Real Patriots Uphold Our Values
Guantánamo Deaths Deserve a Closer Look
Did three detainees at Guantánamo die of suicide or homicide? According to the Pentagon, three Guantánamo prisoners hung themselves in their individual cells on the night of June 9, 2006, in order to commit an act of "asymmetrical warfare." But that official...
Obama Undeserving of Civil Liberties Accolades
At the end of each year I typically award the "Freeby" to the person who has done the most in the service of civil liberties. As dusk fell on 2008 and the reign-of-error Bush administration was packing up its jackhammers, I felt then that I could have...
Uighurs Deserve Legal Remedy
Ubi jus ibi remedium. Probably nothing turns readers off more than starting a column with some incomprehensible Latin phrase. But this one's relevant. It means: Where there is a right, there is a remedy. When a legal wrong has been done, the courts should be able to...
A Golden Opportunity to Declaw PATRIOT Act
You remember the USA PATRIOT Act, don't you? It was that 342-page bill that sped through a supplicant Congress within weeks of 9/11, dismantling our privacy rights like a castoff Hollywood set. A reauthorization in 2006 made some things better and some worse, but...
Obama’s Wrong Turn on Detention
Confront Our Own Torturers
Let's see, a U.S. court successfully convicted the son of the brutal former president of Liberia, Charles Taylor, of torturing his father's political opponents. But we're going to leave it to a Spanish judge to go after our own Torquemadas? A Spanish court has...