It is impossible to overstate the magnitude of the warfare-state revolution that transformed the federal government and American society after World War II. The roots of America’s foreign-policy crises today, along with the massive infringements on civil liberties and...

George Washington pointed out, “Overgrown military establishments, which under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty." Wise words by the father of our country, but ones,...

Ever since the advent of the Cold War, US officials have told us that it was necessary for the United States to adopt the totalitarian structure known as the national-security state in order to combat communist totalitarianism. We are now witnessing a similar...

The most important thing about Operation Iraqi Freedom is how it demonstrates how US national-security state officials view the concept of freedom. In their minds, the 11 years of brutal occupation on the part of the US military brought freedom to the Iraqi people. In...

Several days ago, the New York Times, which of course epitomizes the mainstream press in America, asked a question that ordinarily would be found mainly on libertarian websites like that of The Future of Freedom Foundation. In the Room for Debate section of the Times’...

Rolando Sarraff Trujillo, the Cuban government official who was released from prison as part of a spy trade between the US government and Cuba, is being hailed by US officials as a hero. Of course, that’s not the view of the Cuban government, which considers Sarraff a...

(Note: Today's announced swap of three members of the "Cuba 5" for jailed US operative Alan Gross, who is mentioned in the below article, makes this article all the more relevant and prescient. Strong forces in the US -- including in the CIA -- will continue to...

Don’t you just love those Americans who celebrate how free they are under America’s national-security state system? I wonder if such Americans also celebrated how free people were who lived under East Germany’s national-security state system. I just read an...

Prior to Thanksgiving, President Obama continued the presidential tradition of pardoning two turkeys. Too bad he didn’t use the occasion to also pardon every single victim of the US government’s decades-long failed and destructive war on drugs. I’m referring, of...

People who are trying to reform the NSA and the CIA are just wasting their time. After all, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, these two agencies operate in secret. Moreover, they know that they can do anything they want, including breaking the law, and that...

As the world celebrates the 25th anniversary of fall of the Berlin Wall, Americans remain more convinced than ever that the United States won the Cold War. The Cold War brought us a national-security state, which consists of an enormous military establishment, a vast...

The great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out that one government intervention inevitably produces a crisis, which then causes government officials to enact a new intervention to address the crisis. The new intervention, however, produces a new crisis,...

Sen. Robert MenendezIn its October 11 Sunday edition, the New York Times published an editorial calling for the lifting of the 45-year-old Cold War-era economic embargo against Cuba. The Times pointed out: Over the decades, it became clear to many American policy...

In April 2003, when U.S. officials were still celebrating their invasion and occupation of Iraq as a fantastic success, I wrote an article entitled, “Where Did Iraq Get Its Weapons of Mass Destruction?” Actually though, it wasn’t actually an article but rather a list...

In response to the Islamic State’s execution of American journalist James Foley, President Obama referred to Foley’s killers as a “cancer.” That, of course, implies that anti-American terrorism is like a disease, one that strikes at nations willy nilly, without rhyme...

Just as I predicted in my article “Why Not Simply Abolish the CIA?” critics of the CIA’s illegally hacking into the computers of U.S. senators who were investigating CIA torture are calling for reform, rather than abolition, of the CIA. Stuck in the mindset of the...

A Chilean court ruled this week that the U.S. national-security state conspired to murder American citizens Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi in Chile in 1973. The brutal act occurred during the violent military coup in which the Chilean military, with the full support...

A news article this week entitled “South Laredo Trafficking Group Indicted” caught my attention. That’s because Laredo is my hometown. I spent 26 years there, including 8 years practicing law, most of which was in partnership with my father. That newspaper article is...

Good for Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa for kicking USAID out of his country. If only every nation in the world would do that. While part of USAID’s activities ostensibly relate to helping “the poor,” that’s just a cover to disguise the real mission of the agency:...

The US government’s 116-year-old obsession with controlling Cuba has suddenly manifested itself again. Yesterday, the Associated Press, based on secret records that it obtained, reported that USAID, the federal agency that distributes billions of dollars in...