Tagged: Stephen Gottlieb

Did you hear the demonstrators against New York's new gun law chanting in unison "We will not comply!"

That's the problem. Guns allow some of their owners to think that they can define right and wrong and everybody else has to comply. In the hands of some of their owners, guns puff up their sense of self-importance, their sense that laws are written for everybody else but that they are above the law.

I’ve spoken often about why sequester type budget cuts threaten a weak economy and can worsen the debt. Today I want to talk about history.

In prior commentaries I have spoken about the moral and constitutional issues in targeting people for assassination, by drones or otherwise. Today I’d like to look at the problem coldly, and try to assess whether and when those moral arguments have consequences on our effort to end terrorism. In particular, what should we make of the Obama Administration’s use of drones abroad to kill those it labels enemies. Plainly al-Qaeda has few scruples; why should we? Should we “fight fire with fire” or “sink to their level” to use two common expressions?

David McCraw, vice-president of the New York Times and a graduate of Albany Law, has been involved in a lawsuit for documents showing how the Administration decided which Americans to assassinate who were on foreign soil but not in war zones. United States District Judge Colleen MacMahon decided that the government did not have “to explain in detail the reasons why its actions do not violate the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

 The suicide of Aaron Swartz made me focus on what he’d been fighting for – free access to knowledge on the internet. Swartz’s methods were misguided and illegal but his purposes are nevertheless worth thinking about. He was part of a movement devoted to giving us all free access to government documents, research papers and much else, believing that it should all be available on the internet at no charge.