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Have America's Anti-Terror Policies Made It Safer?

Professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh, vice president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and author of Success Without Victory, Jules Lobel has written and litigated extensively in the area of war and emergency power. He argues that the Bush administration's detention and deportation of terror suspects has not made the U.S. safer from terrorism.

The irony is that sacrificing fundamental commitments to the rule of law ("disappearing" suspects into secret CIA prison and "waterboarding" them to compel them to talk; asserting unchecked executive power to violate criminal laws and spy on Americans without warrants; holding suspects indefinitely in Guantanamo's law-free zone; attacking Iraq against the will of the U.N. Security Council and most of the world) have not made America safer, but in fact more vulnerable to future terrorist attacks.

Jules Lobel is author of Success without Victory and co-author of Less Safe, Less Free: The Failure of Preemption in the War on Terror.
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5 nov  |  Jon Stewart explains how torture such as waterboarding sounds so much more fun than simulated drowning.  . . read more
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Did those who were briefed condone these practices? Judge for yourself. From ABC News. "Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing," the report quotes former director of the CIA Porter Goss as saying. "And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.”

Shame on those members of Congress who were briefed and kept silent. Shame on those in the Administration who were complicit and acted moral and indignant when questioned about torture. Shame on a complicit media for not boring in and exposing this madness. Shame on those in America who will applaud this brutal and deadly practice.

[HomePage Daily’s question to the Australian media: Why do you still refer to CIA torture as “enhanced interrogation”?]  . . read more

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"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." -- Ronald Reagan (1986)