I recently excavated a British newspaper picture of me in a phalanx of demonstrators charging the American Embassy in London in 1969 to protest the war in Vietnam. People in Britain were angry about the war even without the goad of possible conscription and deployment, and the protest came very close to breaking the police […]

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Forty years ago, in 1977, as the Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, I defended the right of a small group of Chicago-area neo-Nazis to hold a march in Skokie, Illinois. At the time, that was very controversial. The ACLU was widely criticized. Skokie was home for a large number of Holocaust survivors. Holding […]

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I arrived in New York in 1976 intending to spend a few weeks investigating the role Washington had played in the downfall of the Australian government the previous year—and got waylaid for 37 years in America. A lot happened over those decades: I met a feisty New York labor activist named Cydney and we had […]

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The years since the September 11 attacks have seen a myriad of civil lawsuits brought in the United States to expose the horror of the CIA’s Bush-era torture program and obtain compensation and accountability for its victims, only to be dismissed early on as courts invariably bowed to overly expansive claims of state secrets and […]

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In January 2018, contractors working for the Department of Homeland Security will begin to fulfill what Donald Trump has promised: building “a big, beautiful wall” that will separate the United States of America from Los Estados Unidos de Mexico. The path of least resistance to breaking ground on the first segment of the controversial border […]

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