I first heard from Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution about two years ago, when he was conducting research into the cases of the prisoners held at Guantánamo, for a project entitled, “The Current Detainee Population of Guantánamo: An Empirical Study.” Wittes got in touch because he had drawn on my analysis of 8,000 publicly [...]
Almost all children hear a set of conflicting statements from their parents, relatives, and friends. They’re told if they study hard, if they work hard, they can achieve whatever they want. It’s the “American Dream.” But they’re also told that life isn’t always fair. Looking for internships or jobs, America’s children learn that no matter [...]
Last week, on the heels of the release of the alarming statistics on religious harassment at the U.S. Air Force Academy, the Academy held a religious respect conference. Who wasn’t invited to this religious respect conference? The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) — the only organization representing service members of all religions as well as [...]
To listen to certain Republican critics of last week’s verdict in the federal court trial of the Tanzanian Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a former Guantánamo prisoner and a former CIA “ghost prisoner,” you would think that the jury had found him not guilty, and that he had been released onto the streets of New York. In [...]
If nothing else, the election of 2010 has taught us that a “third” political party is not the answer. Like the two existing major parties, it too would simply become another political commodity to be purchased by the corporations and wealthy elite for their own purposes, rather than serving the interests of ordinary voters. Political salvation will [...]
The Federal Reserve represents global banking interests who have overstepped their legal authority. Their Quantitative Easing program is an explicit violation of the Constitution. By deliberately devaluing the dollar and causing the price of basic necessities to rise, the Federal Reserve is, as a matter of strategic policy, sacrificing a significant percentage of the US [...]
On his show last Friday, Glenn Beck did something quite unusual for a guy who makes his living scaring people into thinking that America is on the road to communism — he promoted an idea straight out of the Paris Commune of 1871, an idea considered by the Commune to be a necessary stepping stone [...]
The official announcement on Tuesday in the House of Commons, by Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke, that the govermment has reached a financial settlement with a number of former Guantánamo prisoners brings to an end a court case that promised to be long, expensive and full of disturbing revelations about British complicity in torture and abuse. [...]
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 [...]
