A.J. Jacobs has become famous for coming up with great ideas and taking them way too far. While researching his best-selling 2007 book, The Year of Living Biblically, he literally followed every single rule in the Bible, growing a huge beard and avoiding clothes made from two kinds of fibers. For Drop Dead Healthy in 2012, he tested every diet and exercise regimen he could find, on a two-year quest to become “the healthiest man alive.” He wrote parts of the book while walking on a treadmill, experimented with “extreme chewing,” completed his first sprint triathlon, and lost more than 20 pounds.

This past May, A.J. published The Year of Living Constitutionally. His latest extreme mission was inspired by Supreme Court rulings in 2022 on women’s rights and gun rights, which ignited a national conversation about how to interpret the Constitution—and A.J. decided to find out what would happen if he interpreted it as literally as possible. He exercised his right, as an American citizen, to bear an eighteenth-century musket in the streets of New York. He quartered soldiers in his apartment, much to his wife’s consternation. And—as he describes in the following piece—he petitioned Congress to become a state-sanctioned pirate, otherwise known as a “privateer,” with permission to detain enemy ships.

Privateers are the unsung heroes of the American Revolution. We probably wouldn’t celebrate the Fourth of July without them. So, while A.J. acknowledges parts of his experiment are absurd, his goal is a serious one: to fully understand, and therefore preserve, the democracy that was founded on this day 248 years ago. It’s a goal we admire at The Free Press. So this holiday, we bring you A.J.—tricorn hat, musket, and all—on the art of living constitutionally. 

It’s important, on today of all days, to be grateful for our constitutional rights—not only the right to free speech and the right to free exercise of religion but also the underappreciated rights. Like your constitutional right to become a government-sanctioned pirate. 

It may not get much publicity, but there it is, smack-dab in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution: Congress has the power to grant citizens “letters of marque and reprisal.” Meaning that, with Congress’s permission, private citizens can load weapons onto their fishing boats, head out to the high seas, capture enemy vessels, and keep the booty. Back in the day, these patriotic pirates were known as “privateers.” 

At the start of the Revolutionary War, America had a meager navy, so we had to rely on these privateers, who captured nearly two thousand British vessels and confiscated vast amounts of food, uniforms, weapons, and barrels of sherry. They included Jonathan Haraden, who captained several vessels, including the delightfully named Tyrannicide. He once fought three British ships at once off the coast of New Jersey—and captured all of them.

The Founding Fathers were big fans of privateers. Late in life, John Adams wrote glowingly about the 1775 Massachusetts law that first legalized them, calling it “one of the most important documents in history. The Declaration of Independence is a brimborion in comparison with it.” You read that right: in Adams’ opinion, a law authorizing patriotic piracy is much more important than that trifling tidbit about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The trouble is, Congress has not granted permission to become a privateer to any citizen since 1815. So, a few months ago, I set out on a quest to become the first constitutionally approved privateer in 209 years. 

The quest was, in part, research for my new book, The Year of Living Constitutionally, which was inspired by the heated contemporary debate over how America should interpret its Constitution. The majority of justices currently sitting on the Supreme Court are originalists: they believe the most important consideration in interpreting the Constitution is what it originally meant when it was ratified in 1789. I wanted to find out what would happen if I attempted to become the ultimate originalist—engaging with the document as a brand-new eighteenth-century citizen of the United States might have.

But when I first considered applying to Congress for “letters of marque and reprisal,” I was a little stumped. Should I write them a quill-penned missive? Should I trek from my home in New York City down to Washington, D.C., on horseback? A few weeks later, providence offered an opportunity.

In the past, I have donated to the Democratic National Committee, so I occasionally get fundraising emails from the offices of congresspeople all over the nation. And shortly after my project began in 2023, I received an email from an aide to Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from Silicon Valley, saying the congressman was coming to New York and would love to meet me, I suppose because of my past generosity. I’ve always ignored such requests, but now there was something I needed.

“It would be my honor,” I replied.

So a few weeks later, I arrived in the lobby of a Midtown hotel for my meeting. The congressman’s aide, Cooper, led me to the table, and there was Khanna—a tall, good-looking, rising star of the Democratic Party; a Yale Law School graduate focused on climate change and artificial intelligence governance.

We shook hands, and I explained I wanted to ask him “one quick thing.” 

“Please,” said the congressman.

I forced myself to speak the words, reminding myself of my commitment to live by the Constitution’s original meaning in 2024. 

“I brought you this. It’s an application to get a letter of marque from Congress. I’m interested in becoming a privateer.”

I handed the congressman a piece of paper on which, in an old-timey font, I had evoked what is my right, according to Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution. He examined it for a couple of seconds, then asked: “How do we do this?” 

I loved Representative Khanna’s optimism, his let’s-make-this-work attitude. He was on board even before he really understood what I was asking.

I explained that every American had the right to seek approval to “detain and seize any seafaring vessels considered to be operated by enemies of the United States.”

“Are you going to the Taiwan Strait?” Khanna asked, incredulous.

“Yeah, if you want me to.”

“Wow,” he said.

I couldn’t tell if it was a Wow, this is cool, or a Wow, this is what I have to put up with to raise money. “It has to be voted on by the whole Congress?”

“I think so.” 

“We will look into it,” Khanna said, then held up my letter: “Can I keep this?”

For several minutes, we spoke about originalism and the Constitution. Though it’s obscure, the privateering clause highlights that this document—for all its brilliance and prescience—was written in a vastly different time. Some passages—such as those about the “blessings of liberty” and “equal protection”—are timeless. But others are clearly the product of the eighteenth century. For more proof that the Constitution is a historical document, please see the Third Amendment, which is about quartering soldiers.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be grateful to the Constitution. We should. It made possible not just privateers but also our most basic liberties. But we should also be grateful we don’t interpret it as it was written in the eighteenth century. Back then, for instance, free speech was far more constrained (there were numerous state laws banning blasphemy), and putting a man in the pillory was considered neither cruel nor unusual punishment.

I’m also not saying we should ignore the dated parts of the Constitution. Article I, Section 8 reminds us about a crucial part of our history: privateers are rarely given their due, perhaps because their own patriotism was mixed with the motive of profit. But they deserve credit, especially at a time when Americans seem increasingly unwilling to serve their country.

I am not one of those Americans. Over the last year I have exchanged several emails with Cooper, Rep. Khanna’s aide, who now addresses me as “Captain.” He says Khanna is discussing getting me a letter of marque with his colleagues. In the meantime, I have found my own vessel: my friend’s 23-foot waterskiing boat. All I need to become a state-sanctioned pirate is for the majority of congresspeople to sign off on my request. Right now, they seem a little distracted with other matters.

But I still have my tricorn hat, ready and waiting. I’ve told Cooper I’m standing by, ready for updates, prepared to serve. But I feel I have already done something patriotic, in raising awareness for privateers, these unsung heroes of American independence—even if I myself never get to hit the high seas.

A.J. Jacobs is an author, journalist, lecturer, and human guinea pig. His new book is “The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning.” Follow him on X @ajjacobs, and find him on Substack at “Experimental Living with A.J. Jacobs.”

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Text originally published July 1, 2024

Craig Murray – by Mr. Fish

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Blackburn, England: I am standing with Craig Murray who is running for Parliament in this gritty former mill town. We are on a narrow street with brick row houses that jaggedly descend down a hill. The sky is overcast. There is intermittent rain.

Craig, portly, his white hair unkempt and dressed in a clashing checkered shirt with a paisley tie, is handing out leaflets at the entrance of the Masjid e Tauheedul Islam, Blackburn’s largest mosque. He introduces himself politely to those leaving the midday prayers. 

I speak with about half a dozen of the worshippers, who like most of the Muslim community in Blackburn, are of Indian and Pakistani origin. They curtly dismiss the leaders of the ruling Labour and Conservative parties as out of touch with their lives and concerns, including their outrage over the genocide in Gaza.

Craig’s central campaign issue, like that of George Galloway — who was recently elected as MP for Rochdale — is ending the genocide in Gaza, including the halting of all arms shipments to Israel. Craig is running on the ticket of Galloway’s socialist Workers Party of Britain, to counter what he says is the “appalling pro-genocide stance” of the opposition Labour Party, which looks set to win the British elections on July 4, ousting the Conservative Party government led by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

The Labour Party has won the parliamentary elections in Blackburn for the last 69 years. The socialist crusader, Barbara Castle — instrumental in exposing the British atrocities in Kenya, including the deaths of perhaps 300,000 Kikuyu people and the detention of up to 320,000 more in over 100 camps, where prisoners were tortured, murdered and died of disease — previously held this seat, as did the former foreign secretary Jack Straw. Straw was decidedly less progressive. He was one of the architects of the 2003 war in Iraq under former prime minister Tony Blair. Craig challenged Straw for the seat in 2005 on an anti-war platform. He received five percent of the vote.

The Labour MP for Blackburn, Kate Hollern, in the last election in 2019, won 64.9 percent of the vote. She deviates from the Labour Party line on Gaza, calling for an immediate ceasefire and a suspension of arms shipments to Israel. She was one of the few party members who remained loyal to Jeremy Corbyn when his campaign to run for prime minister was sabotaged by party apparatchiks close to Blair, who accused him of being an anti-Semite because of his defense of Palestinians.

“I have nothing bad to say about the woman really, except that if elected, she would be part of putting Keir Starmer into Number 10 and I have a very great deal against Keir Starmer,” Craig says of his Labour opponent.

Straw, although out of Parliament, casts an ominous shadow over Craig’s campaign. For, as in most of the constituencies where Labour is being challenged by candidates that oppose Labour’s support for Israel, a second well-funded independent, devoid of political experience or a public record on nearly all issues, is also running on an anti-genocide platform. In the case of Blackburn, this person is Adnan Hussain. While Hussain spends much of his campaign attacking Craig, Craig has held a series of meetings on Palestine, including one where he, Richard Medhurst and I spoke to a packed hall at Saint Paul’s Methodist church in Blackburn. Craig has also hosted campaign events with Professor David Miller, who was fired in 2021 from the University of Bristol for his criticisms of Israel, and Dr. Bob Gill, who has documented the defunding, outsourcing and marketization of Britain’s National Health Service by all ruling parties since Margaret Thatcher. Roger Waters is scheduled to hold a campaign rally in Blackburn for Craig on July 2.

The Muslim media site, 5Pillars, proposed that Craig and Hussain toss a coin to see who should run as an independent against the Labour Party. Craig agreed. Hussain, a 34-year-old lawyer, refused.                                                         

“The people behind Hussain’s campaign are Jack Straw’s people,” Craig says. “The people financing and organizing his campaign are Jack Straw’s people. The Labour Party is splitting the challenge. It’s not only here. It’s happening around the country.”

Craig’s cluttered second floor campaign office sits on a narrow street above the Mi Chaii cafe on Whalley Range. Covering the windows outside are huge posters and billboards with pictures of public figures, including George Galloway, Roger Waters and Stella Assange, with their brief endorsements supporting Craig’s candidacy.

Nearly half of Blackburn’s constituents are Muslim. The town is reputed to have more mosques than any town in Europe. British Muslims, like Muslims in the U.S. who have abandoned Joe Biden, have walked away from the Labour Party because of Starmer’s unequivocal support for Israel. In Blackburn’s local council elections in May, Labour suffered a significant decline in votes.

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Craig, the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, was pushed out of the Foreign Office after leaking to The Financial Times, in 2004, a memorandum he authored that detailed the CIA torture and extraordinary rendition program in Uzbekistan. Craig says his internal protests to the Foreign Office were ignored.

He exposed practices in Uzbek black sites of sexual humiliation, genital mutilation, the rape of men and women, cutting and the dousing of prisoners with boiling liquid, including the death of a prisoner who was immersed in a vat of boiling water.

“The Uzbeks were doing it on behalf of the CIA,” he tells me one morning as we sit in his campaign office. “At first, the prisoners were mostly Uzbeks who had been captured in Afghanistan. But latterly, people were being brought in from all over the place.”

According to the Council of Europe report on extraordinary rendition, of all the CIA flights that stopped in Poland, 50 percent went to Uzbekistan.

Straw, at the time of Craig’s revelations, was the foreign secretary. He pushed for Craig’s prosecution, something the Foreign Office decided against. Caught in a “cash for access” sting, Straw was forced to retire from politics. But he remains a powerbroker in the Labour Party, especially in Blackburn.

“This is entirely prompted by the genocide in Gaza,” Craig says of his parliamentary campaign. “I wouldn’t have come back were it not for the genocide in Gaza. Starmer’s attitude to the genocide in Gaza reminds me of Straw’s attitude to torture, extraordinary rendition and the Iraq war. The Labour Party is corrupt. It doesn’t stand for any of the principles the Labour Party is supposed to stand for.”

“Gaza represents the dislocation of the political class from the people,” he says. “The people want to stop it, certainly here in the U.K., but they have no leverage. The political class is no longer connected to the people. It is connected to the arms industry, to the lobbyists, particularly the Zionist lobby. That’s where the interests of the political class lie. They don’t care about the people. That’s true of both of the main parties. They suffer no hardship because there’s nobody else likely to be elected. Western democracy has become meaningless. The political class is homogeneous. All of them could move from one of the main parties to the other main party without changing anything. If we’re going to save democracy, we have to offer an actual democratic alternative. Gaza brought that home to people.”

Craig, an ardent supporter of Julian Assange, who produced the most erudite reporting on Julian’s many court hearings, spent four months in prison in Edinburgh in the summer of 2022.

He was found in media contempt of court for his reporting on the trial of the Scottish independence leader Alex Salmond, who was accused of sexual assault.

“It was another example of the state using sexual allegations to undermine and wreck the reputation of an opponent,” he says of Salmond and Julian.

The group of women who brought the charges against Salmond were closely connected to the then first minister, Nicola Sturgeon. Craig was jailed for hinting at this fact in his court reports. 

Salmond was found not guilty.

“Over 5,000 individuals wrote to me in jail,” he says. “I answered all those by hand, 50 or 60 letters a day.”

“There were quite a lot of illiterate prisoners,” he says. “If you want anything in jail you have to fill in a form. If you cut your foot and need a sticking plaster, you have to fill a form. If you want a family visit you have to fill in a form. Forms would appear under my cell door. Someone would shout through the door what they wanted filled in. A majority of prisoners are there because of poverty. Their crime is poverty. They’ve all been born into deprivation. They’ve had a very poor education. Most of them were born into addiction. The number who are not addicts is tiny. On my entire block, which would be 120 people, there were two people who weren’t addicts and one of them was me.” 

“Most of them are in jail for very, very petty crimes,” he continues. “They shoplift or burgle or deal small amounts of drugs in order to feed their addiction. And then they get put in jail. They get no treatment for addiction in jail. They get prescribed drugs daily because the guards want to keep them dazed. Every morning they get their fix. They serve two years. They’re released back out again. They go and burgle someone else and get caught and then they’re back in again. Most of them have been in jail five or six times. The number of real criminals, as in violent people or people who have done large scale crime, is tiny. Most of them are very, very sad, incapable people who need help with their lives. They don’t need locking up.”

“I hadn’t realized so many people have abject, bleak lives, lives without hope,” he says softly. “Their whole life has been without hope from the day they were born. They never had a chance, never had direction. I thought I was socially aware. I realized I’m not. I didn’t know what it was like at the bottom of society.”

“The state has a monopoly on violence and uses it,” he says. “It used extreme violence against Julian Assange, which had a deleterious effect on his health, both mental and physical.”

On October 16, 2023, as he was returning from a WikiLeaks meeting in Reykjavik, where he also attended a pro-Palestine demonstration, Craig was detained and interrogated in Glasgow airport under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. He was questioned about his relationship with WikiLeaks and his support for the Palestinians. He later received a letter informing him that he was under investigation under the Terrorism Act and that his electronic devices, which had been confiscated at the airport, would not be returned. 

The Terrorism Act 2000 is often used to detain and interrogate politically active individuals, members of “suspect communities” such as Muslims, Tamils and Kurds, and journalists, such as David Miranda, for carrying the Snowden files. Kit Klarenberg of The Grayzone was detained under the 2019 Counter-Terrorism and Border Act, after his report revealed journalist Paul Mason’s close ties to British intelligence.

“I’m a traitor in their eyes,” Craig says of the ruling class. “I was an insider, a member of the establishment who turned against the establishment.”

“It’s empathy,” he says when I ask him what drives him, “empathy for the people being tortured in Uzbekistan and for their families, for all those who suffer. I was driven by horror at what happened to the victims of the Iraq war. I am driven by horror at what I see happening to the children of Gaza. I hate human suffering. I do my best to alleviate it.”

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