by James Bovard
On June 4, 2010, FFF policy advisor James Bovard gave the following speech at The Future of Freedom Foundations Restoring Liberty and the Constitution supper seminar in Bernville, Pennsylvania. The speech can be viewed below in its entirety.
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by Andy Worthington
A week ago Thursday, three former Guantánamo prisoners who were released in Slovakia in January this year, after the U.S. government concluded that it was unsafe for them to be returned to their home countries, which all have poor human rights records, embarked on a hunger strike to protest the conditions in which they are ... [click for more]
by Andy Worthington
Saturday was the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, established twelve years ago to mark the day, in 1987, when the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Punishment or Treatment came into force, but you wouldn’t have found out about it through the mainstream U.S. media.
No editorials or news ... [click for more]
by Andy Worthington
Three weeks ago, I wrote a bitter commentary about the repeated failures of the U.S. government to release an innocent Yemeni prisoner in Guantánamo — a student, Mohammed Hassan Odaini, now aged 26, but just 18 when he was seized — even though he was cleared for release by a military review board under President Bush in 2006, ... [click for more]
by Andy Worthington
On June 2 last year, the Pentagon announced that a Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo, Mohammed al-Hanashi (also known as Muhammad Salih) had died, reportedly by committing suicide. He was the fifth reported suicide at Guantánamo, following three deaths on June 9, 2006, and another on May 30, 2007, and he was the sixth man to die at ... [click for more]
by Andy Worthington
On the evening of March 28, 2002, Mohammed Hassen, an 18-year-old Yemeni student at Salafia University in Faisalabad, Pakistan, made a decision that was to change his life forever. He had been visiting fellow students in another house connected with the university, had stayed for dinner, and had decided to stay the night rather than traveling back to his ... [click for more]
by Andy Worthington
On Friday, the Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., delivered a genuinely disturbing ruling (PDF) regarding prisoners in the U.S. prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, which has turned the clock back to the darkest days of the Bush administration, before prisoners seized in the war on terror had any recourse to justice if they claimed they ... [click for more]
by Jacob G. Hornberger
I recently wrote two articles in which I criticized liberals for being two-faced and hypocritical when it comes to racial issues. The articles, which concerned the minimum wage, a longtime favorite government program among liberals whose negative effects fall disproportionately on blacks, were entitled “Why Do Daily Kos and Alternet Favor a Racist Government Program?” and “ [click for more]
by James Bovard
In his commencement address at the University of Michigan on May 1, President Obama warned that public ignorance subverts self-government. Obama declared: “When we don’t pay close attention to the decisions made by our leaders, when we fail to educate ourselves about the major issues of the day... that’s when democracy breaks down. That’s when power is abused.”
Unfortunately, most ... [click for more]
by Andy Worthington
On April 20, unnoticed by any media outlet whatsoever, a Libyan prisoner at Guantánamo, Omar Mohammed Khalifh (also identified as Omar Abu Bakr) lost his habeas corpus petition.
I learned about the ruling through a “Guantánamo Habeas Scorecard” maintained by the Center for Constitutional Rights, but although Judge James Robertson’s unclassified opinion is not yet available, ... [click for more]
by Sheldon Richman
Arizona’s horrid law empowering cops to demand that people show their “papers” when suspected of being in the country without government permission holds an important lesson for both so-called progressives and conservatives. It’s a lesson about a seemingly separate issue: drugs.
Concern about illegal immigrants along the Mexican border would undoubtedly diminish if the “war on drugs” ended. (It’s not ... [click for more]
by Andy Worthington
Since coming to power 15 months ago, promising to close Guantánamo within a year, and suspending the much-criticized military commission trial system for terror suspects, President Obama’s zeal for repudiating the Bush administration’s “war on terror” detention policies has ground to a halt.
The rot set in almost immediately, when the new administration invoked ... [click for more]