McDaniel and Botkin Are Wrong: The Troops Never Defended Our Freedom in Iraq and Vietnam by Jacob G. Hornberger February 3, 2015 The controversy surrounding Sheldon Richman’s article “The American Sniper Was No Hero” generated the repeated use of a bromide that is inculcated in the American people from the time they enter the first grade in the public (i.e., government) schools that their parents are forced to send them to — a bromide that holds that the troops defend ...
Aggression and the American Sniper by Jacob G. Hornberger February 2, 2015 FFF Vice President Sheldon Richman stirred up quite a bit of controversy over his article last week entitled “The American Sniper Was No Hero.” Defenders of Chris Kyle, the U.S. military sniper around which the movie American Sniper revolved, took Sheldon to task for daring to criticize the members of the U.S. military who killed people in Iraq, ...
The National Security Establishment vs. Defense by Jacob G. Hornberger January 26, 2015 I have a simple proposal: Why not bring all the troops home from Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere in the Middle East. I mean all of them. Bring them all home and let them defend the United States. After all, it’s called the Department of Defense, right? Well, what would be wrong with applying the principle of defense to ...
Indefinite Detention: A Hallmark of Tyranny by Jacob G. Hornberger January 23, 2015 Khaled al-Qazzaz wants to know why U.S. officials were silent during the time he was incarcerated by the military dictatorship that rules Egypt. An engineer and educator, he had joined the government of democratically elected Mohamed Morsi as foreign relations secretary. According to an article in the New York Times, he was one of nine Morsi advisers who ...
The Troops Are Destroying Our Country by Jacob G. Hornberger January 22, 2015 The mindset that is common to U.S. troops serving overseas is that they are all doing it for America, for us, for our rights and freedoms, for our safety and security. They’ll all tell you that they are doing it because they love their country. There’s one big problem with that mindset, however. The truth is that the troops, through ...
Why Should the Government Deliver Mail? by Jacob G. Hornberger January 21, 2015 In a country where people extol the virtues of free enterprise, why is the U.S. government involved in the delivery of mail? After all, it would be difficult to find a better example of a violation of the principles of free enterprise than the U.S. Postal Service. Making the situation worse is the fact that the Postal Service is a ...
American Sniper by Jacob G. Hornberger January 20, 2015 Last evening I went to see the new movie American Sniper because I wanted to see how they portrayed American soldiers killing people in Iraq, especially Chris Kyle, the man whose life the movie revolved around. As Nazi official Herman Goering pointed out, it is easy for any regime to get people to back a war. All that it has ...
Paris, Iraq, and Abu Ghraib by Jacob G. Hornberger January 19, 2015 Consider the following lead paragraph from a front-page article in yesterday’s New York Times entitled “From Amateur to Ruthless Jihadist in France”: In the year after the United States’ invasion of Iraq, a 22-year-old pizza delivery man here couldn’t take it anymore. Sickened by images of American soldiers humiliating Muslims at the Abu Ghraib prison, he made plans to ...
Behaving Like the North Koreans by Jacob G. Hornberger January 16, 2015 The controversy over North Korea’s supposed hacking of Sony in retaliation for The Interview actually goes a long way in showing the brilliance of our American ancestors who demanded the enactment of the Bill of Rights after the federal government was called into existence with the Constitution. Why did our ancestors insist on passage of the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and ...
Déjà vu in France by Jacob G. Hornberger January 15, 2015 I’m getting a big déjà vu feeling in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo killings in France. The French government is declaring war on terrorism. It’s militarizing French society. It’s proposing a Patriot Act. It’s supporting a mass surveillance scheme. It’s advocating killing more people in the Middle East. There is even talk of using military tribunals to try terrorism ...
Free Speech in America? What About Lynne Stewart? by Jacob G. Hornberger January 14, 2015 In the aftermath of the terrorist attack in France on Charlie Hebdo, U.S. officials are telling the world how committed they are to the principles of freedom of speech. Really? How about Lynne Stewart, the New York lawyer who was convicted and sentenced to serve time in a federal penitentiary for doing nothing more than speaking the following words to the ...
How the Cuban Embargo Got Imposed by Jacob G. Hornberger January 13, 2015 I wonder how many Americans know how the U.S. embargo against Cuba got imposed. The story provides one more example of how the post-World War II national-security state apparatus that was grafted onto America’s governmental structure warped and perverted the values and principles of the American people in the name of the anti-communist crusade. From 1953-1959, Fidel Castro’s forces were ...