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President Bush’s Speech on Proposed Legislation
Relating to Treatment of Detainees
By Dave Caddell
09/07/06
On September 6, 2006, President George W. Bush gave a speech to explain his administration’s new course of action in dealing with accused terrorists captured on the global battlefield. In this speech he outlined two major developments. For the first time, the president admitted that United States government agents had been holding and interrogating a small number of highly dangerous and important figures in the war on terror in discrete and unnamed locations around the world. This approach, he insists, has been very helpful in gaining important information to foil planned attacks and to learn how the major terrorist networks are organized, communicate and plan attacks. However, he stated that those individuals have been transferred to Guantanamo and would face trials by military commissions as soon as Congress passes his proposed legislation outlining the rules and details of those proceedings. And second, he explained the basic parts of his proposed legislation on how government agents can fight the War on Terror. More. |
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Amnesty International: Israeli War Crimes
By Dave Caddell
09/03/06
On Wednesday, August 23, 2006, Amnesty International published their findings from a month long investigation into whether Israel deliberately attacked civilian targets during their strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Their clear and unambiguous answer to this question is, “yes.” Concluding that there should be a full blown investigation into the culpability of both sides—Israel and Hezbollah—for war crimes during their brutal attacks on each other over the last month, the committee determined that “Israel conducted attacks throughout Lebanon from land, sea and air, killing some 1,000 civilians.” The findings from the investigation are direct and poignant. More. |
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A Worthy Punishment
Justice for Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling
By Rachel King
06/08/2006
A Houston jury convicted Kenneth Lay, 64, and Jeffrey Skilling, 52, of 25 counts of insider trading: six counts for Lay and 19 for Skilling. Their crimes helped destroy the multi-billion dollar corporation Enron, leading it into bankruptcy, which cost investors millions of dollars and caused the loss of jobs, investments and pensions for thousands of workers. The collapse of Enron scared Wall Street investors, caused a chill on the stock exchange, led to the collapse of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm and caused lawmakers to pass sweeping changes to corporate practices.
On September 11, 2006, U.S. District Judge Simeon T. Lake III will sentence the two men for their crimes in what is, almost certainly, the most serious white-collar criminal case in U.S. history. More. |
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Pirates of the Corporation
Activist attorneys are using a law enacted in 1789 to hold American companies responsible for abetting the worst crimes overseas
By Joshua Kurlantzick
Tuesday, August 2, 2005
In the spring of 2003, Terry Collingsworth was holed up in a Bangkok hotel, meeting with a group of Burmese villagers. Terrified by horrors they'd witnessed in Burma, the villagers had contacted local human rights activists, who in turn had gone to Collingsworth, executive director of a small Washington nonprofit called the International Labor Rights Fund, for salvation. Now, almost 10 years later, over the course of days in the hotel, Collingsworth was still sifting through the tales of abuse. The group had claimed that the oil company Unocal had hired Burmese army troops to secure the construction of a pipeline through the country, and that the troops had forced people living near the pipeline into slave labor. One woman was allegedly shoved into a fire holding her baby. More. |
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Black Man With a Gun
By Neal Shaffer
12/10/03
Periodically, a voice of reason comes from somewhere deep in the wilderness to prompt a needed rethinking of the paradigm that, itself, is partially responsible for the problem. Such a voice is that of Kenneth Blanchard. Blanchard, a former U.S. Marine and federal law enforcement officer, works as a Baptist minister doing outreach work in the Washington, D.C., area. He is also the author and proprietor of BlackManWithAGun.com, a site he started with the goal of changing people's perceptions about the sort of person who is in favor of gun rights, and why. More. |
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Michael Jackson Is Guilty?!
By David Dalton
11/20/03
Michael Jackson is guilty as hell. The case has been made beyond the shadow of a doubt. Haven't you been paying attention? Bill Press, Dan Abrams, Chris Mathews, Imus, Brian Williams, Dateline NBC and E! Bill O'Reilly, Linda Stasi of the New York Post, Diane Diamond from Court TV, whatshername from Celebrity Justice (!), and Gloria Allred have all come right out and said it. How many psychologists, profilers, relatives, ex-cops, ex-D.A.s, ex-employees' lawyers, and free-floating pundits do you need? More. |
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Why Is File Sharing So Popular?
By Neal Shaffer
10/07/03
In one of the first major, above the board clashes between technology and the old economy (at least as far as average consumers are concerned), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) recently filed 261 lawsuits against individual users of file-sharing sites such as Kazaa and Grokster. Record sales have been in decline for several years, and the RIAA has decided that downloading is largely to blame. Their response is a study in ignorance, and it reveals desperation in an industry that, if it can't catch up, might never be the same again. More. |
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Or Prohibiting the Free Exercise Thereof
Why the First Amendment doesn't protect Rastafarians
By Jayson Whitehead
08/27/03
To be a Rastafarian in America is to practice one’s religion under the constant threat of prosecution. The federal government condemns virtually all marijuana use and Attorney General John Ashcroft and the drug enforcement authorities have made its eradication one of their top priorities. A laughable campaign to link marijuana to terrorism as well as an assault on medical marijuana, whose development and use in some manner have been ratified by ten states, illustrate the federal government’s antipathy toward the herb. More. |
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Commercial Speech v. Free Speech
Can Marc Kasky make Nike tell the truth?
By Jayson Whitehead
04/23/03
This story begins in 1997, when Marc Kasky opened up his New York Times in his home in San Francisco and began reading an article about shoe manufacturer Nike. "Prior to that day, I was aware of the protests," he says. "Nike had opened a Niketown in San Francisco. And there had been a lot of protests by activists and organizations about what they were claiming was Nike's sweatshop practices in Southeast Asia, and the issues that related to that health, safety, etc." More. |
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Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State
An interview with Author Daniel Dreisbach
By John W. Whitehead and Casey Mattox
10/28/02
In 1802 Thomas Jefferson penned a letter to the Danbury, Connecticut, Baptist Association in which he described the First Amendment as erecting a "wall of separation between church and state." That phrase, largely forgotten for nearly 150 years, was reintroduced to our lexicon in 1947 by Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in his opinion in Everson v. Board of Education, a case holding that state funded transportation of all students to and from their schools, including parochial schools, was constitutional. The wall metaphor has since been accepted by most Americans, and many jurists, as the authoritative description of the interaction between religion and civil government countenanced by the First Amendment. In his latest book, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State, Daniel Dreisbach exposes the history of the wall metaphor and argues that the wall is rooted in anti-Catholicism and the fear of religious influence on public life. More. |
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The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms
Who does the Second Amendment protect?
By Neal Shaffer
11/25/02
On this much we can all agree: America has a very powerful relationship with firearms. We owe our existence as a nation to the practical application of guns, and just as surely we owe the twinge of some of our greatest tragedies to their misuse. From there the debate branches out in a hundred directions or more, polarizing the American populace along the way. Guns have become a litmus test for political orientation—a window into an entire belief system: pro-gun equals conservative; anti-gun equals liberal. Unfortunately, as is often the case, the breakdown obscures the reality, and honest debate is rendered all but impossible. There is no shortage of opinion, and every question is rhetorical. More. |
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Cops at War
The drug war and the militarization of Mayberry
By Joel Miller
12/30/02
Waking up to the concussive sound of explosions, the rumble of heavy machinery, and the blaring crackle of a public-address system is hardly how most people enjoy greeting the day. Much worse when those things are accompanied by nearly four-dozen heavily armed police officers with a tank-like armored vehicle, seizing control of a city block.
This isn't a scene out of Judge Dredd or some dystopian cop movie set in the near-distant future. As far as news cycles go, it's actually old news, happening, as it did, in the wee hours of Oct. 17, 2002, in Whiteaker, Ore., when police staged what residents described as a military-style invasion of their neighborhood. More. |
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