President Bush got one thing right: The greatest threat to American security is a rogue state providing a terrorist group with a weapon of mass destruction and the means to deliver it in the United States. Unfortunately, almost everything he has done since September 11 has made this problem worse rather than better. We need […]
Morton Halperin
Formerly director of policy planning at the Department of State (1998–2001), Morton H. Halperin is Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. He worked for many years for the American Civil Liberties Union, where he directed the Center for National Security Studies.
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Deter and Contain
The simplest question that supporters of going to war with Iraq cannot answer is why would Saddam Hussein be less likely to use his weapons of mass destruction if we attack than if we contain him. This debate, essentially within the Republican Party, closely mirrors the struggle over the proposed rollback of communism that raged […]
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Stockade Justice
Even before the ink was dry on the antiterrorism bill, the Bush administration began relying less on powers granted it by a cowed Congress and more on assertions of inherent presidential authority. Several new actions–the establishment of military tribunals, the monitoring of lawyer-client conversations, the interrogation of several thousand Middle Eastern men, and the continued […]
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The Liberties We Defend
The tragic and unbearable events of September 11 have united Americans and much of the world as they have not been united for many years. The Bush administration has a unique opportunity to create effective domestic and international structures to deal not only with terrorism but with the other twenty-first-century threats to national and international […]
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Less Secure, Less Free
For civil libertarians, there was one extra nightmare when we finally got to sleep on that awful day of September 11, 2001. We knew that the Washington bureaucracy’s wish list of additional powers to conduct surveillance of Americans would not be based on a careful analysis of what went wrong. We feared that in the […]
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Collective Security
The Bush administration would be wise to work through the UN Security Council abroad and respect civil liberty at home