WHAT IF THE CIA OR FBI should catch wind of an imminent plot to blow an American airliner out of the sky? "Should the government disclose terrorist threats to the public and let passengers make their own decisions about how to react?" Not all that many years ago, the New York Times editorial page…
Since shortly after September 11, 2001-and under the terms of a formal order signed by the president of the United States sometime early the following year-the Pentagon's giant signals--intelligence division, the National Security Agency, has monitored "the international telephone calls and…
LAST TUESDAY THE SUPREME COURT heard oral argument in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights. Rumsfeld, of course, is the secretary of defense. FAIR, as it's more commonly known, is a coalition of 36 law school and faculty groups, backed by friend-of-the-court briefs from…
FOR A BRIEF MOMENT AT a think-tank speech here in Washington a few weeks back, Vice President Dick Cheney appeared to be unholstering the same, classic loose-lips-sink-ships argument that wartime White Houses have been firing at their critics since the Royal Marines burned James Madison's wartime…
THE SENATE-APPROVED VERSIONS of next year's Defense authorization and appropriations bills each contain an amendment sponsored by Arizona's John McCain that would, as the commonplace newspaper shorthand has it, "make torture illegal" at Pentagon facilities throughout the world. The House-approved…
RICHARD DICKER OF THE NEW York-based international monitoring outfit Human Rights Watch remembers how "distressing" it was, in those first weeks and months after the liberation of Baghdad, to watch nightly news footage of ordinary Iraqis "desperately uncovering and excavating mass graves and…
TO SOME EXTENT it was probably inevitable that the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States--the "9/11 Commission" lately so much in the news--would deal unfairly with those individuals and agencies who were "supposed to" defend us against the attacks in question. Modern…
WE DON'T CLAIM to understand the mind of Howard Dean. With back-room assistance from a small army of Democratic party foreign policy brahmins, Dean recently produced a long, formal speech on "Meeting the Security Challenges of the New Century." The speech was advertised as a reassuring…
IT WAS A TOUGH AND TRICKY CROWD. When Joe Lieberman took the stage, on October 17, and politely reaffirmed his commitment to the security of a Jewish state in Israel, he was booed and heckled for it. Yet the next day, when it was his turn to address the Dearborn, Michigan, candidates' forum…
WE ARE LIVING IN another low, dishonest decade, it seems--at least where the intersection of race and American electoral politics is concerned. Following the 1990 census, the Republican National Committee--determined to press its partisan interests in forthcoming state-by-state congressional…
EARLY LAST WEEK, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals here in Washington, refereeing yet another legal skirmish over the civil liberties implications of Bush administration anti-terrorism policy, handed down yet another ruling favorable to the government. This is what usually happens: With fewer…
MEETING THIS WEEK here in Washington, our nation's scholarly community, through the American Association of University Professors duly assembled, stands poised to commit an act of self-betrayal the depth of which is without obvious precedent in the history of American higher education. It's not a…
FIVE MONTHS AGO, on September 24, 2002, an FBI electronic surveillance team recorded a telephone conversation between two Tampa, Florida, residents: a woman named Fedaa Al-Najjar and her friend Hatim Naji Fariz, the manager of a local medical clinic. The subject was Al-Najjar's husband, Mazen, a…
A FEW WEEKS BACK, a Washington-based "investigative research" outfit called the Center for Public Integrity announced that it had recently "obtained" a large and significant set of confidential legal papers from someone inside the Justice Department--a someone whose name the Center for Public…
NEEDLESS TO SAY, everyone in Washington politics and journalism is accomplished and popular and physically attractive. But even here, there are some among us whom Allah has clearly singled out for special blessing. And Adel al-Jubeir is one of them. He's the 40-year-old "foreign policy adviser" to…
EARLY ONE EVENING in September 1986, a 17-year-old local girl was walking along West North Street in Wooster, Ohio, a rural town about 50 miles southwest of Cleveland, when Joel Douglas Walton Yockey, 30, also of Wooster, rolled up next to her in a pickup truck and asked if she'd like a ride.…
AN INTERESTING THING happened in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia last Thursday, as the nation woke up to the news that two people thought to be responsible for the Washington area's recent wave of sniper murders had finally been arrested.
"A few weeks ago, we were doing some work on my back porch back home, tearing out a section of old stacked rocks, when all of a sudden I uncovered a nest of copperhead snakes. . . . A copperhead will kill you. It could kill one of my dogs. It could kill one of my grandchildren; they play all the…
IN LAST WEEK'S EPISODE, much of respectable Washington was aghast that the Bush White House had "politicized" the possibility of war by questioning the patriotism of congressional Democrats who opposed the president's Iraq policy. Respectable Washington was mistaken about all this. First off, war…
MR. DURBIN: As I return to Illinois, people tell me over and over again: Senator, when you go back, please go to the floor of the Senate and express our feelings that we do need a coalition of force, not just for the principle and value of it, but for the military significance of it . . . MR. REID:…
ABROAD IN THE LAND, needless to say, there is plentiful criticism of the Bush administration's purported tendency to deny terrorism suspects the judicially supervised civil liberties protections of the regular criminal law. Also abroad in the land--in an Alexandria, Virginia, federal district…
DURING THIS JULY FOURTH SEASON, the two hundred twenty-seventh year of American democracy now dawning, just how secure--under the temporary stewardship of President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft--are the basic constitutional rights that democracy was founded to assert? One or another version…
"Our biggest problem is we have people we think are terrorists. They are supporters of al Qaeda. . . . They may have sworn jihad, they may be here in the United States legitimately, and they have committed no crime. And what do we do for the next five years? Do we surveil them? Some action has to…
HEARINGS on the government's pre-September 11 counterterrorism efforts begin this week on Capitol Hill. These earliest sessions of the House and Senate intelligence committees will be conducted behind closed doors. But it is a fair bet which official lapses will principally occupy the panelists'…
AT 7:53 A.M. local time on August 21, 1995, a Number 26 bus filled with Monday morning commuters slowed to a stop in front of Rene Kassem High School in the northern Ramat Eshkol suburb of Jerusalem. Rene Kassem just happened to be out of session that day; its students owe their lives to a fluke of…
AT 7:53 A.M. local time on August 21, 1995, a Number 26 bus filled with Monday morning commuters slowed to a stop in front of Rene Kassem High School in the northern Ramat Eshkol suburb of Jerusalem. Rene Kassem just happened to be out of session that day; its students owe their lives to a fluke of…
IN 1948, when the armies of five surrounding Arab dictatorships invaded tiny, newborn Israel--in what the secretary general of the Arab League announced was a "war of extermination" against "the Jews"--the United Nations sat on its ass. And did not send a fact-finding mission. But, oh, how the U.N.…
MANY A bone-dry political science disquisition has by now been written about the institutional combat between White House and Congress during the first year of the Bush administration. Our current president is a man who seems especially determined to protect the authority and prerogatives of his…
THERE'S BEEN a great lot of hand-wringing these past few weeks over the "axis of evil," President Bush's State of the Union coinage for hostile foreign dictatorships that cultivate weapons of mass destruction and make sponsorship of terrorism a conscious policy. The president's critics wonder: Do…
IN FEBRUARY 1998, after an American team won the first Olympic gold medal ever awarded for women's hockey, there was a brief rainshower of patronizing media coverage, as is customary in such matters. Weren't they a great bunch of gals? And didn't they really deserve it? And--forget about…
NEXT WEDNESDAY, January 23, Rep. Dan Burton's House Committee on Government Reform will hold a hearing on the "history of congressional access to deliberative Justice Department documents," Burton having served a subpoena for certain such documents on Attorney General Ashcroft in early September,…
LAST WEEK the White House made a down payment on President Bush's promise that due-process protections would be extended even to the most fanatic current enemies of U.S. policy. No, we don't mean the Justice Department's December 11 indictment of Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged "twentieth man" in…
OF ALL the myriad criticisms lately leveled against President Bush's November 13 "military tribunals" order, the most wonderful--for pure dishonesty--is the indignation expressed over the directive's alleged denigration of regular Pentagon legal work. What the president has proposed "bear[s] scant…
IT IS NOW a virtually unquestioned assumption of American elite conversation that the law enforcement measures George W. Bush has adopted in the aftermath of September 11 make him, as the New York Times matter-of-factly reports, "only the latest of many presidents to restrict civil liberties in…
NINE MONTHS HAVE NOW GONE BY, and we, like most Americans, find much to praise in the conduct of George W. Bush's presidency--especially his recent assumption of wartime leadership. But we are a bit concerned by one aspect of the administration's performance these past couple of weeks: In the…
BY THE SECOND WEEK OF AUGUST, instructors at the Pan Am Flying Academy in Eagan, Minnesota, had become so suspicious about the behavior of a new, foreign student that they were moved to contact the FBI's field office in Minneapolis. One Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan extraction in…
IF YOU’VE HEARD IT ONCE, you’ve heard it a thousand times already—from the same people who always tell us obvious things a thousand times when once would do: In response to a mass murder of our fellow citizens carried out by foreign hands, Americans must be careful not to alter the fundamental…
WE WILL ADJUDICATE who’s at fault in a moment. We will begin, instead, simply by noting that today, nearly eight months after Inauguration Day, it remains unclear whether the "Bush administration" actually warrants that designation. The president’s Social Security Administration has no…
LAST OCTOBER IN ST. LOUIS, during the closing minutes of their third and final televised debate, Al Gore and George W. Bush had a little exchange on the proper role of affirmative action in federal decision-making. A woman in the audience asked Governor Bush what his intentions were with respect to…
FROM RECENT SCHOLARSHIP has emerged a remarkably complete picture of modern American legal politics at the moment of creation. We now know that in the 1980s, occupying the farthest-right outposts of human imagination, was a barbarian tribe of conservative "Republicans" led by a mythic figure called…
TWO WEEKS AGO, following a long round of high-profile diplomacy, the Bush administration finally achieved what it thought an acceptable entente with the People’s Republic of China regarding the disposition of our downed EP-3 surveillance plane. The entire embarrassing incident thus safely consigned…
EVERY STUDENT OF AMERICAN POLITICS is familiar with the life-cycle biology of "borking," that process by which nominees for high national office are nowadays targeted for career-destroying character assassination. First there comes the insect's egg: a cartoon account, hatched by some ideological…
Nobody in the White House or Justice Department appears to have known who Tom Bhakta was. Not really. They didn't know where he lived, so the address boxes on all the relevant forms were left blank. They didn't even know how to spell his name; it came out "Bhatka" on both the president's executive…