Civil Liberties

In the summer of 1995, an Iranian man named Majid Yourdkhani allowed a friend to photocopy pages from “The Satanic Verses,” the Salman Rushdie novel, at the small print shop that he owned in Tehran. Government agents arrested the friend and came looking for Majid, who secretly crossed the border to Turkey and then flew to Canada. In his haste, Majid was forced to leave behind his wife, Masomeh; for months afterward, Iranian government agents phoned her and said things… more

In a Manhattan courtroom in May 2001, four men were convicted for their roles in al-Qaeda's bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania three years earlier. The evidence against them had been collected without recourse to torture, coercion, or unorthodox interrogation techniques. The attacks had killed a dozen Americans and more than two hundred Africans, and family members of some of the victims attended the trial and testified about the devastating loss of their loved ones.

The trial… more

The Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War in 1648, effectively established an entity that most of us today take for granted: the nation-state. In the nation-state, it is the duty of the state to protect the nation and of the nation to remain loyal to the state. When security threats to the nation arise, the state must defend against them, and, in times of danger, liberty is often at odds with security. For authoritarian states, such tension… more

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees not only the freedom to speak but also the freedom not to listen. The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that "no one has a right to press even good ideas on an unwilling recipient." Nevertheless, American businesses are increasingly violating the First Amendment freedoms of their employees.

Frito-Lay Inc., one of the world's largest producers of snack foods, is also one of America's worst abusers of employees' right not to listen.… more

Privacy doesn't mean anonymity. Think about that for a bit -- and get used to it.

Or if you don't like it, get a plan. But it had better be a good one.

On Oct. 23, Donald Kerr, deputy director of the Office of National Intelligence, outlined the new order of things: "Too often, privacy has been equated with anonymity; and it's an idea that is deeply rooted in American culture." Well, yes, the Bill of Rights, for instance, includes protections against… more

You don’t have to be a crusading right-winger to recognize that University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, who compared the victims of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack to Nazis, is an extremist, an ideologue whose scholarship is less than objective.

Nor do you have to be a flame-throwing left-winger to agree that the university where he was once director of the ethnic studies department shouldn’t have ditched him the way it did. It needed to do much, much more.

Two short… more

The most egregious liar I ever knew was someone I never suspected until the day that, suddenly and irrevocably, I did. Twelve years ago, a young man named Stephen Glass began writing for The New Republic, where I was an editor. He quickly established himself as someone who was always onto an amusingly outlandish story -- like the time he met some Young Republican types at a convention, gathered them around a hotel-room minibar, then, with guileless ferocity, captured their… more

The single most famous document expressing America’s commitment to freedom in the world must surely be President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s "Four Freedoms" speech of 1941, calling for US resistance to Nazi and Japanese aggression. The freedoms Roosevelt spoke of were freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear, which he defined in terms of the permanent abolition of aggressive war.

This statement is so familiar that few notice an extraordinary omission. The freedom to… more

Here is the redacted version of a draft Op-Ed article we wrote for The Times, as blacked out by the Central Intelligence Agency's Publication Review Board after the White House intervened in the normal prepublication review process and demanded substantial deletions. Agency officials told us that they had concluded on their own that the original draft included no classified material, but that they had to bow to the White House.

Indeed, the deleted portions of the original… more

The crowning disgrace of this country’s five-year experiment with one-party Republican rule was surely the passage of a bill on September 29, that sanctioned abusive treatment of prisoners in the "war on terror," banned habeas corpus claims for those identified as "enemy combatants," and allowed the president to place that designation on anyone, including U.S. citizens.

Even with their president’s approval ratings at Nixonian levels, and their own sinking below that, congressional Republicans were able to muster one last grand gesture… more