Guest Contributor

MANDEVILLE, LOUISIANA/Mike Church -  Much has been made about the “Tea Party” movement and other American’s calls to “return to the Constitution” and get “our government back” from the politicians and special interests that have stolen it from us and our posterity. There are many thoughtful plans being promoted that should the Republican Party regain control of the House of Representatives, people feel they should pursue. These plans offer various degrees of remodeling the federal system but do nothing to alter its inexorable course toward either an Oligarchy or acting national democratic legislature.

I offer as a counterpoint this brief list of actions that would merely begin the process of “returning to the Constitution”. The list could easily number in the hundreds of pages and resemble one of the current Congress’s legislative acts in both size and scope and even that wouldn’t completely “return us to the Constitution.”

With an open mind and with an even more hopeful heart I offer this brief set of actions that would only begin the “return” process and challenge my fellow citizens to consider the magnitude of what must be done to “secure the [former] blessing of liberty to ourselves AND our posterity.

Authors Disclaimer – I make no claim to the precise naming of all agencies, Acts and or laws cited herein.

1. Freeze all federal hiring, this includes funding requests from the executive branch to hire.

2. Repeal the Budget Act of 1974 and all it’s contingent COLA “mandates” no matter the agency or program they are applicable to.

3. Freeze under threat of rescinding funding any and all new regulations currently under review or consideration

4. Have an up or down vote on a Declaration of War with Iraq and with Afghanistan. if either fails then troop withdrawals must begin immediately.

5. Pass the Private Property Restoration Act which among other things shall forbid any federal magistrate from hearing any cases to restrict use of private property.

6. Repeal the AMT permanently by statute.

7. Repeal the capital gains tax.

8. Refuse to fund the Education Department and the Department of Energy, any programs, grants projects or construction begun under these agencies must cease. The EPA’s charter must be rewritten to make it clear that it only has jurisdiction over federal and or territorial waters and land.

9. Repeal ObamaCare and all contingent legislation. Congress must then use legitimate Commerce Clause powers to “make commerce regular” and remove from the tax code all subsidies, all claims of tax credit, any and all restrictions federal law imposes on the sale or use of major medical health insurance. This must include federal recognition of PPO, HMO or other plans created to satisfy Congress.

10. Repeal the FICA and sunset the program by Jan 1, 2030. Establish a cutoff date for continued payment eligibility such as born on or before December 31, 1959.

11. Repeal the Patriot Act of 2001, 2005 and sunset the Department of Homeland Security on or before December 31, 2012.

12. Repeal all mandates, taxes and law pertaining to the SCHIP program.

13. Announce the return of U.S. Gold and Silver bullion coins as legal tender and order the treasury to begin the purchase of bullion with the intent of eliminating paper currency in favor of gold and silver coin and gold and silver coin backed notes.

14. Pass the Debt Consolidation and Repayment Act. This Act will require the sale of all lands currently “owned” by the U.S. government which do not house “needful buildings, docks, arsenals, forts and magazines”. This is not limited to “Parks” and “National forests”. All proceeds are to be solely applicable to the repayment of the U.S. Governments outstanding debts both domestic and foreign.

15. End the federal tax designations enacted and known as 501 (c), (g), 503, 527 e.g. “non-profits”.

16. Repeal the “Income tax witholding act” and enact an immediate and deduction free, flat income tax law, payable once per year by each citizen.

17. Repeal all corporate and business interest, income and profit taxation.

18. Heed the call of 38 states that shall call an convention to amend the Constitution under Article V of the U.S. Constitution.

Mike Church, Sirius/XM Radio Talkshow Host “The Mike Church Show”, Singer/Songwriter, and Owner “Founding Father Films”

In the sea of nationally syndicated Straussian Neo-Conservative voices which dominate talk-radio, Mike Church is the lone champion of “little-r” Republicanism regardless of which “party” is in control. He speaks passionately about the necessity of returning to a humble foreign policy, abolishing the FEDERAL RESERVE, the insidious nature of Income Taxation, the false choice of Democrat or Republican, and advocates tirelessly for a full-restoration of the Constitution. As such, and as one of the only voices to have a nationally broadcast platform, Mike is quickly becoming a favorite amongst the burgeoning “Liberty Movement” which sprang up across the internet during Dr. Ron Paul’s 2008 Presidential Campaign. Further, Mike is also an author, filmmaker and singer/songwriter in addition to his duties as host of “The Mike Church Show” Mike uses facts and the actual writings produced by the Founding Generation to promote the singular notion that in order to save our future, we must look back to the principles our beloved union was founded upon. He is also known for writing and producing a bevy of parody songs that use humor as a vehicle to drive home serious political points. His rendition of the Simon & Garfunkel classic, “Mrs. Robinson,” aptly entitled “Mr. Jefferson” racked up nearly 200,000 views in its first few days on YouTube and was on its way to becoming viral before Google/YouTube stepped in and pulled the clip from the site for reasons the site has never been able to explain. (the clip was later re-uploaded and spread by others) Still, Mike’s message could not be silenced, as it became the theme song for hundreds of “Tax Day Tea Party” events across the country in 2009. Mike is also the author, producer, and a voice talent behind the heralded documentaries: “Road to Independence” (the story of the Declaration of Independence) and “The Fame of Our Fathers: How Immortality Inspired Our Constitution;” and “The Spirit of ’76”. The third in the series, “Spirit” is also the first feature-length film from Mike Church’s Founding Father Films. The company is currently in production to bring an animated-feature length film version to theaters in the fall of 2010. The Mike Church show can be heard daily Monday through Friday from 6:00am to 9:00am EST on SiriusXM PATRIOT

Wire Report

(WIRE/Ind.Inst.) – The U.S. Justice Department is apparently considering prosecuting Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, which is a Web site that publishes classified documents from governments, under the rarely used Espionage Act of 1917. Such a prosecution would have adverse effects on the American people’s right to know what their government is doing in a republic that is supposed to be run by them.

Ironically, the U.S. government may have leaked the threat of prosecution to coerce Assange into giving back 76,000 classified documents on the war in Afghanistan and deleting them from his Web site, which the Pentagon has demanded. More important, this threat may be meant to intimidate Assange from making public another 15,000 documents that he says will be even juicier than the previous release.

The Espionage Act, originally passed during World War I, was designed to prosecute spies from foreign powers. Yet Assange, who is Australian and spends most of his time in Belgium, Iceland, and Sweden, is hardly a foreign spy. While spies operate in the shadows and try to help foreign governments against the United States, Assange gets documents employees of various governments willingly give him and publishes them widely so citizens can see what their governments are up to.

The threatened prosecution may be just a bluff, because the Justice Department recently was forced to drop a similar case against two American pro-Israel lobbyists for taking documents from Larry Franklin, a Department of Defense employee who was successfully prosecuted for violating his secrecy oath. It is probably kosher, although somewhat hypocritical, for the government to prosecute government employees, such as Franklin and Pfc. Bradley Manning, a U.S. intelligence analyst who allegedly leaked a video of U.S. helicopter gunships killing a Reuters journalist in Iraq and who is suspected of leaking the treasure trove of documents from Afghanistan. The hypocrisy comes in because the Justice Department leaked the threat of prosecuting Assange, intentions that are usually kept secret, and high-level government officials regularly leak highly classified information to further their own policy agendas during bureaucratic turf battles. However, prosecuting people who just publicize leaks threatens all journalists who regularly publish stories using leaks from government officials.

Such journalistic stories are valuable and necessary, because much hush-hush information is overclassified, is kept under wraps only because it is embarrassing to the U.S. government, or is classified to keep the public in the dark about questionable government policies or actions. During the Cold War and continuing to this day, the American public is often the last to know information that is common knowledge among intelligence agencies of adversarial nations. Excessive government secrecy is a serious and underrated problem in a republic and has been exacerbated by the spike in clandestine government actions in the Bush-Obama war on terror.

If the government of a republic is going to keep secrets from its own people for their own good (faith is required here), they should keep the restricted information to the minimum. If the government drastically reduced its vast storehouse of secrets to what was truly needed to protect intelligence agents and troops in the field, whistleblowers such as Manning would have much less reason to leak and would likely have more respect for the necessity not to disclose the remaining vital information.

Most important, if a republican government cannot keep its secrets secret, it should not prosecute third-party, non-governmental recipients of the material, but should concentrate on plugging the leaks in its security system.

© 2010 The Independent Institute

Ivan Eland, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace and Liberty, The Independent Institute

Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa State University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from George Washington University. He has been Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, and he spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. He also has served as Evaluator-in-Charge (national security and intelligence) for the U.S. General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office), and has testified on the military and financial aspects of NATO expansion before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on CIA oversight before the House Government Reform Committee, and on the creation of the Department of Homeland Security before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Dr. Eland is the author of Partitioning for Peace: An Exit Strategy for Iraq, Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty, The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy, as well as The Efficacy of Economic Sanctions as a Foreign Policy Tool. He is a contributor to numerous volumes and the author of 45 in-depth studies on national security issues. His articles have appeared in American Prospect, Arms Control Today, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Emory Law Journal, The Independent Review, Issues in Science and Technology (National Academy of Sciences), Mediterranean Quarterly, Middle East and International Review, Middle East Policy, Nexus, Chronicle of Higher Education, American Conservative, International Journal of World Peace, and Northwestern Journal of International Affairs. Dr. Eland’s popular writings have appeared in such publications as the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Houston Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times, San Diego Union-Tribune, Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Newsday, Sacramento Bee, Orange County Register, Washington Times, Providence Journal, The Hill, and Defense News. He has appeared on ABC’s World News Tonight,  NPR’s Talk of the Nation,  PBS, Fox News Channel, CNBC, Bloomberg TV, CNN, CNN Crossfire,  CNN-fn, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC), Canadian TV (CTV), Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, BBC, and other local, national, and international TV and radio programs.

Wire Report

Abu Zubaydah: Tortured for Nothing

by: Andy Worthington

(WIRE/FFF) – The story of Abu Zubaydah — a Saudi-born Palestinian whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn — has always been absolutely central to the “war on terror.” Seized in a house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002, he was immediately touted¹ as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations and top recruiter,” who would be able to “provide the names of terrorists around the world and which targets they planned to hit.” He then pretty much vanished off the face of the earth for four and a half years.

In September 2006, he resurfaced in Guantánamo, when President Bush announced that he was one of 14 “high-value detainees,” previously held in secret CIA prisons, whose existence had been resolutely denied by the administration until that point.²

In a speech on September 6, 2006, Bush finally conceded that “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war [on terror] have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency,” and claimed that when Abu Zubaydah, who he described as “a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden,” became “defiant and evasive” after his capture, “the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.”

The Infamous Torture memos

This was a reference to the CIA’s torture program for “high-value detainees,” which was first publicly revealed when a memo that purported to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA, written by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo and issued in August 2002, was leaked in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004.

However, another narrative had already appeared to challenge the one put forward by the president. In June 2006, Ron Suskind’s book The One Percent Doctrine was published³, which explained, as I described it in an article a year ago, that:

Zubaydah “turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be,” in the words of Barton Gellman, who reviewed Suskind’s book⁴ for the Washington Post in 2006. He “appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations,” and was, instead, the “go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like”…

Suskind described how, through a close scrutiny of his diaries, in which FBI analysts found entries in the voices of three people — a boy, a young man, and a middle-aged alter ego — which recorded in numbing detail, over the course of ten years, “what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said.” Dan Coleman, the FBI’s senior expert on al-Qaeda, told his superiors, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.”

Since then, more and more compelling evidence has emerged to demonstrate that Abu Zubaydah was indeed nothing more than a “safehouse keeper” with mental-health problems^5-6, who “claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did,” and a “kind of travel agent” for would-be jihadists, who “was not even an official member of al-Qaeda.” This included Abu Zubaydah’s own testimony at his Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantánamo in 2007, when he stated that he was tortured by the CIA to admit that he worked with Osama bin Laden, but insisted, “I’m not his partner and I’m not a member of al-Qaeda.”

Moreover, following on from Ron Suskind’s explanation of how “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered,” further confirmation was also provided that his torture yielded no significant information and led only to vast amounts of the intelligence agencies’ time being wasted on false leads. A year ago, summing up the results of Zubaydah’s torture, a former intelligence official stated, bluntly, “We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms.”

In addition, the details of the torture program that was specifically developed for use on Abu Zubaydah have also been revealed — primarily through a leaked International Committee of the Red Cross report, based on interviews with the “high-value detainees,” including Abu Zubaydah, and also through other Justice Department “torture memos” released by the Obama administration last April. The grim list of techniques includes waterboarding (a form of controlled drowning), confinement in tiny, coffin-like boxes, prolonged sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation, and the use of violence and stress positions, sustained nudity, loud music, and noise.

Given all these facts — that the Bush administration implemented torture for use on a man whose importance was hideously overstated, which led to no useful intelligence and a hideous waste of the agencies’ time — Abu Zubaydah’s story is one of the most distressing examples of hubris in the whole of the Bush administration’s brutally inept “war on terror,” but his story has not come to an end, of course, and his continued detention, and the Obama administration’s attempts to justify it, continue to throw up new revelations, as was made clear just last week when a court submission filed by the government in September 2009 was unclassified.

In response to 213 requests by Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers for discovery in his habeas corpus petition, the government itself provided the most comprehensive rebuttal to date of the kind of claims put forward by the Bush administration in defense of its torture program, and, specifically, its claims regarding Abu Zubaydah, on the basis that requests for discovery are only relevant when they refer to claims made by the government.

In seeking to turn down the lawyers’ requests, the government revealed that it “has not contended … that Petitioner was a member of al-Qaeda or otherwise formally identified with al-Qaeda” and “has not contended that Petitioner had any personal involvement in planning or executing either the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, or the attacks of September 11, 2001.”

Instead, the government now claims that the ongoing detention of Abu Zubaydah “is based on conduct and actions that establish Petitioner was ‘part of’ hostile forces and ‘substantially supported’ those forces,” and that he “facilitat[ed] the retreat and escape of enemy forces” after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

In response, as Jason Leopold reported for Truthout:

Zubaydah’s attorneys claim that “the persons whom [Zubaydah] assisted in escaping Afghanistan in 2001 included ‘women, children, and/or other non-combatants’” and that the government has evidence to support those assertions. The lawyers also questioned the government’s history of falsehoods about their client.

“The government’s accounts frequently have been at variance with the actual facts, and the government has generally been loath to provide the facts until forced to do so,” said Zubaydah’s attorney, Brent Mickum, in an interview. “When the government was forced to present the facts in the form of discovery in Zubaydah’s case, it realized that the game was over and there was no way it could support the Bush administration’s baseless allegations. So it changed the charges.”

Mickum continued, “I’m not surprised at all that the government has dropped the old charges against our client and is alleging new charges against him. That is their tried-and-true modus operandi … [W]hen their case falls apart, they re-jigger the evidence, and come up with new charges and [say] ‘we will defend the new charges with the same zeal we defended the earlier bogus charges.’”

Since taking up Abu Zubaydah’s case and filing a habeas corpus petition in February 2008, his lawyers have always maintained not only that their client was not a member of al-Qaeda, but also that Khaldan, the training camp for which he was the “safehouse keeper,” was closed down by the Taliban in 2000 after the camp’s leader refused to allow it to come under the control of Osama bin Laden. Even the government now accepts that Khaldan was “organizationally and operationally independent of al-Qaeda,” and as Brent Mickum told Jason Leopold, reviewing all of the above, “We have never deviated from that position, and now the government admits that we were correct all along.”

These extensive concessions on the part of the government seem only to reveal that the Justice Department is painting itself into a corner with Abu Zubaydah, engaged in a slow-moving legal process, which senior officials must be hoping can be strung out indefinitely. Otherwise, profoundly difficult truths will emerge — about the extent of Abu Zubaydah’s torture, its particular futility, and, it should be noted, his relationship to Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of Khaldan who turned down Osama bin Laden.

Rendered to Egypt after his capture at the end of 2001, al-Libi was tortured until he confessed that Saddam Hussein was helping al-Qaeda obtain chemical weapons, a wildly improbable scenario, which, nevertheless, was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. What makes the revival of al-Libi’s story particularly unappealing for the U.S. government is that, after years of detention in secret prisons, he was returned to Libya, where, last May, he conveniently died in prison — reportedly by committing suicide — just three days before the U.S. embassy reopened in Tripoli after being closed for 40 years.

When it comes to dealing with Khaldan, the stories of Abu Zubaydah and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi not only demonstrate the Bush administration’s legacy at its most toxic and self-defeating, but also at its most cruel and pointless, from which, it seems clear, there is no easy way out.

Source(s): ¹“Anatomy of a Raid” by Tim McGirk Time/CNN • ²The White House Archives. Pres. G. W. Bush”President Discusses Creation of Military Commissions to Try Suspected Terrorists” Sept. 6, 2006 • ³“The One Percent Doctrine” by Ron Suskind 2006 • ⁴The Washington post “The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light” By Barton Gellman, Tuesday, June 20, 2006 •⁵Washington Post “FBI, CIA Debate Significance of Terror Suspect Agencies Also Disagree On Interrogation Methods” By Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus, Tuesday, December 18, 2007 • ⁶ Washington Post “Detainee’s Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots Waterboarding, Rough Interrogation of Abu Zubaida Produced False Leads, Officials Say”, By Peter Finn and Joby Warrick Sunday, March 29, 2009 •⁷

© 2010 The Future of Freedom Foundation

Andy Worthington – Journalist/Author
	Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press) and serves as policy advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation. Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk.

Allison Bricker

QUINCY, ILLINOIS – Representative Phil Hare of the 17th Illinois Congressional District provided keen insight to his and most likely many of his colleagues’ feelings towards the U.S.  Constitution when asked about the authorization for the Federal government’s intervention into health care whereby he stated:

“I don’t worry about the Constitution on this to be honest with you.”

Representative Phil Hare
17th Congressional District of Illinois

 

He then quickly returned to his “appeal to pity” as a justification for the takeover of health insurance by the Central Authority. He spewed forth heartbreaking stump-story after stump-story that would even make Glenn Beck weep crocodile tears in support of involuntary charity. In the comedy of errors that followed, Representative Hare proceeded to confuse the preamble to the Constitution with that of the Declaration of Independence, and squirmed his pull-peddling self straight out of the door after being confronted unto his laughable assertion that he read the health care bill three separate times prior to casting his vote.

Representative Hare like many in Congress, was hand-picked by his fellow Democrat precinct committeemen¹ in 2006 to replace Lane Evans who in the rich Illinois tradition of public-official corruption, announced his retirement after pleading nolo contendere and coughing up $185,000 in Civil fines to the FEC². The penalties were levied by the Federal Election Commission for collusion and misuse of political funds after uncovering a coordinated effort to bypass contribution limitations by then Representative Lane’s campaign fund, the 17th District Victory Fund, and Rock Island Democratic Central Committee.

As a reaction to his sudden YouTube infamy, Representative Hare decided to issue a response video in order to reassure his constituents that the Constitution is “near and dear to his heart”. So much so that it even says so on the  notes he reads from throughout his heart-felt plea to be able to “disagree but not be disagreeable.” Hopefully the voters of Illinois will send this ignorant excuse for a representative packing in November, replacing him with someone who understands and fully appreciates their oath of office to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution.

Source(s): ¹Who Runs Government, a Washington Post Company “Phil Hare (D-17IL)” • ²FEC Press Office: THE FRIENDS OF LANE EVANS COMMITTEE AGREES TO PAY $185,000 CIVIL PENALTY June 28th, 2005

Wire Report

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Veterans Administration Has Long Record of Negligence, Inefficiency, Failure; Services Burdened by Reopened Cases, War on Terror

OAKLAND, Calif., Mar. 18, 2010—The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has decided to reexamine the rejected claims of veterans purportedly suffering from “Gulf War syndrome.” Although these cases were closed nearly two decades ago, reopening them may be the first move toward providing compensation to as many as 210,000 veterans for this illness, whose origin remains uncertain in spite of the $340 million put into research. Arriving in time to deliver insight into this unusual health care investigation, a new report divulges the historical precedent of inefficiency and negligence that has plagued the VA since its genesis.

Failure to Provide: Healthcare at the Veterans Administration (March 2010) by Independent Institute Research Fellow Ronald Hamowy sheds light on the role of the VA by following the course of its inception and development. Hamowy, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Alberta, explains that because the VA is a public organization, the health care provided by its facilities has always lagged behind the standards of private medical institutions. Additionally, he finds that the VA “was a giant first step in undermining the notion of private responsibility for one’s medical treatment.”

Before World War I, the federal government was almost entirely uninvolved in providing direct medical care to veterans, although generous pensions comprised 41.5 percent of the federal budget by 1893. After the war, advocates of nationalized health care for veterans argued that it “would constitute the most efficient and least traumatic system for continuing the care veterans had received while on active duty.”

Failure to Provide (PDF 3.0MB)

The Veterans Bureau was consequently established in 1921, but was abolished nine years later due to extensive corruption, and replaced by the Veterans Administration. The VA was given responsibility not only for health care—which was extended to include outpatient and psychiatric services, substance abuse treatment, and care for non-service related illnesses—but also for all other veterans affairs. Additional legislation passed after World War II even contained measures such as unemployment compensation and educational allowances.

While the VA’s budget, payroll, and number of facilities expanded rapidly to become “by far the most extensive [medical program] in the country,” its standard of care stagnated, and complaints of inefficiency and negligence mounted. A 1949 commission “uncovered a staggering amount of waste,” a result of the highly political nature of the VA’s health care system.

The VA was raised to a Cabinet department in 1989, although Hamowy argues that there was “not one substantive argument put forward” that justified doing so. The Cabinet position offered no lasting changes to address the extensive waste and inferior care. Conditions further deteriorated as the U.S. began to intervene in Iraq and Afghanistan, “substantially increasing the number of veterans needing medical care” from an already dilapidated system. Hamowy finds that “the lifetime costs of providing disability benefits and medical care to the veterans of these two wars . . . will amount to between $350 and $700 billion.”

The VA has clearly overstepped its original role as a health care provider for veterans with service-related disabilities, a raison d’être that the author believes “was extremely weak to begin with.” As new evidence of the VA’s inefficiency reaches the news daily, such as having to reconsider the Gulf War syndrome cases, Failure to Provide presents a compelling examination of the rationale behind the administration that “paved the way for instituting a national system of socialized medicine.”

###

Ronald Hamowy, Research Fellow at The Independent Institute

Ronald Hamowy is a Research Fellow at The Independent Institute and Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Alberta, Canada. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago under the late Nobel Laureate economist and philosopher Friedrich A. Hayek. Professor Hamowy’s scholarly work has focused on two disparate areas: eighteenth-century British political and social history and the intersection between medicine and law in twentieth-century century North America. Among his books are an edited and annotated edition of the eighteenth-century British classic political volumes, Cato’s Letters, or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects; his edited volumes, The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism and Dealing With Drugs: Consequences of Government Control; and his authored books, Canadian Medicine: A Study in Restricted Entry, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Theory of Spontaneous Order and Government and Public Health in America. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including the William and Mary Quarterly, History of Political Thought, Journal of Libertarian Studies, Inquiry, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, and The New Republic.

Allison Bricker

This Saturday, March 20th, 2010 is the 7th Anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Seeking to help bring more public pressure and return the U.S. to a more humble foreign  policy in line with the vision of the Founding Generation, Liberty activists from across the Republic are hosting an all day radio marathon. The group is hoping to raise funds to further fund the Peace Blimp project and other anti-war outreach activities.

The all-star line up includes Trevor Lyman, the originator of both the first money bombs and Ron Paul Blimp, Future of Freedom Foundation President & Founder Jacob Hornberger, Kurt Wallace of LibertyPulse, my debate partner from earlier in the week, Jack Hunter, Editor & Publisher of the DailyPaul, Michael Nystrom, Congressional House candidate and Iraq veteran Adam Kokesh, and many others from the Liberty Movement. In addition, the all-day marathon will include interviews  ranging from  Representatives Ron Paul of Texas and Alan Grayson of Florida to Green Party Presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney.

Finally, the diverse line up will feature a live performance by Nadir beginning at 4:00 p.m. Eastern. You can tune into the all day event scheduled to run from 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. at PeacBlimp.com.

Source(s): PeaceBlimp.com

Wire Report

(WIRE/SA) – In 2007, USA Today reported. “Like a ticking time bomb, the national debt is an explosion waiting to happen. It’s expanding by about $1.4 billion a day – or nearly $1 million a minute¹. What’s that mean to you? It means almost $30,000 in debt for each man, woman, child and infant in the United States.” Three years later Congress has raised the national debt ceiling yet again — to an unprecedented and even more astronomical $14 trillion. From healthcare to climate change, stimulus to war, virtually every conversation coming out of today’s Washington, DC-regardless of which party is in power — is about how much money our government is going to spend next.

Not surprisingly, countless Americans are now realizing that the greatest threat to their life, liberty and property is their government. Describing such people as “deranged,” New York Times columnist Frank Rich seems to think the greatest danger on the horizon is not necessarily big government-but “extremists” hell-bent on fighting it. Writes Rich:

(M)ost Tea Party groups have no affiliation with the G.O.P. despite the party’s ham-handed efforts to co-opt them. The more we learn about the Tea Partiers, the more we can see why. They loathe John McCain and the free-spending, TARP-tainted presidency of George W. Bush. They really do hate all of Washington, and if they hate Obama more than the Republican establishment, it’s only by a hair or two. The Tea Partiers want to eliminate most government agencies, starting with the Fed and the I.R.S., and end spending on entitlement programs. They are not to be confused with the Party of No holding forth in Washington – a party that, after all, is now positioning itself as a defender of Medicare spending. What we are talking about here is the Party of No Government at All.

Frank Rich
New York Times Columnist
“The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged”²
Published: February 27, 2010

What Rich derisively calls the “Party of No Government at All,” has been a healthy and long overdue reaction to what we have now — the Party of Any-and-All Government. Flustered over the rise of anti-Washington “extremism,” establishment men like Rich continue to ignore that our current, virtually omnipotent federal government is pretty damn extreme itself-that is, if the U.S. Constitution is still any gauge on what American government should be and not simply the status quo sympathies of a NYT’s columnist.

Rich paints a picture in which the supposedly respectable conservative movement of the recent past has been hijacked by the ghost of John Birch and the specter of Ron Paul. But Rich has it exactly backward-there has been no mainstream movement advocating for limited government conservatism for decades, only the GOP using conservative rhetoric as a marketing tool to win elections. The conservative movement isn’t being hijacked-it’s being resuscitated. Rich notices the difference; he just doesn’t like it:

The distinction between the Tea Party movement and the official G.O.P. is real, and we ignore it at our peril. While Washington is fixated on the natterings of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Michael Steele and the presumed 2012 Republican presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, these and the other leaders of the Party of No are anathema or irrelevant to most Tea Partiers. Indeed, McConnell, Romney and company may prove largely irrelevant to the overall political dynamic taking hold in America right now. The old G.O.P. guard has no discernible national constituency beyond the scattered, often impotent remnants of aging country club Republicanism. The passion on the right has migrated almost entirely to the Tea Party’s counterconservatism.

Frank Rich
New York Times Columnist
“The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged”²
Published: February 27, 2010

As the old GOP guard scrambles to put rank-and-file conservatives back in line so they can vote for Republicans like Mitt Romney who might save Medicare or spend trillions on another war, tea partiers, libertarians, and constitutionalists of all stripes should take solace in the fact that despite their critics–radical loyalty to limited government principles has long been a hallmark of American conservatism. Or as the original right-wing extremist, Barry Goldwater explained in his famous 1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative:

The turn will come when we entrust the conduct of our affairs to the men who understand that their first duty as public officials is to divest themselves of the power that they have been given. It will come when Americans, in hundreds of communities throughout the nation, decide to put the man in office who is pledged to enforce the Constitution and restore the Republic. Who will proclaim in a campaign speech: ‘I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel the old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is ‘needed’ before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ ‘interests,’ I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.’

Barry Goldwater
“The Conscience of a Conservative”³

Copyright © 2010 The Southern Avenger

SOURCE(s): ¹USA Today “U.S. Debt $30,000 per American” published 12/03/2007 • ²The New York Times “The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged” by Frank Rich, published 02/27/2010 • ³ “The Conscience of a Conservative” by Barry Goldwater • ⁴ Southern Avenger YouTube Channel

Allison Bricker

WASHINGTON D.C. – Speaking to a standing room only crowd in the ballroom of the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, Representative Ron Paul of Texas addressed attendees of CPAC 2010 with an energy and passion usually reserved for the stump. After being largely dismissed by the old-media and political status-quo during the 2008 Presidential campaign, the reception for Doctor “No” at this year’s annual conservative gathering mirrored the response he routinely received at campaign stops and still garners at his speeches before the energetic college crowd. Driving home his message of smaller Constitutional government his speech was interrupted several times by standing ovations and loud chants of “End the FED”, the latter a reference to his bill to finally allow for a full and complete audit of the FEDERAL RESERVE, H.R. 1207.

The cheers continued to echo throughout the ballroom as he spoke to the necessity of realigning American Foreign Policy to that of the Founding Generation and classical not neo conservative philosophy.

Source(s): CPAC • MinnesotaChris YouTube Channel • C-SPAN

Wire Report

Andy Worthington – Journalist/Author
	Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press) and serves as policy advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation. Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk.

(WIRE FFF) – Last Tuesday, a little-known court — the Court of Military Commissions Review — convened to hear appeals in the cases of the only two men sentenced in the military commission trial system established by Congress in 2006, after the first version, conceived by Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisors in November 2001, was ruled illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court.¹

The two men in question — Salim Hamdan and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul — were tried and convicted in 2008, but whereas Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden, had the major charge against him (conspiracy) dismissed by a military jury in August 2008, and was sentenced to serve just six months for providing material support to terrorism², al-Bahlul, who made a video promoting al-Qaeda and is regularly described as al-Qaeda’s “media secretary,” was convicted of conspiracy, solicitation of murder, and providing material support to terrorism, and received a life sentence in November 2008.

Under consideration are two specific questions: firstly, whether providing material support to terrorism is a valid basis for conviction in a war crimes court; and, secondly, whether al-Bahlul’s trial was unfair because he was denied the right to represent himself.

On the first point, lawyers have always maintained that providing material support to terrorism is not a valid war crime. In an email exchange last week, Lt. Col. David Frakt, who represented al-Bahlul before his trial, explained, “It has always been my position that material support to terrorism was a fabricated war crime that was not traditionally triable in a military commission as of the time of Mr. al-Bahlul and Mr. Hamdan’s affiliation with al-Qaeda, but rather was illegally retroactively applied to them several years after the fact.”

As Lt. Col. Frakt also mentioned, the problems with the material-support charges had been advanced by Hamdan’s attorneys in a pre-trial motion to dismiss the charge back in February 2008, when they also attempted to dismiss the conspiracy charge for the same reason. On July 16, the judge in Hamdan’s case, Army Capt. Keith Allred, rejected the motion to dismiss on ex post facto grounds, finding that “conspiracy and material support for terrorism have traditionally been considered violations of the law of war,” as Human Rights First explained in a summary of Hamdan’s case.³

Assist. Attrny. Gen. David S. Kris Statement to Comm. of Armed Srvcs U.S. Senate July 7, 2009 (PDF 61KB)

However, as Lt. Col. Frakt described it, Allred indicated that it was “a very close issue. Although he acknowledged that the crime of material support to terrorism had never been the subject of charges in a military commission before, he reasoned that similar conduct, essentially being part of an armed insurgent group committing war crimes against civilians, had been treated as a war crime in the past, such as during the U.S. Civil War. He argued that Congress was merely providing a new name to conduct that had always been treated as a law of war offense triable by military commission.”

Significantly, Lt. Col. Frakt added, “What Captain Allred ignored is that what Mr. Hamdan was charged with was essentially serving as a personal driver and servant to Osama bin Laden and there was no indication of involvement in any war crimes, against civilians or otherwise.”

Even more significantly, when the Obama administration and Congress revived the Commissions last summer, David Kris, a senior Justice Department official in the National Security Division, testified that the Justice Department had concluded that material support to terrorism was not a traditional war crime and should be removed from the new version of the Military Commissions Act. As Kris explained:

“While this is a very important offense in our counter-terrorism prosecutions in Federal Court … there are serious questions as to whether material support for terrorism or terrorist groups is a traditional violation of the rules of war … our experts believe that there is a significant risk that appellate courts will ultimately conclude that material support for terrorism is not a traditional law of war offense, thereby reversing hard-won convictions and leading to questions about the system’s legitimacy.”

David S. Kris
U.S. Assistant Attorney General
Department of Justice
National Security Division

As Lt. Col. Frakt explained to me, despite Kris’ concerns, “Congress rejected this sound advice and included material support to terrorism in the revised 2009 MCA, possibly in part because I advised CongressNov when I testified that if they removed this crime from statute there would be very few detainees left to prosecute.”

Noticeably, Kris was more enthusiastic about retaining the conspiracy charge, but as I explained in an article in November, “this, too, is fraught with problems. In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the case in which the Supreme Court shut down the Commissions’ first incarnation, Justice John Paul Stevens, in an opinion in which he was joined by three other justices, made a point of mentioning that ‘conspiracy’ has not traditionally been considered a war crime.”

In Hamdan’s case, a successful appeal on the material support charge would have little practical effect, as he is already a free man⁴ (although Charles Schmitz, who served as his interpreter during proceedings at Guantánamo, told the Wall Street Journal that it was “important to him to clear the conviction,” because “In Yemen, they look at him as a criminal. He’s been tainted.”).⁵

To be honest, a successful appeal on the material support charge would mean little to al-Bahlul either, although, it would, of course, fulfill the Justice Department’s own fears about including it in the new legislation, especially as the Obama administration has already announced its intention of using it against several prisoners currently held at Guantánamo.

It remains to be seen, of course, whether material support and/or conspiracy survive an appeal, but in court last week, lawyers for al-Bahlul pushed both points. As the Wall Street Journal described it, Michel Paradis, representing al-Bahlul, argued that the charges on which al-Bahlul was convicted “weren’t traditionally considered war crimes under international law, and thus Congress in 2006 couldn’t retroactively make them so. International law strongly discourages viewing conspiracy as a war crime. Providing material support for terrorism, while a domestic U.S. crime since the 1990s, has never been considered a war crime.”

Ingeniously, the lawyers also argued that al-Bahlul’s production of propaganda material for al-Qaeda should have been protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing freedom of speech. One of his attorneys, Mike Berrigan, told reporters, “Mr. al-Bahlul’s conduct in making this documentary — his prosecution for that conduct — was a violation of the U.S. First Amendment. Not that Mr. al-Bahlul had particular First Amendment rights, but the constitutional restrictions on the U.S. government prosecuting someone for speech made the prosecution itself illegal. Mr. al-Bahlul’s conduct in making that documentary does not come close to the standard of inciting violence that can be criminalized.”⁶

The prosecution disagreed, of course, and Navy Capt. Edward White, who argued for the government at the appeal, stated, “Our position was that, as an enemy combatant waging war against the United States from abroad, he does not have First Amendment rights. He crossed the line into criminally, soliciting other people — inducing, enticing, encouraging, persuading them — to commit war crimes.”

Beyond all these claims, however, the most disturbing aspect of al-Bahlul’s conviction is the nature of his trial, and what Lt. Col. Frakt described to me as his “best hope” is that the Court of Military Commission Review will recognize that the one-sided trial, in which he refused to mount a defense, was fundamentally unfair — or, as Lt. Col. Frakt put it, the judge’s “denial of his right to self-representation essentially denied him of a fair trial because the judge knew that he would not allow me to represent him.”

This was indeed what happened. Al-Bahlul sought strenuously to represent himself, but although his request was granted by Army Col. Peter Brownback, his first judge in the revived Commissions, Brownback was then involuntarily retired from the Army, and the new judge, Air Force Col. Ronald Gregory, revoked al- Bahlul’s pro se status (his right to represent himself).

As I explained at the time, after Maj. Frakt (as he was at the time) announced that al-Bahlul was boycotting the trial, because he wished to represent himself, and did not wish to be represented by a military lawyer, Frakt then asked to be relieved, noting that he was obliged to respect his client’s wishes. When Col. Gregory refused, he declared that he too was unable to participate. “I will be joining Mr. al-Bahlul’s boycott of the proceedings,” he said, “standing mute at the table.” He then refused to answer any further questions from Col. Gregory, even though the judge attempted to argue that he was “obliged to participate,” before conceding that it was not in his power to force him to do so. As Lt. Col. Frakt described it to me last week, Col. Gregory’s actions “ensured there would be no defense at all in the final military commission trial of the Bush era.”

Lt. Col. Frakt also explained that, although appeals are automatic in the Commissions unless waived in writing, the only reason that al-Bahlul failed to waive his right to appeal in writing was because he “refused to accept any papers from his lawyers or the court.” As Frakt described it, “Mr. al-Bahlul made it plain to me that he did not wish to appeal any conviction and he categorically refused to meet with his appointed appellate counsel to discuss any possible grounds for appeal.”

Lt. Col. Frakt was full of praise for the lawyers attempting to defend al-Bahlul, even though they “were hampered by the fact that I did not preserve any issues for appeal (other than the self-representation issue) because I did not speak during the entire trial.” He noted that they “managed to find a way to raise a number of interesting and important issues that strike at the core of the legitimacy of the military commissions,” but in the end, what is most noticeable about al-Bahlul’s case is how he remains in a position of extraordinary isolation at Guantánamo.

Not only is he imprisoned, alone, to serve out his life sentence, but as Lt. Col. Frakt explained, “it remains a mystery what will happen to Mr. al-Bahlul. Although he is serving a life sentence, under current U.S. law, he can’t be transferred out of Guantánamo to a prison on the mainland because detainees can only be transferred to the U.S. to face trial.”

Unless he is to stay in Guantánamo, as the prison slowly empties around him, until, perhaps, he is the only prisoner left, it seems, as Lt. Col. Frakt also explained, that “special legislation will be required” to enable him to leave Guantánamo, even if it is just to resume his life sentence elsewhere.

Lost in the system, essentially, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul is another example of the way in which justice at Guantánamo never progressed much beyond an ad hoc system full of holes, and, whatever the outcome of these appeals, it should give the Obama administration some salutary reminders as to why the commissions remain an unsuitable system for any kind of credible trial.

© 2001-2010 The Future of Freedom Foundation. All rights reserved.

Source(s): ¹HAMDAN v. RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, ET AL. CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT No. 05–184. Argued March 28, 2006—Decided June 29, 2006 • ²The UK Guardian “Profile: Salim Ahmed Hamdan” by Mark Tran published Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 • ³Human Rights First, “In the Courts: The Case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan” • ⁴The Star “Bin Laden’s Driver Talk” by Michelle Shephard, published Monday, August 17, 2009 • ⁵The Wall Street Journal “White House Defends Use of War Crime Tribunals” by Jess Bravin • ⁶Voice of America “US Military Panel Hears 1st Guantanamo Appeal” by Michael Bowman, published January 26, 2010

Allison Bricker

Synopsis:

Global warming alarmists want Americans to believe that humans are killing the planet. But Not Evil Just Wrong, a new documentary by Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, proves that the only threats to America (and the rest of the world) are the fl awed science and sky-is-falling rhetoric of Al Gore and his allies in environmental extremism.   The film warns Americans that their jobs, middle-class lifestyles and dreams for their children will be destroyed if the government rushes to judgment and imposes job-killing regulations on an economy already mired in recession.

Not Evil Just Wrong exposes the deceptions about global warming that scientists, politicians, educators and the media have been force-feeding the public for years, including fear-mongering about floods and dying polar bears. The documentary shows how environmentalists are pushing the same kind of anti-human propaganda that triggered a ban DDT and condemned millions of children to death by malaria, a story recounted in the documentary. Not Evil Just Wrong asks: Is carbon dioxide the new DDT and are we taking the same risks with our future?

Source(s):