Archive for the ‘freedom’ Category
This article, which first appeared in The Standard for April 1963, is collected in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays.
The libertarian movement has been chided by William F. Buckley, Jr., for failing to use its “strategic intelligence” in facing the major problems of our time. We have, indeed, been too often prone to “pursue our busy little seminars on whether or not to demunicipalize the garbage collectors” (as Buckley has contemptuously written), while ignoring and failing to apply libertarian theory to the most vital problem of our time: war and peace. There is a sense in which libertarians have been utopian rather than strategic in their thinking, with a tendency to divorce the ideal system which we envisage from the realities of the world in which we live. In short, too many of us have divorced theory from practice, and have then been content to hold the pure libertarian society as an abstract ideal for some remotely future time, while in the concrete world of today we follow unthinkingly the orthodox “conservative” line. To live liberty, to begin the hard but essential strategic struggle of changing the unsatisfactory world of today in the direction of our ideals, we must realize and demonstrate to the world that libertarian theory can be brought sharply to bear upon all of the world’s crucial problems. By coming to grips with these problems, we can demonstrate that libertarianism is not just a beautiful ideal somewhere on Cloud Nine, but a tough-minded body of truths that enables us to take our stand and to cope with the whole host of issues of our day.
Let us then, by all means, use our strategic intelligence. Although, when he sees the result, Mr. Buckley might well wish that we had stayed in the realm of garbage collection. Let us construct a libertarian theory of war and peace.
The fundamental axiom of libertarian theory is that no one may threaten or commit violence (“aggress”) against another man’s person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another.1 In short, no violence may be employed against a non-aggressor. Here is the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory.2
Let us set aside the more complex problem of the State for a while and consider simply relations between “private” individuals. Jones finds that he or his property is being invaded, aggressed against, by Smith. It is legitimate for Jones, as we have seen, to repel this invasion by defensive violence of his own. But now we come to a more knotty question: is it within the right of Jones to commit violence against innocent third parties as a corollary to his legitimate defense against Smith? To the libertarian, the answer must be clearly, no. Remember that the rule prohibiting violence against the persons or property of innocent men is absolute: it holds regardless of the subjective motives for the aggression. It is wrong and criminal to violate the property or person of another, even if one is a Robin Hood, or starving, or is doing it to save one’s relatives, or is defending oneself against a third man’s attack. We may understand and sympathize with the motives in many of these cases and extreme situations. We may later mitigate the guilt if the criminal comes to trial for punishment, but we cannot evade the judgment that this aggression is still a criminal act, and one which the victim has every right to repel, by violence if necessary. In short, A aggresses against B because C is threatening, or aggressing against, A. We may understand C’s “higher” culpability in this whole procedure; but we must still label this aggression as a criminal act which B has the right to repel by violence.
To be more concrete, if Jones finds that his property is being stolen by Smith, he has the right to repel him and try to catch him; but he has no right to repel him by bombing a building and murdering innocent people or to catch him by spraying machine gun fire into an innocent crowd. If he does this, he is as much (or more of) a criminal aggressor as Smith is.
The application to problems of war and peace is already becoming evident. For while war in the narrower sense is a conflict between States, in the broader sense we may define it as the outbreak of open violence between people or groups of people. If Smith and a group of his henchmen aggress against Jones and Jones and his bodyguards pursue the Smith gang to their lair, we may cheer Jones on in his endeavor; and we, and others in society interested in repelling aggression, may contribute financially or personally to Jones’s cause. But Jones has no right, any more than does Smith, to aggress against anyone else in the course of his “just war”: to steal others’ property in order to finance his pursuit, to conscript others into his posse by use of violence, or to kill others in the course of his struggle to capture the Smith forces. If Jones should do any of these things, he becomes a criminal as fully as Smith, and he too becomes subject to whatever sanctions are meted out against criminality. In fact, if Smith’s crime was theft, and Jones should use conscription to catch him, or should kill others in the pursuit, Jones becomes more of a criminal than Smith, for such crimes against another person as enslavement and murder are surely far worse than theft. (For while theft injures the extension of another’s personality, enslavement injures, and murder obliterates, that personality itself.)
Suppose that Jones, in the course of his “just war” against the ravages of Smith, should kill a few innocent people, and suppose that he should declaim, in defense of this murder, that he was simply acting on the slogan, “Give me liberty or give me death.” The absurdity of this “defense” should be evident at once, for the issue is not whether Jones was willing to risk death personally in his defensive struggle against Smith; the issue is whether he was willing to kill other people in pursuit of his legitimate end. For Jones was in truth acting on the completely indefensible slogan: “Give me liberty or give them death” surely a far less noble battle cry.3
The libertarian’s basic attitude toward war must then be: it is legitimate to use violence against criminals in defense of one’s rights of person and property; it is completely impermissible to violate the rights of other innocent people. War, then, is only proper when the exercise of violence is rigorously limited to the individual criminals. We may judge for ourselves how many wars or conflicts in history have met this criterion.
It has often been maintained, and especially by conservatives, that the development of the horrendous modern weapons of mass murder (nuclear weapons, rockets, germ warfare, etc.) is only a difference of degree rather than kind from the simpler weapons of an earlier era. Of course, one answer to this is that when the degree is the number of human lives, the difference is a very big one.4 But another answer that the libertarian is particularly equipped to give is that while the bow and arrow and even the rifle can be pinpointed, if the will be there, against actual criminals, modern nuclear weapons cannot. Here is a crucial difference in kind. Of course, the bow and arrow could be used for aggressive purposes, but it could also be pinpointed to use only against aggressors. Nuclear weapons, even “conventional” aerial bombs, cannot be. These weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction. (The only exception would be the extremely rare case where a mass of people who were all criminals inhabited a vast geographical area.) We must, therefore, conclude that the use of nuclear or similar weapons, or the threat thereof, is a sin and a crime against humanity for which there can be no justification.
This is why the old cliché no longer holds that it is not the arms but the will to use them that is significant in judging matters of war and peace. For it is precisely the characteristic of modern weapons that they cannot be used selectively, cannot be used in a libertarian manner. Therefore, their very existence must be condemned, and nuclear disarmament becomes a good to be pursued for its own sake. And if we will indeed use our strategic intelligence, we will see that such disarmament is not only a good, but the highest political good that we can pursue in the modem world. For just as murder is a more heinous crime against another man than larceny, so mass murder – indeed murder so widespread as to threaten human civilization and human survival itself – is the worst crime that any man could possibly commit. And that crime is now imminent. And the forestalling of massive annihilation is far more important, in truth, than the demunicipalization of garbage disposal, as worthwhile as that may be. Or are libertarians going to wax properly indignant about price control or the income tax, and yet shrug their shoulders at or even positively advocate the ultimate crime of mass murder?
If nuclear warfare is totally illegitimate even for individuals defending themselves against criminal assault, how much more so is nuclear or even “conventional” warfare between States!
It is time now to bring the State into our discussion. The State is a group of people who have managed to acquire a virtual monopoly of the use of violence throughout a given territorial area. In particular, it has acquired a monopoly of aggressive violence, for States generally recognize the right of individuals to use violence (though not against States, of course) in self-defense.5 The State then uses this monopoly to wield power over the inhabitants of the area and to enjoy the material fruits of that power. The State, then, is the only organization in society that regularly and openly obtains its monetary revenues by the use of aggressive violence; all other individuals and organizations (except if delegated that right by the State) can obtain wealth only by peaceful production and by voluntary exchange of their respective products. This use of violence to obtain its revenue (called “taxation”) is the keystone of State power. Upon this base the State erects a further structure of power over the individuals in its territory, regulating them, penalizing critics, subsidizing favorites, etc. The State also takes care to arrogate to itself the compulsory monopoly of various critical services needed by society, thus keeping the people in dependence upon the State for key services, keeping control of the vital command posts in society and also fostering among the public the myth that only the State can supply these goods and services. Thus the State is careful to monopolize police and judicial service, the ownership of roads and streets, the supply of money, and the postal service, and effectively to monopolize or control education, public utilities, transportation, and radio and television.
Now, since the State arrogates to itself the monopoly of violence over a territorial area, so long as its depredations and extortions go unresisted, there is said to be “peace” in the area, since the only violence is one-way, directed by the State downward against the people. Open conflict within the area only breaks out in the case of “revolutions” in which people resist the use of State power against them. Both the quiet case of the State unresisted and the case of open revolution may be termed “vertical violence”: violence of the State against its public or vice versa.
In the modern world, each land area is ruled over by a State organization, but there are a number of States scattered over the earth, each with a monopoly of violence over its own territory. No super-State exists with a monopoly of violence over the entire world; and so a state of “anarchy” exists between the several States. (It has always been a source of wonder, incidentally, to this writer how the same conservatives who denounce as lunatic any proposal for eliminating a monopoly of violence over a given territory and thus leaving private individuals without an overlord, should be equally insistent upon leaving States without an overlord to settle disputes between them. The former is always denounced as “crackpot anarchism”; the latter is hailed as preserving independence and “national sovereignty” from “world government.”) And so, except for revolutions, which occur only sporadically, the open violence and two-sided conflict in the world takes place between two or more States, that is, in what is called “international war” (or “horizontal violence”).
Now there are crucial and vital differences between inter-State warfare on the one hand and revolutions against the State or conflicts between private individuals on the other. One vital difference is the shift in geography. In a revolution, the conflict takes place within the same geographical area: both the minions of the State and the revolutionaries inhabit the same territory. Inter-State warfare, on the other hand, takes place between two groups, each having a monopoly over its own geographical area; that is, it takes place between inhabitants of different territories. From this difference flow several important consequences: (1) in inter-State war the scope for the use of modem weapons of destruction is far greater. For if the “escalation” of weaponry in an intra-territorial conflict becomes too great, each side will blow itself up with the weapons directed against the other. Neither a revolutionary group nor a State combating revolution, for example, can use nuclear weapons against the other. But, on the other hand, when the warring parties inhabit different territorial areas, the scope for modern weaponry becomes enormous, and the entire arsenal of mass devastation can come into play. A second consequence (2) is that while it is possible for revolutionaries to pinpoint their targets and confine them to their State enemies, and thus avoid aggressing against innocent people, pinpointing is far less possible in an inter-State war.6 This is true even with older weapons; and, of course, with modern weapons there can be no pinpointing whatever. Furthermore, (3) since each State can mobilize all the people and resources in its territory, the other State comes to regard all the citizens of the opposing country as at least temporarily its enemies and to treat them accordingly by extending the war to them. Thus, all of the consequences of inter-territorial war make it almost inevitable that inter-State war will involve aggression by each side against the innocent civilians – the private individuals – of the other. This inevitability becomes absolute with modem weapons of mass destruction.
If one distinct attribute of inter-State war is inter-territoriality, another unique attribute stems from the fact that each State lives by taxation over its subjects. Any war against another State, therefore, involves the increase and extension of taxation-aggression over its own people.7 Conflicts between private individuals can be, and usually are, voluntarily waged and financed by the parties concerned. Revolutions can be, and often are, financed and fought by voluntary contributions of the public. But State wars can only be waged through aggression against the taxpayer.
All State wars, therefore, involve increased aggression against the State’s own taxpayers, and almost all State wars (all, in modern warfare) involve the maximum aggression (murder) against the innocent civilians ruled by the enemy State. On the other hand, revolutions are generally financed voluntarily and may pinpoint their violence to the State rulers, and private conflicts may confine their violence to the actual criminals. The libertarian must, therefore, conclude that, while some revolutions and some private conflicts may be legitimate, State wars are always to be condemned.
Many libertarians object as follows: “While we too deplore the use of taxation for warfare, and the State’s monopoly of defense service, we have to recognize that these conditions exist, and while they do, we must support the State in just wars of defense.” The reply to this would go as follows: “Yes, as you say, unfortunately States exist, each having a monopoly of violence over its territorial area.” What then should be the attitude of the libertarian toward conflicts between these States? The libertarian should say, in effect, to the State: “All right, you exist, but as long as you exist at least confine your activities to the area which you monopolize.” In short, the libertarian is interested in reducing as much as possible the area of State aggression against all private individuals. The only way to do this, in international affairs, is for the people of each country to pressure their own State to confine its activities to the area which it monopolizes and not to aggress against other State-monopolists. In short, the objective of the libertarian is to confine any existing State to as small a degree of invasion of person and property as possible. And this means the total avoidance of war. The people under each State should pressure “their” respective States not to attack one another, and, if a conflict should break out, to negotiate a peace or declare a cease-fire as quickly as physically possible.
Suppose further that we have that rarity – an unusually clear-cut case in which the State is actually trying to defend the property of one of its citizens. A citizen of country A travels or invests in country B, and then State B aggresses against his person or confiscates his property. Surely, our libertarian critic would argue, here is a clear-cut case where State A should threaten or commit war against State B in order to defend the property of “its” citizen. Since, the argument runs, the State has taken upon itself the monopoly of defense of its citizens, it then has the obligation to go to war on behalf of any citizen, and libertarians have an obligation to support this war as a just one.
But the point again is that each State has a monopoly of violence and, therefore, of defense only over its territorial area. It has no such monopoly; in fact, it has no power at all, over any other geographical area. Therefore, if an inhabitant of country A should move to or invest in country B, the libertarian must argue that he thereby takes his chances with the State-monopolist of country B, and it would be immoral and criminal for State A to tax people in country A and kill numerous innocents in country B in order to defend the property of the traveler or investor.8
It should also be pointed out that there is no defense against nuclear weapons (the only current “defense” is the threat of mutual annihilation) and, therefore, that the State cannot fulfill any sort of defense function so long as these weapons exist.
The libertarian objective, then, should be, regardless of the specific causes of any conflict, to pressure States not to launch wars against other States and, should a war break out, to pressure them to sue for peace and negotiate a cease-fire and peace treaty as quickly as physically possible. This objective, incidentally, is enshrined in the international law of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that is, the ideal that no State could aggress against the territory of another – in short, the “peaceful coexistence” of States.9
Suppose, however, that despite libertarian opposition, war has begun and the warring States are not negotiating a peace. What, then, should be the libertarian position? Clearly, to reduce the scope of assault of innocent civilians as much as possible. Old-fashioned international law had two excellent devices for this: the “laws of war,” and the “laws of neutrality” or “neutrals’ rights.” The laws of neutrality are designed to keep any war that breaks out confined to the warring States themselves, without aggression against the States or particularly the peoples of the other nations. Hence the importance of such ancient and now forgotten American principles as “freedom of the seas” or severe limitations upon the rights of warring States to blockade neutral trade with the enemy country. In short, the libertarian tries to induce neutral States to remain neutral in any inter-State conflict and to induce the warring States to observe fully the rights of neutral citizens. The “laws of war” were designed to limit as much as possible the invasion by warring States of the rights of the civilians of the respective warring countries. As the British jurist F.J.P. Veale put it:
The fundamental principle of this code was that hostilities between civilized peoples must be limited to the armed forces actually engaged…. It drew a distinction between combatants and noncombatants by laying down that the sole business of the combatants is to fight each other and, consequently, that noncombatants must be excluded from the scope of military operations.10
In the modified form of prohibiting the bombardment of all cities not in the front line, this rule held in Western European wars in recent centuries until Britain launched the strategic bombing of civilians in World War II. Now, of course, the entire concept is scarcely remembered, the very nature of nuclear war resting on the annihilation of civilians.
In condemning all wars, regardless of motive, the libertarian knows that there may well be varying degrees of guilt among States for any specific war. But the overriding consideration for the libertarian is the condemnation of any State participation in war. Hence his policy is that of exerting pressure on all States not to start a war, to stop one that has begun and to reduce the scope of any persisting war in injuring civilians of either side or no side.
A neglected corollary to the libertarian policy of peaceful coexistence of States is the rigorous abstention from any foreign aid; that is, a policy of nonintervention between States (= “isolationism” = “neutralism”). For any aid given by State A to State B (1) increases tax aggression against the people of country A and (2) aggravates the suppression by State B of its own people. If there are any revolutionary groups in country B, then foreign aid intensifies this suppression all the more. Even foreign aid to a revolutionary group in B – more defensible because directed to a voluntary group opposing a State rather than a State oppressing the people – must be condemned as (at the very least) aggravating tax aggression at home.
Let us see how libertarian theory applies to the problem of imperialism, which may be defined as the aggression by State A over the people of country B, and the subsequent maintenance of this foreign rule. Revolution by the B people against the imperial rule of A is certainly legitimate, provided again that revolutionary fire be directed only against the rulers. It has often been maintained – even by libertarians – that Western imperialism over undeveloped countries should be supported as more watchful of property rights than any successor native government would be. The first reply is that judging what might follow the status quo is purely speculative, whereas existing imperialist rule is all too real and culpable. Moreover, the libertarian here begins his focus at the wrong end – at the alleged benefit of imperialism to the native. He should, on the contrary, concentrate first on the Western taxpayer, who is mulcted and burdened to pay for the wars of conquest, and then for the maintenance of the imperial bureaucracy. On this ground alone, the libertarian must condemn imperialism.11
Does opposition to all war mean that the libertarian can never countenance change – that he is consigning the world to a permanent freezing of unjust regimes? Certainly not. Suppose, for example, that the hypothetical state of “Waldavia” has attacked “Ruritania” and annexed the western part of the country. The Western Ruritanians now long to be reunited with their Ruritanian brethren. How is this to be achieved? There is, of course, the route of peaceful negotiation between the two powers, but suppose that the Waldavian imperialists prove adamant. Or, libertarian Waldavians can put pressure on their government to abandon its conquest in the name of justice. But suppose that this, too, does not work. What then? We must still maintain the illegitimacy of Ruritania’s mounting a war against Waldavia. The legitimate routes are (1) revolutionary uprisings by the oppressed Western Ruritanian people, and (2) aid by private Ruritanian groups (or, for that matter, by friends of the Ruritanian cause in other countries) to the Western rebels – either in the form of equipment or of volunteer personnel.12
We have seen throughout our discussion the crucial importance, in any present-day libertarian peace program, of the elimination of modern methods of mass annihilation. These weapons, against which there can be no defense, assure maximum aggression against civilians in any conflict with the clear prospect of the destruction of civilization and even of the human race itself. Highest priority on any libertarian agenda, therefore, must be pressure on all States to agree to general and complete disarmament down to police levels, with particular stress on nuclear disarmament. In short, if we are to use our strategic intelligence, we must conclude that the dismantling of the greatest menace that has ever confronted the life and liberty of the human race is indeed far more important than demunicipalizing the garbage service.
We cannot leave our topic without saying at least a word about the domestic tyranny that is the inevitable accompaniment of war. The great Randolph Bourne realized that “war is the health of the State.”13 It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society. Society becomes a herd, seeking to kill its alleged enemies, rooting out and suppressing all dissent from the official war effort, happily betraying truth for the supposed public interest. Society becomes an armed camp, with the values and the morale – as Albert Jay Nock once phrased it – of an “army on the march.”
The root myth that enables the State to wax fat off war is the canard that war is a defense by the State of its subjects. The facts, of course, are precisely the reverse. For if war is the health of the State, it is also its greatest danger. A State can only “die” by defeat in war or by revolution. In war, therefore, the State frantically mobilizes the people to fight for it against another State, under the pretext that it is fighting for them. But all this should occasion no surprise; we see it in other walks of life. For which categories of crime does the State pursue and punish most intensely – those against private citizens or those against itself? The gravest crimes in the State’s lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of person and property, but dangers to its own contentment: for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, conspiracy to overthrow the government. Murder is pursued haphazardly unless the victim be a policeman, or Gott soll hüten, an assassinated Chief of State; failure to pay a private debt is, if anything, almost encouraged, but income tax evasion is punished with utmost severity; counterfeiting the State’s money is pursued far more relentlessly than forging private checks, etc. All this evidence demonstrates that the State is far more interested in preserving its own power than in defending the rights of private citizens.
A final word about conscription: of all the ways in which war aggrandizes the State, this is perhaps the most flagrant and most despotic. But the most striking fact about conscription is the absurdity of the arguments put forward on its behalf. A man must be conscripted to defend his (or someone else’s?) liberty against an evil State beyond the borders. Defend his liberty? How? By being coerced into an army whose very raison d’être is the expunging of liberty, the trampling on all the liberties of the person, the calculated and brutal dehumanization of the soldier and his transformation into an efficient engine of murder at the whim of his “commanding officer”?14 Can any conceivable foreign State do anything worse to him than what “his” army is now doing for his alleged benefit? Who is there, O Lord, to defend him against his “defenders”?
References
1 There are some libertarians who would go even further and say that no one should employ violence even in defending himself against violence. However, even such Tolstoyans, or “absolute pacifists,” would concede the defender’s right to employ defensive violence and would merely urge him not to exercise that right. They, therefore, do not disagree with our proposition. In the same way, a libertarian temperance advocate would not challenge a man’s right to drink liquor, only his wisdom in exercising that right.
2 We shall not attempt to justify this axiom here. Most libertarians and even conservatives are familiar with the rule and even defend it; the problem is not so much in arriving at the rule as in fearlessly and consistently pursuing its numerous and often astounding implications.
3 Or, to bring up another famous antipacifist slogan, the question is not whether “we would be willing to use force to prevent the rape of our sister,” but whether, to prevent that rape, we are willing to kill innocent people and perhaps even the sister herself.
4 William Buckley and other conservatives have propounded the curious moral doctrine that it is no worse to kill millions than it is to kill one man. The man who does either is, to be sure, a murderer; but surely it makes a huge difference how many people he kills. We may see this by phrasing the problem thus: after a man has already killed one person, does it make any difference whether he stops killing now or goes on a further rampage and kills many dozen more people? Obviously, it does.
5 Professor Robert L. Cunningham has defined the State as the institution with “a monopoly on initiating open physical coercion.” Or, as Albert Jay Nock put it similarly if more caustically, “The State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime…. It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants.”
6 An outstanding example of pinpointing by revolutionaries was the invariable practice of the Irish Republican Army, in its later years, of making sure that only British troops and British government property were attacked and that no innocent Irish civilians were injured. A guerrilla revolution not supported by the bulk of the people, of course, is far more likely to aggress against civilians.
7 If it be objected that a war could theoretically be financed solely by a State’s lowering of nonwar expenditures, then the reply still holds that taxation remains greater than it could be without the war effect. Moreover, the purport of this article is that libertarians should be opposed to government expenditures whatever the field, war or nonwar.
8 There is another consideration which applies rather to “domestic” defense within a State’s territory: the less the State can successfully defend the inhabitants of its area against attack by criminals, the more these inhabitants may come to learn the inefficiency of state operations, and the more they will turn to non-State methods of defense. Failure by the State to defend, therefore, has educative value for the public.
9 The international law mentioned in this paper is the old-fashioned libertarian law as had voluntarily emerged in previous centuries and has nothing to do with the modem statist accretion of “collective security.” Collective security forces a maximum escalation of every local war into a worldwide war – the precise reversal of the libertarian objective of reducing the scope of any war as much as possible.
10 F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism (Appleton, Wis.: C.C. Nelson, 1953), p. 58.
11 Two other points about Western imperialism: first, its rule is not nearly so liberal or benevolent as many libertarians like to believe. The only property rights respected are those of the Europeans; the natives find their best lands stolen from them by the imperialists and their labor coerced by violence into working the vast landed estates acquired by this theft.
Second, another myth holds that the “gunboat diplomacy” of the turn of the century was a heroic libertarian action in defense of the property rights of Western investors in backward countries. Aside from our above strictures against going beyond any State’s monopolized land area, it is overlooked that the bulk of gunboat moves were in defense, not of private investments, but of Western holders of government bonds. The Western powers coerced the smaller governments into increasing tax aggression on their own people, in order to pay off foreign bondholders. By no stretch of the imagination was this an action on behalf of private property – quite the contrary.
12 The Tolstoyan wing of the libertarian movement could urge the Western Ruritaniansto engage in nonviolent revolution, for example, tax strikes, boycotts, mass refusal to obey government orders or a general strike – especially in arms factories. Cf. the work of the revolutionary Tolstoyan, Bartelemy De Ligt, The Conquest of Violence: An Essay On War and Revolution (New York: Dutton, 1938).
13 See Randolph Bourne, “Unfinished Fragment on the State,” in Untimely Papers (New York: B.W: Huebsch, 1919).
14 To the old militarist taunt hurled against the pacifist: “Would you use force to prevent the rape of your sister?” the proper retort is: “Would you rape your sister if ordered to do so by your commanding officer?”
Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995), the founder of modern libertarianism and the dean of the Austrian School of economics, was the author of The Ethics of Liberty and For a New Liberty and many other books and articles. He was also academic vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the Center for Libertarian Studies, and the editor – with Lew Rockwell – of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report.
Copyright © 1963 by Murray N. Rothbard.
Copyright © 2003 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
All rights reserved.
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0802b.asp
by Sheldon Richman, Posted May 9, 2008
What’s more obnoxious than a person who constantly whines about the real and imagined injustices committed against him while ignoring his own injustices against others?
A country that does the same thing.
One of the great myths accepted by the American people is that historically, the United States — more precisely, the U.S. government — has been a gentle giant, powerful and rich but entirely peaceful and well-meaning, and slow to anger when wronged. The truth is nearly the diametric opposite.
We often hear American politicians and commentators reciting a list of “terrorist” acts committed against the “United States.” It typically includes the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 1996 bombing of U.S. Air Force housing in Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in the port of Aden in Yemen. Reciting this string of attacks supposedly demonstrates, without further argument, that the United States has been the major victim of violence on the world stage — unprovoked violence perpetrated by “Islamofascists” because we are free and represent democracy. Indeed, it is widely believed that the attacks on September 11, 2001, were in part the result of “our” failure to retaliate for those unprovoked earlier attacks.
But this is sheer balderdash. The attacks, while often criminally misdirected, were hardly unprovoked. They were not bolts out of the blue. On the contrary, they were seen by the perpetrators as retaliation against the world’s dominant imperial power.
The last century-plus of U.S. foreign policy has largely been a story of aggression and empire-building. American presidents have intervened and interfered in every region of the world, not in self-defense, but in the name of U.S. “national interest,” which in reality means the interest of well-connected corporations and their ambitious political agents who felt appointed by history to bring order to the world. In the view of the policy advocates, the best interests of America, as they conceived them, and the best interests of the people of the world coincided. Of course the people of the world were given no say in the matter. What was in their interest was decided for them by American policymakers and their foreign agents.
Most Americans haven’t gained by this approach to foreign affairs — in fact, they have paid dearly in money and lives. But not as dearly as those on the receiving end of that policy. For all the pious moralizing about democracy and human rights, American foreign policy has treated foreign populations like garbage, beginning with the brutal repression of the Filipino uprising against American colonial rule from 1899 to 1902. That war and its related hardships killed 250,000 to a million Filipino civilians and 20,000 Filipino rebels. In other words, foreigners have been regarded as highly as the Indians were.
How many Americans know that?
Intervention and blowback
Since that time American presidents have intervened, directly or by proxy, in countless places, including Cuba, Haiti, Colombia (Panama), Chile, Mexico, Nicaragua, the Soviet Union, Iran, Iraq, Guatemala, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. On many occasions American administrations have engineered regime changes (sometimes with assassinations) to install leaders friendly to “American interests.” Rarely has intervention occurred without the murder of innocent civilians, degrading hardship for survivors, and arms and (taxpayer) money for repressive “leaders.” The paradigm is the 1953 intervention in Iran, when the CIA helped drive an elected, secular prime minister from office so the autocratic shah could be restored to power. His brutal U.S.-sponsored repression of the Iranian people finally provoked an Islamic revolution in 1979, creating an anti-American theocracy that has been a thorn in the side of U.S. presidents ever since.
Coincidence? Of course not. Americans may be ignorant or forgetful; the victims seldom are.
To this day we routinely hear references to the Iranian takeover of the U.S. embassy and the 444 days the American hostages were held. Rarely do those references mention that the flare-up of violence followed a quarter century of cruel dictatorship, in which torture was a state policy — all sponsored by U.S. administrations. One can criticize the embassy seizure and the holding of hostages. But it is wrong to think that America was an aggrieved party. But that’s how it works in big-power politics. An imperial force can wreak all kinds of havoc in a weaker foreign country, but there is no outrage in the domestic population until the victims strike back, usually with pathetically meager force compared with what the aggressive power employed.
Iran was neither the first nor the last case of “blowback,” the CIA’s term for what happens when a foreign operation explodes in one’s own face. Indeed, American foreign policy from the end of the 19th century onward can be viewed as a series of blowbacks.
None of this means that innocent American civilians deserve to be killed or injured in retaliation for the government’s conduct. The American people did not “invite” the 9/11 attacks. Not even the U.S. government did that, if by “invite” we mean “sought” or “welcomed.” Arguing that issue is a distraction from what really matters.
The point is that U.S. policy in the Middle East was bound to create victims who sooner or later would want revenge. That they were less than discriminating in whom they sought revenge against does not alter that fundamental fact. To comprehend is not to excuse. If a victim of a crime goes on to commit a crime himself, that should not be a reason to ignore the initial crime. A country keeps itself safe from terrorism first by not forcibly imposing itself on others.
Every imperial power has been the target of what is called “terrorism.” But this term itself should make us suspicious. To be sure, horrific crimes against innocents are included under that label. But one must ask how legitimate the concept is in light of the fact that applying it to any U.S. conduct is impermissible virtually by definition. Something is wrong when the United States in the eyes of many Americans is incapable of committing terrorism, but any resistance to U.S. impositions is condemned with that term. Who controls the definitions controls the future.
How many Americans have any inkling of the crimes — yes, crimes — their government has committed against foreign people in their name over the last century? Most don’t know and don’t care — and that’s fine with their rulers because when vengeful foreigners assault American civilians (unjustifiably) or military occupiers, U.S. leaders and jingoist supporters can say, “America was the victim of another unprovoked attack. Why do they hate us?”
Anyone who is the least bit familiar with history will know the answer. It doesn’t take much effort to learn the truth. Reputable scholars and journalists have turned out a library full of books in the last six years documenting the U.S. government’s record as an international bully. There’s no excuse for ignorance.
Let’s stop whining and get curious. As Walt Kelly’s Pogo put it, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation, author of Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State, and editor of The Freeman magazine. Visit his blog “Free Association” or send him email.
This article originally appeared in the February 2008 edition of Freedom Daily. Subscribe to the print or email version of Freedom Daily.
From The Future of Freedom Daily
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0802c.asp
by James Bovard, Posted May 5, 2008
Americans are taught to expect their elected leaders to be relatively honest. But it wasn’t always like that. In the mid 1800s, people joked about political candidates who claimed to have been born in a log cabin that they built with their own hands. This jibe was spurred by William Henry Harrison’s false claim of a log-cabin birth in the 1840 presidential campaign.
Americans were less naive about dishonest politicians in the first century after this nation’s founding. But that still did not deter presidents from conjuring up wars. Presidential deceits on foreign policy have filled cemeteries across the land. George W. Bush’s deceits on the road to war with Iraq fit a long pattern of brazen charades.
In 1846, James K. Polk took Americans to war after falsely proclaiming that the Mexican army had crossed the U.S. border and attacked a U.S. army outpost — “shedding the blood of our citizens on our own soil.” Though Polk refused to provide any details of where the attack occurred, the accusation swayed enough members of Congress to declare war against Mexico. Congressman Abraham Lincoln vigorously attacked Polk for his deceits. But Lincoln may have studied Polk’s methods, since they helped him whip up war fever 15 years later.
In 1917, Woodrow Wilson took the nation to war in a speech to Congress that contained one howler after another. He proclaimed that “self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies” — despite the role of the British secret service and propaganda operations in the prior years to breed war fever in the United States. Wilson hailed Russia as a nation that had always been “democratic at heart” — less than a month after the fall of the tsar and not long before the Bolshevik Revolution. He proclaimed that the government would show its friendship and affection for German-Americans at home — but his administration was soon spearheading loyalty drives that spread terror in many communities across the land.
In 1940, in one of his final speeches of the presidential campaign, Franklin Roosevelt assured voters, “Your president says this country is not going to war.” At the time, he was violating the Neutrality Act by providing massive military assistance to Britain and was searching high and low for a way to take the United States into war against Hitler.
In his 1944 State of the Union address, Roosevelt denounced those Americans with “such suspicious souls — who feared that I have made ‘commitments’ for the future which might pledge this Nation to secret treaties” at the summit of Allied leaders in Tehran the previous month. In early 1945, Roosevelt told Congress that the Yalta Agreement “spells the end of the system of unilateral action and exclusive alliance and spheres of influence.” In reality, he signed off on Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and the crushing of any hopes for democracy in Poland.
In August 1945, Harry Truman announced to the world that “the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians.” Hiroshima was actually a major city with more than a third of a million people prior to its incineration. But Truman’s lie helped soften the initial impact on the American public of the first use of the atomic bomb. (The U.S. government also vigorously censored photographs of Hiroshima and its maimed survivors.)
Vietnam falsehoods
Presidential and other government lies on foreign policy are often discounted because they are presumed to be motivated by national security. But as Hannah Arendt noted in an essay on the Pentagon Papers, during the Vietnam War,
The policy of lying was hardly ever aimed at the enemy but chiefly if not exclusively destined for domestic consumption, for propaganda at home and especially for the purpose of deceiving Congress.
CIA analysts did excellent work in the early period of the Vietnam conflict. But “in the contest between public statements, always over-optimistic, and the truthful reports of the intelligence community, persistently bleak and ominous, the public statements were likely to win simply because they were public,” Arendt commented. The truth never had a chance when it did not serve Lyndon Johnson’s political calculations.
Vietnam destroyed the credibility of both Lyndon Johnson and the American military. Yet the memory of the pervasive lies of the military establishment did not curb the gullibility of many people for fresh government-created falsehoods a decade or so later. During the 1980s, the U.S. State Department ran a propaganda campaign that placed numerous articles in the U.S. media praising the Nicaraguan Contras and attacking the Sandinista regime. As the Christian Science Monitor noted in 2002, the State Department “fed the Miami Herald a make-believe story that the Soviet Union had given chemical weapons to the Sandinistas. Another tale, which happened to emerge the night of President Ronald Reagan’s reelection victory, held that Soviet MiG fighters were on their way to Nicaragua.” The General Accounting Office investigated and concluded that the State Department operation was illegal, consisting of “prohibited, covert propaganda activities.” There was no backlash against the government when the frauds were disclosed. Instead, it was on to the next scam.
Reagan, Bush, and Clinton
Reagan paved the way for subsequent presidents in immersing anti-terrorist policy in swamps of falsehoods. In October 1983, a month after he authorized U.S. Marine commanders to call in air strikes against Muslims to help the Christian forces in Lebanon’s civil war, a Muslim suicide bomber devastated a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 242 Americans. In a televised speech a few days later, Reagan portrayed the attack as unstoppable, falsely claiming that the truck “crashed through a series of barriers, including a chain-link fence and barbed-wire entanglements. The guards opened fire, but it was too late.” In reality, the guards did not fire because they were prohibited from having loaded weapons — one of many pathetic failures of defense that the Reagan administration sought to sweep under the carpet.
In 1984, after the second successful devastating attack in 18 months against a poorly defended U.S. embassy in Lebanon, Reagan blamed the debacle on his predecessor and falsely asserted that the Carter administration had “to a large extent” gotten “rid of our intelligence agents.” A few days later, while campaigning for reelection, Reagan announced that the second embassy bombing was no longer an issue: “We’ve had an investigation. There was no evidence of any carelessness or anyone not performing their duty.” However, the Reagan administration had not yet begun a formal investigation.
On May 4, 1986, Reagan bragged, “The United States gives terrorists no rewards and no guarantees. We make no concessions; we make no deals.” But the Iranian arms-for-hostage deal that leaked out later that year blew such claims to smithereens. On November 13, 1986, Reagan denied initial reports of the scandal, proclaiming that the “‘no concessions’ [to terrorists] policy remains in force, in spite of the wildly speculative and false stories about arms for hostages and alleged ransom payments. We did not — repeat — did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages nor will we.” But Americans later learned that the United States had sold 2,000 anti-tank weapons to the Iranian government “in return for promises to release the American hostages there. Money from the sale of those weapons went to support the Contras’ war in Nicaragua,” as Mother Jones magazine noted in 1998.
Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990 provided a challenge for the first Bush administration to get Americans mobilized. In September 1990, the Pentagon announced that up to a quarter million Iraqi troops were near the border of Saudi Arabia, threatening to give Saddam Hussein a stranglehold on one of the world’s most important oil sources. The Pentagon based its claim on satellite images that it refused to disclose. One American paper, the St. Petersburg Times, purchased two Soviet satellite “images taken of that same area at the same time that revealed that there were no Iraqi troops ‘near the Saudi border — just empty desert.’” Jean Heller, the journalist who broke the story, commented, “That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn’t exist.” Even a decade after the first Gulf war, the Pentagon refused to disclose the secret photos that justified sending half a million American troops into harm’s way.
Support for the war was also whipped up by the congressional testimony of a Kuwaiti teenager who claimed she had seen Iraqi soldiers removing hundreds of babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and leaving them on the floor to die. George H.W. Bush often invoked the incubator tale to justify the war, proclaiming that the “ghastly atrocities” were akin to “Hitler revisited.” After the United States commenced bombing Iraq, it transpired that the woman who testified was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador and that her story was a complete fabrication, concocted in part by a U.S. public relations firm. Dead babies were a more effective selling point than one of the initial justifications Bush announced for U.S. intervention — restoring Kuwait’s “rightful leaders to their place” — as if any Americans seriously cared about putting Arab oligarchs back on their throne. (A few months before Saddam’s invasion, Amnesty International condemned the Kuwaiti government for torturing detainees.)
Bill Clinton’s unprovoked war against Serbia was sold to Americans with preposterous tales of the Kosovo Liberation Army’s being freedom fighters, with absurd claims that a civil war in one corner of southeastern Europe threatened to engulf the entire continent in conflict, with wild and unsubstantiated claims of an ongoing genocide, and with a deluge of lies that the U.S. military was not targeting Serb civilians.
Lying and warring appear to be two sides of the same coin. Unfortunately, many Americans continue to be gullible when presidents claim a need to commence killing foreigners. It remains to be seen whether the citizenry is corrigible on this life-and-death issue.
James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [2006] as well as The Bush Betrayal [2004], Lost Rights [1994] and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003) and serves as a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.
This article originally appeared in the February 2008 edition of Freedom Daily. Subscribe to the print or email version of Freedom Daily.
Folks if you think Rev. Jeremiah Wright is wrong about US Experiments on African Americans prepare to have your eyes opened.
http://tjcoop30.wordpress.com/
Then read here: http://tjcoop30.wordpress.com/human-experiments-in-us-history/
Do not judge without studying the facts
The Obama/Wright Controversy: Symptom of a Rigged Election
Author of Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola–Nature, Accident or Intentional?
This Obama/Wright controversy is a deadly deception and political distraction in a rigged election.
Rev. Wright’s unsettling truth-telling is decades old. Why would it surface suddenly when Barack Obama was about to trounce Hillary? The timing is obviously telling: The illusion of wrongdoing by Rev. Wright is being spun to demonize Obama, a shill candidate, advancing a predetermined plan to put a witch in the White House.
Who controls such shenanigans, American politics, and media propaganda? The economic power restricting American political representation to two parties, flip sides of the same corrupt co[i]n, ostracizes and demonizes humanitarian truth-tellers for multi-national corporate control. Thus, the mass mind is effectively misdirected to tolerate, even generate, the genocides against which Rev. Wright preaches.
How dare the pundits indict this holy man when, by their ignorance and prostitution, they shun for profitable political expediency the millions of people morbidly wounded and mortally sacrificed to the military-medical-petrochemical-pharmaceutical cartel?
If vaccines triggered AIDS, as Rev. Wright and scientists worldwide now preach, what makes you think such profitable contaminations and exterminations died with Tuskeegee? Can the world’s wealthiest vaccine-maker, Merck, be trusted to give us anything better than VIOXX?
Politics played as usual assures you will never know who or what ails you, poisons your children, kills your parents, and pollutes our planet. If AIDS’s immunological degeneration (like environmental pollution) is not a “socio-political imposition” as the late Jonathan Mann, AIDS czar for the World Health Organization, said exposing the iniquity and impotence of his political appointment, what do you call popping pills to cure every ill and accepting side effects far worse than the original diseases? Only fools and madmen call this genocide civilized.
Now, by his spoiled harvest, we know Barack Obama. As my letter to Rev. Wright stated, “Rather than modeling faithful and honest leadership to remedy this nation’s and world’s gravest inequity, that of man’s inhumanity towards man through the administration of . . . genocide, [Obama] chose political expediency over Divine loyalty. In so doing, he rejected the opportunity . . . to save our human family from the ongoing and increasing tragedy of population decimation.”
Obama no longer deserves my vote. Nor does the White House witch prescribing cheap drugs, vaginal vaccines, medical IDs, and biochips for a “freer America.” John McCain already looks and acts comatose. That only leaves Ron Paul.
About the author: Leonard G.Horowitz, DMD, MA, MPH, DNM, DMM has authored dozens of scientific articles and sixteen books about health and natural healing. He has been interviewed repeatedly as an expert guest on every major television and radio network throughout North America. His works on vaccination contaminations and government suppressed public health risks has made him world famous for helping to save millions of lives. This article was prompted by Rev. Wright’s spontaneous urging on network television for serious HIV/AIDS and genocide investigators to “read Dr. Horowitz’s book, Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola–Nature, Accident or Intentional?“
You can also view the entire message list archive by clicking here.
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... God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. … And what country can preserve its liberties, if it’s rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure– Thomas Jefferson, Nov. 13, 1787
(Ed. If you think they are waiting to get permission then you are very naive. They are getting permission because they want to legalize their crimes of the past and present)
Senate Considers Adding Universal Wiretapping
Amendments to Telecom Act
Darren Pauli
Computerworld
April 19, 2008
Sweeping reforms will make it easier than ever for law enforcement to intercept communications if amendments to the Telecommunications (Interceptions) Act are agreed upon by a Senate standing committee.
The federal government is pushing a bill to force all telecommunications providers to facilitate lawful data interception across fixed and mobile telephone systems, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Instant Messaging (IM) and chat room discussions.
The standing committee is meeting today to discuss the proposed changes to Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment Bill 2008 (TIA).
The amendments build on previous reforms by the then Howard government which required Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to implement wiretapping provisions in VoIP services.
Private organisations will be handed “quasi-police” powers under separate government plans announced on Monday.
Attorney-General Robert McClelland said business owners will be handed powers to intercept employee e-mails without notice in a bid to prevent cyber-terrorism.
Consumer advocacy groups are outraged by the reforms and have questioned the motives of the government, labelling the move as a blatant invasion of privacy.
NSW Council of Civil Liberties president, Cameron Murphy, said the changes are unnecessary and will inadvertently subject hundreds of people to privacy violations.
“These laws will massively increase the number of interception points available for techniques such as wiretapping,” Murphy said.
“Everything from online chatting, to Skype (VoIP) and mobile phone calls will be open to interception.”
He believes the changes are being driven by law enforcement which is effectively offloading its work on the private industry.
The reforms also violate the privacy of other parties involved in a monitored communication channel, according to the Council, the Australian Privacy Foundation (APF) and the Electronic Frontiers Association (EFA).
The organisations told Computerworld that NSW law, which allows businesses to intercept employee e-mails with consent, is a breach of the TIA and the Privacy Act. The problem arises from ambiguity in the law which does not stipulate rules for dealing with third party information, and what constitutes consent.
APF board member Roger Clarke called on the government to provide clarity and scope on the new proposals, including what the changes hope to ultimately achieve and who will be affected. “Any employer that acted on the powers of interception (under the NSW bill) are in breach of the TIA and the Privacy Act if they are accessing the information of non-employees,” Clarke said.
“The attempts of the Attorney-General’s Departments of successive governments to get some changes to the TIA have been torn apart by various agencies because they haven’t addressed scope.
“Every time ministers open their mouths on this type of policy, they keep saying something stupid.” He said the scope of the changes can be interpreted to apply to all employers, to private organisations with a responsibility to national infrastructure, or to investigators of serious threats against nation infrastructure.
“The last thing we want is private investigators running with enormous powers if an act of terrorism occurs,” Clarke said, speaking of McClelland’s reference that the employers powers is a counter-terrorism measure.
The APF has argued for years for workplace privacy protection law reform, and for interception to be solely in the hands of trained investigators under the public service framework.
Both Murphy, Clarke and EFA chair Dale Clapperton called for government to document what it sees as problems with the TIA.
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
A recent Austin-American Statesman review of Neo-Con Philip Bobbitt’s new book Terror and Consent features an image of a shredded Constitution under the words “Everything must go,” which acts as a suitable entrée to a disgusting diatribe which praises Bobbitt’s call for the end of America and its replacement with a de facto world government in the name of fighting terror. The words, “How to Fight Terrorism” are in place of a torn piece of the Bill of Rights.
Reviewer James E. McWilliams describes Bobbitt as “a distinguished lecturer and senior fellow at the University of Texas and a law professor at Columbia University,” but anyone with a basic grasp of what America’s founders envisioned and what Ronald Reagan later termed the “shining city on a hill” would be more apt to describe Bobbitt – nephew of Lyndon Baines Johnson and former State Department counselor – as an enemy of the Republic.
McWilliams’ fawning review of the book is intended to sucker in millionaire pseudo-intellectuals who think they are part of the elite by using mental gymnastics and brazenly contradictory statements in order to justifying the revolting underlying premise of the book.
As soon as we learn that the facade of Bobbitt’s argument is to provide a solution “for fighting the wars that are bound to plague the 21st century,” we’re already safe in the knowledge that Bobbitt represents another chicken-necked warhawk who has already claimed ownership of the next 10 decades for his Neo-Con ideological fetish of imperial bloodletting and brutal domination.
So what exactly is Bobbitt’s solution?
The complete obliteration of sovereignty and the nation state and its replacement with a new “order that takes its structural cues from multinational corporations and nongovernmental organizations” that will have the power to pursue “more aggressive tactics of preclusionary warfare,” meaning more pre-emptive invasions of broken-backed third world countries to expand the creaking pax-Americana empire.
Despite terse and contradictory promises that we will still have some semblance of freedom in Bobbitt’s technocracy, he admits that there will be “no obvious answer to many of the human rights issues that are bound to arise,” as a result of his plan to completely eviscerate God-given freedoms enumerated in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
The reviewer cites Bobbitt’s justification to impose world government as a means of combating,”The accessibility of weapons of mass destruction, the globalization of international capital and the “universalization of culture” have eroded the conventional borders that once legitimated national security,” all problems that were created by globalists’ drive to impose centralized systems of control in the first place by creating crises and then posing as the saviors.
This is another classic example of problem-reaction-solution. Use the pretext of the problems you have created to then offer a solution that befits your ultimate agenda – global government.
“Bobbitt believes that the UN Charter should be amended to allow the preemptive use of force without a Security Council authorization,” and “In cases in which the use of non-lethal chemical weapons could be used to prevent terror, be able to redefine such methods as “counterforce measures,” writes McWilliams.
The “use of chemical weapons,” where have we heard that one before?
It was Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, William Kristol, Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the Neo-Con collaborators that formed the Project For a New American Century – the ideological framework of the Bush administration, who proposed the use of “…advanced forms of biological warfare that can target specific genotypes (which) may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.”
A leaked British Ministry of Defence report last year also envisioned a nightmare future society in which the population are forced to accept brain chips, immigration and urbanization ravages communities, class warfare ensues, and biological and neutron weapons are used to combat overpopulation.
(Ed. I’m tellin’ you folks-the people running our govts. are nut cases and probably demonically controled. Cheney, Wolfawitz, even Bush need to be carefully watched. They want to kill us off to have better control)
Since Bobbitt cites “non-lethal chemical weapons” as a means of “preventing terror” what exactly does he mean? Mass-medicating Americans’ drinking water with sodium fluoride to keep the population docile and subservient to the new international order, absent of traditional constitutional rights, that Bobbitt seeks to impose? The vagueness of the reference suggests Bobbitt and in turn the simpering reviewer McWilliams are attempting to carefully dance around the true scale of the horror that they are advocating.
Mandating a false choice between the acceptance of terrorism as a routine cancer upon society or the imposition of a brutal warmongering world government and the obliteration of sovereignty and the constitution, the book advises us to progress, “not by choosing good over bad, but — as is usually the case in war and politics — the lesser of evils.”
And the lesser of evils in this case is to allow Bobbitt and his salivating Neo-Con cronies to have their way with the 21st century while they posture and insist their global government is our savior against a terrorist threat that they created in the first place. As Bobbitt would no doubt agree with the CFR’s Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the globalists are “not going to achieve a new world order without paying for it in blood as well as in words and money,” and as H.G. Wells proclaimed, “Countless people… will hate the new world order… and will die protesting against it… When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents…” (Ed. They’ve been talking about this for a long time. The Plan is in place. Are you prepared-is your heart right? There may not be much time left, “now is the day of salvation”. It is time to repent)
We are those “malcontents” that the globalists fear so much, we are the representation of everything that is good about the human spirit – love, hope, the yearning for freedom and a kindred bond with our fellow man, along with the shared promise of a peaceful and prosperous future for our children.
Bobbitt and the rest of the Neo-Con turds who have already decided to condemn us to a century of warfare, tyranny, and centralized control may be surprised to learn that the resistance to their agenda is accelerating and that the true essence of humanity, the “malcontents,” will rise up and condemn them to the only place they belong – on the scrapheap of history.
Philip Bobbitt:
Phone: (512) 232-1376
Fax: (512) 471-6988
E-mail: PBOBBITT@LAW.UTEXAS.EDU
If you contact Bobbitt, please be polite in your disagreement.
Always Question Authority-Do not be deceived by those who tell you to submit
to this stuff.
That Message is form the Pit of Hell. We were created to submit to only one. Not the Government.
Not some pastor or other spiritual leader
Submit to Yahushua Alone!
Think for yourselves!
The eletists depend on you acting like Robots or slaves.
“Come out of her My Beloved”.
(Ed. E-mail recieved from a friend. I had thought about this myself and considered writing something. When one persons’ right are violated we all lose. The US Govt is intruding in our lives more and more. We need to wake up-Remember the Nazis and their gradual elimination of all groups they could not control)
Shalom Chaverim. I have been very dissappointed over the last 2 years in some of the things that Rabbi Moshe has come out with, but on this one, politically, humanistically, spiritually, and socially, he hit the mark 100 percent. Reply with comments for discussion if you like.
Bracha V’hazlaha
Bro. Gregory
Hebrew Malkhut Israel.
www.hmisrael.net , www.hmisrael.org
—– Original Message —–
From: YATI News
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2008 1:09 PM
Subject: All Torah Believers Are Now In Grave Danger
Tyranny in Texas-DO NOT Ignore This!
 |
 |
Right: An armed law enforcement official sits behind a series of rocks.
Left: An armored personnel carrier moves into position during a raid at a Texas polygamist compound.
These photos were taken by sect members, contradicting police lies of a non military exodus.
NEW
4/16/08
Editorial by Apostle Moshe Yoseph Koniuchowsky
The USA Constitution guarantees freedom of religion.
- First Amendment Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Yet the recent illegal military style invasion of the polygamous sect in Lubbock Texas has violated their most basic freedom of religion, guaranteed under the first amendment.
While we may, or may not agree, with their lifestyle, the fact remains this practice is part of their religion based on Torah beliefs. The US government entered the compound illegally, without any evidence of child abuse. Period! They allegedly have only one witness, a 16 year old girl, who allegedly phoned in a telephone tip of abuse by a 50 year old man. Problem is that the man was not in Texas and hasn’t been for many years. So far they have not found the girl who allegedly alerted authorities.
Is it not interesting that the US gov’t does not enter gay bath houses, or illegal massage parlors, where all kinds of perversions and fornication including sodomy and other alternative lifestyles are practiced. All these behaviors are clearly against the word of YHWH. It seems like the only alternative lifestyle that the government despises is marriage, even if the marriage is polygamy. How come the gov’t does not seek to remove children from gay couples and gay marraiges, or those monogamous couples that raise children in an abusive home, or a home where there is open fornication or other vices going on? And when they do, do tanks show up?
This is nothing but an attack on all religious freedoms in the USA and an attack on marriage, regardless of whether polygamy is viewed as legitimate or not. The problem with this sickening gov’t “police state” action is that if one religion is outlawed, or persecuted by the state without any real evidence of illegalities, then ALL NON-TRADITIONAL, NON-PROTESTANT, OR NON-ROMAN CATHOLIC expressions of religion are in danger of a gov’t military invasion, or shut down.
We may not agree with the Jehovah Witness doctrine, but because they are free to express their religion apart from state interference, we and other non traditional sects are also free to express ourselves religiously. If we don’t stand with these victims in this polygamous sect, then our rights may one day be trampled upon by a state that sees our lack of willingness to confirm to Sun god/day worship and Easter celebrations as a threat.
If we don’t stand with these polygamous folks, even though we may, or may not agree with their lifestyle, one day very soon the US gov’t may well declare all Messianic and Nazarene Yisraelite believers an “abusive sect,” because we also practice Torah and also spank our children to discipline them when needed. The day may soon come when the gov’t police will rip your children out of your arms, homes, because you home school them, or because you don’t worship on Sun/god day. This case with over 430 innocent children ripped and pulled away from their homes and parents at gunpoint with firearms drawn, is nothing but a brutal police state action against all men and women of faith. They may soon be wards, or children of the state, subject to the cruelest forms of bureaucratic abuse and neglect.
Don’t believe what the media is telling you. Please! Where is the EVIDENCE OF THREE credible witnesses required by Torah that alleged child abuse is going on? It’s not there and all the media labeling and self righteous declarations will not change that underlying fact. Where is the evidence?
The USA Constitution in the 4th amendment guarantees that citizens shall not be subject to sudden, or unjust entry and seizure.
- Fourth Amendment – Protection from unreasonable search and seizure.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The State of Texas has SEIZED these children from their homes and from PRIVATE property, all because these folks practice a religion, or have a religious expression that society does not understand or approve.
There was no warrant against 430 MOTHERS TO SEIZE their precious babies. Only one warrant was issued for 1 individual adult, who allegedly abused an underage child. Yet when the State of Texas came looking for the under aged child, the child was missing, as was the adult. The State of Texas, not the polygamist sect is engaged in illegal and immoral criminal activity, as the Torah DOES forbid kid-napping, which is the seizure of “kids!” The Torah DOES NOT criminalize polygamy, as almost all of Yisrael’s patriarchs; our forefathers were in fact polygamous. It may not be your cup of tea, but it’s certainly not illegal in Scripture.
Furthermore, the second amendment to the USA Constitution guarantees the right of all Americans to bear arms for self defense.
- Second Amendment – A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed
Part of self defense, is protection against the illegal search and seizure of our properties and children by the USA, or state governments’. See, the founding fathers knew that if the US experiment in democracy was to succeed, the people needed to have and maintain a real and legitimate means of defending themselves, if and when Uncle Sam came knocking. They wanted to make 1 million % sure that the citizens were armed, so that the fear of YHWH could be put into the gov’t, should the gov’t ever step out of constitutional bounds.
This is why those opposed to private firearms ownership to keep tyrannical government actions at bay are ignorant, or simply scared by misinformation, or personal fears. Sadly these folks in Texas were unarmed to defend their 2nd and 4th amendment rights and were no match for armed Texas gov’t kidnapers, coming to kidnap 430 children with military tanks and AK 47s.
Never forget, that it is the second amendment, the right to bear arms for self defense that keeps us free, and guarantees the first amendment, so that all Americans can enjoy religious freedom, with the US gov’t forbidden to make any laws for, or against any religious expression. Without the exercising of our second amendment rights, our first amendment rights will most certainly be lost. Most people still won’t get that however, as they have been spell bound and brainwashed by the media and by so called “cultural norm.” Gun control really means the gov’t ALONE controls the guns, so that only criminals and police state officials can have guns. The average law abiding innocent citizens are then at the mercy of the state. Only in gun control situations can the type of illegal human abduction and “kid”-napping police action that we have seen in Texas take place.
Now pershaps the most sensitive point; but we must confront the biblical truth regrdless where it leads us, and regardless of who may turn against us. All of these statuatory rape laws are simply bogus and purely manmade and have no basis in Scriputre. Most of our biological Yisraelite forefathers had young women/girls, say ages 14-19 as their wives. Some had more than one. Those are the facts folks. Even though we may not feel comortable with the facts.
YHWH never denocunced them, or condemned them. This may be a tad uncomfortable for most, but do you want the MSNBC, CNN lies that promote a secular anti-marriage society and agenda, or do you really want to know what YHWH has said all along on this matter? Moreover, Miriam the surrogate mother of Yahshua was no more than 15 when she carried and brought YHWH’s very own Son to term. Joseph was not arrested when he betrothed her either at age 14, or 15 and later slept with her, as he fathered several of Yahshua’s siblings.
Based on manmade statuatory (note statuatory, not biblicaltory) rape laws, YHWH The Father, the ANCIENT OF DAYS, certainly older than 50 years old, allowed an “underaged” girl to carry His seed. So based on these faulty manmade laws defining, or should we say redefining, what YHWH does and does not allow, men and women are being sent to jail, as innocent children are ripped away from their loving mothers with horrific machine like cruelty; all in the name of MANMADE statuatory rape laws. Our forefather Jacob fathered Yisrael through polygamy. Was he arrested?
So let’s recap here. Scriputre allows for marraige with younger women/girls and allows poylgamy, though it may not have been YHWH’s initial “Garden of Eden will.” Man has declared these practices abusive and repulsive. On the other hand, YHWH decalres sodomy and fornication as abominable. Yet these gay, lesbian, and transgender couples and families can legally rasie children and have government sanction, medical care and protection for their abominations and for the chldren victims in their care. What is wrong with this sick picture?
This is the true biblical view of the wrongdoing still unfolding right now in Texas, as this police state Gestaapo action unfolds before our eyes, while most of the American public is drunk with the lies of our secualr society and of the American media, that portrays these folks as some kind of threat to their own sick anti-Christ society.
These religious folks teach their children Torah, salvation thru Messiah, love, pacificism, mercy and covenant relationships, teaching them faithfulness and how to eschew fornication and pornography. Yet the very same government thugs, who proliferate pornography by looking the other way ($$$) and who continue to do nothing about its widespread availablity in society, are now guilty of the worst kind of illegal crimes against helpless people.
Who will restore the children to their families? Will they be returned to their homes? Where is the righteouss outcry and indignation from Americans with real discernement? Sadly, if we don’t speak the truth in love right now, hold on real tight to your children now being raised in Torah.
The day may not be too far off, where they also will be seized at gunpoint in the middle of the night, as you also are allegedly guilty of a religious faith and expression that is “not approved” by the US gov’t. If we don’t stand with the polygamists rights to practice their religion freely and without persecution and raise their children in the USA, we who practice monogamy, are also in danger, as our children are being raised based on the same Torah that allows both monogamy and polygamy as marriage lifestyles before YHWH.
If we remain withdrawn, unconcerned, duped and silenced by apathy, or by the media references to these folks as being some kind of a weird crazy religious cult, or sect, and if we don’t see our way out of their “Geobels type propoganda machine,” there is no doubt in my mind, that we are “tomorrows cult,” needing armed gov’t intervention and salvation to protcet our children from us and our Torah based faith and parenting methods.
Remember that the gov’t officials, media and news reports that are committed to ending this group represent a sick anti-YHWH society that has sanctioned gay marraiges and gay civil unions without marriage, along with open adultery and fornication, all the while decrying and belittiling all forms of covenant marriage, whose undergirding principle is love, commitment and faithfulness.
Final Thought-By the way, can you imagine the Associated Press ever calling a mosque a “polygamist temple? Why not? Double standard? How would Muslims react?
Please do your civic duty and pass this along to many others. Thank you so much. Please address all comments to: info@yourarmstoisrael.org Keep them brief please. Feel free to pass this on to news media organizations.
Listen to the YATI Radio Network, the only true Name 24/7 radio network.
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/editorblog/081
BUZZFLASH EDITOR’S BLOG
by Mark Karlin
Editor and Publisher
April 15, 2008
Statue of Ronald Reagan in Full Cowboy Gear at the Entrance to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. It is entitled “After the Ride.”
Dateline: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California Before you open a door and enter into the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, a large bronze sculpture of a strapping cowboy greets you, with the wide-eyed optimism of the mythic west, a handkerchief dangling from the back pocket of a pair of jeans, and cowboy hat in hand. It’s called “After the Ride” and it is a tribute to Ronald Reagan. Or make that the myth of Ronald Reagan. Reagan, as the fawning exhibition area that paints a flattering, blemish free portrait of his life unintentionally reveals, went from a childhood and small college upbringing in Illinois to a Hollywood “B” film career, to spokesperson for the GE corporation, to Death Valley Days, to the political life that led him to the White House. The key transition, not noted as such by the library narrative, is when Reagan became the hired front man for GE, hosting a program for them but also going around the country selling the concept that the corporation is a benevolent and positive force in our lives, without any downsides. Reagan went from a “B” movie career to an “A” career as a political salesman for corporate wealth and control of the government. In the turbulent social climate of the ’60s, his wealthy backers (who regarded him as a prize race horse for a right-wing coup for the super rich and corporate welfare) watched as Reagan won the governorship and masterfully was guided in the use of wedge issues such as “Guns and God” to lure the emerging displaced middle class into voting Republican. Aside from the “October Surprise,” when Reagan negotiators allegedly convinced the Iranian mullahs to hold onto our hostages until Reagan’s inauguration day (they were literally released after he was sworn in), the GOP had perfected the selling of a myth about America — and they had the hale and hearty actor to sell the product. The myth of “morning in America” obscured the emerging theft of jobs from the middle class by creating emotional hot buttons for rural and working class voters to gravitate toward: Their values were under attack by liberal extremists, they were repeatedly told. Only the Republicans could save the nation from further moral degradation, the myth went — and only the GOP could guarantee victory in foreign conflicts (even if the conflicts were often unnecessary and the GOP failed to achieve “victory,” however it might be defined). Because our perceptions today are so dependent upon television as a source, how one acts as president or senator has superseded, in large part, what one does. Ronald Reagan made many working class and rural voters proud to be Americans again, but meanwhile, behind the scenes, corporate lobbyists and Reagan’s aides (who were really running the show) went about dismantling factories in places like central Pennsylvania and moving them overseas, sometimes — literally — in the dark of night. It was the Republican version of “Let them eat cake.” Only, in this case, it was: “Let them eat God, Guns, and Patriotism.” This process that began with Reagan’s election continued through Bush I — and to a degree in the Bill Clinton Administration, as he aggressively pursued NAFTA and followed the neo-liberal economic agenda of opening up the gates of exporting jobs in return for larger corporate profits — and it rocketed ahead in the administration of Bush II into a juggernaut of betrayal of the middle class. Hunting and faith are important to many people in rural America and small towns — as faith is throughout America — but there has and will be no threat to those core “values.” There is no gun control measure with any remote possibility of passing in any state that would affect hunters — and Democrats and civil libertarians are ardent supporters of the right to follow one’s religious beliefs without government interference. So, Barack Obama’s remarks in San Francisco, as borne out by a true understanding of the Ronald Reagan myth, are ultimately true. His mistake was that he said what he said in a way that allowed the twin corporate D.C. insiders — McCain and Clinton — to once again demagogue the issue into one of emotion, rather than fact. And that is what the attack on Obama is about: demagoguery. I can’t save workers from voting against their own economic interests when they vote to defend values that no one is going to take away from them. And I understand that Clinton and McCain are playing on the pride of such displaced members of the middle class. No one wants to be told that they have been duped for nearly 30 years by the wealthy backers of the Republicrats. Rural and small town Pennsylvanians want to feel proud about America and themselves — and the uproar from the McCain and Clinton camps once again presses the hot button of dignity, while privately believing in (whatever Clinton is saying on the campaign trail today) policies that will continue to erode the earnings and standard of living of the very people that they claim to be championing. The media owned by corporate elites has a role in this, too. Last month, the conventional wisdom of the media, for the most part, was that the deteriorating rust belt of Western Pennsylvania had left many former decently paid workers angry and bitter. But, on a dime, the new conventional wisdom, after Obama’s remarks, was that it was insulting to say that these same people are angry and bitter. Nothing says more about the non-factual based reporting of the mainstream press than that sudden conversion, because the mainstream media represents the global corporate interests of its multinational parent companies who reap the profits of moving jobs overseas. What Obama said was shorthand for this grim reality: no one is really threatening the traditions of hunting, or anyone’s faith, or heterosexual marriage. But there are plenty of politicians among the Republicrats — usually the Republicans, but Hillary Clinton has joined with them on this one — who exploit the fear that conspiratorial “leftist” forces are conspiring to end hunting and religious belief in America. This is the heart of being a demagogue, because it is an appeal to emotion that has no basis in fact. It is how Republicans have won many an election, and how Senator Clinton is now trying, in a last gasp, to obtain the office she has compromised so much of her life pursuing. As someone who was born and raised in Illinois, and having lived here my adult life, I was always surprised by how little connection Reagan appeared as an adult to have with home state. During his presidency, he rarely returned here, and his persona was tied to the myth of the cowboy, the triumphant rugged conqueror of the West. Illinois was just part of his early biography. He seemed to have no strong emotional attachment to the very Midwest roots that he so championed. It just didn’t fit in with the mythic figure that came out of his films, Western ranch (which was the inspiration for Rove getting Bush to buy his Crawford spread and do a Reagan “cut the brush” imitation), and heroic GI movie roles during WW II (which he never actually fought in.) So we understand that some of the working class who buy clothes at Wal-Mart that they used to make — because the price is right — only the blouses and shirts are made in China now — we understand that they feel insulted by some politician telling them that they’ve been taken for a ride, that no one is going to stop them from hunting or going to their church, but that the people who peddle that nonsense to them are allowing corporations to steal their jobs and wallets from right in front of their noses. That’s a tough pill to swallow, that you’ve been swindled for 30 years. But McCain and Clinton are once again pulling the same Republicrat tricks of playing on emotional vulnerabilities while ignoring the truth surrounding the job heist that is occurring in places like Pennsylvania. Yes, it is bad political practice to ever say anything that makes a group of potential voters feel that they are being insulted because you’re making the claim that they’ve been had. But if you want to help those same people out to create a positive future for employment and their standard of living, you can’t keep hiding the truth under a rock. Obama’s statement could have been said more fully, and not so elliptically, and that would have explained the difference between respect for traditions and beliefs, and exploitation of those very same characteristics for political gain by those who are exploiting the working class. But, in the end, as he did with race, Obama is touching upon a third rail of truth that neither party wants to discuss much. The “K Street Lobbyists” are very pleased with the masquerade and demagoguery that achieved, and now accelerates, the slide of the middle class towards a lower class fate. The working class will have its faith, hunting, and small town “values,” but it can’t have them if they don’t have jobs. And after Obama’s remarks, they can’t say that they weren’t warned by an honest politician.
BUZZFLASH EDITOR’S BLOG
by Chuck Baldwin
April 15, 2008
Every four years, conservative “pragmatists” trot out the “We Can’t Let So-And-So Win” mantra. Of course, the so-and-so in question is always the Democratic Presidential candidate. For all of my adult life, I have been listening to so-called “conservative” Republicans warn us of the impending doom that would befall our country if the Democratic candidate were elected. And this year is no different. This year’s Republican primary did provide a wonderful aberration, however, to the usual choices between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Republicans had an opportunity to nominate a real American constitutionalist, a statesman in the similitude of Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. That man was Texas Congressman, Ron Paul. Unfortunately, the Republican faithful seem to be incapable of discerning the marks of true greatness, not to mention fidelity to constitutional government. It is doubtful that most of them even understand what constitutional government is. And as for Christian conservatives, they can barely see any issues beyond abortion and “gay rights.” To try and convince them to support a constitutionalist candidate is like talking to a brick wall. So, what choice does the Republican Party offer the American people this year? The worst of all possible choices: good old John “McSame” McCain. Let’s be clear: a John McCain Presidency will be no better than a Hillary Clinton or a Barack Obama Presidency. In fact, in many ways, a McCain White House will be WORSE than a Democratic one. On many issues, there is virtually no distinction between John McCain and any potential Democratic candidate. John McCain is no friend to gun owners. He is no friend to pro-lifers. He is no friend to fiscal conservatives. He is no friend to property owners. He is no friend to “family values” voters. He is no friend to America’s blue-collar workers. He is no friend to small business owners. He is no friend to opponents of illegal immigration. On the other hand, John McCain is a great friend to Big Business. Similarly, he is a friend to Big Government and Big Brother. He is also a friend to open borders, supranational government, regionalism, and American imperialism. But this is where the Boogeyman comes in. At this point, Republican Party lackeys will break in and say, “We can’t let Hillary Clinton win. We can’t let Barack Obama win.” Even the favored son of the Religious Right, Mike Huckabee, has endorsed John McCain, not to mention Mitt Romney and virtually every other Republican “bigwig.” (Thank God, Ron Paul has maintained his integrity by NOT endorsing McCain.) I, for one, am fed up with this baloney, because what we are actually faced with is not the “lesser of two evils” but “the evil of two lessers.” (To quote a good friend of mine.) And the reason John McCain would actually be a worse President than either Obama or Clinton is because of the manner in which conservatives go to sleep whenever a Republican occupies the Oval Office. Furthermore, the next couple of years are “crunch time” for this burgeoning North American Union and related issues. America is currently facing the most serious threat to its national independence and sovereignty since the War of 1812. The forces of globalism have declared an all-out war against our country’s independence. Illegal immigration, the NAFTA superhighway, the North American Community, a regional currency called the Amero, and “free trade” deals are just a few of the weapons in their arsenal. And John McCain will use every bit of his power as President to facilitate all of this chicanery. And, because McCain is a Republican, conservatives and Christians will sit back and let it happen without even the slightest whimper of resistance. If Obama or Clinton were sitting in the Oval Office, however, massive numbers of conservatives and Christians would rise in protest over every inch of ground ceded to these nefarious nabobs. So, tell me, who is the greater evil? I say it is John McCain. I realize that there are many readers shouting to themselves right now and saying, “So what do we do, Chuck? We have to vote for one or the other.” To which I say, No you don’t. You can think outside the box. You don’t have to throw your vote away on either of these wretched candidates. You can cast a vote for principle and vote for a third party candidate. I can hear readers screaming at me now, saying that voting for a third party candidate is a wasted vote. I strongly disagree! Casting a vote for a person who you know is unfaithful to your principles is a wasted vote! Voting for someone who you know will keep our borders and ports open to illegals, continue George Bush’s preemptive war doctrine, and facilitate a burgeoning hemispheric government–not to mention someone who will increase and augment a burgeoning Orwellian police state–is a wasted vote! At some point, we Americans must decide whether we will tolerate the continued sellout of our freedoms and principles or not. Will we swallow the shallow squeals of the establishment elite who think we are a bunch of sheep to be herded into their New World Order? Or will we stand our ground? Will we vote our principles and our conscience? It does not matter that the pundits and experts say we can’t win. That is not our business. As John Quincy Adams said, “Duty is ours; results are God’s.” When will Christians, especially, quit trying to play politics and start standing for principle? They talk a lot about principle, but when it comes down to where the rubber meets the road, most don’t act like people of principle. If God intends to give America another chance, if He intends to return these United States to constitutional government, and if He intends to preserve America’s independence, it will only come in the form of a miracle. And miracles do not happen by the machinations of pragmatic planners. Miracles are just that. America was born a miracle, and it could now be given a new birth by miracle. If so, it would demand that people of principle start acting like it. That we cast aside the pragmatic, the reasonable, the sophisticated, and the expected. That we–as did the priests of old–would be willing to step out into the raging current of the Jordan River, knowing that either God would part the water or we would drown. That we would be willing to sign our names to a document–as did our Founding Fathers–that would make us either the enemies of the state or the inventors of a new nation. It means taking risks; it means doing the impractical; it means rejecting accepted wisdom and standing for principle. I am convinced that only a miracle can save America now. And I am expecting God to grant such a miracle. Beyond that, I am willing to do my part to place myself in a position to let God use my voice and my vote to accomplish this miracle. And if that means voting for someone who “has no chance of winning” in order to let God take the glory for whatever victory results, it is the least I can do. So, who will join me? *If you enjoyed this column and want to help me distribute these editorial opinions to an ever-growing audience, donations may now be made by credit card, check, or Money Order. Use this link: http://www.chuckbaldwinlive.com/donate.php
© Chuck Baldwin This column is archived as
http://www.chuckbaldwinlive.com/c2008/cbarchive_20080415.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/11/AR2008041103296.html
By Nita Farahany
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Imagine a world of streets lined with video cameras that alert authorities to any suspicious activity. A world where police officers can read the minds of potential criminals and arrest them before they commit any crimes. A world in which a suspect who lies under questioning gets nabbed immediately because his brain has given him away.
Though that may sound a lot like the plot of the 2002 movie “Minority Report,” starring Tom Cruise and based on a Philip K. Dick novel, I’m not talking about science fiction here; it turns out we’re not so far away from that world. But does it sound like a very safe place, or a very scary one?
It’s a question I think we should be asking as the federal government invests millions of dollars in emerging technology aimed at detecting and decoding brain activity. And though government funding focuses on military uses for these new gizmos, they can and do end up in the hands of civilian law enforcement and in commercial applications. As spending continues and neurotechnology advances, that imagined world is no longer the stuff of science fiction or futuristic movies, and we postpone at our peril confronting the ethical and legal dilemmas it poses for a society that values not just personal safety but civil liberty as well.
Consider Cernium Corp.’s “Perceptrak” video surveillance and monitoring system, recently installed by Johns Hopkins University, among others. This technology grew out of a project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense — to develop intelligent video analytics systems. Unlike simple video cameras monitored by security guards, Perceptrak integrates video cameras with an intelligent computer video. It uses algorithms to analyze streaming video and detect suspicious activities, such as people loitering in a secure area, a group converging or someone leaving a package unattended. Since installing Perceptrak, Johns Hopkins has reported a 25 percent reduction in crime.
But that’s only the beginning. Police may soon be able to monitor suspicious brain activity from a distance as well. New neurotechnology soon may be able to detect a person who is particularly nervous, in possession of guilty knowledge or, in the more distant future, to detect a person thinking, “Only one hour until the bomb explodes.” Today, the science of detecting and decoding brain activity is in its infancy. But various government agencies are funding the development of technology to detect brain activity remotely and are hoping to eventually decode what someone is thinking. Scientists, however, wildly disagree about the accuracy of brain imaging technology, what brain activity may mean and especially whether brain activity can be detected from afar.
Yet as the experts argue about the scientific limitations of remote brain detection, this chilling science fiction may already be a reality. In 2002, the Electronic Privacy Information Center reported that NASA was developing brain monitoring devices for airports and was seeking to use noninvasive sensors in passenger gates to collect the electronic signals emitted by passengers’ brains. Scientists scoffed at the reports, arguing that to do what NASA was proposing required that an electroencephalogram (EEG) be physically attached to the scalp.
But that same year, scientists at the University of Sussex in England adapted the same technology they had been using to detect heart rates at distances of up to 1 meter, or a little more than three feet, to remotely detect changes in the brain. And while scientific limitations to remote EEG detection still exist, clearly the question is when, not if, these issues will be resolved.
Meanwhile, another remote brain-activity detector, which uses light beamed through the skull to measure changes in oxygen levels in the brain, may be on the way. Together with the EEG, it would enhance the power of brain scanning. Today the technology consists of a headband sensor worn by the subject, a control box to capture the data and a computer to analyze it. With the help of government funding, however, that is all becoming increasingly compact and portable, paving the way for more specific remote detection of brain activity.
But don’t panic: The government can’t read our minds — yet. So far, these tools simply measure changes in the brain; they don’t detect thoughts and intentions.
Scientists, though, are hard at work trying to decode how those signals relate to mental states such as perception and intention. Different EEG frequencies, for example, have been associated with fear, anger, joy and sorrow and different cognitive states such as a person’s level of alertness. So when you’re stopped for speeding and terrified because you’re carrying illegal drugs in the trunk of your car, EEG technology might enable the police to detect your fear or increased alertness. This is not so far-fetched: Some scientists already are able to tell from brain images in the lab whether a test subject was envisioning a tool such as a hammer or a screwdriver or a dwelling, and to predict whether the subject intended to add or subtract numbers. Just last month, scientists announced a new study aimed at decoding visual imagery in the brain.
Although brain-based lie-detection technology has been quite controversial and has only been tested on a limited basis, early researchers have claimed high accuracy at detecting deception. But there’s a problem: Most brain-based lie-detection tests assume that lying should result in more brain activity than truth-telling because lying involves more cognition. So these lie-detection methods may fail in sociopaths or in individuals who believe in the falsehood they’re telling.
Whether such technology will be effective outside the laboratory remains to be seen, but the very fact that the government is banking on its future potential raises myriad questions.
Imagine, for example, a police officer approaching a suspect based on Perceptrak’s “unusual activity” detection. Equipped with remote neural-detection technology, the officer asks her a few questions, and the detection device deems her responses to be deceptive. Will this be enough evidence for an arrest? Can it be used to convict a person of intent to commit a crime? Significant scientific hurdles remain before neurotechnology can be used that way, but given how fast it’s developing, I think we must pause now to ask how it may affect the fundamental precepts of our criminal justice system.
Americans have been willing to tolerate significant new security measures and greater encroachments on civil liberties after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Could reports of significant crime reduction such as that seen by Johns Hopkins, or incidents such as the student shootings last year at Virginia Tech or more recently at Northern Illinois University, be enough to justify the use of pre-crime technology? Could remote neural monitoring together with intelligent video analytics have prevented those tragedies? And if they could, should they be allowed to?
These are just some of the questions we must ask as we balance scientific advances and the promise of enhanced safety against a loss of liberty. And we must do it now, while our voices still matter. In a world where private thoughts are no longer private, what will our protections be?
Nita Farahany, an assistant professor of law and philosophy at Vanderbilt University, is the editor of the forthcoming “Genes and Justice: The Impact of Behavioral Genetics and Neuroscience on Criminal Law.”
The Martial Law Act of 2006
by James Bovard, Posted April 9, 2008
Martial law is perhaps the ultimate stomping of freedom. And yet, on September 30, 2006, Congress passed a provision in a 591-page bill that will make it easy for President Bush to impose martial law in response to a terrorist “incident.” It also empowers him to effectively declare martial law in response to what he or other federal officials label a shortfall of “public order” — whatever that means.
It took only a few paragraphs in a $500 billion, 591-page bill to raze one of the most important limits on federal power. Congress passed the Insurrection Act in 1807 to severely restrict the president’s ability to deploy the military within the United States. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 tightened those restrictions, imposing a two-year prison sentence on anyone who used the military within the United States without the express permission of Congress. (This act was passed after the depredations of the U.S. military throughout the Southern states during Reconstruction.)
But there is a loophole: Posse Comitatus is waived if the president invokes the Insurrection Act.
The Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus Act aim to deter dictatorship while permitting a narrow window for the president to temporarily use the military at home. But the 2006 reforms basically threw any concern about dictatorial abuses out the window.
Section 1076 of the Defense Authorization Act of 2006 changed the name of the key provision in the statute book from “Insurrection Act” to “Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order Act.” The Insurrection Act of 1807 stated that the president could deploy troops within the United States only “to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” The new law expands the list of pretexts to include “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition” — and such a “condition” is not defined or limited.
One might think that given the experience with the USA PATRIOT Act and many other abuses of power, Congress would be leery about giving this president his biggest blank check yet to suspend the Constitution. But that would be naive.
The new law was put in place in response to the debacle of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. There was no evidence that permitting a president far more power would avoid future debacles, but such a law provides a comfort blanket to politicians. The risk of tyranny is irrelevant compared with the reduction of risk of embarrassment to politicians. According to Washington, the correct response to Katrina is not to recognize the failure of relying on federal agencies a thousand miles away but rather to vastly increase the power of the president to dictate a solution, regardless of whether he knows what he is doing and regardless of whether local and state rights are trampled.
The new law also empowers the president to commandeer the National Guard of one state to send to another state for as many as 365 days. Bush could send the South Carolina National Guard to suppress anti-war protests in New Haven. Or the next president could send the Massachusetts National Guard to disarm the residents of Wyoming, if they resisted a federal law that prohibited private ownership of semi-automatic weapons. Governors’ control of the National Guard can be trumped with a simple presidential declaration.
Section 1076 had bipartisan support on Capitol Hill, including support from Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), and Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Since the law would give the feds more power, it was very popular inside the Beltway.
On the other hand, every governor in the country opposed the changes. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, warned on September 19, 2006, that “we certainly do not need to make it easier for presidents to declare martial law.” Leahy’s alarm got no response. Ten days later, he commented in the Congressional Record, “Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy.”
A U.S. Enabling Act
The new law vastly increases the danger from the actions of government provocateurs. If there is an incident now like the first bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993, it would be far easier for the president to declare martial law — even if, as then, it was an FBI informant who taught the culprits how to make the bomb. Even if the FBI masterminds a protest that turns violent, the president could invoke the “incident” to suspend the Constitution.
“Martial law” is a euphemism for military dictatorship. When foreign democracies are overthrown and a junta establishes martial law, Americans usually recognize that a fundamental change has occurred. Perhaps some conservatives believe that the only change when martial law is declared is that people are no longer read their Miranda rights before they are locked away. “Martial law” means: Obey soldiers’ commands or be shot. The abuses of military rule in Southern states during Reconstruction were legendary, but they have been swept under the historical rug.
Section 1076 is an Enabling Act-type legislation — something which purports to preserve law and order while formally empowering the president to rule by decree.
Bush can commandeer a state’s National Guard any time he declares a “state has refused to enforce applicable laws.” Does this refer to the laws as they are commonly understood — or to the “laws” after Bush “fixes” them with a signing statement? Unfortunately, it is not possible for Americans to commandeer the federal government even when Bush admits that he is breaking a law (such as the Anti-Torture Act).
Section 1076 is the type of “law” that would probably be denounced by the U.S. State Department’s Annual Report on Human Rights if enacted by a foreign government. But when the U.S. government does the same thing, it is merely another proof of benevolent foresight. The “comfort blanket” on Section 1076 is that the powers will not be abused because the president will show more concern with the Bill of Rights than Congress did when it rubberstamped this provision. This is the same “pass the buck on the Constitution” that worked so well with the PATRIOT Act, the McCain Feingold Campaign Reform Act, and the Military Commissions Act. As long as there is hypothetically some branch of the government that will object to oppression, no one has the right to fear losing his liberties.
The military on the home front
Section 1076 is more ominous in light of the Bush administration’s long record of Posse Comitatus violations. Since 2001, the Bush administration has accelerated a trend of using the military as a tool in the nation’s domestic affairs. From its support of the Total Information Awareness surveillance vacuum cleaner, to its use of Pentagon spy planes during the Washington-area sniper shootings in 2002, to the Pentagon’s seizures of Americans’ financial and other private information without a warrant, the Bush administration has not hesitated to use military force and intimidation at home whenever convenient. And Americans may have little or no idea of how far the military has actually gone on the home front, given the Bush team’s obsessive secrecy.
The Pentagon has sent U.S. military intelligence agents on domestic fishing expeditions. In 2004, two U.S. Army intelligence agents descended on the University of Texas’s law school in Austin. They entered the office of the Journal of Women and the Law and demanded that the editors turn over a roster of the people who attended a recent conference on Islam and women. The editors denied having a list; the behavior of one agent was described as intimidating. The agents then demanded contact information for the student who organized the conference, Sahar Aziz. University of Texas law professor Douglas Laycock commented,
We certainly hope that the Army doesn’t believe that attending a conference on Islamic law or Islam and women is itself ground for investigation.
Military officials later declared that U.S. Army intelligence agents had overstepped their bounds. But this did not stop the Bush administration from having a provision inserted in a bill passed in secret session by the Senate Intelligence Committee that would allow military intelligence agents to conduct surveillance and recruit informants in the United States. Wired.com reported,
Pentagon officials say the exemption would not affect civil liberties and is needed so that its agents can obtain information from sources who may be afraid of government agents.
The provision would authorize military agents to go undercover and never inform their targets that they were dealing with a G-man. Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, denounced the provision:
This … is giving them the authority to spy on Americans. And it’s all been done with no public discussion, in the dark of night.
The controversy over the amendment scuttled its enactment, though it is unclear whether that has deterred the military from expanding its domestic spying.
There is no Honesty-in-Absolute-Power mandate in the federal statute books. The more power government seizes, the more easily it can suppress the truth. There is nothing to prevent a president from declaring martial law on false pretexts — any more than there is to prevent him from launching a foreign war on false pretenses. And when the lies become exposed years later, it could be far too late to resurrect lost liberties.
James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [2006] as well as The Bush Betrayal [2004], Lost Rights [1994] and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003) and serves as a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.
This article originally appeared in the January 2008 edition of Freedom Daily. Subscribe to the print or email version of Freedom Daily.
© 2001-2007 The Future of Freedom Foundation. All rights reserved.
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