Americans watching President Bush on Thursday could be forgiven for confusing his press conference with the movie Groundhog Day. In the 1993 film, Bill Murray wakes each morning only to realize he's reliving the previous day. Discussing the mushrooming CIA tapes scandal yesterday, President Bush claimed he had no recollection of knowing about the tapes' […]

When it comes to the debate over Congressional legislation to ban waterboarding of detainees by the CIA, President Bush is proving Marx's dictum that historical events occur twice, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. After all, while the White House is threatening to veto the new interrogation restrictions passed this […]

The anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor gives us an opportunity to remember our tragic loss that day, and reflect on the almost unimaginable sacrifices that generation of Americans made to protect the liberty of all who followed. But as I first suggested in 2005, our observance now includes a new ritual. With each […]

In Washington, House Minority Leader John Boehner is struggling to rebrand a downtrodden and disheartened Republican Party in time for the 2008 elections. It's no wonder. Its agenda stymied and burdened by an unpopular war and an even less popular President, the GOP is being pulverized in the polls. And with its evangelical base splintered […]

In Washington Tuesday, members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee savaged Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and General Counsel Michael Callahan for the company's involvement in the 2005 jailing of a Chinese dissident. But if their bipartisan criticism of Yahoo's behavior - cooperating with a Chinese government "subpoena-like document" to supply information about journalist accused of […]

No doubt, these have been among the darkest days in the global war on terror. The president of one of the key powers in the fight against Al Qaeda terrorism has in essence suspended his nation's constitution and rendered its democratic institutions unrecognizable. Its citizens can be detained and held indefinitely without habeas corpus protections. […]

For supporters of the Bush administration's crusade against civil liberties in its war on terror, today's rulings in the 2004 Madrid bombing case will no doubt provide more justification for detainee torture, the suspension of habeas corpus, military commissions and other clearly extra-constitutional measures. In Madrid today as in so many terrorism prosecution trials in […]

In Iowa yesterday, GOP frontrunner Rudy Giuliani followed Bush Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey in playing dumb on the subject of torture. It should come as no surprise that Giuliani would argue that whether waterboarding violates the Geneva Convention depends on what the definition of "torture" is. Even less surprising is that the same man […]

By most accounts, Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey is not the intellectually stunted, duplicitous partisan hatchet man and unabashed Bush loyalist that was his predecessor, Alberto Gonzales. But in his testimony this week before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, Mukasey followed almost the same script on Bush administration torture policy as Gonzales during his […]

President Bush's disturbingly flip comment Wednesday about Iran and World War III not only revealed his apparent comfort when discussing global conflagration. Bush's gaffe also showed the common vision between himself, the man most likely to succeed him as head of the Republican Party and those who advise them both. For George Bush, Rudy Giuliani […]