In May, London-based Hip Hop artist M.I.A. revealed that she was denied a visa to come work with American music producers on her next album. News reports indicate that the Sri Lankan-born artist was excluded because government officials concluded that some of her lyrics are overly sympathetic to the Tamil Tigers and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

American Civil Liberties Union : U.S. Government Increasingly Blocking Entry at the Border Because of Ideology, ACLU Says

Pulitzer-prize winner Steve Coll ("Ghost War") is in rare form here. This short Comment is worth your time.

The President has spent December in sleeves-rolled-up discussions with State Department experts and military officers, apparently searching for such ideas. It seems a little late in his chief-executive-style Presidency for such an earnest return to graduate school. Worse, he remains imprisoned by his binary vision and rhetoric. When he emerged from one Iraq cram session, a reporter asked if he had heard any encouraging new plans. The President could only think to say, "I’ve heard some ideas that would lead to defeat. And I reject those ideas."

The arrogance and the incompetence that brought the United States to this moment in Iraq cannot release it from the obligations and the interests, some of indefinite duration, that require its persistence there.

We should send the next President to Fort Leavenworth. Or, rather, to save time, maybe the next President should come from Fort Leavenworth. Or at least the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

His Way | Steve Coll in The New Yorker

Demonstrating that extremism in the defense of either security or liberty is not a virtue, the book charts a middle course between those who are committed to the preservation of our liberties but blind to the needs of public security and those who are willing to sacrifice our cherished freedoms for the sake of preventing terrorism.

How Patriotic is the Patriot Act?

This article details one particularly instructive case from the Vietnam era.

Update: This article is now here, owing to the CIA's move to site-wide use of SSL.

The Man in the Snow White Cell

The strength of a nation is not characterized by what it holds dear in times of peace, but what it holds dear in times of war. Unfortunately, this administration has been all too willing to bend the rules and reinterpret the law.

Wrongly Held: It Can Happen Here

Liberals, in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib and now with Supreme Court restraints on executive power, are piling on. It's safe; civil liberty is suddenly in vogue, at least until the next terror strike.

Rights of Terror Suspects

Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer in Oregon, was held for two weeks, even though the only other connections between him and terrorism were things like the fact, as the FBI pointed out, that his law firm advertised in a "Muslim yellow page directory" whose publisher had once had a business relationship with Osama bin Laden's former personal secretary.

So is this what you call a Non-Obvious Relationship?

This nation was organized under a rule of law, not a dictatorship of the virtuous. The founding fathers wrote the Bill of Rights specifically because they did not believe that honorable men always do the right thing.

About Independence

Decius wrote:
]] And so it's come to this. The American people -- proud
]] heirs of a bold revolutionary spirit now marking the
]] 228th anniversary of its fiery eruption into the world --
]] have been reduced to thanking the robed Olympians on the
]] U.S. Supreme Court for preserving a few crumbs of the
]] nation's once-vast ancient liberties.
]
] Damn ...

I find this article rather ironic (hypocritical?) in the context of Chechnya today and Soviet/KGB practices of decades past.

RE: A Russian view of the Supreme Court Decision

Herbert S. Lin: "Filters are a good thing, in the same way that fences around the swimming pool are a good thing," Mr. Lin said. "But you'd better believe I'm going to teach my kid to swim."

Antipornography Law Keeps Crashing Into First Amendment