After 9/11, the word of the president was supposedly the only protection that the rights and liberties of the American people needed. After 9/11, President Bush granted himself unlimited, unchecked power over anyone in the world suspected of being a terrorist. The...
A former speechwriter for President Richard Nixon thinks his old boss made a mistake when he ended the military draft in the early 1970s during the war in Vietnam. Noel Koch reports that Nixon himself came to believe he erred and “[urged] that the draft be...
Mohammed ElBaradei – Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency – was in Israel last week. Pakistan next week? Or maybe India? Or North Korea? All in pursuit of a nuke-free world. But getting rid of nukes is not ElBaradei’s job. True,...
In what civil liberties advocates call the most massive database surveillance program in U.S. history, the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, or Matrix, continues to compile billions of records on law-abiding citizens and receive federal funding, despite...
Iraq is suffering an acute economic crisis marked by widespread poverty, catastrophic levels of unemployment and deteriorating work conditions for those fortunate enough to have jobs. Yet according to reports by international labor and human rights groups, a series of...
While the Pentagon claims that it is trying to expedite the implementation of last week's decision by the Supreme Court to provide fair reviews of the status of some 594 terrorist suspects held at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, human rights groups are...
Media attention in late June focused on the European Union summit in Ireland, the NATO summit in Turkey, and the surprise early transfer of "sovereignty" to the Iraqi interim government. As noteworthy as each of these might have been, equally significant events were...
A U.S. Army counterintelligence agent who accused fellow National Guardsmen of abusing Iraqi detainees says that his own commander coerced an Army psychiatrist into diagnosing him as "delusional." According to Sergeant Greg Ford, his commanding officer confronted...
I love the sharp tongue of the British. A former legal adviser to the British Foreign Office has said George Bush's war on terrorism is "legal nonsense" and confers no more power on the United States to detain people than the war against obesity. That's true. The...
LONDON - The ruling by the International Court of Justice in The Hague that the "security wall" Israel is building in the West Bank is illegal marks a major victory for Palestinians. The ruling is not binding. Officially it is termed only an "advisory...
