Daily Articles

Why is a Yemeni Student in Guantánamo, Cleared on Three Occasions, Still Imprisoned?

by Andy Worthington June 1, 2010

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 ...

The Libertarian Legacy of R.C. Hoiles, Part 1

by Wendy McElroy June 1, 2010

Part 1 | Part 2 The libertarian publishing giant Raymond Cyrus Hoiles created the newspaper and media chain known as Freedom Communications. He was an immensely successful businessman who opposed all governmental privileges for business. As a self-made man, he deeply respected the “working man” and willingly did the “grunt work” involved in ...

The Real Culprit in the Housing Crisis

by George Leef June 1, 2010

The Housing Boom and Bust by Thomas Sowell (Basic Books, 2009); 192 pages. Throughout Thomas Sowell’s long career, he has tried to get Americans to grasp some simple but crucial truths about economics and government policy. One of those lessons is central to this book, namely that it is a mistake to judge policy enactments on the basis of their stated, ...

The Black Hole of Bagram

by Andy Worthington May 24, 2010

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 ...

Is the Peace Movement Finally Awakening?

by Sheldon Richman May 24, 2010

What America needs most today is a peace movement, a broad-based coalition that opposes not only the American empire’s operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (as well as less overt activities elsewhere), but also their attendant accretion of presidential power, which diminishes or eliminates civil liberties and the traditional protections accorded criminal suspects. Unfortunately, there have been impediments to the ...

Rand Paul, Civil Rights, and More Liberal Hypocrisy on Race

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 21, 2010

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 “

Obama and Attention Deficit Democracy

by James Bovard May 21, 2010

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 ...

Who is the Syrian Released from Guantánamo to Bulgaria?

by Andy Worthington May 17, 2010

On May 4, two prisoners were released from Guantánamo — one to Spain and one to Bulgaria. Spanish media revealed that the former prisoner offered a new life in Spain (following the arrival of Walid Hijazi, a Palestinian, in February) was a Yemeni, but no further information has yet been revealed regarding his ...

Judge Denies Habeas Petition of an Ill and Abused Libyan in Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington May 10, 2010

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, ...

Immigration Socialism versus Freedom and the Free Market

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 7, 2010

Let me begin by making a very simple, direct point: There is one — and only one — solution to the so-called immigration crisis: freedom and free markets. Every other measure, including the recently enacted immigration law in Arizona, will accomplish nothing more than continue the “crisis” and actually exacerbate it. After all, how many times have we been here ...

Immigration, Civil Liberties, and the Drug War

by Sheldon Richman May 4, 2010

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 ...

Prosecuting a Tortured Child: Obama’s Guantánamo Legacy

by Andy Worthington May 3, 2010

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 ...