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The Roots of Iran’s Nuclear Secrecy

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For years we’ve heard the steady drumbeat of news stories like this: Over 18 years, Iran secretly assembled uranium enrichment and conversion facilities that could be used for a nuclear energy program or to construct an atomic bomb. And this was among the least alarmist stories. The thrust of the sensational coverage, instigated by hawkish American politicians, has been that for almost two decades, beginning in the mid-1980s, Iran secretly enriched uranium in order to make a bomb. What’s the real story? For that we have to turn to Gareth Porter’s definitive Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. In fact, Porter writes, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in 2003 that during those 18 years, Iran had enriched uranium only briefly in 1999 and 2002. “Instead of referring to the brief few months of experiments testing centrifuges,” Porter writes, “news coverage of the report suggested that Iran had been continuing ...

Let’s Raise Our Vision

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There was once a time when religious liberty had never before been considered. Throughout history, people lived under political systems in which government and religion were combined. Since it was the system under which they had been born and raised and which existed all over the world, people just didn’t give any thought to an alternative. Then one day, after centuries of conflict, discord, and corruption, someone came along with a radical idea: let’s separate religion and the state. Let’s relegate religious activity to the private sector and prohibit the government from controlling or regulating it. Let’s establish freedom of religion. That principle, of course, was firmly established when our American ancestors called the federal government into existence. First of all, the power to establish, control, or regulate religious activity was not among the powers delegated to the federal government in the Constitution. Second, to make sure federal officials got the point, the First Amendment expressly guaranteed religious liberty for ...

Crime and Punishment in a Free Society

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Would a free society be a crime-free society? We have good reason to anticipate it. Don’t accuse me of utopianism. I don’t foresee a future of new human beings who consistently respect the rights of others. Alas, there will always be those who would invade the boundaries of their fellow human beings. Rather, I want to draw attention to the distinction between crime and tort — between offenses against the state (or “society”) and offenses against individual persons or their justly held property. We’re so used to this distinction, and the priority of the criminal law over tort law, that most of us don’t realize that things used to be different. Not so long ago, an “offense” that was not an act of force against an individual was not an offense at all. What happened? In England, the early kings recognized that the administration of justice could be a cash cow. So, as to be expected, they grabbed on and never ...