Recommended Reading: Challenge of Liberty Student Seminar Colorado Springs, June 17–21 2013 Below you will find the reading for the summer seminar. To fully understand each lecture, you will want to at least look at all the preparatory readings. The supplemental readings are less necessary. See especially the Plato, Cochran, and Higgs items. Monday:...
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In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration crafted a legal theory and detention policy to handle accused terrorists. Nowhere was the policy more conspicuously problematic than at Guantánamo, where a total of 779 detainees were held and where today 166 remain after over ten years. The Bush administration referred to these...
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It seems simple enough. Publicly available evidence shows two young men implicated in the horrific massacre in Boston this Monday, the shooting of the officer at MIT, crimes against others, and violent resistance against the police. One brother is dead and the other on the lam. And so the police have locked down Boston,...
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Join the Independent Institute this summer for its college seminars in Colorado Springs and Berkeley. These five-day programs feature lectures, readings, multimedia presentations, and group discussions on the fundamentals of free societies. Students will learn about ethics and liberty, Austrian economics, public choice, money and banking, the follies of socialism and interventionism, myths of...
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Finally, some sanity, and from a somewhat unexpected source. The ACLU is concerned about the civil liberties implications of the new Harry Reid Senate bill to establish so-called “universal background checks” for firearms purchases. The organization has tended toward silence on gun rights, but at least now it recognizes aspects of the problem with...
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Senator Rand Paul’s thirteen-hour filibuster of Obama’s appointee for CIA chief, John Brennan, was the ninth longest filibuster in U.S. history, and unlike most such spectacles in U.S. history, it concerned fundamental, core issues of American liberty. It will go down in the history books as one of the very few great moments in...
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On February 28, 1993, the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Bureau raided the home of the Branch Davidians, a religious sect just outside Waco, Texas. The agency, which has suffered bad press due to sexual harassment and racial discrimination scandals, made sure reporters were there to witness its planned heroics and dubbed the raid “Operation...
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By this time next year, Obama plans to bring the U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan down to about 32,000. For this, I’m sure many will credit him for winding down the war. Yet this is almost the exact number of troops that were there when Obama took power in January 2009. He then proceeded...
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Dianne Feinstein and some liberals have suggested that, if the president’s targeted killing policy is too unilateral, the remedy might be found in something modeled after the FISA court. Make no mistake: Such a court would be nothing more than a rubber-stamp. At best. In 1978, after Church Committee hearings exposed massive abuse of...
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The response to the leaked Obama administration document explaining its rationalization for targeted drone killings of American citizens has proven louder than I expected. Obama’s kill list was reported very early in his first term. In October 2011 I wrote about his summary execution of Anwar al-Awlaki. A few months ago it was reported...
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