In ending the war in Afghanistan, Biden left the door open for more “counterterrorism” — with serious implications for our foreign policy, politics, and legal system.
In a democracy, shouldn’t we be using peacetime laws to constrain us during war, rather than wartime laws to constrain us during (relative) peace?
A culture of Islamophobia continues to poison the politics of both India and the United States.
A strong global right to electronic privacy demands recognition, in U.S. law and internationally.
You remember James Sensenbrenner, don’t you? A Republican from Wisconsin, he introduced the Patriot Act in the House of Representatives 42 days after 9/11. Among his other “accomplishments” was authoring the Real ID Act in 2005 and acting as a general thorn in the...
The world started to make sense to Zac Reed when he accepted a new religion into his life. As he describes his story in the new book of oral histories titled Patriot Acts, assembled by Alia Malek, Reed’s conversion to Islam erased everything he had done for his country. He’d served in the military, volunteered for Desert Storm as part of the National Guard, and worked as a firefighter. But his life of service didn’t protect him from being detained and interrogated as part of the religious profiling that took place in the United States after 9/11.
Most readers of the September 7, 2007 Washington Post who stayed with the news (i.e., non-sports, non-fashion, non-entertainment) sections of the paper probably went to the story headlined: "Petraeus Open to Pullout of 1 Brigade." Nothing remarkable about that; given that General David Patraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, were due to testify before Congress starting Monday September 10.
Since the beginning of the republic, U.S. presidents have used some form of secrecy in the course of governing. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, congressional hearings in the 1970s and the disclosure of covert U.S. programs of assassination and destabilization overseas temporarily reduced the scope of secret activities sponsored by the executive branch. From the 1980s on, however, presidents have come to rely increasingly on secrecy-related practices. Though the U.S. Constitution does not explicitly grant executive secrecy in the list of Article II powers, presidents have increased their powers through legislation, the federal courts’ recognition of legal defenses to conceal information, and responses to the ongoing threat of terrorism.
This law, as has become more and more clear over the last three months, was but the initial move by the Bush administration in what has become an extended and coordinated attack on the civil liberties of U.S. persons in the name of national security and—ironically—in the name of bringing democracy and civil liberties to Iraq.