ON AUGUST 15, PETE SEDA CAME HOME. He had written to the U.S. Attorney in Eugene, Oregon, advising him that he would arrive in Portland at 11:25 a.m. on Lufthansa Flight 425. I was waiting for Seda in the international lobby at the airport, as was Associate Press reporter William McCall. There was also a […]

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Senator Hothead—Arizona Republican senator and presidential candidate John McCain hadn’t been in town to cast a Senate vote in five weeks when he jumped on Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) for slowing down final negotiations on the bipartisan immigration bill, thereby delaying McCain’s departure for a New York fund-raising event. McCain wanted to attend a midday […]

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In July 2005, George Christian got a call from an employee he supervised. An FBI agent had called to ask who could receive service of a national security letter addressed to the Library Connection, a nonprofit consortium that provides computer services to twenty-six Connecticut libraries. As executive director, Christian was responsible for the organization’s legal […]

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Would More Guns Make Us Safer?—The American Enterprise Institute, a neo-conservative think tank in Washington, DC, is not known by all as a purveyor of accurate information. It publishes studies funded by the oil industry disputing the existence of global warming, and cooked-up rationales for invading Iraq. From 2001 to 2006 it housed a scholar, […]

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Americans of all persuasions were shocked by the revelations, first reported in the New York Times in December of 2005, that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop secretly for years on the calls and e-mails of American citizens, bypassing the warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the U.S. […]

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