Last week, the government announced that it does not want to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four of his colleagues whom it claims are the remaining conspirators of the attacks on 9/11. All five are awaiting trial at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The...
Killing With Near Certainty
Last week, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. secretly reaffirmed his own self-willed authority to kill persons in other countries, so long as the CIA and its military counterparts have "near certainty" that the target of the homicide is a member of a terrorist...
Edward Snowden: An American in Moscow
When the Trump administration obtained an indictment of Edward Snowden for violation of the Espionage Act of 1917, many of us who believe that the Fourth Amendment means what it says were deeply critical of the government, and we remain so today. This week, retaining...
Presidents Kill Because They Can
What if the purpose of sending nearly $60 billion in cash and military aid to Ukraine is to extend the war Ukraine can only win if American troops become involved? What if the government is giving Ukraine more borrowed federal dollars in six months than Ukraine's...
Forever Prisoners
"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical." ~ Thomas Jefferson, January 30, 1787 When Thomas Jefferson wrote to his friend, neighbor and...
Julian Assange and Personal Freedom
"I prefer the tumult of liberty to the quiet of servitude." ~ Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) It wasn't until 1969 that the Supreme Court's modern First Amendment jurisprudence made it clear that whenever there is a clash between the government...
Bloody Gina and Her Team of Torturers
Last week, at a pretrial hearing at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi who is charged with being the mastermind of an attack on the USS Cole in 2000 at which 17 American sailors were killed, the psychologist in charge of...
The Bill of Temporary Privileges
Last week, the Director of National Intelligence, the data-gathering and data-concealing arm of the American intelligence community masquerading as the head of it, revealed that in 2021, the FBI engaged in 3.4 million warrantless electronic searches of Americans. This...
Using War To Assault Freedom
Most judges and lawyers agree that the war on drugs in the past 50 years has seriously diminished the right to privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. Now a small group of legal academics is arguing that the war in Ukraine should be used to diminish property...
Is Putin a War Criminal?
President Joseph R. Biden caused a stir in the media last week when he called Russian President Vladimir Putin "a war criminal." Biden's statement was apparently made to capitalize on the government's and the American media's monolithic anti-Russian...