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William Fisher

  • MCA HEADED FOR SUPREMES
    26 February 2007 par (Open-Publishing)
    1 comment

    by William Fisher
    Following an appeals court’s divided decision upholding the constitutionality of the Military Commissions Act, opponents of the measure are racing the clock to file an appeal to the US Supreme Court and have it heard during the court’s current term.
    A spokesperson for the Center for Constitutional Rights, the New York-based legal advocacy group that brought the original suit, told IPS it expected the appeal to be filed within the next two weeks and heard in the spring. (…)

  • LAWMAKERS AND LAWYERS CHALLENGE BUSH ADMINISTRATION MILITARY COMMISSIONS
    18 February 2007 par (Open-Publishing)
    2 comments

    By William Fisher
    In the face of multiple legal and legislative challenges, President George W. Bush this week issued an executive order to allow cases against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to move forward to trials by military tribunals.
    The challenges are to the constitutionality of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA), which Bush signed into law last October. The first three cases to be tried under the law involve an Australian, a Yemeni, and a Canadian, all held at (…)

  • SAUDI COSMETICS?
    7 June 2006 par (Open-Publishing)

    By William Fisher As human rights organizations expressed skepticism that detainees recently transferred from Guantanamo Bay to Saudi Arabian custody could receive fair trials and escape torture - and a new study charged that the country’s textbooks continue to promote intolerance of other religions - the oil-rich Kingdom put the finishing touches on its new Human Rights Commission. The new commission - which the government characterizes as an independent rights watchdog — came into (…)

  • OIL ON TROUBLED WATERS
    31 May 2006 par (Open-Publishing)
    10 comments

    by William Fisher Amid the ever-escalating rhetoric between the United States and Venezuela, the president of the oil-rich Latin American country, Hugo Chavez, has been busily scoring points with low-income American consumers. Under a program sometimes dubbed petro-diplomacy, Citgo, Venezuela’s wholly-owned gas and oil subsidiary, has been providing discounts of up to 60 per cent on heating oil to poor communities in the U.S. The program is currently operating in Maine, Massachusetts, (…)

  • USED THE PHONE LATELY? WORRIED?
    28 May 2006 par (Open-Publishing)
    7 comments

    by William Fisher Anticipating that the U.S. federal government would invoke the so-called "state secrets" privilege to block any lawsuit calling for the disclosure of details about allegations that phone companies shared customer records with the government’s biggest spy agency, a major civil rights group has embarked on an alternate course.
    The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed complaints in more than 20 individual states demanding that their utility commissions and (…)

  • PAIN MANAGEMENT: A DOUBLE STANDARD?
    23 May 2006 par (Open-Publishing)

    By William Fisher Two weeks from now, a South Carolina pain management physician will surrender at the Talladega, Alabama, prison to begin serving a 2.5-year sentence for drug trafficking, racketeering, and money laundering. Dr. Michael Jackson is one of hundreds of pain management specialists arrested, charged and jailed by federal and state authorities for violating the Controlled Substances Act, designed to limit the dispensing of illegal prescription drugs by doctors and their use (…)

  • RISING ABOVE PRINCIPLE
    14 February 2006 par (Open-Publishing)

    By William Fisher
    Small government is one of the golden tenets of American conservatism. Small government is more efficient. The smaller the government, the more power will be returned to the people. The smaller the government, the freer our people will be of bureaucratic intrusion, regulation and control. The smaller the government, the closer lawmaking will be to the ‘will of the people’.
    There is much to commend this Jeffersonian construct ? notwithstanding that it oftten chooses to (…)

  • PALESTINE: WHAT’S NEXT?
    3 February 2006 par (Open-Publishing)
    4 comments

    By William Fisher
    That President Bush is a big fan of elections should surprise no one. He’s won a lot of them.
    But his simplistic equation — elections = freedom = democracy = peace — has been running into a bit of trouble lately.
    The president hyped the deeply flawed presidential and parliamentary elections in Egypt as steps toward democracy. But the result was a dramatic rise in votes for the outlawed Islamic brotherhood and Mubarak’s principal contender for the top job sent to jail. (…)

  • THE END OF U.S. AID?
    2 February 2006 par (Open-Publishing)
    2 comments

    By William Fisher
    Foreign affairs experts agree that the Bush Administration is quietly using the Chinese water-torture method to slowly engineer the death of America’s traditional system for delivering foreign aid ? and some of them think it ?s not such a bad idea.
    They point to the creation of the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) and the U.S. Global AIDS initiative outside the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where such programs would normally be located. And, as (…)

  • DEPORTEES’ SUIT
    1 February 2006 par (Open-Publishing)

    de William Fisher
    Four Muslim men who were detained without charge for months in the weeks after September 11, 2001, eventually cleared of any connection to terrorism, but then deported to Egypt, have been allowed to return to the U.S. to pursue their class action civil lawsuit against the U.S. government for unlawful imprisonment and abuse on behalf of 1,200 other Muslim and South Asian men rounded up and jailed following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
    Yasser (…)