Daily Articles

Shades of Operation Condor

by Jacob G. Hornberger July 29, 2009

The CIA’s assassination plan, which it chose to keep secret from Congress, brings to mind Operation Condor, a similar plan run by DINA, which was Chile’s counterpart to the CIA under the dictatorial regime of military strongman Augusto Pinochet. After Pinochet took power in a coup, his agents proceeded to round up communists and ...

Martial Law and the War on Terrorism

by James Bovard July 28, 2009

The New York Times reported last week that the Bush administration considered sending in the U.S. military to arrest the so-called Lackawanna Six in 2002. Ironically, one of the worst prosecutorial overreaches by the Justice Department in the war on terror almost resulted in a temporary period of martial law. The Lackawanna Six was a group of half-a-dozen Yemeni-Americans from a ...

Obama and the Guantánamo Deadline: It’s Worse than You Think

by Andy Worthington July 27, 2009

When the Obama administration’s Detention Policy Task Force, established by executive order on the president’s second day in office, conceded last week that it would miss its six-month deadline to issue its recommendations about how to close Guantánamo, many observers focused on whether this meant that Obama would fail to meet his deadline of Jan 21, 2010, for ...

Failure Leads to Success in the Public Sector

by Gregory Bresiger July 24, 2009

We are playing out the latest chapter in the crisis and leviathan model in the financial-services business. It is a model in which public-sector failure leads to bigger government. It leads to success for socialists who want the government to expand into every aspect of our economy but dont want to overtly call for nationalization ...

Obama’s Failure to Deliver Justice to the Last Tajik in Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington July 21, 2009

Two weeks ago, the indefatigable Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald, Guantánamo’s most dedicated reporter, outlined the story of Umar Abdulayev, the last Tajik prisoner in Guantánamo, who has been cleared for release from the prison on two occasions — once by a military review board under the Bush administration, and six weeks ago by the Obama administration’s ...

The Fatal Conceit of Health-Care Reformers

by Sheldon Richman July 20, 2009

It’s easy to get distracted by the details and crushing cost estimates of “health-care reform” while losing sight of the key question: Can a handful of congressmen, most of whom probably have never even run a small business, design an entire market for medical services and insurance? A few moments’ thought should be enough to ...

Guantánamo and the Courts, Part 1: Exposing the Bush Administration’s Lies

by Andy Worthington July 13, 2009

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 In recent months, those who have been studying Guantánamo closely have come to the disturbing conclusion that the biggest obstacle to President Obama’s pledge to close Guantánamo by January 2010 comes not from the fear-mongering and opportunistic politicians who recently voted to prohibit the use of any funds to ...

A New Stimulus? Washington Never Learns

by Sheldon Richman July 10, 2009

In Washington, the rule is: If a little poison doesn’t cure the patient, give him more. This rule is being applied not only to health care, where massive doses of government intervention are being prescribed to treat the toxicity of past government intervention. It’s also being used in the attempt to end ...

McNamara’s Other Debacle

by James Bovard July 9, 2009

Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who died on July 6, was best known for ratcheting up the Vietnam War thanks to the false claims he provided to President Johnson, Congress, and the American people. Despite his lies that vastly expanded an unnecessary conflict and cost more than a million American and ...

Judge Rules that Afghan “Rendered” to Bagram in 2002 Has No Rights

by Andy Worthington July 6, 2009

In a depressing if predictable decision last Monday, U.S. District Court Judge John D. Bates ruled that Haji Wazir, an Afghan businessman seized in the United Arab Emirates in 2002 and rendered to the U.S. prison at Bagram airbase, can continue to be held as a prisoner without rights, even though he has never had an adequate opportunity to ...

Gold and Freedom, Part 4

by Jacob G. Hornberger July 1, 2009

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 On April 5, 1933 — about a month after taking office — President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order commanding every American to turn in his gold to the federal government. The order was soon ratified by Congress, which made it a felony offense for Americans ...

Still Meddling After All These Years

by Sheldon Richman July 1, 2009

American presidents have long regarded Latin America as their “backyard.” The Monroe Doctrine warned the European powers to stay out — by what right? — and since then American chief executives have deemed it entirely proper to intervene when things did not go as they liked. Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, the ...