their conversations and time together on his Atlantic blog.

Although Fidel gave Goldberg more than a few memorable, newsworthy quotes, t

Over the weekend, The Washington Post published a humanizing, heart-wrenching glimpse of a portrait of a young Iraqi interpreter who served alongside American soldiers when the insurgency was at its potent and lethal zenith three years ago.

“Roy,” the intentionally-protective and unintentionally-evocative nom de guerre that had been given to the Iraqi by his employer, was young (“he looked like a waterboy for a varsity sports team”) and inexperienced (“Roy learned to speak English from watching television”), but earnest and irrepressibly eager.

And he had reason to cast his lot with the American side.

One day, al-Qaeda insurgents stormed Roy’s school, demanding that the students drop their books and join the jihad against the Americans. When two of his classmates defiantly refused, they were marched before the entire student body and beheaded.

The next day, Roy was at an American base, looking for remuneration and, as so many teenage boys would feel compelled to seek, revenge for his friends.

Once hired, under hostile fire and at the tense scenes of suicide bombings, Roy skillfully interpreted the linguistic and the cultural, the obvious and the hidden, for his American colleagues, gaining their trust and endearment and, assuredly in many instances, saving their lives or those of his fellow Iraqis.

Ten years ago this month, President Bill Clinton signed into law a package of primarily military and counternarcotics aid to Bogotá known simply as Plan Colombia. With the stroke of a pen, Clinton made Colombia the recipient of more U.S. assistance than any country outside of the Middle East, opening a pipeline of cash that’s proven harder to cap than BP’s oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.

With $7.3 billion in American treasure already out the vault door, U.S. government officials, including members of President Obama's Cabinet and national security team, have been singing the praises of Plan Colombia anew -- and the country’s outgoing scandal-plagued president, Álvaro Uribe -- at every opportunity, lest the American public wakes up to what’s being done in its name, with its tax dollars.

Recently, though, the praise has moved from the mere gushing and effusive to open calls to apply the Plan Colombia model elsewhere, anywhere, wherever. In fact, in a recent visit to the Colombian Naval Academy in Cartagena, the usually circumspect Joint Chiefs Chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, joined the party, saying “I see the same kinds of challenges in Afghanistan ... there's a great deal to be learned from the success that has been seen here in Colombia.”

The problem -- clearly laid out in a compelling new report by Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) -- is that Plan Colombia is a warning sign, not a model, for U.S. assistance and involvement abroad. Sure, the homicides and kidnappings that for years kept international travelers away from the Andean nation -- inspiring at least two forgettable Hollywood blockbusters along the way -- have declined since the early 2000s. Yet, these improvements in security are, to quote Isacson, “partial, possibly reversible, and weighed down by ‘collateral damage,’” not to mention that Colombia continues to lag behind when it comes to meeting basic human rights standards.

As the United States proceeds with its withdrawal plan, which will see some 50,000 American soldiers redeployed out of Iraq by summer’s end, U.S.-affiliated Iraqis — the interpreters, civil experts, and others who’ve courageously supported efforts to improve security and rebuild their tattered nation — are increasingly isolated and susceptible to attack by Iraqi insurgents all too eager to begin settling scores.

With a target on their backs and their allies withdrawing, one would expect American-affiliated Iraqis to turn inward — to their families and perhaps a small circle of lifelong, trustworthy friends — for moral support and corporeal protection. And one would hope that they could count on those familial and fraternal bonds to see them through the bleak days ahead. One would hope.

An Iraqi interpreter, Hameed al-Daraji, who’d worked for the U.S. military for some seven years, was gunned down by his son and nephew in his Samarra home late last week. According to the Associated Press’ early reporting, al-Daraji’s family had fought often with the erstwhile translator for continuing to “collaborate” with the Americans and demanded he quit, an entreaty that he persistently refused. Al-Daraji’s son and nephew, who shot their father and uncle in the chest at point-blank range, were apparently put up to the shooting by an al-Qaeda linked group.

What if a certain Argentine medical student hadn't left school a semester early to journey 5,000 miles across the South American continent — witnessing along the way the social upheaval and exploitation transpiring at the time — on a beat-up, single-cylinder British motorcycle? What if Dr. King had limited his studies of non-violent resistance to books, never visiting Gandhi's birthplace in India? What if that "skinny kid with a funny name" had spent all of his childhood years in Topeka, Kansas instead of some of them in Jakarta, Indonesia?

The transformative power of travel — for individuals, countries, and societies — simply cannot be underestimated. When people are denied the freedom to travel and exchange with people whose worldviews or daily experiences may differ from their own, new ways of thinking or doing things are never considered and friendships that might otherwise develop don't. Open travel is one of the ways by which a society can get its dynamism, its lifeblood; travelers can either bring new ideas to the marketplace or — through scholarship, public education, or activism — broaden the mental marketplace itself.

When it comes to Cuba, the U.S. government sees things differently. For most of the last five decades, Americans have been banned from traveling to the communist island. If you want to visit Pyongyang, Beijing, or Tehran, no problem, despite significant human rights problems and, to put it mildly, imperfect political systems in each country. Yet, if your passport happens to be issued by good ol' Uncle Sam, traveling to Cuba is, again, strictly prohibited.

The withdrawal of some 50,000 U.S. troops from Iraq is underway, and expected to wrap up by summer's end. While a lighter U.S. military footprint in Iraq is a welcome development, it's likely to leave thousands of American-affiliated Iraqis — the interpreters, engineers, economic experts, and others who've lent a hand to security and reconstruction efforts — even more vulnerable to Islamic extremists who've promised "nine bullets for the traitors."

At this late stage, drastic measures are probably needed to avert a humanitarian catastrophe. Yet, by their nature, eleventh-hour efforts can only bear modest fruit. Without a doubt, many U.S.-affiliated Iraqis will be overlooked in the rush to save even a few, while others — those understandably unenthusiastic about the prospect of leaving their homeland, friends, and family behind — will gamble that their already star-crossed fortunes won't take yet another turn for the worse with the departure of American soldiers, contractors, and aid workers.

The upshot of these realities is that many American-affiliated Iraqis won't benefit from, for instance, a last-ditch airlift operation to the Pacific island of Guam. These people will be forced to navigate the non-emergency resettlement channels that have managed to resettle precious few of their fellow Iraqis. Why is the United States doing such a poor job of getting its Iraqi allies out of harm's way and resettling them?

Dick Cheney's pre-invasion fantasy of Iraqis rushing to the streets to greet their American "liberators" didn't exactly come to pass — and that's putting it kindly. Yet, in the aftermath of Baghdad's April 2003 fall, many thousands of Iraqis, glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein and hopeful about what the Americans might help them accomplish, turned up at American bases looking for work. For a military with so few fluent Arabic speakers, English-speaking Iraqis were in high demand and found jobs primarily as interpreters, but also as impromptu intelligence agents and cultural consiglieres. Other skilled Iraqis, like engineers or people with economic aid expertise, teamed up with U.S. and other civilians on various reconstruction projects.

Insurgent groups bent on undermining the American effort immediately set to work discrediting American-affiliated Iraqis, who they tarred as "traitors" or "collaborators." They targeted them with death threats, kidnapped and tortured many, and killed hundreds with knives, bullets, car bombs, and suicide bombers. The pace of the targeted-violence against these Iraqis picked up, and its gruesomeness and ferocity grew, following the 2006 bombing of the Al-Askari Mosque, widely-regarded as the turning-point event that greatly intensified sectarian violence, in turn displacing some five million people within Iraq's borders and forcing millions more into neighboring Syria and Jordan or even further from home.

As the United States proceeds with the withdrawal of some 50,000 combat troops from Iraq by the end of August 2010, The List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies, a non-profit that maintains a list of Iraqis who have worked with the U.S., is sounding the alarm. In a just-released report, The List Project warns that these Iraqis will continue to face extraordinary dangers once U.S. forces leave — only now, with a diminished U.S. presence, there will be no one helping to protect them from groups with scores to settle. The danger is real. Recently, the Islamic State of Iraq, which includes Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, promised "nine bullets for the traitors," i.e. those who've worked with the United States. The List Project is calling on the United States to live up to its moral obligation to these Iraqis by ensuring that they aren't thrown to the wolves, but are instead offered sanctuary far away from their waiting tormentors. But can the U.S. resettle so many Iraqi refugees so fast?

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The Los Angeles Times reported last month that approximately 430 Sunni Iraqi men were detained for months and tortured in an off-the-grid prison facility at the al-Muthanna Baghdad airport on the mere suspicion of being involved in the Sunni insurgency. The torture-fueled interrogations were reportedly carried out by Justice Ministry officials and members of an elite military unit under the sole authority of Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister.

While al-Maliki promised to have the site shuttered and called for the arrest of at least one of the jailers, he went on to dismiss the torture revelations as "a smear campaign in which embassies and media organizations took part and it was perpetuated by Iraqi politicians because it serves their interests to say that there are secret prisons."

Are the PM's claims correct or are they reality-defying, self-serving hyperbole? Survey says ... reality-defying, self-serving hyperbole!

Now that the health care bill has been signed into law, it's time for President Obama and the Congress to put their time and energies (what's left, at least) into addressing other important issues facing the United States and the world. Climate change, financial regulation, and immigration reform will undoubtedly keep the politicos busy until election fever really kicks into high gear — but many more issues are deserving of legislative action. In 2010, 30 years after the passage of the Refugee Act, it's time for the United States to once again reform its refugee law.

Thankfully, some influential senators think so, too. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has introduced the Refugee Protection Act of 2010, which aims to improve existing laws and practices so that people fleeing persecution in their homelands aren't turned away or otherwise mistreated while in the United States' hands. The act is currently co-sponsored by Senators Carl Levin (D-MI), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Roland Burris (D-IL), and Daniel Akaka (D-HI).

The Refugee Protection Act of 2010 builds on the Refugee Act of 1980, championed by the late Senator Ted Kennedy, which significantly reformed U.S. domestic law, bringing the United States in line with its international commitments. The original act created a legal framework to deal with refugees and asylum-seekers, rather than the ad-hoc, ideologically-driven system that endured for much of the Cold War; set up the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) within the Department of Health and Human Services to help provide legally-required assistance to refugees for up to three years; and enshrined the principle of non-refoulement, which, at least in theory, would keep people with a credible fear of persecution from being deported to their home countries.

Sounds like a great law, right? So why the need for a new one?

In a statement released Sunday, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Joint Command, the American-led NATO mission in Afghanistan, admitted that an American Special Operations-Afghan National Police (ANP) team was, in fact, responsible for killing three Afghan women in a recent raid.

During the night of February 12, American Special Ops. and ANP forces were searching for at least one Taliban fighter when they arrived at an Afghan man's home in a village outside of Gardez, a provincial capital near the infamous caves of Tora Bora. According to accounts provided by relatives, two Afghan men, hearing commotion, went outside to investigate. They were each armed with Kalashnikov rifles. The two men — one a local police chief, the other a local prosecutor, but neither insurgents — were immediately gunned down by the American-Afghan team. When three unarmed women then rushed outside to see what had happened and offer aid to the men, they, too, were shot. As if the tragic loss of these lives wasn't enough, it appears that two of the women were pregnant and at least 16 children were orphaned by the incident.

Immediately following the killings, the ISAF Joint Command claimed in a statement that its soldiers had been "engaged ... in a fire fight" and that they had "found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed" prior to the soldiers' arrival. Sunday's statement, however, spins a starkly different story.