Contributors

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Harvey Silverglate has been litigating habeas corpus suits since 1967, when he defended soldiers wrongfully inducted into the Army or court-martialed during the Vietnam War. He even filed a habeas petition on behalf of Timothy Leary at Allen Ginsberg's request. So he had a special interest in a series of Supreme Court cases on the rights of alleged "enemy combatants." While other pundits hailed those decisions as victories for civil liberties, Silverglate couldn't square that reading with his on-the-ground experience, as he explains in "No Cause for Celebration" (page 22).

Paul Sperry is WorldNetDaily's Washington bureau chief and the author of Crude Politics: How Bush's Oil Cronies Hijacked the War on Terrorism (Thomas Nelson). An angry critic of U.S. foreign policy, he says that Osama bin Laden is "not on the run, not cowering in a cave, but has a nice lectern and enough electricity to have powered a DVD player to watch Michael Moore's flick with a bag of microwaved halal kettle corn." Sperry, who received his bachelor of journalism degree ("B.J.–that's what they call it," he insists) from the University of Texas at Austin, looks at the less reputable degrees some government officials have accumulated in "Cut-Rate Diplomas" (page 38).

Like Michael Otsuka, author of Libertarianism Without Inequality, Tom G. Palmer took his doctorate at Oxford. Unlike Otsuka, who promulgates a Frankenstein hybrid of libertarian and egalitarian ideas and whose book he reviews on page 56 ("John Locke Lite"), Palmer went on to become a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.? That's because, he jokes, "I didn't think I was clever enough to get a first-rate academic teaching job, though having read Otsuka's book, I see that was wrong." Prior to taking his current position at Cato, Palmer smuggled literature, photocopiers, and fax machines to dissidents in the Soviet bloc and was vice president of the Institute for Humane Studies. He blogs at TomGPalmer.com.