As I write this article, I’m seated in a hotel room across from the train station in Geneva, Switzerland. There’s a slight, dull pain in my forehead from a two-inch line of stitches that are pulling together a gash that runs diagonally across my brow, thanks to a stumble on a high step on a sidewalk in the rain last night, that sent me flying airborne headfirst into a round metal lamppost.
February 27, 2010 | Filed under
Commentary |
Read More »
So much for the First Amendment.
Morris Davis, the retired Air Force Colonel who served as the Chief Prosecutor of the Military Commissions at Guantánamo from September 2005 until his resignation in October 2007, has just lost his job at the Congressional Research Service (a branch of the Library of Congress) for writing, in his personal [...]
December 7, 2009 | Filed under
Politics |
Read More »
Nobody in the corporate media mentions it, but the war in Afghanistan which President Barack Obama just ramped up by 50% this year, with the dispatch, first of 17,000 troops last spring and now with another 30,000 troops, to begin deployment on Christmas, is being fought on the shaky legal basis of a hastily passed Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) voted by Congress back in October 2001, more than three years before Obama was even elected to the Senate.
December 3, 2009 | Filed under
Commentary |
Read More »
After railing against Senators and Representatives for their cowardly, uninformed and unacceptable attempts to prevent President Obama from bringing any Guantánamo prisoner to the US mainland for any reason — even for trials — I’m delighted to report that, last Tuesday, the Senate finally saw sense, voting, by 79 votes to 19, as part of a $42.8 billion bill for Homeland Security, to accept that the administration can bring prisoners to the US mainland to face trials.
October 27, 2009 | Filed under
Commentary |
Read More »
Presidential power has been on a pathway of expansion beyond what the Constitution outlined, and what a government of, by, and for the people requires, since George Washington was president. That expansion, which hit the highway after World War II, got a turbo boost during the co-presidency of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
October 17, 2009 | Filed under
Commentary |
Read More »
Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and other big city cops are calling for a new system of “citizen watch” programs, allegedly to help them spot hidden terrorists. I view this new call for a nation of private spies with a deep suspicion born of experience with the LAPD and its historic penchant for spying on law-abiding residents of that city.
October 7, 2009 | Filed under
Commentary |
Read More »
I like to believe that, despite studying Guantánamo for four years, I still have a sense of humor, but last Thursday I lost it, after 258 members of the House of Representatives (including 88 members of President Obama’s own party) voted for an idiotic, paranoid and unjust motion proposed by Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ken.), which was designed to “Prohibit the transfer of GITMO prisoners, period” (those were his exact words).
October 6, 2009 | Filed under
Commentary |
Read More »
I’m reminded of this incident by the recent efforts in Congress to produce a health care reform bill—especially of the efforts in Sen. Max Baucus’s Senate Finance Committee, which yesterday, after weeks of allegedly painful negotiating among the so-called Gang of Six and several weeks more of discussions among members of the whole committee, produced a bill that essentially leaves us with the status quo, except with some rather smelly additions.
September 30, 2009 | Filed under
Commentary |
Read More »
In an interview for Radio 4’s Today program, which was partly filmed and televised on BBC News, Fried gave Jon Manel a largely spin-free account of the problems he faces, some of which have been exacerbated by the US government’s unwillingness — or inability — to resettle some cleared prisoners on the US mainland.
September 17, 2009 | Filed under
World |
Read More »
Democrats dominate a government watchdog group’s annual list of the most corrupt members of Congress. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) said it’s list of the Most Corrupt Members of Congress provides a detailed analysis of the unethical and sometimes illegal activities of 15 congressmen and women who have most egregiously betrayed the public’s trust.
September 16, 2009 | Filed under
Politics |
Read More »
