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• Iñaki Egaña. Mr. Egaña is a respected historian and writer from the Basque region of Spain. In March 2006, Mr. Egaña traveled to the United States to conduct research for a book about Basque author Mario Salegi, who was a target of McCarthyism during the 1950s. Upon disembarking the plane, however, Mr. Egaña and his children were interrogated, detained for 24 hours, and forced to return to Madrid. The government has provided no explanation for Mr. Egaña’s exclusion.
• Haluk Gerger. Professor Gerger is a Turkish sociologist and journalist. He was jailed by Turkey in the 1990s for his writing about Turkey’s Kurds. Twice during that time, in its 1994 and 1995 Country Reports on Human Rights, the U.S. State Department cited Professor Gerger’s treatment as an example of the misuse of antiterrorism legislation to stifle freedom of expression. In 1999, when Professor Gerger was on trial again for his writings, the U.S. issued Professor Gerger and his wife 10-year, multiple entry visas. In October 2002, however, when Professor Gerger and his wife arrived at Newark airport, border officials informed them that the State Department had cancelled their visas. The government has provided no explanation for Professor Gerger’s exclusion.
• Adam Habib. Professor Habib, a South African national, is a prominent human rights activist and public intellectual. Although he earned his PhD in the United States, when he attempted to visit the United States in October 2006 for professional meetings, he was interrogated for seven hours at the border and then told that his visa had been revoked. After U.S. organizations filed suit to challenge his exclusion, the government notified Professor Habib that he had been denied entry on terrorism-related grounds. It still has not has not informed him, however, of the specific legal or factual basis for its decision. The evidence strongly suggests that Professor Habib has been excluded not because of any connection to terrorism but because of his political activism.1
• Riyadh Lafta. Dr. Lafta, an Iraqi national, is Professor of Medicine at Baghdad’s Mustansiriyah University. In the fall of 2006, Dr. Lafta applied for a U.S. visa in order to attend a speaking engagement at the University of Washington that was to take place in April 2007. His visa application was denied. Although the government stated that the denial was the result of a “miscommunication,” the circumstances strongly suggest that Dr. Lafta was refused a visa because of conclusions he had drawn in a 2006 article regarding the number of civilian casualties in Iraq.
• Tariq Ramadan. Professor Ramadan, a Swiss national, is a professor at the University of Oxford and, in the words of Time magazine, “the leading Islamic thinker among Europe’s second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants.” In 2004, he was offered a teaching position at the University of Notre Dame; only days before he was to begin teaching, however, he was told that his visa had been revoked under a provision that renders inadmissible anyone who has “endorse[d] or espouse[d]” terrorism. After U.S. groups filed suit, the government abandoned the accusation that Professor Ramadan had endorsed terrorism. It continues to exclude him now, however, under the INA’s “material support” provisions. We believe that the material support provisions do not apply to Professor Ramadan, and the evidence strongly suggests that he has been excluded not because of his donations but because of his vocal criticism of U.S. foreign policy.2
• Rafael de Jesus Gallego Romero. Father Gallego is a parish priest from the village of Tiquisio in North-Central Colombia, where he ministers to miners and peasants, facilitates community support initiatives, and runs a local radio station. Father Gallego is also a vocal critic of government-supported paramilitary units acting on behalf of multinational mining corporations. In the fall of 2008, Father Gallego received invitations to travel to the United States to address universities, activist organizations, community radio stations, and churches. The U.S. government simply failed to adjudicate the visa. Father Gallego eventually learned from the Provincial Jesuit, who has ties to the American Embassy, that his visa was going to be denied “for national security reasons,” but he has never received a formal notification that his visa was adjudicated, let alone an explanation of the grounds on which it was denied.
• Dora María Téllez. Professor Téllez was a leading figure in Nicaragua’s revolution against the brutal Somoza regime, and has served in her country as a government minister, political activist, and professor. She has also been a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy. In 2004, she was appointed Robert F. Kennedy visiting professor in Latin American Studies at Harvard’s Divinity School and Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. When Professor Téllez attempted to enroll at a language class in California in preparation for that post, however, her student visa was denied on the ground that she had previously engaged in terrorist acts, despite the fact that she had been granted visas to enter the United States in the past.

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Obama’s Policy on Civil Liberties: Bush Lite?
February 23, 2009 - The Multiracial Activist
Ivan Eland

Barack Obama entered the presidency as one of the most rhetorically pro-civil liberties politicians in recent memory. And shortly after taking office, he drew applause from friends of liberty for promulgating executive orders closing Guantanamo and CIA secret prisons, ending CIA torture, suspending kangaroo proceedings at military tribunals, and pledging more openness than the secretive Bush administration. Unfortunately, instead of prosecuting Bush administration officials, including George W. Bush, for violating criminal statutes against torture, illegal wiretapping of Americans, and other misdeeds—thus avoiding the bad precedent of giving a president a free pass on illegal acts—Obama appears ready to vindicate the prior administration’s anti-terrorism program by adopting Bush Lite.

Warning signs that Obama was softer on civil liberties than advertised came even before he took office, when as a Senator, he voted for blatantly unconstitutional legislation that allowed federal snooping into some e-mail messages and phone calls without a warrant. The Constitution implies that all government searches and seizures of private property require a judicially-approved warrant based on probable cause that a crime has been committed—with no exceptions mentioned, including for national security.

Politicians love symbolic acts and Obama’s rapid pledge to shutter the high profile prison at Guantanamo and secret CIA prisons was widely praised. But if civil liberties continue to be violated elsewhere, have we made much progress?

Obama’s nominees have said the administration will continue the CIA’s policy of “extraordinary rendition” of terrorism suspects—a euphemism for secret kidnapping without the legal nicety of extradition or any other procedural due process rights. Prior to the Bush administration, such government-sanctioned kidnapping was authorized only to return the suspects to their home countries. The Bush administration began using such renditions to abduct suspects and send them to third-party nations that practiced harsh torture—presumably to keep U.S. hands (relatively) clean. Leon Panetta, Obama’s CIA director, has said that the new administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of rendition to third party countries and relying on those countries’ suspect diplomatic promises not to torture.

Also, Obama supposedly banned CIA torture by executive order, but such orders are not laws and can be reversed with the stroke of a pen. What’s worse, although CIA director Panetta has admitted that water boarding (simulated drowning) is torture, he has also asserted publicly that if regular interrogation techniques did not produce information from a prisoner suspected of being involved in an imminent attack, he would request the authority to use harsher methods.

In perhaps the most important of the civil liberties waffling, Elena Kagan, the administration’s nominee for solicitor general at the Justice Department, pledged to continue detaining indefinitely prisoners without trial, even if they were noncombatant terrorist financiers arrested far from a combat zone. Ominously, the Obama administration is stalling on taking a position on the even more important Bush-era policy of perpetually incarcerating “enemy combatants” without trial on U.S. territory. To stay within the U.S. Constitution, such vital habeas corpus rights, one of the pillars of the rule of law, should only be suspended by Congress in areas where combat has rendered the civilian courts inoperable—hardly the case in the United States during the never-ending “war on terror.”

Although Obama’s executive order suspended the Bush administration’s kangaroo military tribunals, which have insufficient legal procedural safeguards, it has kept its options open on their resumption.

Finally, the new administration has mimicked the Bush administration’s use of the “state secrets” doctrine to try to nix lawsuits by former CIA detainees and, for the same reason, pressured another country’s court not to release information about U.S. torture of a prisoner. Traditionally, the doctrine was usually used to withhold specific evidence in a legal proceeding, not to nix entire cases against the government for malfeasance. So much for a more open government.

The Obama administration is new and should be given a chance to do the right thing. Although certainly better than the lawless Bush administration, the new boss unsurprisingly resembles the old boss.

Historically, party label has been a less good indicator about actual presidential policies than the era in which the chief executive served. For example, in terms of actual programs, Richard Nixon was the last liberal president, a chief executive who largely continued Lyndon Johnson’s government penetration into American society and even further expanded it. Similarly, Jimmy Carter started the move back to the right and Ronald Reagan continued it (but in practice he really wasn’t all that conservative). Civil liberties follow the general trend. After the first Word Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the Oklahoma City and Tokyo subway attacks in 1995, Bill Clinton signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which augmented the government’s powers of surveillance on Americans and paved the way for the further vast expansion of such authority (and other aforementioned dramatic civil liberties violations of the Bush administration) after 9/11.

New from Ivan Eland! THE EMPIRE HAS NO CLOTHES: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed (Updated Edition) Most Americans don’t think of their government as an empire, but in fact the United States has been steadily expanding its control of overseas territories since the turn of the twentieth century. In The Empire Has No Clothes, Ivan Eland, a leading expert on U.S. defense policy and national security, examines American military interventions around the world from the Spanish-American War to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Learn More »»

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NAACP 100th Anniversary: Exploiting Color Instead of Erasing It
February 12, 2009 - The Abolitionist Examiner
Jonathan J. Bean

George Orwell famously wrote “who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” As the NAACP celebrates its 100th anniversary, its leaders present a past that squares with its present positions on racial preferences, welfare, and a public school monopoly that traps poor children in failed schools.

But that is not the NAACP’s past. The historic achievements of the NAACP—all but forgotten by most Americans—derived from a passionate dedication to colorblindness and individual freedom. From its founding in 1909 until the 1960s, the NAACP fought for a “colorblind Constitution.” Since then, it has become just another interest group pleading for favors. This flip-flop would make splendid material for an Orwellian novel: preference is equality, some “more equal” than others.

The history of the NAACP is usually presented as a story of triumphant radicalism. School children learn about the contributions of NAACP founder W.E.B. DuBois but do not learn that DuBois quit the NAACP in the mid-1930s, joined the Communist Party, and left the country for self-exile in Africa.

The forgotten colorblind tradition of the NAACP can be told through the story of other key figures. The NAACP’s cofounders included lawyers Moorfield Storey and Louis Marshall, two white men dedicated to the principle of colorblind law. From 1909 to 1929, the NAACP relied on their legal firepower. As NAACP president, Storey successfully challenged cities that segregated neighborhoods by law. In 1917, the Supreme Court overturned this residential apartheid—a victory that came thirty-seven years before Brown v. Board of Education.

Louis Marshall followed with a victory in Nixon v. Herndon (1927), a decision banning the Democratic Party’s “white-only primaries.” Marshall also won a case in favor of school choice, winning a ruling that laws banning private schools, pushed in many states by the Ku Klux Klan, were unconstitutional. The court ruled in this historic case that private schools could not be banned because children were not “mere creature[s] of the state.” Today’s NAACP ought to take note of the irony: Its opposition to “school choice” is the position once taken by the bigots of the KKK.

Black lawyers took the lead from the 1930s onward. A young Thurgood Marshall, who became NAACP chief counsel at the age of thirty-two, after winning the very first case he argued before the Supreme Court, shared the colorblind sentiments of Storey and Louis Marshall. An aide recalled: “Marshall had a ‘Bible’ to which he turned during his most depressed moments. . . . Marshall would read aloud passages from Harlan’s amazing dissent [in Plessy v. Ferguson]. I do not believe we ever filed a major brief in the pre-Brown days in which a portion of that opinion was not quoted. Marshall’s favorite quotation was, ‘Our Constitution is color-blind.’ It became our basic creed.”

In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), Marshall asked the Supreme Court to desegregate schools and end Plessy’s “separate but equal” standard by declaring the Constitution colorblind. Instead, the court based its decision on dubious sociology.

Nevertheless, into the 1960s the NAACP continued to argue that racial classifications were dangerous. For example, a letter writer asked NAACP attorney Robert L. Carter where the group stood on a bill to repeal racial identification on marriage certificates. Carter responded: “Color designations on birth certificates, marriage licenses and the like can serve no useful purpose whatsoever. If we are prepared to accept the basic postulate of our society—that race or color is an irrelevance—then contentions that race and color statistics are of social science value become sheer sophistical rationalization.”

Likewise, Clarence Mitchell, the NAACP’s chief lobbyist for nearly three decades, declared that “the minute you put race on a civil service form . . . you have opened the door to discrimination.”

Beginning in the 1970s, however, the Supreme Court upheld “benign” discrimination in the name of equality. When President Richard Nixon held out the prospect of racial preferences in jobs and government contracts, the NAACP shifted course and began seeking these favors. Those who still supported colorblind law became the new enemy.

George Orwell was famous for challenging the “smelly little orthodoxies” of his time.

The wayward NAACP needs the smelling salts of dissidents who can recapture the proud tradition that recent leaders have betrayed. They can begin by honestly presenting the history of “the civil rights century.” That history would be marked by the quest for a colorblind society—a legacy of liberty that contemporary NAACP leaders have abandoned.

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Darwin and the Right
February 11, 2009 - The Abolitionist Examiner
Alvaro Vargas Llosa

WASHINGTON—Polls, particularly in the United States, tell us that many conservatives still distrust Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. The bicentennial of his birth should be a fitting occasion for the right to take another look at a man who contributed immensely to some ideas that it holds dear.

Darwin was not an atheist but a Victorian believer. He was not a proto-Marxist but a liberal, which in 19th-century Britain meant someone who favored individual liberty over big government. Darwin was an admirer of John Locke and Adam Smith, two of the greatest thinkers of freedom. And although he was influenced by Malthus, whose writings on overpopulation were later used by critics of capitalism to justify collectivism, Darwin used that political economist’s ideas in biology, not political economy.

Darwin did not set out to deny God. Anyone who has read “The Origin of Species,” “The Descent of Man” or his correspondence is immediately struck by how careful Darwin was to avoid what we would today call an “ideological agenda.” But this diligent student of nature did make one shattering discovery: not the theory of evolution itself, which had been proposed many times and can be traced back to the Greeks, but the fact that evolution is a random process of natural selection whereby certain variations that become well-adapted to the environment are gradually preserved through hereditary transmission. Ultimately, all species have a common origin.

This finding posed a cataclysmic challenge to the established church, comparable to the re-examination of Aristotle in the 12th and 13th centuries or the displacement of the Earth from the center of the universe in the 16th and 17th centuries. But unlike the teachings of Aristotle, which were absorbed by the church through Thomas Aquinas, and the findings of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, which were reconciled with religion by rational Christianity and Deism, Darwin’s books have remained anathema to many believers. The pope finally accepted his teachings in the 1990s and the Anglican Church recently apologized to him. But for millions of Christians, Darwin remains unacceptable.

And yet science has confirmed and expanded Darwin’s theory, using it to great advantage. What he called the “mystery” of variation in offspring was explained by modern genetics. DNA sequencing and molecular biology have helped to understand the evolution of viruses and therefore to protect people from diseases.

Darwin’s teachings have been caricatured and grossly distorted. Social Darwinism, which turned his biological theory into a sociopolitical one to justify eugenics, harmed his reputation. But Darwin was an early opponent of slavery and, precisely because he identified a common origin in nature, he did more than anybody to debunk the notion that different races belong to different species.

Herein should lie Darwin’s appeal to the right: The English naturalist gave scientific validity to the revolutionary idea that order can be spontaneous, neither designed by nor beholden to an all-powerful authority. The struggle for existence that drives natural selection according to Darwin has nothing predetermined about it. In fact, he maintained that the presence of certain habits, values and institutions, including religion—themselves part of man’s adaptation to the environment—can impact evolution. The instinct of sympathy, for instance, drives some stronger members of the human species to help weaker ones, thereby mitigating the struggle for existence.

It is fascinating that conservatives who advocate for a spontaneous order—the free market—in political economy and decry social engineering as a threat to progress and civilization should resent Darwin’s overwhelming case for the idea that order can design itself. In an essay in the British publication The Spectator, the conservative science writer Matt Ridley reflects on the paradox that the left has claimed Darwin even though leftist political ideas contradict his basic teaching: “In the average European biology laboratory you will find fervent believers in the individualist, emergent, decentralized properties of genomes who prefer dirigiste determinism to bring order to the economy.”

The bicentennial of Darwin’s birth is a good opportunity for those on the right who trash him as an icon of the left to give the author of “The Origin of Species” another chance.

New from Alvaro Vargas Llosa! The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty Nearly four decades after his death, the legend of Che Guevara has grown worldwide. In this new book, Alvaro Vargas Llosa separates myth from reality and shows that Che’s ideals re-hashed centralized power—long the major source of suffering and misery for the poor. Learn More »»

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