Hornberger's Blog

Conservative Responsibility for Iraq and Afghanistan

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 20, 2012

Among the favorite mantras of conservatives is With freedom comes responsibility. They love to hurl it at liberals whenever they point to the disastrous failure of the welfare state. When liberals cry, Please, judge us by our good intentions, not by the actual results of our policies, conservatives respond, No, good intentions mean nothing. What matters is the damage ...

Speaking at a Leftist Conference

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 19, 2012

For two years in a row — 2010 and 2011, The Future of Freedom Foundation participated in the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. Ordinarily, we would never do something like that, given how ardently conservatives support such things as foreign interventionism, militarism, empire, undeclared wars, wars of aggression, torture, the war on terrorism, and the denigration of ...

Where’s the Declaration of War on Iran?

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 15, 2012

Given all the talk about the possibility of President Obama initiating another war of aggression, this one against Iran, now would be a good time to review the illegality of such an operation, a point that will likely be forgotten once the standard war fever and warped sense of patriotism hits the media and the mainstream public. Under our ...

Confronting Guatemala’s Military Massacres

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 14, 2012

Ironically, while the U.S. military is grappling with the cold-blooded killing of 16 Afghans, including women and children, the Guatemalan people are dealing with a military massacre of their own. A Guatemalan court has just sentenced a former member of Guatemala’s special forces, Pedro Pimental Rios, to a jail term of 6,060 years. Pimental was convicted of participating in a ...

The Time for Soul-Searching Has Arrived

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 13, 2012

How ironic. Countless American Christians supported the U.S. government’s war of aggression on Iraq, and now consider this headline from last Sunday’sNew York Times: “Exodus from North Signals Iraqi Christians’ Slow Decline.” And now we learn that an American soldier went on a killing rampage in Afghanistan, walking into people’s homes in a brutal shoot-up that ended up killing 16 people, ...

Foreign Aid and the Empire

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 12, 2012

The pro-empire crowd sometimes claims that the U.S. Empire is different from other empires in history in that it doesn’t try to acquire foreign lands. They fail to grasp the real nature of the U.S. Empire. It isn’t about acquiring foreign lands, it’s about acquiring control over foreign regimes. And its model is based pretty much on how the ...

The Persecution of Lynne Stewart

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 9, 2012

Today’s Los Angeles Times has an interesting editorial on the Lynne Stewart case. Stewart is a 72-year-old criminal defense lawyer from New York who is now serving a 10-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. She was convicted in 2005 of supporting terrorism, an offense that arose during her defense of Omar Abdel Rahman, a radical Islamic cleric known as the “blind ...

Assassination as Speech Suppressor

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 8, 2012

As most everyone knows, after President Obama’s reelection, most liberals went silent with respect to the defense of civil liberties and condemnation of the war on terrorism. Of course, there have been a few notable exceptions, such as Glenn Greenwald and the ACLU and others, but by and large liberals ended up doing what conservatives do when their man ...

Holder’s Ridiculous Justification for Assassination

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 7, 2012

With Attorney General Eric Holder’s speech attempting to justify the president’s omnipotent power to assassinate Americans, we are seeing, once again, the consequences of having permitted U.S. officials with getting away with the sham of converting a criminal offense, terrorism, into an “act of war.” In his speech at Northwestern University, Holder claimed that when the president’s forces kill ...

The Thank-You System

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 6, 2012

In an economic transaction, who should be the one saying thank you — the buyer or the seller? Or in an employment relationship, who should be thanking the other — the employer or the employee? In real life, we see all four saying thank you. Sometimes, the cashier in the grocery store will say, “Thank you” to the customer, sometimes ...

Don’t Invade Portugal

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 5, 2012

We can only hope that President Obama doesn’t order a military invasion of Portugal for refusing an extradition request by the U.S. government to extradite a convicted murderer to the United States. The case involves 68-year-old George Wright, who was convicted by a New Jersey court for a 1962 killing of a gas station attendant during a robbery. Wright had ...

What about the Debt Ceiling?

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 2, 2012

Let’s not forget the big debate several months ago over whether the debt ceiling should be raised. It’s important that we periodically revisit this issue before the new ceiling is reached in couple of years from now, at least to show the fraud that U.S. officials and the mainstream media engage in each time the ceiling is reached. First of ...