Spencer Ackerman of Wired has an excellent piece today on the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command’s secret jails in Afghanistan. Ackerman notes: Human rights groups have been sounding the alarm about these detention centers since 2009. Detainees who claim to have gone through the sites have told them about abuses inside the so-called “Black Jails” […]
Tag Archives | Bush
Obama’s Unlimited Right to Kill?
Is there any limit to the killing that a U.S. president can initiate as long as he claims benevolent motives? Over the past dozen years, three presidents commenced bombing nations that posed no threat to the U.S. The only “restraint” seems to be whether presidential speechwriters can stitch together phrases to portray the president as […]
Video – My CPAC Patriot Act Bash (and Jacob Hornberger’s Speech)
FFF “Repeal the PATRIOT Act!” Roundtable from CPAC 2011 from The Future of Freedom Foundation on Vimeo. Here’s the video from Saturday’s CPAC forum, sponsored by Campaign for Liberty. Ivan Eland did an excellent job of moderating. My speech was probably about 15 minutes. Hornberger followed and gave the best speech I have ever seen […]
Video – Me & Jacob Hornberger Thumping Conservative Statists
Jacob Hornberger Show from CPAC 2011 with James Bovard from The Future of Freedom Foundation on Vimeo. From the Future of Freedom Foundation: This edition of the Jacob Hornberger Show was recorded at the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 11, 2011. Jacob and special guest James Bovard discuss “Why Do Conservatives Support Statism?” The […]
Trashing the Patriot Act at CPAC
Christian Gomez of the New American wrote an excellent article on the Patriot Act bashing during CPAC. Here’s a few outtakes from his piecedealing with my spiel at CPAC on Saturday: Bovard started his speech by asking the audience: “I’d like to know how many people in this room have had their phone calls wiretapped […]
Patriot Act and Attention Deficit Democracy
The Campaign for Liberty reposted this 2006 article of mine today, so, what the heck – I’ll pile on. The Patriot Act and Attention Deficit Democracy By James Bovard The American political system failed when Congress and the media recently rolled over in favor of extending the most onerous provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act. […]
Our Know-Nothing Foreign Policy
From January 2011, my American Conservative review of Derek Leebaert’s Magic and Mayhem. Worst and Brightest Review of Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy From Korea to Afghanistan, Derek Leebaert, Simon & Schuster, 336 pages By James Bovard In the decades since John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, foreign-policy experts have become Washington’s leading […]