Glenn Greenwald's Blog, page 150

Who are the real "crazies" in our political culture?

One of the favorite self-affirming pastimes of establishment Democratic and Republican pundits is to mock anyone and everyone outside of the two-party mainstream as crazy, sick lunatics.  That serves to bolster the two political parties as the sole arbiters of what is acceptable:  anyone who meaningfully deviates from their orthodoxies are, by definition, fringe, crazy losers.  Ron Paul is one of those most frequently smeared in that fashion, and even someone like Howard Dean, during those...

A disgrace of historic proportions

(updated below)

The Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg reports that, this week, yet another federal judge has ordered the Obama administration to release yet another Guantanamo detainee on the ground that there is no persuasive evidence to justify his detention.  The latest detainee to win his habeas hearing, Mohammed Hassen, is a 27-year old Yemeni imprisoned by the U.S. without charges for 8 years, since he was 19 years old.  He has "long claimed he was captured in Pakistan...

The unasked question

(updated below)

From CNN:

The article notes that a new classified Department of Homeland Security report documents that "the number and pace of attempted attacks against the United States over the past nine months have surpassed the number of attempts during any other previous one-year period."

Maybe, one day, we might want to ask:  "why"?  Is it because they Hate Us For Our Freedoms more than ever before?  Are we Extra Free now, thus increasing...

Democrats and the McCarthyite attack on detainee lawyers

(updated below)

Over at Balkinization, Law Professor Steve Vladeck has done a superb job highlighting a truly vile provision in the National Defense Authorization Act for FY2011, which directs the Pentagon's Inspector General to "conduct an investigation of the conduct and practices of lawyers" who have represented Guantanamo detainees and then report back to Congress.  That provision is the brainchild of GOP Rep. Jeff Miller of Florida, who has labeled efforts to represent...

U.S. demands civilian trials -- except in the U.S.

(updated below)

The Washington Post, today (h/t Arkinsaw):

A judge granted parole Tuesday to Lori Berenson, the 40-year-old New York activist who has spent 15 years in Peruvian prisons on a conviction of aiding leftist rebels. . . . Berenson had for many years denied any wrongdoing, maintaining she was a political prisoner and not a terrorist. But her defense team said in papers submitted to the judge that she "recognized she committed errors in involving herself in...

Those irrational, misled, conspiratorial Muslims

(updated below)

The New York Times this morning has a particularly lush installment of one of the American media's most favored, reliable, and self-affirming rituals -- it's time to mock and pity Those Crazy, Primitive, Irrational, Propagandized Muslims and their Wild Conspiracy Theories, which their reckless media and extremists maliciously disseminate in order to generate unfair and unfounded hostility toward the U.S.:

Conspiracy theory is a national sport in Pakistan...

War on whistle-blowers intensifies

The Obama administration's war on whistleblowers -- whose disclosures are one of the very few remaining avenues for learning what our government actually does -- continues to intensify.  Last month, the DOJ announced it had obtained an indictment against NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, who exposed serious waste, abuse and possible illegality.  Then, the DOJ re-issued a Bush era subpoena to Jim Risen of The New York Times, demanding the identity of his source who revealed an extremely inept...

The absence of debate over war

The Washington Post's Fred Hiatt ponders how little attention our various wars received during the primary campaigns that were just conducted:  "You would hardly know, from following this year's election campaign or the extensive coverage of last week's primaries, that America is at war. . . . those wars, and the wisdom of committing to or withdrawing from them, have hardly been mentioned in the hard-fought campaigns of the spring."  Hiatt is right in that observation, and it's worth...

Obama wins the right to detain people with no habeas review

Few issues highlight Barack Obama's extreme hypocrisy the way that Bagram does. As everyone knows, one of George Bush's most extreme policies was abducting people from all over the world -- far away from any battlefield -- and then detaining them at Guantanamo with no legal rights of any kind, not even the most minimal right to a habeas review in a federal court.  Back in the day, this was called "Bush's legal black hole."  In 2006, Congress codified that policy by enacting the Military...

The Tory/Lib-Dem Government endorses actual change

(updated below - Update II)

Over the past couple years, I've written numerous times about the serious left-right coalition that had emerged in Britain -- between the Tories and Liberal Democrats -- in opposition to the Labour Government's civil liberties abuses, many (thought not all) of which were justified by Terrorism.  In June of 2008, David Davis, a leading Tory MP, resigned from Parliament in protest of the Government's efforts to expand its power of preventive detention to ...