An Open Letter to the Troops: You’re Not Defending Our Freedoms by Jacob G. Hornberger May 31, 2011 Dear Troops: Yesterday — Memorial Day — some people asserted, once again, that you are “defending our freedoms” overseas. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those people are just repeating tired old mantras. The reality is that you are not defending our freedoms with your actions overseas. In fact, it is the exact opposite. Your actions overseas are placing our ...
Lessons from the Middle East, Part 1 by Jacob G. Hornberger May 30, 2011 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 The widespread revolts against dictatorships in the Middle East hold valuable lessons for the American people. Time will tell whether Americans focus on those lessons and heed them or simply turn away and ignore them. The lessons involve principles of liberty, democracy, and the role of government in a ...
The Supreme Courts Failure to Tackle Torture, Now and Forever by Andy Worthington May 26, 2011 Since the dying days of the Bush administration, when the Supreme Court savaged the indifference of the executive branch and of Congress towards the cruel mess they had created at Guantánamo, by recognizing that the prisoners had constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, it has, sadly, all been downhill when it comes to judicial oversight of the national-security ...
The Road to the Permanent Warfare State, Part 1 by Gregory Bresiger May 24, 2011 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 |Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 |Part 12 |Part 13 In modern political society it is probably a fact that national leadership can heighten foreign crises to the point where war becomes almost ...
The Only Way Out of Guantánamo Is In a Coffin by Andy Worthington May 20, 2011 Despite sweeping into office promising to close Guantánamo, President Obama now oversees a prison that may well stay open forever, from which the only exit route is in a coffin. The last living prisoner to be released from Guantánamo was Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, an Algerian who was repatriated against his will in January. Since then, an Afghan ...
The Continuing Economic Depression, Part 1 by William L. Anderson May 16, 2011 Part 1 | Part 2 More than three years ago, it became clear that the housing bubble was about to burst, and that the U.S. economy would be in for a very rough patch. In the three years since the collapse of the financial entities behind the mortgage boom, we have seen the U.S. government spend trillions of dollars ...
U.S. Attorneys Crack Down on the Tenth Amendment by Laurence M. Vance May 4, 2011 Since just last month, the Arizona Department of Health Services has been accepting applications for medical marijuana patient and caregiver cards. Voters in Arizona approved an initiative placed on the ballot via a citizen petition, Proposition 203, the “Arizona Medical Marijuana Act,’ in the general election last November. The measure, which took effect on April 14, narrowly ...
Scaremongers Fail to Undermine WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Revelations by Andy Worthington May 3, 2011 For regular readers of The Future of Freedom Foundation, the release by Wikileaks, of classified military documents relating to almost all of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo will not have yielded any great surprises. Since October 2008, I have been writing weekly columns for FFF, dealing exclusively with the horrors of Guantánamo and the Bush ...
Deference to Authority, Part 3 by Jacob G. Hornberger April 30, 2011 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 The 50-year-old economic embargo by the U.S. government against the Cuban people stands as a testament to the power of the state to mold the minds of a citizenry, in this case the American citizenry. Having been inculcated from the first grade on up that the U.S. government ...
More Judicial Interference on Guantánamo by Andy Worthington April 18, 2011 Last week, in my article, “How the Supreme Court Gave Up on Guantánamo,” I explained how, given the option of addressing complaints made by prisoners in Guantánamo regarding the basis of their ongoing detention, the Supreme Court chose not to, leaving the final decisions regarding the prisoners not in the hands of the District Court in Washington, D.C., ...
How the Supreme Court Gave Up on Guantánamo by Andy Worthington April 12, 2011 Last Monday, on the very same day that the Obama administration gave up on Guantánamo, so too did the Supreme Court. For opponents of the unconstitutional aberration that is Guantánamo, Monday, April 4, 2011, will go down in the history books as the day that they were obliged to watch impotently as federal court trials for terrorist suspects ...
Holder, Obama, and the Cowardly Shame of Guantánamo by Andy Worthington April 5, 2011 Since May 2009, when President Obama first bowed to Republican pressure on national-security issues and abandoned a plan by White House Counsel Greg Craig to rehouse on the U.S. mainland a couple of cleared prisoners at Guantánamo who were at risk of torture if repatriated, it has been apparent that no principles are sufficiently important to the administration ...