Obama’s Collapse: The Return of the Military Commissions by Andy Worthington January 25, 2011 For T.S. Eliot, April was the cruelest month, but for the prisoners at Guantánamo it is January — from the dashed hopes of January 2009, when President Obama swept into office issuing an executive order in which he promised to close the prison within a year, to January 2010, when, having failed to do so, he ...
Pentagon Propaganda on Gitmo Prisoners Releases by Andy Worthington January 18, 2011 For several years now, one organization in the U.S. government has persistently undermined attempts to have a grown-up debate about the perceived dangerousness of prisoners at Guantánamo, and the need to bear security concerns in mind whilst also trying to empty the prison and to bring to an end this particularly malign icon of the Bush administration's ill-conceived response ...
Guantánamo Forever? by Andy Worthington January 10, 2011 On the 9th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, it may sound uncharitable to President Obama to be asking whether all plans to close the prison have failed, and to be asking whether it might remain in operation for as long as anyone can foresee. After all, the president may have failed to close it within a year ...
Plumbing New Depths on Guantánamo by Andy Worthington December 27, 2010 With just two weeks to go before the ninth anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo, almost everyone in a position of authority in the United States has failed to resolve, in a satisfactory manner, the bitter legacy left by the Bush administration. In fact, to judge by two recent developments, anything resembling progress ...
Guantánamo Prisoners Sacrificed in Political Horse-Trading by Andy Worthington December 20, 2010 How messed up is American politics? Well, here are a few clues. Two weeks ago, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a $1.1 trillion continuing resolution, which funds the government through to September 30 next year. As The Hill explained, the resolution was needed “because Congress failed to pass any of the 12 regular appropriations bills for 2011, ...
Cut the Tax Cuts by Laurence M. Vance December 15, 2010 For several years now we have been told that the Bush tax cuts will be expiring at the end of 2010. That time is now here — unless Democrats and Republicans in Congress can reach an agreement to extend them. The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA) and the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act ...
Guantánamo: A Dismal Week for America by Andy Worthington December 13, 2010 Just when it seemed that President Obama’s paralysis regarding Guantánamo couldn’t get any worse — with any further trials or prisoner releases apparently on permanent hold because any other course of action would be politically inconvenient — the House of Representatives and the Director of National Intelligence have stepped in to make the prospect of closing Guantánamo even ...
Wikileaks: Suppressing the Investigation of Torture by Andy Worthington December 7, 2010 In the relatively small number of U.S. diplomatic cables released to date by WikiLeaks, from its cache of 251,287 documents, the most disturbing revelations concerning the “war on terror” deal with the pressure that the Bush administration exerted on Germany in 2007, regarding the planned prosecution of thirteen CIA agents involved in the rendition and torture of Khaled El-Masri, ...
A Message from Jacob Hornberger by Jacob G. Hornberger December 2, 2010 Ever since I discovered libertarianism some 30 years ago, I have dreamed of a “great awakening” in which the American people discover our nation’s libertarian heritage and restore individual liberty, free markets, and a limited-government constitutional republic to our land. Every day more and more Americans are waking up and discovering that something is wrong in this country. They’re asking ...
Natural Rights, the Declaration, and the Constitution, Part 3 by Jacob G. Hornberger December 1, 2010 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 The Bill of Rights should actually have been called the Bill of Prohibitions because it actually doesn’t give any rights to anyone. Instead, it expressly prohibits the federal government from infringing the fundamental rights of the people. Our American ancestors understood that people’s rights don’t come from the government or from ...
On Guantánamo, Obama Hits Rock Bottom by Andy Worthington November 16, 2010 On national security issues, there are now two Americas. In the first, which existed from January to May 2009, the rule of law flickered briefly back to life after eight years of the Bush administration. In this first America, President Obama swept into office issuing executive orders promising to close Guantánamo and to uphold the absolute ban on ...
Terrorism, Habeas Corpus, and the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals by Andy Worthington November 8, 2010 In the struggle in the U.S. courts to establish who can be detained at Guantánamo, and on what basis, following the Supreme Court’s ruling, in June 2008, that the Guantánamo prisoners have constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, there are three main players: the District Court judges, who, in 57 cases over the last two years, ...