For all its foreign policy lapses, the United States has long stood as a beacon of individual freedom. The US Constitution and Bill of Rights constrain government action against individuals to a degree unimagined elsewhere in the world. Even the most criticized parts of the Bill of Rights, like the Second Amendment guarantee of the right ro bear arms, are, in William O. Douglas's felicitous phrase, "designed to take the government off the backs of people." It is commonplace to observe that the September 11 attacks undermined those constraints. In the run-up to Christmas, Glenn Greenwald, Salon's tenacious legal affairs reporter, produced...

26 December, 2010

Some reaction to yesterday's Wikileak disclosure of horrific footage from an American helicopter gunship mowing down unarmed* civilians, as crewmen gloated over the killings. James Fallows: I can't pretend to know the full truth or circumstances of this. But at face value it is the most damaging documentation of abuse since the Abu Ghraib prison-torture photos. As you watch, imagine the reaction in the US if the people on the ground had been Americans and the people on the machine guns had been Iraqi, Russian, Chinese, or any other nationality. As with Abu Ghraib, and again...

06 April, 2010