How significant are the same-sex marriage cases?

There has been a lot of chatter in the media recently about the upcoming oral arguments before the US Supreme Court on March 26 and 27 on two cases involving same-sex marriage. Hollingsworth v. Perry concerns California’s Proposition 8 that banned same-sex marriage but was later overturned by the courts. The second is United States v. Windsor that challenges the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). While these cases are undoubtedly important and interesting, their long-term effects are not as significant. The reason is that same-sex marriage is coming and the only question is whether it comes soon or sooner and the court cannot stop it. [Read more…]

Justice – American style

Indefinite detention, torture and testimony obtained from torture, spying on attorney-client conversations, solitary confinement for months and years, no habeas corpus, military tribunals that suspend normal rules of due process, all these are now part of the brave new world that we live in as a result of the war on terror. Ah, for the days of the Cold War when the US used such charges to bludgeon the Soviet bloc nations as part of the propaganda blitz to show the world how evil they were and how superior the US system of justice was. [Read more…]

Update on Bradley Manning

Any government that engages in willful wrongdoing, such as the US government now routinely does, must also by necessity simultaneously retaliate against those who would reveals such acts. This explains why the Obama administration has been engaged in the most vicious persecutions of whistleblowers and the case against Bradley Manning provides a prime example. [Read more…]

Obama will not rule out extrajudicial killings of US citizens within the US

The invaluable Glenn Greenwald provides further evidence of how the US is now a lawless state, pointing out that president Obama and his nominee to head the CIA John Brennan (both of whom are key players in the current drone execution program that have murdered Americans and foreigners abroad) have repeatedly shown themselves unwilling, even under direct questioning, to deny that they have the power to order the extrajudicial killing of Americans even within the US. [Read more…]

The Cleveland bombers and other terrorist plots

One day in April last year, I opened the local newspaper to read a sensational story of the successful thwarting of a plot by five ‘terrorists’, people from the area, to blow up a bridge south of Cleveland. They accepted a plea deal in November that resulted in four of them receiving sentences ranging from 6 to 11 years with the remaining person still awaiting mental competency evaluation. The US attorney’s office had asked for sentences ranging from 19 to 30 years. [Read more…]