After 9/11, President George W. Bush turned to Civil War precedents to create military tribunals for trying alleged “terrorists.” But in applying those draconian rules to a worldwide battlefield, he created the nightmarish potential for a global totalitarianism, as retired…
Category: Right Wing
Will the American Right Kill Us All?
Reagan’s Road to Climate Perdition
From the Archive: More than a quarter century after President Reagan ordered President Carter’s solar panels removed from the White House roof, new ones are being installed, a belated nod to the foresight of one president and a rebuke to the…
How False History Props Up the Right
Exclusive: The Right’s policy nostrums are failing across the board from free-market extremism to austerity as a cure for recession to continuing the old health-care dysfunction leaving only an ideological faith that this is what the Framers wanted. But that…
Greasing the Capitol’s Locked Gears
The Permanent ‘War on Terror’
Over the past dozen years, the “war on terror” has taken a profound toll on U.S. constitutional protections and democratic principles, a process that continues despite President Obama’s promise last May that “this war like all wars must end,” as…
Blaming Obama for Syrian Mess
’42’ and 44
Struggling for Peace in Colombia
Exclusive: Normally, peace negotiators end a conflict first and then examine the war crimes later. But the long-running civil war in Colombia has such a secretive and brutal history that efforts to cease the fighting began with an investigation of the slaughter, writes Andrés…
The Moral Imperative of Activism
Exclusive: Today’s crises endless war, environmental catastrophe, desperate poverty and more can seem so daunting that they paralyze action rather than inspire activism. But the imperative to do something in the face of injustice defines one’s moral place in the…