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Second Circuit Affirms Dismissal of Arar

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Harper's - By Scott Horton - Nov. 03 (Editorial) - The majority, Calabresi charges, “engaged in extraordinary judicial activism.” Its activism was aimed at extricating political actors from a precarious predicament and keeping the door firmly shut on what may well be the darkest chapter in the entire history of the Justice Department.

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Peering Under the Rock at the C Street “Family”

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Harper's - By Scott Horton - Jul. 29 (News Analysis) - At C Street, the “totalitarianism of Christ” is advocated, and Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden, and Lenin are held out as positive examples of how a politician can achieve his goals.

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Labor's last stand: The corporate campaign to kill the Employee Free Choice Act

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Harper's - By Ken Silverstein - Jun. 24 (Special Report) - (subscribers only for full article, see link.) THE BUSINESS LOBBY HAS FRAMED ITS OPPOSITION TO EFCA AROUND THE “SECRET BALLOT” AND LABOR “COERCION.” BUT THE CURRENT RULES GIVE EMPLOYERS A CHOKEHOLD OVER UNION ELECTIONS

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Jesus killed Mohammed: The crusade for a Christian military

Tue, 05 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Harper's - By Jeff Sharlet - May. 05 (Investigative Report) - When Sergeant Jeffery Humphrey and his squad of nine men, part of the 1/26 Infantry of the 1st Infantry Division, were assigned to a Special Forces compound in Samarra, he thought they had drawn a dream duty. “Guarding Special Forces, it was like Christmas,” he says. In fact, it was spring, 2004; and although Humphrey was a combat veteran of Kosovo and Iraq, the men to whom he was detailed, the 10th Special Forces Group, were not interested in grunts like him. They would not say what they were doing, and they used code names. They called themselves “the Faith element.” But they did not talk religion, which was fine with Humphrey. An evenhanded Indianan with a precise turn of mind, Humphrey considered himself a no-nonsense soldier. His first duty that Easter Sunday was to make sure the roof watch was in place: a machine gunner, a man in a mortar pit, a soldier with a SAW (an automatic rifle on a bipod), and another with a submachine gun on loan from Special Forces. Together with two Bradley Fighting Vehicles on the ground and snipers on another roof, the watch covered the perimeter of the compound, a former elementary school overlooking the Tigris River.

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The Enemy Combatant Canard

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Harper's - By Rachel Maddow - Feb. 18 (Interview) - Thomas Jefferson and James Madison shared one definition of the term “tyrant”–a ruler who deprived a person of his freedom without operation of law and without accountability before a court. Which perhaps explains why American historians are consistently ranking George W. Bush at the very bottom of the list of all American presidents; the man, ultimately, is guilty of tyranny.

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Halliburton Settlement Leaves Unsettling Questions

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Harper's - By Scott Horton - Feb. 15 (Opinion) - ... the Obama Administration are chumps if they sit back and accept the deal the Bush Justice Department concluded for the benefit of Dick Cheney. The whole matter needs to be reopened and examined independently. Let’s hope they consider Patrick Fitzgerald for the job.

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The $4.7 trillion pyramid

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Harper's - By Michael Hudson - Feb. 13 (Special Report) - Social Security, formerly the “third rail” of American politics, has now been trod upon, in rather dramatic fashion, by George W. Bush. Given that the maneuver is both stupid and unnecessary, one must ask why. After all, the program's alleged deficiencies, if there are any, will not manifest themselves until at least 2018. This is not quite the same as worrying about the sun's eventual collapse into a black hole, but for most politicians a problem that lies thirteen years in the future is nearly the same thing. Clearly all is not what it seems. Bush himself offers two reasons for the present boldness. The first—that Social Security is “in crisis”—is easily dismissed. Government actuaries, backed by economists from across the political spectrum, insist there is no funding problem. The Social Security Administration will take in more money than it pays out for the next thirteen years; it has built up a reserve of $1.8 trillion in interest-bearing Treasury bonds for the years after that; and any later shortfall can be covered easily by even a partial rollback of the recent tax cuts for the rich. Bush's second argument sounds more promising. If the American people will simply follow his plan, he says, they too will become rich.

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How to Save Capitalism: Fundamental fixes for a collapsing system (Harper's Magazine)

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Harper's - By Michael Hudson - Feb. 13 (Special Report) - If the financial debacles of the past decade—the enormous bubbles, the credit collapse and its trillion-dollar consequences—have taught us anything about the American economy, it is that capitalists have done a remarkably poor job of safeguarding the future of capitalism. Our system became so dominated by finance, insurance, and real estate, and by the complex derivative securities these industries engendered, that the most eminent financiers (and their unsleeping computers) were unable to protect us from economic shocks. For a number of years, farsighted commentators—including in this magazine—warned of the looming credit collapse, and yet the masters of our economy took no action until the crisis was already upon us. Now we must not only repair our tenuous financial system but shore it up to withstand two great, gathering storms: dwindling energy supplies and accelerating climate change. To this end, Harper’s Magazine asked a group of leading economic thinkers to offer sweeping but concrete proposals for the rescue of capitalism, and capitalists, from doom.

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Yoo for the Defense

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Harper's - By Scott Horton - Jan. 31 (Opinion) - I’ve followed John Yoo and his writings with some care for a while now, and I think I finally understand what this is about. Namely, a pending probe by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is looking at serious ethical issues surrounding the issuance of Yoo’s legal opinions.

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The Genius of Karl Rove

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Harper's - By Scott Horton - Jan. 29 (Opinion) - Democratic strategists are praying that Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh remain as the guiding lights of the G.O.P.

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Six Questions for David Hendrickson on the Obama Administration, Banana Republics and Foreign Policy

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Harper's - By Ken Silverstein - Nov. 13 (Interview) - The bailout bill was a colossal mistake and it is based on a false premise: specifically, that we’re facing a liquidity crisis and not an insolvency crisis. Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson originally justified buying all this toxic paper because we were facing a short-term panic.

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The Southern Strategy Comes of Age

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Harper's - By Scott Horton - Nov. 04 (Opinion) - At the heart of the Rovian calculus was America’s Southland, which he saw as the ideological and political base of the reshaped Republican Party of the age of Bush. But the very success of this strategy has been the party’s unmaking. It has also marked a complete betrayal of the founding values of the party of Lincoln and Frémont—an act of ultimate political cynicism.

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The wrecking crew: How a gang of right-wing con men destroyed Washington and made a killing

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Harper's - By Thomas Frank - Sep. 22 (Special Report) - Fantastic misgovernment is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, what follows from that: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we've come to expect from Washington.

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Elegy For A Rubber Stamp

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Harper's - By Lewis H. Lapham - Aug. 24 (Opinion) - Long ago in the days before journalists became celebrities, their enterprise was reviled and poorly paid, and it was understood by working newspapermen that the presence of more than two people at their funeral could be taken as a sign that they had disgraced the profession. Full pdf here: www.nationinstitute.org/pdf/Elegy_for_a_Rubber_Stamp.pdf

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The Justice Department's truthiness problem

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Harper's - By Scott Horton - Aug. 09 (Opinion) - Americans now have more confidence in the integrity and reliability of Post Office employees than they do in federal prosecutors and FBI agents. But is the Justice Department going to start coming to grips with its "truthiness" problem, or will it just plod along through inauguration day, 2009?

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The Misdirection

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Harper's - By Scott Horton - Jul. 22 (Opinion) - The questions that the Congressional investigators want answered are fairly simple. Who is responsible for torture policy? What caused it to begin? Exactly how was it pushed through over strong opposition from career professionals in the uniformed services, in the intelligence community, and among lawyers in government service?

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Vital Strategic Debate at Air Force: What color leather for our comfort capsules?

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Harper's - By Ken Silverstein, Project on Government Oversight - Jul. 21 (News Analysis) - While elements of the Air Force brass were bickering about color coordination for their new comfort capsules, troops have sat for hours on long flights in mangled seats and on netting inside cargo aircraft . . .

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Six Questions for Arvind Ganesan on the Beijing Olympics, the Media and Human Rights

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Harper's - By Ken Silverstein - Jul. 14 (Interview) - Arvind Ganesan has been at Human Rights Watch as the Director of the Business and Human Rights Program and is involved in research, advocacy, and policy development. His program has issued groundbreaking reports on Enron, Wal-Mart, corruption in Angola, where American oil companies have major investments, and Western companies censoring the Internet in China.

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Six Questions for Jane Mayer, Author of The Dark Side

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Harper's - By Scott Horton - Jul. 14 (Opinion) - We learn the details on the torture techniques and the drama behind the fierce and lingering struggle within the administration over torture, and we learn that many within the administration recognized the potential criminal accountability they faced over these torture tactics and moved frantically to protect themselves from possible future prosecution

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Torture from the Top Down

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Harper's - By Scott Horton - Jun. 19 (News Analysis) - Yesterday's hearings in the Senate Armed Services Committee ...brought a new focus on....William J. Haynes II, Rumsfeld's lawyer and now a lawyer for Chevron. Two things emerge from the hearing. First, that Haynes was effectively a stationmaster when it came to introducing torture techniques in the "war on terror," circumventing opposition from career military and pushing through a policy of brutality and cruelty, by stealth when necessary. And second, that Haynes lacks the courage of his convictions, a willingness to stand up and testify honesty about what he did.

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My Lobby, Myself: How John McCain's hypocrisy is laundered as reform

Sat, 31 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Harper's - By Ken Silverstein - May. 31 (Special Report) - In 2001, the year after he lost the G.O.P. presidential nomination to George W. Bush, McCain helped found the Reform Institute... a nonprofit whose stated aim was to advance ideals of influence-free good governance. But as McCain makes a second run at the White House, his supposedly independent project functions rather obviously as a public-relations arm of his political machine. In fact, in its revolving-door policy for loyalists, its dubious fund-raising, and its improper support of its founder's aspirations, it resembles nothing so much as yet another Washington influence peddling scheme.

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Numbers Racket: Why the economy is worse than we know

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Harper's - By Kevin Phillips - Apr. 30 (News Report) - If Washington's harping on weapons of mass destruction was essential to buoy public support for the invasion of Iraq, the use of deceptive statistics has played its own vital role in convincing many Americans that the U.S. economy is stronger, fairer, more productive, more dominant, and richer with opportunity than it actually is.

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A Tale of Three Lawyers

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Harper's - By Scott Horton - Apr. 08 (Opinion) - He watched a shameless assault on America's Constitution and commitment to the rule of law carried out by the Bush Administration. He watched the introduction of a system of cruel torture and abuse. He watched the shaming of the nation's uniformed services, with their proud traditions that formed the very basis of the standards of humanitarian law, now torn asunder through the lawless acts of the Executive. Matthew Diaz found himself in a precarious position--as a uniformed officer, he was bound to follow his command. As a licensed and qualified attorney, he was bound to uphold the law. And these things were indubitably at odds.

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Worst. President. Ever.

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Harper's - By Scott Horton - Apr. 06 (Opinion) - America's historians, it seems, don't think much of George W. Bush. Now in all fairness, historians should wait a while before passing judgment on a president's who served recently, much less one still in office. But the current incumbent is a special case. After all, 81 percent of Americans, according to a recent New York Times poll, believe he's taken the country on the wrong track. That's the highest number ever registered. The same poll also says 28 percent have a favorable view of his performance in office, which is also in Nixon-in-the-darkest-days-of-Watergate territory.

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The Spitzer Sex Sting: A Few More Questions

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Harper's - By Scott Horton - Mar. 11 (Opinion) - ... there is a second tier of questions that needs to be examined with respect to the Spitzer case. They go to prosecutorial motivation and direction. Note that this prosecution was managed with staffers from the Public Integrity Section at the Department of Justice. This section is now at the center of a major scandal concerning politically directed prosecutions. During the Bush Administration, his Justice Department has opened 5.6 cases against Democrats for every one involving a Republican.

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