The Military Commissions for trying alleged al-Qaeda terrorists always had the risk of becoming Kafkaesque kangaroo courts with little credibility among people around the world, a danger that has become more and more acute as the process moves forward, Marjorie…
Category: The Bush-43 Administration
Another ‘War on Terror’ Casualty
Attorney Lynne Stewart aggressively defended alleged terrorists, making her a target of President George W. Bush’s “war on terror.” After 9/11, she was prosecuted for violating special security rules for dealing with a client and is now dying of cancer in…
Flag-Waving to Death
In American politics and media, anyone who questions the concept of “American Exceptionalism” is banished to the margins of society. But this self-aggrandizing notion has always contained a large measure of self-deception, ignoring the suffering inflicted on other peoples and on…
Supreme Court’s War on Democracy
Exclusive: The U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing majority is a serial killer of American democracy first Bush v. Gore, then Citizens United, now gutting the Voting Rights Act but another part of this crime story is the Right’s grotesque last stand for white…
Snowden’s Case for Asylum
Despite U.S. government pressure, Russian President Vladimir Putin is balking at demands that he extradite Edward Snowden from Moscow to face espionage charges for leaking secrets about America’s global surveillance operations. Still, Snowden’s status remains dicey, as Marjorie Cohn explains…
America’s Informant Society
During World War II, the U.S. military and public were told “loose lips sink ships,” perhaps a worthy wartime reminder. But the seemingly endless “war on terror” has made government hostility to openness part of America’s permanent wartime mentality, a…
Bush/Cheney Pulled Torture Strings
From the Archive: James Comey, President Obama’s nominee to be FBI director, was a conservative Republican lawyer when he went to work for George W. Bush’s administration and witnessed how the White House pulled the Justice Department’s strings to get…
Cables Hold Clues to US-Iran Mysteries
From the Archive: Iran’s election of Hassan Rowhani as president has raised hopes for a deal, with Iran accepting tighter constraints on its nuclear program and the West rolling back sanctions. But there has been a long and often secret…
Bush’s Foiled NSA Blackmail Scheme
More than a decade ago, President George W. Bush enlisted the National Security Agency in a blackmail scheme to dig up dirt to coerce UN Security Council members to approve his aggressive war against Iraq. But the plot was foiled by…
Hard Lessons from the Afghan War
For years, the Afghan Taliban have said they would negotiate with the U.S. once it was clear the Americans were committed to leaving, making their sudden commitment to talk less “surprising.” But Official Washington could learn other important lessons from…