Legacy Links

Torture and Terrorism: In the Middle East It’s 2011, In America It’s Still 2001

by Andy Worthington April 1, 2011

The gulf between what’s happening on the ground in the Middle East and the way it is perceived by the U.S. intelligence services — as well as the gulf between how critics perceive America’s counterterrorism policies in the Middle East, and how those policies are perceived by U.S. intelligence — were recently exposed in an article in the Wall ...

Deference to Authority, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 30, 2011

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Many years ago, I had the opportunity to visit Cuba, a country that holds valuable lessons in freedom for the American people, albeit not in ways that one might imagine. As a prerequisite to traveling to Cuba, the U.S. government requires Americans to secure a license from the U.S. Treasury Department. ...

Auberon Herbert, Part 2

by Wendy McElroy March 20, 2011

Part 1 | Part 2 On other issues, Auberon Herbert predictably sided with working people. In 1869, he acted as one of the presidents of the first national Cooperative Congress. As its name suggests, the Cooperative movement focused on establishing cooperative societies and arrangements, such as mutual insurance agencies. When Herbert’s Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State first ...

Obama Turns the Clock Back on Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington March 10, 2011

Those of us who have been studying Guantánamo closely were not surprised when, on March 7, President Obama announced that he was lifting a ban on trials by military commission at Guantánamo, which he imposed on his first day in office in January 2009, and also issued an executive order establishing a periodic ...

Spanish Torture Investigation into Gitmo to Continue

by Andy Worthington February 28, 2011

On Friday, the Spanish National Court gave hope to those seeking to hold accountable the Bush administration officials and lawyers who authorized torture by agreeing to continue investigating allegations made by a Moroccan-born Spanish resident, Lahcen Ikassrien, that he was tortured at Guantánamo, where he was held from 2002 to 2005. Spanish courts are empowered to hear certain types of ...

Deference to Authority, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger February 27, 2011

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Addressing the WikiLeaks controversy, noted New York Times columnist David Brooks opened up his November 29, 2010, column with the following observation: mother didn’t enroll him in the local schools because, as Raffi Khatchadourian wrote in a New Yorker profile, she feared “that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy ...

Military Commissions and the Case of Bin Laden’s Cook

by Andy Worthington February 22, 2011

On February 10, it was reported that Ibrahim al-Qosi, a 50-year old Sudanese prisoner in Guantánamo who accepted a plea deal in his trial by military commission last July, had the 14-year sentence that was subsequently handed down by a military jury reduced to two years by Retired Vice Adm. Bruce MacDonald, the convening authority of the ...

Auberon Herbert, Part 1

by Wendy McElroy February 18, 2011

Part 1 | Part 2 In his periodical Liberty, (May 23, 1885), the quintessential American individualist-anarchist Benjamin Tucker wrote of his British counterpart Auberon Herbert, “I know of no more inspiring spectacle in England than that of this man of exceptionally high social position doing battle almost single-handed with the giant monster, government, and showing in it a mental ...

Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform (video)

by David E. Bernstein February 16, 2011

On February 7, 2011, David E. Bernstien gave the following speech at The Future of Freedom Foundation’s “Economic Liberty Lecture Series.” The speech can viewed below in its entirety. David E. Bernstein is Foundation Professor at the George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Virginia, where he has been teaching since 1995. He was a Visiting Professor at ...

George W. Bush, War Criminal, Is Not Welcome in Europe

by Andy Worthington February 15, 2011

Last week I was in Poland, touring the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (which I co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash), and discussing the importance of an ongoing investigation into the complicity of the Polish government in the establishment of a secret CIA torture prison in Poland in the early years of the ...

The Unraveling of U.S. Mideast Policy

by Sheldon Richman February 3, 2011

The blow to U.S. foreign policy by the popular uprising in Egypt cannot be overstated. The Egyptians’ demand that Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt with an iron hand and billions of American taxpayer dollars, step down is unquestionably a major setback to the U.S. governing class and its plans for the Middle East. Since the end of World ...

Revolution in Egypt and Hypocrisy in the U.S.

by Andy Worthington January 31, 2011

For the United States and other Western countries, the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (which threaten to spread to other countries, including Yemen and Algeria) are something of a nightmare. Just as the authorities in these countries are struggling — and failing — to cope with popular uprisings, so too the United States and other Western countries are ...