A Collapsing Empire — Opportunities for Restoring the Republic (video) by Karen Kwiatkowski December 17, 2008 On June 8, 2008, Karen Kwiatkoski gave the following Speech at FFF’s conference Restoring the Republic 2008: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties. The speech can viewed below in its entirety.
Will Europe Take the Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners? by Andy Worthington December 15, 2008 As rumors continue to fly regarding Barack Obama’s plans to close the notorious “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, one country in the European Union, Portugal, took the opportunity offered last Wednesday by the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — one of whose Articles declares, “Everyone has the right to seek and ...
The Bailout State by Sheldon Richman December 15, 2008 Ours is the Age of the Bailout. Bailing out failing companies is not new, but today the scale is unprecedented and the opposition is scant. The government today is committed to more than $7trillion in various forms of stock purchases, loans, and guarantees. The Treasury secretary has been given awesome discretionary power to buy bad securities or shares in ...
War Is Peace and Other Things the Government Wants You to Believe by Sheldon Richman December 12, 2008 On June 8, 2008, Sheldon Richman gave the following Speech at FFF’s conference Restoring the Republic 2008: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties. The speech can viewed below in its entirety.
Lost In Guantánamo: The Faisalabad 16 by Andy Worthington December 8, 2008 On the evening of March 28, 2002, an armed group of FBI agents and Pakistani commandos, accompanied by a hundred local police, stormed Shabaz Cottage, an apartment in a quiet neighborhood in the city of Faisalabad, Pakistan. Their target, who had been tracked by the careless use of a satellite phone, was Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, more commonly ...
The Socialist Bailout of Wall Street, Part 1 by Jacob G. Hornberger December 1, 2008 Part 1 | Part 2 The massive federal bailout of U.S. financial firms reflects everything that’s wrong with the economic system of welfare and interventionism under which the United States has operated since at least the 1930s. There are critically important lessons in the bailout that the American people ignore at their peril. While most politicians and mainstream pundits ...
Torture, Preventive Detention and the Terror Trials at Guantánamo by Andy Worthington December 1, 2008 In the real world outside the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Barack Obama’s pledge to close Guantánamo and scrap the military commissions (the system of trials for “terror suspects” that was established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks) has provoked a rare outburst of frenzied media coverage. With no concrete plans announced by the President-elect’s transition team, ...
Government Failure by Sheldon Richman December 1, 2008 To hear the media pundits and presidential candidates tell it, you’d think Adam Smith had been president for the last eight years and, with a Congress full of free-market advocates, had enacted an agenda of full-blown laissez faire. Had that been the case, we would not be in the mess we are in economically. Alas, it has not been the ...
How Abu Ghraib Was Politically Defused, Part 2 by James Bovard December 1, 2008 Part 1 | Part 2 From the first days of the torture scandal, the Bush administration followed a “deny everything and praise American values” strategy to defuse the controversy over Abu Ghraib. In a May 28, 2004, interview, a French journalist mentioned Abu Ghraib and asked President Bush, “Do you feel responsible in any way for this moral failure in ...