Hornberger's Blog is a daily libertarian blog written by Jacob G. Hornberger, founder and president of FFF.
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by Jacob G. Hornberger
Last February a federal court in Richmond sentenced a Roman Catholic priest, Rodney L. Rodis, to five years in prison for wire fraud and money laundering arising out of his embezzlement of hundreds of thousands of dollars from church coffers. The state of Virginia has now indicted him for the actual ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
In an editorial published last Saturday, the Washington Post celebrated the killing of a man in Somalia who the Post said “deserved the label of ‘evildoer.’” The man was killed when a U.S. Navy ship fired Tomahawk missiles at a Somali home in which the man was apparently located. The Post ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
In his new book Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA by Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post columnist, Morley delves into an interesting and revealing aspect of the John Kennedy assassination.
Morley points out that the CIA’s official story had long been that the CIA ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Friday, May 30, 2008
Compassionless Conservatism
by Jacob G. Hornberger
In an op-ed entitled “The Libertarian Jesus” by Michael Gerson in today’s Washington Post, Gerson provides an excellent example of the moral blind spot that afflicts the conservative movement.
Gerson, who served as a speech writer for President Bush and who was a senior policy advisor for the conservative Heritage Foundation, ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
I just finished reading a very interesting book entitled Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA by Jefferson Morley. The book is a biography of Winston Scott, the head of the CIA’s Mexico City office from 1959 to 1969. Morley is a former ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Just as Eastern European and Russian dissidents who opposed the Soviet Empire’s tyrannical system are today celebrated as heroes, so it will be with those Americans who have opposed the Pentagon’s system at Guantanamo Bay. Among the heroes will be Air Force Col. Morris Davis, who formerly served as the Defense Department’s chief prosecutor for ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
One of the principle differences between the Pentagon’s military-tribunal system and the U.S. federal-court system for prosecuting accused terrorists involves the presumption of innocence. In the federal-court system, the accused is presumed innocent while in the Pentagon’s system, the accused is presumed guilty and treated accordingly.
An article in yesterday’s New York Times reflects ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Ever since invading U.S. troops failed to find those infamous WMDs that Saddam was supposedly about to unleash on the United States, U.S. officials have claimed that their primary objective in invading and occupying Iraq, a predominantly Muslim country, has been an altruistic one: They did it out of love and concern for the Iraqi people, nobly sacrificing more ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Ever since 9/11 the U.S. government has maintained a criminal-justice system that enables it to treat suspected terrorists in two alternative ways: as criminal defendants in federal district court or as unlawful enemy combatants in the Pentagon’s military system. It would be difficult to find a better example of denial of equal protection and a violation of the rule ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Conservatives are reigning supreme in Afghanistan and the United States, especially in their advancement of censorship.
In Afghanistan, a country whose regime was installed thanks to the U.S. invasion of that country several years ago, the minister for information and culture, Abdul Karim Khurram, an Afghan conservative, has ordered television networks to stop broadcasting five ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa may not be long for this world, both in a political sense and in genuine life-or-death sense. He recently fired his defense minister, army chief of intelligence, and commanders of the army, air force, and joint chiefs.
Why might those firings cost Correa his job or even his life? Because the reason he fired them was ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
A front-page article in yesterday’s New York Times reminds us of the ominous 1961 warning of President Dwight Eisenhower, a warning that unfortunately the American people decided to ignore. Eisenhower wrote:
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even ...