What James Foley’s Murder Says about the U.S. by Jacob G. Hornberger August 29, 2014 Given that the Islamic State subjected American citizen James Foley to physical abuse, waterboarding, and extra-judicial execution, U.S. officials and American interventionists, including those in the mainstream media, are describing the Islamic State as savage and barbaric. But wait a minute! When the U.S. government was doing those same things, weren’t U.S. officials and American interventionists saying that such actions ...
Our Upcoming Conference by Jacob G. Hornberger August 28, 2014 We just received a grant from one of our donors to host what just might prove to be the finest and most important conference in the 25-year history of The Future of Freedom Foundation. We are doing the conference in partnership with the Young Americans for Liberty, a nationally renowned group devoted to libertarianism. We have worked with YAL in ...
The Murder of James Foley by Jacob G. Hornberger August 27, 2014 In response to the Islamic State's execution of American journalist James Foley, President Obama referred to Foley's killers as a “cancer.” That, of course, implies that anti-American terrorism is like a disease, one that strikes at nations willy nilly, without rhyme or reason. Obama’s cancer metaphor for ISIS brings to mind what President Bush said about al Qaeda after the ...
The Evil of U.S. Aggression against Iraq by Jacob G. Hornberger August 26, 2014 What better confirmation of the manifest failure of the philosophy of foreign interventionism than the renewed U.S. bombing of Iraq? Just think: All those hundreds of thousands of dead, maimed, detained, and tortured Iraqis, along with those who lost their homes, businesses, and savings. They were all bombed and shot by U.S. troops for nothing. All those Iraqis suffered and ...
How to Provoke a Crisis by Jacob G. Hornberger August 25, 2014 There is no one more capable at provoking a crisis than the U.S. national-security establishment. They are absolute experts at doing so. They have to be. Their survival and ever-increasing tax-funded bounty depends on it. Consider, for example, a recent altercation between a U.S. surveillance plane and a Chinese fighter jet near the coast of Japan. According to an article ...
Three Malignant Tumors on the Body Politic by Jacob G. Hornberger August 22, 2014 As everyone knows, no matter how healthy a person might be, cancerous tumors, if permitted to remain in the body, will ultimately bring about the person’s demise. Depending on the size and aggressiveness of the cancer, the end might occur sooner or it might come later, but it will inevitably come. The same holds true for the body politic. Once ...
Ferguson Cops and the Fourteenth Amendment by Jacob G. Hornberger August 21, 2014 The antagonism displayed by the militarized police force in Ferguson, Missouri, toward the protests and demonstrations by people outraged over the police killing of Michael Brown provides a good opportunity to review constitutional principles, especially the Fourteenth Amendment. We begin with the Constitution itself. When it called the federal government into existence, it simultaneously limited its powers to those enumerated ...
Welcome to Military America by Jacob G. Hornberger August 20, 2014 Perhaps it’s finally dawning on many Americans the adverse effect that the national-security state apparatus, which was grafted onto America’s governmental system after World War II, has had on American society. It’s taken the events in Ferguson, Missouri, to cause people to see what a militarized society looks like. We’ve seen the blowback that has come with U.S. imperialist and ...
What If the Military or CIA Had Killed Mike Brown? by Jacob G. Hornberger August 19, 2014 While the facts surrounding the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, must still be determined, one thing is clear: If it turns out that the killing was not justified, the law dictates that he is subject to being criminally indicted and also to being sued in a civil action for wrongful death by Brown’s survivors. Not so, however, ...
Embracing Communists by Jacob G. Hornberger August 18, 2014 For some 45 years, the U.S. national-security state justified its existence and its Cold War antics based on the “communist threat” that the United States was supposedly facing. If the United States failed to maintain an enormous standing army and a CIA, the nation would almost sure to fall into communist hands. Moreover, we were told, dark-side practices, such as ...
Why Reform the CIA? by Jacob G. Hornberger August 7, 2014 Just as I predicted in my article “Why Not Simply Abolish the CIA?” critics of the CIA’s illegally hacking into the computers of U.S. senators who were investigating CIA torture are calling for reform, rather than abolition, of the CIA. Stuck in the mindset of the national-security state, they simply cannot raise their vision to a higher level—to ...
The Fiasco of the Two World Wars by Jacob G. Hornberger August 6, 2014 I sometimes wonder whether U.S. officials changed the name of Armistice Day, which commemorated the end of World War I, to Veteran’s Day in order to get Americans to forget about World War I. If so, this year’s 100-year anniversary of the start of World War I must be their worst nightmare because it causes people to focus their ...
