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My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that, until the…

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On October 22, I reported on the rising number of military lawyers who exercise increasingly open loathing and contempt for the Military Commissions system which was concocted by former Attorney…

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Fly envious Time, till thou run out thy race, Call on the lazy leaden-stepping hours, Whose speed is but the heavy Plummets pace; And glut thy self with what thy…

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But it is said, when a man comes to high office, that makes him worthy of honor and respect. Surely such offices do not have the power of planting virtue…

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From the first emergence of allegations that the Siegelman prosecution was politically motivated, the Bush Administration has rested its defense on a single straw: that the case was brought and…

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No nation however powerful, any more than an individual, can be unjust with impunity. Sooner or later, public opinion, an instrument merely moral in the beginning, will find occasion physically…

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George Henry Borrow, Lavengro: The Scholar, The Gipsy, The Priest, 2 vols. (Harper’s 1851) Borrow’s Lavengro is a curious relic of the early to mid-Victorian period, but like many of…

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Towery city and branchy between towers Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded; The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did Once encounter in, here coped and poisèd powers; Thou…

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The extra-mental universal constitutes the common nature of the world (natura communis), whereas there is also a principle of individuation, namely “thisness” (hæcceitas). The common nature is common in that…

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Max Weber taught us that secrecy is the implacable foe of democratic society. It can never be eliminated entirely, because every government has military secrets and similar matters which the…

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HAMLET: Madam, how like you this play? QUEEN GERTRUDE: The lady protests too much, methinks. HAMLET: O, but she’ll keep her word. —William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, act iii,…

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The preposterous distinction of rank, which render civilization a curse, by dividing the world between voluptuous tyrants and cunning envious dependents, corrupt, almost equally, every class of people, because respectability…

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Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (Princeton Univ. Press 2007)(with essays by Ronald Steel & Sidney Blumenthal) 114 pp. $21.95 When I began to form my political consciousness in the…

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On September 16, the American media awoke to the existence of Private Military Contractors when Blackwater personnel sprayed Baghdad’s Nisoor Square with bullets. First eleven Iraqis were reported dead and…

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I had a very full calendar today and was not able to take some time to browse the websites I usually hit until I sat down in the train going…

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He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so. —Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (1929)…

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Valerie Plame was a career CIA covert operative whose work focused on efforts to detect and thwart Iranian nuclear proliferation plans. She is married to Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who investigated…

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In writing this column, I have often taken the most embarrassing members of the profession to task: the shameless sycophants, the suck-ups who seek out those in positions of wealth…

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Remembering Alisher Saipov Beat! beat! drums!–Blow! bugles! blow! Through the windows–through doors–burst like a ruthless force, Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation; Into the school where the scholar…

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From the point of sensuous experience, seen from the streets and markets and the haunts of pleasure and gain, the estimate of age is low, melancholy, and skeptical. Frankly face…

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Agence France Presse reports today: The Iraqi government announced on Wednesday that it has decided to formally revoke the immunity from prosecution granted to private security companies operating in the…

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In its (as usual) tortured reporting on the Siegelman case, today’s Birmingham News unwittingly opens the door on another chapter in this saga. Here’s the key passage: During the hearing,…

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A United States Attorney, an embittered Republican who has been defeated in a series of election contests, had a meeting with attorneys for a criminal defendant, a prominent Democrat, at…

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Sed iniustitiæ genera duo sunt, unum eorum, qui inferunt, alterum eorum, qui ab is, quibus infertur, si possunt, non propulsant iniuriam. Nam qui iniuste impetum in quempiam facit aut ira…

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Dick Cheney pays a call on John Howard and suddenly the path of a Guantánamo Military Commission case changes dramatically. A plea bargain is reached, and a man who was…

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Alliance for Justice, a leading national association of environmental, civil rights, mental health, women’s, children’s, and consumer advocacy organizations, has just issued a statement in connection with today’s House Judiciary…

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On a cold October evening in 1941, a military lawyer sat at home in Berlin in his apartment composing a letter to his wife. What he had seen and learned…

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In 1972, James Dickey’s novel Deliverance was turned into a major Hollywood motion picture. It instantly became a cultural icon for America of the last years of the Vietnam War.…

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