Antiwar.com

Template:Short description Template:Infobox website Antiwar.com is an American political website founded in 1995 that describes itself as devoted to non-interventionism and as opposing imperialism and war. It has a right-wing libertarian perspective and is a project of the Randolph Bourne Institute. The website states that it is "fighting the next information war”.

StanceEdit

The site's first objective, in its own words, "was to fight against intervention in the Balkans under the Clinton presidency." It says it "applied the same principles to Clinton's campaigns in Haiti and Kosovo and bombings of Sudan and Afghanistan."<ref name=":0" /> Antiwar.com opposed the US wars in Iraq<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and Afghanistan<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and generally opposes interventionism, including the US bombing of Serbia and the US occupation of Afghanistan. It has also condemned aggressive military action and other forms of belligerence on the part of other governments, as well as what contributors view as the fiscal and civil liberties consequences of war.<ref name=":0">“Who We Are”, Antiwar.com (Randolph Bourne Institute, 2010) (April 21, 2010).</ref>Template:Third-party inline

Wen Stephenson of The Atlantic described the site in 1999 as marked by "a decidely Template:Sic right-wing cast of thought."<ref>Wen Stephenson, “Not Your Father's Antiwar Movement,” The Atlantic (April 14, 1999) (retrieved April 21, 2010).</ref> Its founders described themselves as libertarians,<ref>“Frequently Asked Questions,” Antiwar.com (Randolph Bourne Institute, n.d.) (April 21, 2010)</ref> and the two principal co-founders were involved in libertarian Republican politics at the time. The Guardian described it in as "libertarian, anti-interventionist" in 2016;<ref name="Wilson 2016">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> James Kirchick in The Washington Post called it a "paleoconservative clearinghouse" in 2018;<ref name="Kirchick 2018">Template:Cite news</ref> and Salon.com described in 2021 it as "right-wing".<ref name="Henderson 2021">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Other sources describing it as "conservative" include Barbara Clare Foley in The Minnesota Review.Template:Cite journal</ref>

The site publishes opinion from a range of perspectives, publishing "critiques of American foreign policy from the far left and the far right," according to The New Yorker,<ref name="Marantz|2017">Template:Cite magazine</ref> and featuring writers such as the paleoconservative isolationist Pat Buchanan,<ref name="Henderson 2021" /> right libertarians such as Ron Paul, and left libertarians such as Noam Chomsky, Juan Cole,<ref>Crane, David Wade, "Linkages: Political Topography and Networked Topology" in Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities, University of California Press, July 25, 2014, p. 225</ref> and Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin.

HistoryEdit

The site was founded on 24 December 1995<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> by Justin Raimondo and Eric Garris,<ref name="ABC News 2019">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> as a response to the Bosnian war. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation, operating under the auspices of the Randolph Bourne Institute, based in Atherton, California. It was previouslyTemplate:When affiliated with the Center for Libertarian Studies and functioned before thatTemplate:When as an independent, ad-supported website.<ref>For more historical information, see “Frequently Asked Questions”, Antiwar.com (Randolph Bourne Institute, 2010) (April 22, 2010).</ref>

In 2006, Google suspended it from its AdSense advertising network, which was then the source of a significant portion of its income, due to its hosting of explicit photos of abuses committed by United States troops at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, categorised by Google as "gore".<ref name="Pareene 2015">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>Template:Unreliable source?

Lawsuit against the FBIEdit

In 2011, the site discovered it was being monitored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.<ref name="Ackerman 2013">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> After their Freedom of Information Act request failed to produce results, they worked with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California which in May 2013 filed a freedom of the press lawsuit for full FBI records on Antiwar.com, Eric Garris and Justin Raimondo.<ref>Ryan J. Reilly, AntiWar.com Editors Sue Over FBI Surveillance, The Huffington Post, May 21, 2013.</ref><ref>Julia Harumi Mass, Staff Attorney, Sloppy FBI Work Leads to Spying on Journalists, American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California press release, November 6, 2013.</ref> The documents received in November 2013 indicated that the FBI in San Francisco, and later in Newark, New Jersey, began monitoring the site after Eric Garris passed along to the FBI a threat to hack the Antiwar.com website. The FBI mistakenly took this as an actual threat against its own website and began monitoring Antiwar.com and its editors.<ref name="Ackerman 2013"/><ref>DOJ documents show FBI monitoring of antiwar.com (Documents), The Guardian, November 6, 2013.</ref> Eric Garris demanded the FBI correct its file.<ref>Kelley Vlahos, Antiwar.com Editor Demands FBI File Fix, American Conservative, November 15, 2013.</ref> In September 2019, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the FBI must delete its memo documenting Garris' First Amendment activities.<ref name="Egelko 2019">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

In 2013, Eric Garris, Justin Raimondo, and Antiwar.com began a lawsuit against the FBI for incorrectly identifying Garris as a national security "threat," and conducting an investigation into Antiwar.com as a potential threat. The lawsuit was conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union.<ref>Adam Klasfeld, “Antiwar.com Sues FBI for ‘Threat Assessment’”, Courthouse News Service (May 23, 2013)</ref> The lawsuit stated that the FBI had incorrectly claimed that Garris had threatened to hack the FBI website after Garris reported a threat he received against Antiwar.com. The federal court ordered the FBI to amend their files and issue a correction to Garris.<ref>Spencer Ackerman, “FBI monitored anti-war website in error for six years, documents show”, The Guardian (Nov. 6, 2013)</ref> In 2017, the court ordered the FBI to give Antiwar.com access to all the records of the investigation without redaction and to pay $300,000 to the ACLU lawyers.<ref>Helen Christophi, “FBI Agrees to Give Records to Anti-War Reporters”, Courthouse News Service (April 17, 2017)</ref> Antiwar.com lost the part of the case that claimed violations of the Privacy Act by the FBI. Antiwar.com and the ACLU appealed the Privacy Act claim and the appeal went to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In 2019, the 9th Circuit three-judge panel unanimously ruled against the FBI and order them to expunge all records from the investigation.<ref>Eric Garris, “Antiwar.com vs. FBI Appeal Hearing in the 9th Circuit (video)”, Antiwar.com (June 12, 2019)</ref> Civil Liberties groups like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation hailed the ruling as a victory for privacy rights of journalists and activists.<ref>Aaron Mackey “Victory! Individuals Can Force Government to Purge Records of Their First Amendment Activity”, Electronic Frontier Foundation (September 13, 2019)</ref>

PersonnelEdit

Notable site personnel have included:<ref>See “Who We Are”, Antiwar.com (Randolph Bourne Institute, 2010) (April 22, 2010), for a current list of staff members.</ref>

Justin Raimondo (1951–2019), founder and editorial director
Eric Garris, founder, webmaster, and managing editor
Scott Horton (born 1976), assistant editor

Notable contributorsEdit

Featured writers include:<ref>The names of many regular writers are listed on the site's homepage; additional names also appear on this page: “Antiwar.com Columnists”, Antiwar.com (Randolph Bourne Institute, 2010) (April 22, 2010).</ref> Template:Div col

Template:Div col end The site syndicates columns and op-eds by such authors as:Template:Cn Template:Div col

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Antiwar RadioEdit

Antiwar Radio is hosted by Scott Horton and others including Charles Goyette.Template:Cn It features interviews focused on war, international relations, the growth of state power, civil liberties, and related matters. Guests have included:Template:Cn Template:Div col

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Antiwar News with Dave DeCampEdit

Antiwar News with Dave DeCamp, the current news editor of Antiwar.com, shares daily summaries of the top U.S. foreign policy news stories from a non-interventionist perspective.Template:Third-party inline Dave DeCamp was announced as a runner-up awardee of the 2023 Pierre Sprey Award for Defense Reporting and Analysis for delivering "a comprehensive and essential corrective to the tsunami of slanted misinformation that appears each day in our country's mainstream media".<ref name=":1">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>Template:Third-party inline

ReactionsEdit

The Washington PostTemplate:'s Linton Weeks described it "a thoughtful, well-organized site" in 1999.<ref>Linton Weeks, “Waging War on War,” WashingtonPost.Com (The Washington Post, April 15, 1999) (April 22, 2010)</ref> Scott McConnell of The American Conservative wrote in 2010 the New York Press that Antiwar.com was "strikingly successful" and "could claim more readers than Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard once the [Balkan] war began."<ref>Scott McConnell, “The New Peaceniks,” New York Press, June 22, 1999 (republished at Antiwar.com) (April 21, 2010).</ref>Template:Better source needed When Raimondo died in 2019, Patrick Buchanan said that "In the three decades since [1991], no man in America worked harder or did more to resist the interventionist impulses of the American establishment and the wars they produced than Justin and his Antiwar website.”<ref name="Welsch Gottfried Gonzalez 2019">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

David Bernstein included it in 2012 among "far left anti-Israel sites that have ties to the anti-Semitic far-right or are known for playing footsie with anti-Semitism".<ref name="Goldberg 2012">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Antisemitism scholar David Renton in 2021 gave the website as an example of how "ideas [which] started in the American far right... migrated into British left-wing circles without people having any idea where they began."<ref name="Jewish Currents 2021">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Anti-fascist researcher Matthew N. Lyons describes the "paleocon-sponsored" website as an example of left-right alliance.<ref name="Lyons 2003 pp. 377–418">Template:Cite journal</ref>

In 2019, researchers from The Open University found that the crowdsourced MyWOT program labeled Antiwar.com as "trustworthy", while the OpenSources evaluator tagged the website as "conspiracy, clickbait and bias".<ref>Mensio, Martino and Alani, Harith (2019). News Source Credibility in the Eyes of Different Assessors. In: Proceedings of the Conference for Truth and Trust Online 2019.</ref>

ReferencesEdit

Template:Reflist

External linksEdit

Antiwar.com
PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer, “Voices of Dissent,” May 24, 1999
New York Press, Scott McConnell, “The New Peaceniks,” June 22, 1999.
The Atlantic Online, “Not Your Father's Antiwar Movement,” April 14, 1999
“Intrepid Antiwarriors of the Libertarian Right”, San Francisco Weekly, December 10, 2003.

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