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The justifications for Obama's hit list reveal what is missing most from American political thought

A partial defense of Obama's assassination program highlights the corrupted rationale which justifies it

Those claiming that terrorists don't belong in court -- because some might win -- reject basic American justice

The deceit and propaganda which justify both wars are identical, as are the harms they cause

A U.S. bill seeks to crack down on foreign bootlegging websites. But are its provisions too sweeping?

Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, the co-chairs of President Obama's deficit commission, have signaled for months that they are not friends of Social Security. In August, Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, wrote that Social Security is "a milk cow with 310 million tits." Last February, Bowles, who made his fortune on Wall Street and served as a top aide in the Clinton White House, boasted in a speech to bankers, "We're going to mess with Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security."

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 a "Bush's legal black hole." In 2006, Congress codified that policy by enacting the Military Commissions Act, but in 2008, the Supreme Court, in Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that provision unconstitutional, holding that the Constitution grants habeas corpus rights even to foreign nationals held at Guantanamo. Since then, detainees have won 35 out of 48 habeas hearings brought pursuant to Boumediene, on the ground that there was insufficient evidence to justify their detention. Immediately following Boumediene, the Bush administration argued that the decision was inapplicable to detainees at Bagram -- including even those detained outside of Afghanistan but then flown to Afghanistan to be imprisoned. Amazingly, the Bush DOJ -- in a lawsuit brought by Bagram detainees seeking habeas review of their detention -- contended that if they abduct someone and ship them to Guantanamo, then that person (under Boumediene) has the right to a habeas hearing, but if they instead ship them to Bagram, then the detainee has no rights of any kind. In other words, the detainee's Constitutional rights depends on where the Government decides to drop them off to be encaged. One of the first acts undertaken by the Obama DOJ that actually shocked civil libertarians was when, last February, as The New York Times put it, Obama lawyers "told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush's legal team." . . .

72% of Guantanamo detainees whose cases have been heard by a federal court have been ordered released. News and views from Glenn Greenwald

Listen to an interview with 18-year-old American Gulet Mohamed from his detention in Kuwait

There may yet be justice for the victims of the post-9/11 US torture program. Just not in the United States.

Think tank "scholars" are lavishly funded to defend elite prerogatives

On CNN last night, I debated anchor Jessica Yellin and Bush official Fran Townsend and their views were identical

Demands that it be easier to involuntarily commit the mentally ill are knee-jerk and irrational

Obama has won the War on Terror debate -- for the American Right.  And they're quite appreciative

THE EGYPTIAN TINDERBOX: HOW BANKS AND INVESTORS ARE STARVING THE THIRD WORLD

The truth is that the United States has been behind the curve not only in Tunisia and Egypt for the last few weeks, but in the entire Middle East for decades. We supported corrupt autocrats as long as they kept oil flowing and weren't too aggressive toward Israel. Even in the last month, we sometimes seemed as out of touch with the region's youth as a Ben Ali or a Mubarak. Recognizing that crafting foreign policy is 1,000 times harder than it looks, let me suggest four lessons to draw from our mistakes:

A proposal to help Bank of America destroy the group and its advocates reveal a deeply lawless mindset

Amnesty denounces the conditions of Bradley Manning's detention, while new documents shed light on detainee deaths