Wire Report

None Dare Call It Tyranny

(WIRE/FFF/SR) – If you want to know what tyranny is like, look around.

The national government — specifically the executive branch — can do pretty much what it wants. It could bomb Iran tomorrow without a declaration of war from Congress. It can — and does — conduct secret wars and covert operations against countries that have done nothing to us. Of course, they are secret only to the ignorant taxpayers who must finance them and perhaps suffer when the provoked retaliation occurs. It can have men behind PlayStation consoles in Nevada fire Hellfire missiles from aerial drones on people in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

This tyrannical government can send any foreigner picked up anywhere in the world to third countries known for torturing prisoners. It can hold people accused of nothing indefinitely in prisons in Cuba and Afghanistan and torture them into making false confessions. It can conduct a war crimes trial in a military kangaroo court for a man, Omar Khadr, held captive for eight years after he was picked up at the age of 15 during a U.S. assault on villagers near Kabul. His torture-induced “confessions” will be admissible. All this is in violation of commitments under the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict not to treat children in war as though they were adults.

It can assassinate even American citizens abroad without a scent of due process.

It is a government that can write its own warrants without judicial review — and call them national security letters — in order to conduct fishing expeditions in anyone’s electronic records. But that isn’t enough power for the present Progressive administration, which wants the freedom to examine our browser histories and email correspondents’ names. The Bill of Rights, like the Geneva Convention, has become “quaint” and obsolete.

Like any self-respecting tyranny, it tries to keep the truth from its subjects. Comforting words camouflage the 50,000 armed and combat-ready troops that will remain in Iraq after “withdrawal.” Their “primary” mission is to train an army whose own general says won’t be ready for years. This gross deception follows on the heralded “surge,” which supposedly turned things around in Iraq. What “worked,” however, was not U.S. military prowess or Gen. David Petraeus’s brilliance, but the spreading of American taxpayers’ cash to buy off Sunni insurgents and the denouement of ethnic cleansing in Baghdad.

And, again, like any self-respecting tyranny, it bridles at leaks of classified documents that tell the people the truth. Solemn administration officials condemn Wikileaks and its sources for supposedly jeopardizing U.S. troops and Afghan collaborators, while adding that nothing new had been revealed. With no sense of irony, the same officials find blood on the hands of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, ignoring the rivers of blood their policies and weapons have produced in the Middle East and South Central Asia. Without those policies, there would be nothing to leak. Some call for the assassination of Assange, and for all we know he is on President Obama’s kill list. Meanwhile a courageous young soldier, Bradley Manning, who apparently leaked video of American troops committing cold-blooded murder in Baghdad, faces 52 years in prison.

Now we are being softened up for the next war, against Iran. As in 2002 with Iraq’s phantom WMDs, the empire advance men tell us Iran is building nuclear weapons, and Obama and Secretary of State Clinton say “all options are on the table,” which phrase includes hydrogen bombs. Once again a Big Lie is repeated without proof. The reason is simple: all evidence runs the other way. The government’s own intelligence agencies say Iran has no nuclear-weapons program, and the International Atomic Energy Agency is on the scene. But no matter. If it suits the tyrannical administration or its partner in empire, Israel, bombs of some kind will fall. The consequences all around will be horrible.

Can it really be tyranny if we get to vote? Yes. Thomas Jefferson warned of “elective despotism.” How valuable is your one vote when the government manipulates and distorts the flow of information, when Congress capitulates, and when the “adversarial” mainstream media act like government press agents, if not adoring lapdogs. The ugly truth is out there, but you have to want to know it.

Sheldon Richman, Editor “The Freeman”

Sheldon Richman is editor of The Freeman, published by The Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington, New York, and serves as senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is the author of FFF’s award-winning book Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families; Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax; and FFF’s newest book Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State. Calling for the abolition, not the reform, of public schooling. Separating School & State has become a landmark book in both libertarian and educational circles. In his column in the Financial Times, Michael Prowse wrote: “I recommend a subversive tract, Separating School & State by Sheldon Richman of the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank… . I also think that Mr. Richman is right to fear that state education undermines personal responsibility…” Mr. Richman’s articles on population, federal disaster assistance, international trade, education, the environment, American history, foreign policy, privacy, computers, and the Middle East have appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, American Scholar, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Washington Times, Insight, Cato Policy Report, Journal of Economic Development, The Freeman, The World & I, Reason, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Middle East Policy, Liberty magazine, and other publications. He is a contributor to the Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics. A former newspaper reporter and former senior editor at the Cato Institute, Mr. Richman is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia.

Wire Report

Justin Logan -Associate Director of Foreign Policy Studies, The CATO Institute

Justin Logan is associate director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He is an expert on U.S. grand strategy, international relations theory, and American foreign policy. His current research focuses on the formation of U.S. grand strategy under unipolarity; the growing role of counterinsurgency (COIN) and nation building in U.S. foreign policy; and the intellectual lineage of COIN. He has authored numerous policy studies and articles on topics including international relations theory, U.S. China policy, U.S. Russia policy, stabilization and reconstruction operations, and the policy approaches to a nuclear Iran. His articles have appeared in the Harvard International Review, The National Interest, Orbis, the Foreign Service Journal, The American Conservative, Reason, The American Prospect, National Review Online, the Chicago Sun-Times and other publications. He has made regular appearances on a variety of broadcast media including the BBC, MSNBC, Fox News, Voice of America, and others. Logan holds a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree in international relations from American University. He lives in Washington, DC.

(WIRE/CATO) – Recent war games and public statements from U.S. military commanders are reinforcing what should have been clear some time ago: A U.S. or Israeli attack against Iran would have significant but unpredictable consequences.

American and Israeli intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program is of uneven quality, but excellent, near-perfect intelligence would be required to make any strike successful. There is the real possibility that an attack would set back Iran’s progress by only a few years, while rallying Iranian citizens around the regime they seem to be increasingly challenging at present. The Iranians have a host of asymmetric capabilities, some of which they would likely use to respond to a foreign attack. This could complicate the American withdrawal from Iraq and ongoing operations in Afghanistan, and potentially cost American and Israeli (to say nothing of Iranian) lives. Most importantly, there is the prospect of an escalation spiral that could lead to a full-blown war and possibly regime change in Iran followed by chaos, potentially across the region.

Beyond immediate policy questions, though, there are general lessons for U.S. foreign policy: Military violence is a tool of limited utility. American threats can frighten weaker countries, encouraging them to seek nuclear deterrents. Willful diplomatic isolation is counterproductive. Finally, inserting ourselves as the balancer-of-first-resort in every region of the world is a costly and unnecessary strategy that discards America’s natural strategic advantages and plays to our weaknesses. The sooner these lessons are digested by the U.S. foreign policy elite, the better.

Allison Bricker

Essay No. 1 – Ignorance may only flourish in an environment whereby information is controlled either by the state so it may wield unquestioned authority or by academic elite who feel contempt for those of a different station. Neither however may retain their grasp in perpetuum. Such is our situation, thus let us seize this glorious opportunity to the benefit of Human Liberty. We live in a time where knowledge is more freely available to those who desire like no other time in human history. The internet is as revolutionary to the propagation of knowledge as was the Gutenberg Press in its day, which helped usher in the first ‘Age of Enlightenment’.

Nevertheless, a shrinking remnant of individuals who refuse to educate themselves further as well as those who purposely forward false information and half-truths hoping in vain to retain the reigns of their pseudo authority persist. They sit  proliferating sound bite-intellectual morsels from their old-media studios and halls of government hoping their “facts” remain unchecked and thus accepted as truth. Never is a  case of this absurdity more painfully evident than as it relates to the action of nullification against government. Whether by a state or an individual, the word nullification is utterly mired in incomprehension.

Typically, speaking of nullification in the political sense will elicit a poorly informed crippled view of history resulting in a quip regarding the “Civil War” or segregation. Both are utter logical fallacies based on the fact that government was using the law to deny individuals their natural rights in the first place. A fact that is plain and counter to the organic laws of the American Union.

What they are remiss to acknowledge or possibly are wholly unaware, Nullification has worked as a check against Federal power throughout the history of the Republic. Most especially in the cases of the denial of free speech, the imprisonment of those deemed “enemies”, a coerced military draft, and enforcement of the Patriot Act, just to name a few.

It remains imperative that the principle, which prevents the Central Authority from acting as final arbiter of its own power, remain both intact and fully understood. Those powers should and must remain the purview of the several states and the People themselves.

Allison Bricker

The Smoking Argus Daily has written previously on faux liberty talking head Glenn Beck after he attempted to link supporters of Dr. Ron Paul to “Domestic Terrorists” and after he inferred a link between the Liberty Movement and white supremacist James von Brunn, the unhinged lunatic who went on a shooting spree in the holocaust museum. It most certainly seems like a long shot for a man who shamelessly admits he does not check his facts prior to airing a story and blatantly fabricates entire segments in order to forward his agenda.

Nevertheless, some feel his crocodile tears are proof positive that he has seen the sunshine of liberty and is thus leaving his war mongering, torture apologist, PATRIOT Act loving, neoconservative days in the dustbin of history right next to the bottle of Absolut Vodka.

To them we say wake up and smell the coffee:

Allison Bricker

THE REGION, INDIANA – Although not an “official” Federal nor state holiday in my home in Indiana; let us disregard such governmental formalities and please join me in celebrating “Lafayette Day”.

For the uninitiated or perhaps anyone not an American history nerd, Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette was a French military officer born on September 6th, 1757. Upon hearing of the American War for Independence against Britain he wrote:

“When I first learned of that quarrel, my heart was enlisted and I thought only of joining the colors.”

Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette
Memoirs
1779

Shortly after his arrival in America, the Continental Congress commissioned upon him the rank of Major General. During his time on the battlefield against the British, he displayed bravery, cunning, and an unshakable loyalty to the American cause. He went on to win major battles at both Gloucester and Monmouth. In addition to his tactical skill on the battlefield, Lafayette successfully lobbied Louis the XVI for additional French troops and for full support of the French Naval fleet in the form of five additional frigates.

Upon his return to America, he successfully trapped British General Cornwallis between his troops and the York River, thanks to the timely arrival of the French Naval fleet. Lafayette and General Washington knowing that General Cornwallis and his men were low on supplies due to the naval blockade launched what would become known as “The Siege at Yorktown”. The siege succeeded, resulting in the surrender of the British by General Cornwallis to General Washington; effectively ending the American War for Independence.

Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette’s wife, Adrienne gave birth the to the couple’s only son, Georges Washington de La Fayette, who they named in honor of George Washington.

After the successful siege at Yorktown, Lafayette returned to France where he went on to work with Thomas Jefferson to normalize trade relations and debt reconciliation. He then returned to America in 1782 where he and his heirs were awarded honorary natural-born citizenship in several states and the nation as a whole upon ratification of the U.S. Constitution. During his time spent in America after the War for Independence, he visited all of the several states except for Georgia. During his travels around the newly independent nation, he gave impassioned speeches on the inherent natural liberties of mankind and pushed vehemently for the abolition of slavery.

Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette passed away on the 20th of May 1834 at the age of 77.

Source(s): The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson by: William Howard Adams • “The Marquis de La Fayette in the American revolution: With some Account of the Attitude of France Toward the War for Independence” – Volume 1, By Charlemagne Tower published: J.B. Lippincott Company (1895)

Joseph Marohl

The religious right’s positions on a good many issues perplex me. I would genuinely like to hear the data and reasoning behind them, rather than the usual bumper-sticker cant that indicates no research and little thought—and no great attention even to the scriptures they so devoutly brandish, unaware of just how two-edged their swords are (Hebrews 4:12).

On abortion, for instance, the heavenly minded take a stance that life begins at conception. Quite recently, a sincere believer I know upheld this stance with the story of Onan, the guy in Genesis who “spilled his seed on the ground” to avoid his duty of impregnating his dead brother’s childless wife (Genesis 38:9-10). Now I had always thought that the sin of Onan (onanism) was masturbation, but this person was quite certain that the real sin was a sin against life, human life. Then, I asked, was she suggesting that Onan’s sperm was a human being? No, she answered, but Onan’s refusal to give his widowed sister-in-law a child was more than an infraction of Jehovah’s pre-Mosaic law; it was, more importantly, a denial of the special holiness of human life.

Now I’ve read the Old Testament through several times—not recently, though—and I don’t recall its version of God ever having much to say about the special holiness of human life—a concept that rings in my ears as more early 19th-century romantic than Judaic or Christian.

In fact, the jealous and angry God of Moses did not hesitate to ask Abraham and Jephthah to sacrifice (kill) their son and daughter respectively, the former to test Abraham’s piety and the latter to settle what amounts to a careless wager (Genesis 22:1-14; Judges 11:30-37). God spared Isaac and, so a good many evangelical readers believe (or hope), Jephthah’s daughter, as well—an optimism based on her mourning the fact that she would never marry, not her impending death—though for a girl in the ancient world, not marrying equaled death and, in Greek mythology, Iphigenia, King Agamemnon’s daughter, similarly mourns her perpetual maiden state before facing her father’s blade (though some Greeks, suckers for happy endings like the rest of us, imagined that, after death, she married Achilles).

At any rate, God most definitely did not spare Job’s children—and again for no better reason than to put Job’s devotion to the test (Job 1:6-21). But then, according to some traditions, Job was Sumerian, not Hebrew—and the Old Testament God never recognized the special holiness of goyim and backsliding Jews, as again and again he called for the slaughter of every man, woman, and child (even the livestock) among “them” (Exodus 12:29; Leviticus 26:29; Numbers 16:27-33, 31:17-18; Deuteronomy 2:33-34, 3:6; I Samuel 15:3—and here I scratch only the genocidal surface of the Bible).

Beyond a callous disregard for the lives of the born, Mosaic law offers no sense that unborn lives are even as special. The first five books of the Bible offer excruciatingly detailed instructions about the eating of shrimp, copulating during a woman’s menstrual cycle, and the cleansing of lepers, but hardly a word about the disposition of the unborn. Exodus 21:22-25 describes the prescribed punishment for a man who, in the middle of a fight, wounds a pregnant woman. If she miscarries, the guilty party has to pay the woman’s husband a fine (the crime, after all, is against him, not her—and it is damage to property, not manslaughter). But if any “further damage” occurs (presumably the death of the woman), the guilty man must be punished a “life for a life.” (By the way, more recent translations often shy away from wording here that suggests miscarriage—whether due to faithfulness to the original wording or awareness of its modern legal implications, I cannot say.)

Deuteronomy 21:18-21 calls for the public stoning of “stubborn and rebellious” children—and we’re talking living, breathing, possibly even adult children here. So what becomes of the rather petty question “What would have happened had the mothers of Washington, Lincoln, and Edison had an abortion?” Think about it: What would have happened had the mothers of Mozart, Einstein, and George W. Bush followed Deuteronomy to the letter?

In the history of the Christian church, to my knowledge, there exists no general tradition of holding funerals for miscarriages—though I am aware that individuals have deeply mourned these losses, usually in private, sometimes with some attempt at an unofficial religious ritual. But (and you may correct me on this) funeral rites for fetuses (or sperm) have not played a significant role in the Christian liturgy.

For that matter, church registers traditionally recorded births as auspicious events, not pregnancies, though high infant-mortality rates 100 or more years ago might have dampened whatever enthusiasm the old-time religionists would have felt in presumptuously celebrating conception. The sacraments didn’t start until after birth. Naming was usually reserved for breathing infants—even premature births were rarely named. The unborn were not counted in censuses and population tallies.

On what, then, do modern Christians, mainly Catholics and evangelicals, base their claims that abortion violates their religious beliefs—much less the Constitution of the United States of America?

For myself, a gay middle-aged male with no interest in procreation (or adoption), I admit to being squeamish over the topic of abortion. Kodachrome photos of bloody fetuses in trash pails appall me. I physically recoil from them—but, then, I do much the same with pictures of tonsillectomies, liposuction, and spinal surgery, without thus reaching the conclusion that all gross-looking and distasteful medical procedures should be banned.

Even more, on moral principle I have reservations about abortion as mere birth control—I am, thus, more romanticist than pragmatist or dogmatist. I like, even revere life—though on occasion I eat dead animals, stomp on hornets that inadvertently (through no fault of their own) enter my home, and do not particularly fear the inevitability of death. (I also, routinely, commit the sin of Onan.)  More to the point, I am not altogether opposed to war—which may be, though rarely is, logically and ethically justified—or to killing, when unavoidable, any human who poses an immediate deadly or maiming or despotic threat to other humans.

Still, the taking of a human or even just potentially human life—through war, vengeance, or euthanasia—strikes me as being solemn business—a painful choice that fortunately I have not had to make. Such decisions should be made through constitutional means if we are talking about war or capital punishment. And, in keeping with the spirit of the Bill of Rights, when we are talking about a woman’s ownership of and responsibility for her body—and its contents—these decisions should be made by the woman alone, on the best advice and counsel and by the most safe and humane means that can be made available to her.

So, apart from deliberate (or careless) misreading of their own scriptures and predispositions to self-righteous orneriness and busybody-ism, what exactly are the right-to-lifers’ religious or social interests in the issue of abortion? If they are in the Bible or church history, I have not seen them there.

The Smoking Argus

CAMPAIGN for LIBERTY OFFICIAL STATEMENT: Dr. Paul discusses the NPRK’s detonation of an atomic device and how they achieved that technology using subsidies from the Clinton Administration.

Source(s): Campaign for Liberty

Mandy Hyndman

By now Muntadhar al-Zaidi is a household name–well, an Iraqi household name anyway.  Americans aren’t very advanced about pronouncing hard things like ‘Muntadhar’, ‘nuclear’ or ‘grape’.  Regardless, al-Zaidi became a household name when, in a fit of nominal determinism (al-Zaidi translates to:  dumb-dumb who throws shoes at foreign leaders), he chucked his loafers at George W. Bush (America’s ex) during a press conference in Baghdad on December, 14, 2008.  The sober lifestyle has done wonders for Bush’s reflexes because he quickly ducked out of the paths of the flying shoes and escaped injury.

al-Zaidi, who has been detained ever since the incident, was today sentenced to three years imprisonment, the minimum for attacking a foreign leader,  after claiming in his testimony that what he did was a natural reaction to the US occupation of Iraq. Outraged supporters say the verdict was unjust.   His defense attorney claimed al-Zaidi should be set free as his act was “an expression of freedom and does not constitute a crime.”  I realize that democracy is a new concept in Iraq, and the whole ‘freedom of expression’ thing is fun to play with, but is that supposed to be some kind of joke?  The man threw not one, but two projectiles at the US president!  Could someone please explain to me why it is that I’m not allowed to wear shoes in an American airport with a bunch of regular, unimportant people but a reporter in Baghdad can throw his at the leader of the free world and come out whining about his sentence being too harsh?  I mean, seriously, Munthadar al-Zaidi should be kissing the pee-soaked cement floor of his jail cell every morning because he doesn’t have 372 bullet holes in his rotting corpse!  I’m surprised that president Bush, an avid Texan, didn’t pull out some kind of unnecessarily large handgun and start picking people off in his own defense.

It’s not that I don’t understand what if feels like to look at the bobbling, offensive head of George W. Bush and want to throw shoes, flaming bags of poo, or embryonic stem cells.  Believe me, no one despises the man more than those of us who had our country hijacked twice by his mindless horde of, what I like to call, anti-progress zombies.  The thing is, if you throw anything at the US president and the most you get is three years in prison and the undying loyalty and respect of your countrymen, you should probably conisider yourself very, very lucky.

The Smoking Argus

Dr. Ron Paul (R-TX) appeared on “D.L. Hughley Breaks the News” this past Saturday to discuss the failure of the bailouts, President Obama’s continuation of President Bush’s imperial foreign policy, and how even in the case of the Civil War, killing one another is always a poor solution to the problem regardless of complexity or scale. Mr. Hughley compliments Dr. Paul’s forthrightness and asks the big question, will he run again in 2012.

Russell Means

(Original Video Blog) As we all sit awestruck in front of the television, the computer, or the newspaper, Mr. Means offers us a solution to the current Global calamity. In his own beautifully articulated words, Mr. Means, explains both how the World got into this mess and how we can move back towards sanity and wholeness. We must, as he says, return to Matriarchy, a balance, respectful way of life where we celebrate our differences, rather than stifle, or even, destroy them.