Civil Liberties

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.

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 boorishness in print. I liked Steve; most of us who worked with him did.

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.

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.

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.

Anywhere else, it might have played out as just another low-stakes battle between policy wonks. But in Japan, a country struggling to find a brand of nationalism that it can embrace, a recent war of words between a flamboyant newspaper editorialist and an editor at a premier foreign-policy think tank was something far more alarming: the latest assault in a campaign of right-wing intimidation of public figures that is squelching free speech and threatening to roll back civil society.

Alan Duncan, a Conservative MP, is your typical British politician. Which is to say, if he were an American he'd be atypical. He reads a lot, writes a lot, thinks a lot; he seems motivated by ideas, as opposed to just personal ambition. And he has ideas aplenty, on the future of the British Conservative Party, on the future of the conservative movement worldwide, and on the future of freedom in general.

Since the breaking story of the alleged CIA kidnappings, rendition program and secret prisons in Europe, the European Union has released a report stating that "European governments condoned the abduction, transport and detention of terrorist suspects by the United States on European territory." The report examines the extent to which there have been violations of national, EU, and international law.

The bipartisan elite that runs this country is not to be trusted with safeguarding America's national destiny. Most of these elitists worship the strange gods of multiculturalism, globalism and relativism, and so they are blind to the practical realities of preserving a single country -- this country.

Remember when the Internet was supposed to liberate everyone? Well, that was then. Today, it's a different story.

But wait! Here comes the U.S. government, defending our freedom. On Tuesday, the State Department announced its Global Internet Freedom Task Force (GIFT, get it?). That's right, the same Uncle Sam who brought us such secret operations as Carnivore, Total Information Awareness and the National Security Agency wiretaps is now giving the world the gift of free and open speech. Ri-i-i-ight.