War on Terrorism

No End to the War on Terror, No End to Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington May 13, 2011

With the death of Osama bin Laden, there is a perfect opportunity for the Obama administration to bring to an end the decade-long war on terror by withdrawing from Afghanistan and closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The justification for both the invasion of Afghanistan (in October 2001) and the detention of prisoners in Guantánamo (which opened in January 2002) is ...

The USA PATRIOT Act: Dispelling the Myths

by Bruce Fein May 12, 2011

On Behalf of Campaign for Liberty Re: The USA PATRIOT Act: Dispelling the Myths Before the House Judiciary Committee May 11, 2011 Bruce Fein & Associates, Inc. 1025 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Suite 1000 Washington, D.C. 20036 Phone: 703-963-4968 bruce@thelichfieldgroup.com Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee: I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on behalf of the Campaign for Liberty ...

Scaremongers Fail to Undermine WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Revelations

by Andy Worthington May 3, 2011

For regular readers of The Future of Freedom Foundation, the release by Wikileaks, of classified military documents relating to almost all of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo will not have yielded any great surprises. Since October 2008, I have been writing weekly columns for FFF, dealing exclusively with the horrors of Guantánamo and the Bush ...

Obamas Broken Guantánamo Promise

by Sheldon Richman May 2, 2011

The latest leaks of classified documents, which show that the U.S. government imprisoned hundreds of men at Guantánamo Bay on the most dubious “evidence,” brings to mind the question, Why hasn’t President Obama kept his promise to close the infamous prison that will forever stain America’s honor? As the UK Guardian, one of the newspapers that disclosed the documents, reported, ...

More Judicial Interference on Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington April 18, 2011

Last week, in my article, “How the Supreme Court Gave Up on Guantánamo,” I explained how, given the option of addressing complaints made by prisoners in Guantánamo regarding the basis of their ongoing detention, the Supreme Court chose not to, leaving the final decisions regarding the prisoners not in the hands of the District Court in Washington, D.C., ...

How the Supreme Court Gave Up on Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington April 12, 2011

Last Monday, on the very same day that the Obama administration gave up on Guantánamo, so too did the Supreme Court. For opponents of the unconstitutional aberration that is Guantánamo, Monday, April 4, 2011, will go down in the history books as the day that they were obliged to watch impotently as federal court trials for terrorist suspects ...

Holder, Obama, and the Cowardly Shame of Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington April 5, 2011

Since May 2009, when President Obama first bowed to Republican pressure on national-security issues and abandoned a plan by White House Counsel Greg Craig to rehouse on the U.S. mainland a couple of cleared prisoners at Guantánamo who were at risk of torture if repatriated, it has been apparent that no principles are sufficiently important to the administration ...

Torture and Terrorism: In the Middle East It’s 2011, In America It’s Still 2001

by Andy Worthington April 1, 2011

The gulf between what’s happening on the ground in the Middle East and the way it is perceived by the U.S. intelligence services — as well as the gulf between how critics perceive America’s counterterrorism policies in the Middle East, and how those policies are perceived by U.S. intelligence — were recently exposed in an article in the Wall ...

Bush, Torture, and the Rule of Law

by James Bovard March 22, 2011

Last November, George W. Bush’s memoir, Decision Points, hit the streets. And Americans could see firsthand the former president bragging about ordering torture. Bush wrote that when he was requested to approve the CIA’s waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he responded, “Damn right.” Six months before his memoir was released, in a speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he told ...

The Story Behind the Permanent War

by Anthony Gregory March 18, 2011

Washington Rules: Americas Path to Permanent War by Andrew J. Bacevich (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 286 pages. During the last decade, left-liberals accused the controversial Bush administration of a wickedness, arrogance, and incompetence that supposedly set that presidency apart from others in American history. Bush was an especially bad warmonger who broke with the traditional and venerable principles that had ...

Obama’s Disgrace

by Sheldon Richman March 11, 2011

The words could have been spoken by a government official in Orwell’s 1984: “Today, I am announcing several steps that broaden our ability to bring terrorists to justice, provide oversight for our actions, and ensure the humane treatment of detainees,” President Barack Obama said. What Obama actually did, the Washington Post reported, was to sign “an executive order ... that ...

Obama Turns the Clock Back on Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington March 10, 2011

Those of us who have been studying Guantánamo closely were not surprised when, on March 7, President Obama announced that he was lifting a ban on trials by military commission at Guantánamo, which he imposed on his first day in office in January 2009, and also issued an executive order establishing a periodic ...