Earlier this week at Heritage, a Bush-era deputy assistant attorney general shared the stage with a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union. It’s not exactly the type of combination you might expect talking about terrorism 10 years after 9/11. But for John Yoo and Nadine Strossen, it was an opportunity to discuss the future of national security. Yoo is the co-editor of a new book with Dean Reuter that features essays from 22 contributors spanning the ideological spectrum. The compilation, “Confronting Terror: 9/11 and the Future of American …
The law, increasingly, is becoming a tool used by opponents of American power to harass American officials and, through the courts, limit America’s freedom of action. A case in point is the lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Amir Meshal (an American citizen). Meshal, who lives in New Jersey, says that in 2006 he travelled to Somalia “to enrich his study of Islam.” At that time, parts of Somalia were under the control of the Islamic Courts Union – a fundamentalist militia. Later that year …
In a momentous move in March of this year, a Colorado school board voted to implement its first private school choice program. The program allows up to 500 children in Douglas County to attend a private school of their choice. Now, hundreds of students are being blocked from receiving these scholarships due to the decision of a state district judge from Denver to halt the voucher program, claiming that it violates the state constitution. The county school board is planning to appeal the decision. John Carson, president of the Douglas …
A panel of the 9th Circuit of Appeals unanimously ruled this week that the Mount Soledad Cross, a memorial that now honors Korean War veterans and sits on federal land near San Diego, amounts to a violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The issue of memorial crosses and other religious markers on land that is now or has been public property has been much on the mind of the judiciary lately. In fact, just last April, a closely divided Supreme Court ruled in the case of a …
GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA – I was privileged to be one of six representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) invited by the Office of Military Commissions to observe the guilty plea of Ibrahim al Qosi here in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, yesterday. The other invitees were the ACLU, Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the National Institute of Military Justice (NIMJ). Each of those organizations have been highly critical of military commissions, denouncing them as unfair, unjust, unnecessary, not in keeping with the rule of law, and not fair compared …
During this past Wednesday’s mark-up of the Fiscal Year 2011 National Defense Authorization Act my fellow conservatives on the House Armed Services Committee stood strongly on the side of the American people, vociferously fighting for security, liberty, and freedom through our Defend America First platform. One of the issues debated on Wednesday, which many of us have deemed most detrimental to our Republic, is the disgraceful actions apparently undertaken by the disloyal defense lawyers involved in the John Adams Project. We have called for an immediate and thorough investigation of …
Yesterday, the California Assembly Public Safety Committee voted 4 – 2 to approve Senate Bill No. 399, which allows any prisoner to petition the sentencing court for “recall” (i.e., cancellation) if they have served at least 10 years of a life-without-parole sentence for any crime committed before turning 18 . These juvenile offenders, almost all of whom were convicted of first-degree murder with any number of aggravating circumstances (e.g. multiple murders, murder for hire, murder of a police officer or firefighter, and torture of the victim), would then be allowed a rehearing …
According to various news outlets, including the Washington Post, al-Marri (also known as Abdulkareen A. Almuslam), the last remaining unlawful enemy combatant in the United States, is about to be indicted in federal district court in the Central District of Illinois. The news stories indicated that he will be charged with, among other things, material support for terrorism. This is a significant development, and a clear break from the Bush administration’s policy with respect to al-Marri. As readers of this blog are well aware, the Supreme Court had taken up …
The ACLU is at it again. The most recent post on the ACLU blog attacks me for defending the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) tactic of searching laptops at the border. The purpose of the searches is to prevent criminal activity. In one recent case, officers found a traveler’s computer loaded down with child pornography. The ACLU criticism seems strange, since all that I did was point out that the courts have ruled that officers have a legal right to conduct these searches and that since malicious actors including criminals …
After I ran a series of posts on my visit to the Arizona border, the ACLU took me to task for making the case that better border security is a good idea. In the last ACLU post they were particularly irate that I found anything worthy in the technology demonstration project called “P-28″ which looked at integrating sensors to provide Border Patrol officers a “common operating picture.” The goal was to get the right information to the right person at the right time to do the right thing; identifying smuggler …
