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How George W. Bush Redefined American Freedom

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George W. Bush is gone from Washington but his legacy, like an abandoned toxic waste dump, lingers on. Like President Franklin Roosevelt before him, President Bush helped redefine American freedom. And like Roosevelt’s, Bush’s changes were perversions of the clear vision the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us. What did freedom mean in the era of George Bush? In Iraq in September 2004, the U.S. military constructed Camp Liberty, a tent compound to house Iraqi detainees next to the Abu Ghraib prison. (The torture scandal and photos had been revealed in late April.) Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller declared that Camp Liberty and other changes in the treatment of Iraqi prisoners were “restoring the honor of America.” “Camp Liberty” was typical of the rhetorical strategy of the Bush administration: empty words in lieu of basic decency and honest dealing. From the beginning, President Bush invoked freedom to sanctify his war on terrorism. In his Oval Office address on the night of September 11, 2001, ...

The Pentagon’s Favorite Demon

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In 1991, as pressure was mounting in the U.S. Congress to cut the Cold War-era military budget, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staffs General Colin Powell said: “I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.” North Korea is still touted as a major threat to the United States, yet that conflict persists because of a refusal of the United States to agree to North Korea’s demand that all foreign troops leave the Korean peninsula once an armistice is signed. As some U.S. troops are withdrawn from Iraq and Congress looks to cut budgets, generals are busy exaggerating threats. North Korea’s million man army is mostly a collection of conscripts with old weaponry who spend most of their time harvesting crops. Its millions of “reservists” are ...

Obama’s Empire

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Why isn’t the honeymoon over yet? That all peace advocates still haven’t broken with Barack Obama is ominous, indeed. Do they really hate war, empire, and colonialism? Or did they just hate George W. Bush and Dick Cheney? Obama has been in power more than 100 days, which is time enough to judge the man’s intentions for the American empire. The signs are not good. Liquidation is clearly not on his agenda. He says he’ll close Guantánamo; however, he wants to restart military commissions (albeit, he promises, with more protections for the accused), but that is not a big improvement over the Bush policy. If the government has evidence that the men at Guantánamo plotted to commit violence against Americans, charge them and bring them to court. It worked with John Walker Lindh, Zacarias Moussaoui, Ali al-Marri, and ...