Civil Liberties & Privacy

Pentagon Learns About the Sixth Amendment

by Jacob G. Hornberger July 30, 2004

The Pentagon is learning that things work differently here in the United States than they do in Iraq. In this country, when the judiciary issues an order, the Pentagon is required to obey it. That’s why the government is now permitting Ali Saleh al-Marri to meet ...

Padilla, Hamdi, and Rasul: Charge Them or Release Them

by Jacob G. Hornberger July 16, 2004

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that Yaser Hamdi and Shafiq Rasul (and other Guantanamo detainees) are entitled to seek habeas corpus relief in U.S. federal district courts to challenge their detention by U.S. military officials, the question naturally arises: What relief should the federal district courts ...

War Is No Blank Check

by Sheldon Richman July 14, 2004

“A state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens.” Those words from Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor are music to the ears of every friend of freedom. That line is a direct slap at President George ...

The Draft Is Fascist

by Sheldon Richman July 9, 2004

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 “ that the draft be restored.” Well, that’s too bad. ...

Torture as Due Process

by James Bovard July 1, 2004

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 Supreme Court, in a series of rulings on June ...

A Supreme Reason to Celebrate the Fourth of July

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 30, 2004

With the Supreme Court’s delivery of severe blows this week against the assumption and exercise of certain dictatorial powers by the president and the Pentagon, every American should feel freer, safer, and more secure. While the Court avoided issuing a substantive ruling in the most critical case — the Jose Padilla case — the Court’s holdings and statements in the ...

No Right to Remain Silent

by Sheldon Richman June 25, 2004

You have the right to remain silent — unless you’re asked your name when you aren’t even charged with a crime. That’s right: it can now be a crime to refuse to tell a policeman your name. What’s happening to America? Nevada and 20 other states have criminalized remaining ...

The Fraud of Physician-Assisted Suicide

by Sheldon Richman June 23, 2004

Freedom is so little understood in this “land of the free” that it is often confused with its opposite. Case in point: Oregon’s 1994 Death With Dignity Act, which a federal appeals court recently shielded from attack by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft. The law permits what has come to ...

The Padilla Doctrine Doesn’t Infringe on Freedom — It Destroys It

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 4, 2004

Critics of the federal government’s two-year incarceration of accused terrorist Jose Padilla without charges or trial correctly point out that the government has violated Padilla’s right to counsel and his rights to due process of law, habeas corpus, and jury trial, all of which are guaranteed by the U.S. ...

Fourth Circuit Moussaoui Ruling Is a Loss for the Constitution

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 30, 2004

Although the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals paid the obligatory lip service to the Sixth Amendment in the Zacharias Moussaoui case, in an audacious act of judicial activism, its ruling effectively rewrote and negated the Sixth Amendment to account for the government’s new “war on terrorism.” While ostensibly upholding the Constitution, the court’s ruling was actually a ...

The New Privileges of U.S. Citizenship

by William L. Anderson April 16, 2004

Last month one of us celebrated a good friends official swearing in as a U.S. citizen. After a decade-plus ordeal of wading through red tape and jumping through Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) hoops, this woman exclaimed, Thank God, I will never have to deal with the INS again! Neither of us had the heart to break the news ...

Missing the Point on Government Power

by Scott McPherson April 2, 2004

Opposition to the USA PATRIOT Act has spread throughout this country. Around the nation, Americans are joining together to send a clear message to Washington that expanding federal powers at the expense of personal liberty in the name of security in the post–9/11 world is not only unnecessary, ...