“What are our global obligations? To give terrorists no support, no sanctuary.” – President Clinton, speaking before the United Nations on terrorism in 1998[1] “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” – President Bush, September 11, 2001[2] Ostensibly, the United…
Depleted uranium, or DU, is produced through the process of enrichment, in which the concentration of the U235 isotope of uranium is increased. For every 1 ton of enriched uranium resulting from the process, another 7 tons of “depleted” uranium are produced as a byproduct. Several hundreds of thousands of…
With all the talk today about “spreading democracy”, two major questions should immediately come to mind. The first is whether or not there is any truth at all to the declarations of noble intent from the proponents of empire, a subject which has received great attention from every point along…
Much attention has been paid recently to a monument of the Ten Commandments between the Texas Capitol and State Supreme Court, with protestors of the statue arguing that it is a violation of the clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution commonly referred to as “separation of Church and…
The corporation is, by nature, an exploitative entity. I’ve pointed this out in conversation only to have the notion summarily rejected, the defense being that this corporation or that corporation is not exploitative, so the hypothesis must therefore be false. The fallacy should be obvious enough, however, to the careful…
As Senator Patrick Leahy noted in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of Alberto Gonzalez to be U.S. Attorney General, Gonzales has been “chief defense lawyer for the White House on a number of very important and, many times, politically sensitive issues.”[1] Take, for example, Gonzales’ fight with…
In a memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, and William J. Haynes, General Counsel of the Department of Defense, Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee concludes that the Geneva Conventions “do not protect members of the al Qaeda organization”, and, furthermore, that the “President has sufficient grounds…
The decision by the United States government to use cluster munitions in the war in Iraq has not gone entirely unnoticed by the American media. A study by USA Today, for instance, acknowledged that civilian deaths – “collateral damage” in Pentagon parlance – from the use of cluster munitions were…
A draft memorandum from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel dated January 9, 2002, entitled “Application of Treaties and Laws to al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees”, was written to inform the Department of Defense that the U.S. government, in the “war on terrorism”, need not conform to the standards…
Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote a memo to follow-up on the January 25, 2002 State Department memorandum to the George W. Bush, entitled “Decision Re Application of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War to the Conflict With al Qaeda and the Taliban”, which contended the Justice Department’s judgment…
On January 25, 2002, the U.S. Justice Department sent a memorandum to the George W. Bush reasserting the judgment that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Entitled “Decision Re Application of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War to the Conflict With al…
On December 18, 2001, The U.S. Department of Justice sent a memorandum to William J. Haynes, II, General Counsel at the Department of Defense. The memo, entitled “Possible habeas jurisdiction over aliens held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba” and written by Deputy Assistant Attorney Generals Patrick F. Philbin and John C.…
Ahmad Chalabi has become a convenient scapegoat not only for the United States Government, but also, it seems, for the American media establishment. In a letter they would have us believe is their mea culpa, the editors of The New York Times name Chalabi as prominent among “a circle of…
“Do you ever get the sense the whole world is becoming unhinged from reality?” That is the question posed by David Brooks in his New York Times op-ed of January 6, appropriately entitled, “The Era of Distortion”. “Yes,” would be my own answer to that question, and never more so…
Jeremy R. Hammond is an independent political analyst and a recipient of the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism. He is the founding editor of Foreign Policy Journal (www.foreignpolicyjournal.com) and can also be found on the web at JeremyRHammond.com. His new book, "Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian economics in the financial crisis", is now available at Amazon.com.
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