Progress! Even New Yorker cartoonists now understand the imperative of people not relying on police to save their necks….

(Okay, maybe that is not the interpretation the magazine hoped for, but…)

A dozen years ago, I wrote a forward for a book entitled Dial 911 and Die, by Richard Stevens and Aaron Zelman. Here’s my two cents:

Not every firearms regulation leads inexorably to genocide. But, as this sweeping historical study shows, supposedly “reasonable measures” such as licensing and registration of gun owners have been followed too many times in recent history by government atrocities. The issue is not the supposed good intention of reformers who seek to reduce private gun ownership: The issue is the nature of political power.

Aaron Zelman and Richard Stevens’s book vividly reviews and analyzes the slaughter of disarmed populaces from the Turkish slaughter or the Armenians to Stalin’s slaughter of the peasantry to the Guatemalan slaughter of Indians. The book goes in-depth into the bloodbath that was the Third Reich, as well as the Khmer Rouge urban renewal experiments, Mao’s depredations, and other atrocities. The book also recounts the abuse that Blacks suffered in the United States after laws were passed them to disarm them – for the convenience of the Klan and other marauders.

Governments around the world have stripped hundreds of millions of people of their right to own weapons and then left them to be robbed, raped, and slaughtered.

Some people may try to dismiss Zelman and Stevens’s distrust of politicians as unAmerican. But the distrust of politicians grabbing guns has a long and honorable history in this country. The American revolutionaries were concerned about the potential for unlimited power inherent in British laws and policies. The initial conflicts at Lexington and Concord occurred because British regiments were marching out to confiscate the colonists’ arms caches. The British assumed that seizing the weapons would quell resistance to the expansion of their power. George Mason, the father of the Bill of Rights, later declared that the British decided that “to disarm the people . . . was the best and most effectual way to enslave them.” If the colonists reasoned like some contemporary Americans, they would have interpreted the British troops’ attempt to seize their guns as proof of how much they cared about the colonists.

Many proponents of restrictions on firearms ownership insist that the specific measure they champion can have little or no adverse impact on people’s freedom. Americans of the Revolutionary Era recognized that the passage of a law does not signal the end of a political onslaught. Instead, it is merely the starting point for a push to further extend government in the same direction—to pursue the “logic” of a new act to its conclusion. As James Madison wrote in 1787, “The sober people of America . . . have seen that one legislative interference is but the first link of a long chain of repetitions, every subsequent interference being naturally produced by the effects of the preceding.” Unfortunately, most contemporary Americans are complacent or naive about politicians planting their flag on new turf.

Politicians continually complain about “loopholes” in existing gun laws as a pretext to enact new gun laws. But the ultimate loophole is freedom: the principle that citizens should not be forced to be dependent on often lackadaisical government employees for their own safety and survival. Every restriction on citizens’ rights to acquire and carry firearms means increasing citizens’ subordination to government employees who are authorized to carry such weapons.

The primary effect of a prohibitions on private gun ownership is to vastly increase the power of politicians. But political tyranny has destroyed far more lives in the last century than have abusive private gun owners. Unfortunately, gun control advocates offer no solution to the problem of political tyranny – almost as if the problem will disappear if we all pretend government is our friend.

On gun control, we have to judge politicians as a class by their records, not by empty promises which can never be enforced after citizens have been disarmed. Gun control laws ultimately rest on the trustworthiness of the political ruling class. The only way that firearms could be less vital to defending freedom now than in the past is if politicians were no longer dangerous. But there is no trigger guard on political ambition.

The post New Yorker Cartoon: 911 is Busy, so Stand Your Ground appeared first on James Bovard.

Former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been charged with “aggravated pimping” by the French government.

I thought “aggravated pimping” was the job description for the IMF  - at least in its function as a bill collector for the banks.

Or maybe it is simply screwing the Third World after invoking the proper econometric formulas (with a few multipliers thrown in for gloss).

Here’s a piece on  the IMF I wrote shortly after Obama took power:

INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY June 11, 2009

U.S. Bailout Of Tinhorn Dictators Sacrifices Taxpayers On IMF Altar
By JAMES BOVARD

The Obama administration wants to pledge $100 billion in U.S. taxpayers’ money to the International Monetary Fund. This provision is included in an appropriations bill containing supplemental funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Luckily, many Republicans and Democrats are vigorously opposing Obama’s effort to sacrifice American taxpayers on an IMF altar.

The IMF is currently bailing out some of the world’s most corrupt regimes. Instead of curing the global downturn, giving the IMF more resources will guarantee more instability, more oppression and bigger losses in the future.

The IMF was created in 1944 to shore up currencies and help nations with temporary balance-of-payment problems. In the decades since the IMF’s founding, global capital markets and fluctuating currency exchange rates have made the IMF a relic. But too many people have gotten rich from IMF largesse to permit the curtain to be closed on this institution.

Actually, the IMF has accomplished many things private markets never could. During the 1970s and 1980s, the IMF was a cheerleader for Third World countries and some communist regimes. The surge in Western lending to such countries helped cause the great debt crisis of the early 1980s.

Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill denounced the IMF and the World Bank in 2002 for driving many poor nations “into a ditch” with excessive lending that governments wasted.

Regardless, the Obama team believes the IMF deserves far more money and power, tripling its war chest to $750 billion from $250 billion.

The U.S. government contributes roughly 20% of the IMF’s capital.

IMF resources are being squandered. Consider some recent bailouts of floundering regimes:

• The IMF just approved a $116 million loan for the government of Tajikistan — even though that government admitted last year that it had brazenly lied to secure previous IMF loans.

• On May 29, the IMF approved a $209 million loan to the government of Kenya — despite previous perennial IMF complaints about pervasive corruption in that country.

• In January, the IMF approved a $2.5 billion loan for the government of Belarus — one of the most oppressive regimes in Europe, and one that retains many Soviet-style economic policies.

• The Ethiopian government received a $50 million loan in January despite its recent brutal oppression of political opposition.

• The Democratic Republic of the Congo will receive $195 million from the IMF — even though that government is rated by Transparency International as one of the 10 most corrupt regimes in the world.

IMF aid allows politicians to entrench themselves and scorn their own people. IMF loans to bad governments are “odious debts” for the people in those nations. The downtrodden masses will be taxed to repay loans that their rulers pocketed, squandered, or used to tighten their fetters.

IMF supporters insist that any increased aid will be used well because the IMF will impose strict conditions on how governments use the largesse. But IMF conditionality is one of the biggest frauds on the international landscape.

Foreign governments continue getting windfalls regardless of how they betray their reform pledges to the IMF. And the IMF often pressures governments to adapt foolish policies that sacrifice the private sector to maximize government revenue.

While Obama proclaimed his devotion to “transparency” in government, the IMF is a secretive organization. The U.S. will be committing $100 billion to a giant black box — and average Americans will never know who reaped the profit of their sacrifice.

The Obama team wants to bloat the IMF in part because it believes that government spending is the magic bullet against the current economic downturn. Supposedly, American taxpayers will benefit from government waste anywhere in the world. But it makes no sense to increase the U.S. budget deficit to allow foreign governments to shovel out more money for every scam under the sun.

Vastly expanding the IMF will make U.S. taxpayers liable for the mistakes and abuses of tinhorn dictators all around the world. Instead of plowing in another $100 billion, the U.S. government should pull the plug on its involvement in the IMF.

Permitting politicians to spend willy-nilly is a fool’s recipe for prosperity.

Tagline; Bovard is a former World Bank consultant and the author of “Attention Deficit Democracy” (Palgrave, 2006) and eight other books.

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Former National Security Agency boss Michael Hayden denounced defenders of Edward Snowden as “nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twentysomethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years.”

Hey, I’m no nihilist! And, though I am still a shy country boy,  it’s been a long time since I was accused of being 20-something.

And, speaking solely out of selfish interest, I was deeply disappointed that Hayden left out “hooligans.”

The post Me? Nihilist? Another NSA Slander appeared first on James Bovard.

Ernie Hancock was at his dynamic best for this morning’s show.  It is always a mistake to drink decaf before going on the air with Ernie.   I appreciate his hearty laugh and his boundless faith in human nature – at least of non-government workers or politicians.

As we were talking about what life influences helped make someone pro-freedom, Ernie mentioned that some psychologists say that there are specific traits that spur individuals to adapt a libertarian mindset.

I told Ernie that I took one of those psychological profile tests when I was a teenager and the results came back saying that I was an a’hole.  So I became a journalist. (Details on the preceding descent in Public Policy Hooligan).

Here’s a link to the interview’s  MP3 -  and to the Vimeo/video version - which mercifully shows only Ernie, not me.   But that second page does have some good links to Amazon….  And there are plenty of other links to excellent Freedom Phoenix stuff!

The post MP3 of Today’s Ernie Hancock Interview on Freedom & Its Enemies appeared first on James Bovard.

The Future of Freedom Foundation is producing transcripts from its 2007 and 2008 conferences.  Following is the text of my speech at their June 2008 conference,  “Restoring the Republic 2008: Foreign Policy & Civil Liberties” held in Reston, Virginia.  My opening bit about having lunch with Homeland Security czar Mike Chertoff and getting the scoop on which conference attendees were on the Terrorist Watch List made some audience members nervous.  (Here is a PDF of the speech.)

At a time when some folks are castigating the Obama administration as the most oppressive in U.S. history, this review of some of Bush era atrocities shows that how the outrages have long been bipartisan.

Bush’s War on Civil Liberties by James Bovard  June 4, 2008

Jacob Hornberger: James Bovard, our next speaker, is the author of Attention Deficit Disorder, [sic - Democracy]  Lost Rights, and seven other books. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. The Wall Street Journal called Jim “the roving inspector general of the modern state.” His book Terrorism and Tyranny received the Lysander Spooner Award for best book on liberty in 2003. At the Future of Freedom Foundation, we are proud of the fact that Jim serves as policy adviser for FFF and has been writing a regular monthly column in our journal Freedom Daily for some 15 years. The title of Jim’s talk is “Bush’s War on Civil Liberties.” Please welcome Jim Bovard.

James Bovard: I want to thank Bumper for his kind words and for inviting me to speak at this conference. Bumper has been a good influence on me. He’s kept me from becoming too moderate. It’s great to see so many fine folks here. It’s great to see so many folks came back from last year. It makes for a really wonderful audience here. But I was curious about one thing: I always try to get a sense of the audience. How many people here are guilty of treason? That’s about the same count that I estimated. And how many people here are on the terrorist watch list? Sheldon, you’re on the list. You should have raised your hand. That’s actually about the right number.
I had lunch yesterday with Mike Chertoff, Homeland Security secretary. I gave him a list of the attendees and Mike ran to the computer. He said about 68 percent were actually on the list. Well, actually, what Chertoff said was, “68 percent are on the list so far. And the fact that they came to this conference, I think that maybe adds to your permanent record.”
It’s interesting, on this notion of treason. It was on December 6, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft told the U.S. Congress, “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and give ammunition to America’s enemies.” This is how the Bush administration– this was their de facto definition of treason: people who talked about the phantoms of lost liberty. And at the time Ashcroft said that, he was aware that the Bush administration had already started a massive illegal warrantless wiretap program here in the U.S., targeting Americans. But that didn’t count as a lost liberty because the government was doing it. After that, it didn’t matter what the government did; the real enemy was people who talked about losing freedom. And also, I guess those guys that are in Al-Qaeda. Those guys are also the enemy.
But if you look at the rhetoric of the Bush administration– Ashcroft, Cheney, a lot of others– look at where they focused their wrath. And it’s on people like many of those in this audience who have had the courage to speak up and say that the government is trampling their rights. The government has gone beyond its rightful bounds.
Now, part of the challenge of this speech topic– I was looking at the title and this whole notion of civil liberties– I’m wondering if it’s supposed to be a lecture on ancient history. I’m wondering if it’s some kind of quaint superstition from bygone times, because isn’t civil liberties what people were concerned about during the Clinton administration? And that was last century. And besides, he was guilty about the intern. It’s fascinating to see how far things have gone to hell in a hand basket on the freedom front. There are folks I’ve talked to in the audience. There was a gentleman from Wisconsin. I spoke there three years ago and it’s interesting, even in the past three years, how much worse things have become. There was an Associated Press report a few weeks ago that said that for at least 16 months after 9/11, the Bush administration believed that the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. soil did not apply against its efforts to protect against terrorism. So basically, anything that was involved with terrorism was exempt from the Constitution. And this is what the Bush administration did at the same time that they were very vigorously attacking anyone who said the government was breaking the law or violating liberty.
Some of the examples on surveillance– you’ll probably hear more about this later on in the weekend– but since 2001, the FBI has sent out hundreds of thousands of national security letters, and these are basically warrantless demands. A person can receive the letter and they are instantly gagged. They were prohibited from even telling their lawyer. And if a person discloses they received one of these letters, they could be sent to prison for several years. And hundreds of thousands of these letters were sent out, and the FBI often lied when they sent them out. They would claim there was an investigation; there wasn’t. The Inspector General looked into this and found pervasive FBI perjury on this, but there weren’t any crimes because they were federal agents; perjury is something that the private citizens do.
The warrantless wiretaps: Back in the summer of 2003, John Ashcroft campaigned across the nation in a Patriot Act salvation tour. There was a lot of beating up in the Patriot Act. John Ashcroft went all around the country. It turned out, most of his audiences were closed and often they were simply local police. And in many cases the press was not allowed to ask any questions. But this is how the Bush administration tried to save the honor of the Patriot Act. Another huge element: the warrantless roundup of e-mail. My impression from what I’ve read, the bits and pieces on places like Wired.com and others, the Feds apparently feel they don’t need any warrant to round up U.S.-to-foreign e-mail, or e-mail that comes in from abroad. This is automatically some type of suspect category, and the information that they’re storing, like this. And on another thing– calling data records– Congress in 1986 passed a law that prohibited the telephone companies from giving calling data records, in general, to the government without a warrant or without a subpoena. What’s happened since 9/11 is that Verizon, a lot of other companies, have simply kept records of all the incoming and outgoing phone calls made or received by American citizens, and they have turned these records over to the government. And so you’ve got federal records of the phone activity of tens of millions of Americans, most of whom are not members of Al-Qaeda, but it didn’t matter. The government did not even need a whiff of suspicion, but this is another huge step that the government took towards erecting a system of total information awareness.
Now, people with distant memories will recall, back in 2002, the Homeland Security czar at that time talked about that– a former Navy admiral named Poindexter, who had been convicted for numerous charges in the 1980s, I think including perjury. I’m not sure if he was convicted of perjury; maybe obstruction of justice. They were overturned on appeal or they were pardoned by Bush or whatever– Bush won– but he [Poindexter] was put in charge of building up this massive surveillance system. But after the term “total information awareness” got out, there was a backlash. People were horrified. Congress was indignant, and so what the Bush administration did was fire that guy and change the name of the surveillance system.
And basically simply by changing the name, they’ve been able to perpetuate a lot of the same things that they were doing back then and they’ve taken it far further. There’s so much data mining going on right now, on financial records, on phone records, and this is not information that they’re looking at once to see if there were criminal ties or if you’re getting wire transfers from Egypt; no, this is all part of your permanent record. The government has these massive data warehouses that they’re stockpiling this information on, and you don’t know how it’s going to be used in the future.
And this is a key change in the nature of American liberty because the more information government has on people, the fewer people will have the courage to resist the government. This was true in the 1960s and early ’70s with the Cointel program– a massive program to target the anti-war movement, to target the blacks like Martin Luther King, targeting some white racists and other groups. But there was an FBI agent who said at that point that the goal was to make the anti-war people think that there was an FBI agent hidden behind every mailbox. And we haven’t reached that point yet, but at this point it’s easy to imagine there’s a federal agent overseeing every Internet service provider. And any sense of sanctity of private data, it’s gone. Because there have been very few companies that have the gumption to tell the government no, and when companies do, the government brings its wrath down upon them.
Another thing that’s going on right now: the FBI is building up a network of 15,000 covert informants here in the U.S. to feed it reports about possible terrorists and foreign spies. It’s kind of a problem when you get a network of 15,000 people to feed you information about terrorists when there are apparently not very many terrorists. I mean, it sort of turns into a self-fulfilling kind of thing, because if you look at many of the most high-profiled terrorism prosecutions since 9/11, they were basically government manufactured. This case down in Miami, of these boneheads who were out there asking for terrorist uniforms and wanted to hold a terrorist parade, basically. And these are the folks that the Justice Department is assuring us pose the greatest threat to the Sears Tower? I mean, these are folks who probably could not have even made it to Chicago, even if you gave them a bus ticket. I mean, these are folks who got lost in Memphis where they were supposed to transfer.
But it’s a standard of what this country’s become. The Justice Department made this one of their most high-profile cases and took it to a jury in Florida, and the government lost. But the government wasn’t satisfied. The government brought in a new jury, a new case. They lost again. And they are bringing this case a third time. I mean, this is a legal atrocity. The folks who have been prosecuted, they’re sure as heck not model citizens, but they are typical of a lot of the arrests since 9/11. These are people who would not have posed any real danger unless the government was feeding them and egging them on.
And there’s a pattern on this going back a long ways in American history. There were a number of cases of violence in the 1960s that were done by government instigators. Government instigators would join groups and then urge them to become violent. And these 15,000 covert informants the FBI is building up, what is their code of conduct? Certainly, the FBI has a very dubious record on that in the past. And what would those informants get bonuses for? That’s the thing: what is their incentive? Justice and fair play, this is not how you move up the FBI or up their network of informants.
Another thing that’s going on right now: the Bush administration is pushing to create a new program to allow Pentagon spy satellites to pass on information about Americans to state and local law enforcement agencies. Needless to say, there would not be a lot of paperwork as far as warrants to be done with this, but this is the kind of surveillance that was long seen as completely illegal. But very few people are objecting to this in Washington right now. The thought of handing photos and Pentagon spy satellites to local law enforcement, it might cut down on the number of underage sex romps in Montana haystacks; but as far as having any real effect on public safety, it doesn’t. But it’s just one more way the government can tighten the screws on the American people.
Another example that’s going on– it’s going to be happening across airports around the country now– is that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has brought in a new type of screening machine, called the backscatter X-ray, which allows the government to see through people’s clothes. And this is also something which could go on your permanent record, because if someone would trust the TSA not to keep dirty pictures, that’s a real triumph of faith. And think of some of the movie stars or famous females going through there; what would their photo be worth? That’s the kind of thing. But there’s been so little controversy about this. This is something that editors don’t want to hear about, in most cases. This is something which politicians are ignoring. It’s one more example of how people are simply falling in line in this country.
Now, it’s interesting to see some of the doctrines that are flourishing under the Bush administration. In a speech to the Fairness Society last year, Bush said that “When Americans go to court they deserve swift and fair answers.” Unless, of course, the administration decides to give them no answers. Nothing illustrates this better than the state secrets doctrine. This is something that originated in 1950s after a crash of a B-29 bomber. The widows of the crash victims sued, asserting their husbands died because of government negligence. But the Air Force said that the official report of the crash revealed classified information that could not be disclosed without endangering national security. Well, 50 years later the actual report was disclosed, and it had nothing to do with national security. It said that the government screwed up. But the Air Force swayed the courts to accept this, and the Supreme Court rubber-stamped that doctrine.
And ever since then, this has been used in this country; it’s spreading like a mushroom cloud. Something the Bush administration does is use claims of state secrets to prohibit torture victims from disclosing to their defense attorneys the specific interrogation methods that they suffered. A Justice Department spokeswoman said that letting a former Maryland resident tell his lawyer the methods that were used on him would risk disclosing potentially highly classified information that is vital to our country’s ability to fight terrorism. It’s been all over the papers, a lot of the methods the government has used, but it’s still a state secret because the government says so.
State secrets were used to cloak the case of Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese decent who was vacationing in Macedonia in 2003. Bad vacation choice on his part. He was kidnapped by the CIA there. He was stripped, he was beaten, he was shackled, and he was flown to a secret interrogation center in Afghanistan where he was tortured for four months. The CIA eventually realized they had the wrong guy. It turns out that there was somebody in a terrorist cell in Hamburg named Masri, but this guy– he was, like, a used car dealer in Frankfort, and it was well known, it was very easy to prove– but they still spent four months torturing the guy. After four months, he was flown to Albania, and he was dumped on the side of the road.
The European Union investigated and confirmed his allegations. The German government issued arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents in 2007 for their role in his kidnap and torture. Masri’s story was all over Europe, and he was interviewed by “60 Minutes” and other American media. Masri sued the CIA chief Tenet, three private aviation companies, and 20 unnamed employees of the CIA and other affiliates. The ACLU, which took this case, said the Supreme Court should not allow the U.S. government to engage in torture, declare it a state secret, and avoid any judicial accountability. It went to a federal appeals court, which said the government did the right thing to sacrifice Masri’s “personal interest for the general and collective interests of national security.”
Now, these federal appeals judges did not explain how covering up this specific case made Americans safer, but it didn’t matter. They were kowtowing to the government. In October 2007, the Supreme Court announced that it would not hear this case. It effectively banned Masri from American courtrooms. Apparently as long as the U.S. government has not confessed, it is a state secret. And this is a legal absurdity, and yet, this is what the government has gotten away with again and again and again. And this is a major reason why the full details of the torture scandal have not come out yet, because of the U.S. government using these arguments that don’t pass a laugh test.
Yet you have these judges who are so complicit in tyranny at this point. The state secrets doctrine is also key to the wiretapping cases. Last year, a federal appeals court overturned a lower court decision that had condemned the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretaps of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Americans. This was a case that was brought by individuals who believed their phone calls or e-mails had been intercepted by the government without a warrant. But the Justice Department claimed that these people had no standing to sue because the Feds refused to disclose whether they had actually violated these individuals’ rights under privacy. A federal appeals court threw the case out. Judge Alice Batchelder, who was on the short list of nominees for the Supreme Court last time, wrote that the plaintiffs are ultimately prevented from establishing standing because of the state secrets privilege. This is a judge’s version of frat-party ethics: as long as the government blindfolds its victims, it can do as it pleases. There were such bizarre convolutions to justify overthrowing this case, and yet it was applauded by the Washington Post editorial page, which has been on the wrong side of many of the most important issues over the last six or seven years.
As far as civil liberties, as far as understanding how the government can treat people, can treat American citizens and treat everybody else, the torture scandal kind of summarizes how this nation and how perhaps American values have changed. People now face the prospect of being sentenced to death because of their own tortured confession or because of the tortured confession of other people down at Guantanamo or Afghanistan or other places. It’s turning back the clock at least two to three hundred years: the thought of using torture confessions in judicial proceedings. It looks like it’s out of a Monty Python movie, and yet not only is it happening in America at this point, in Guantanamo, but so far has not been very controversial. There are some people here who are speaking later this week who have done magnificent work on this issue. But overall, this issue has not gotten anywhere near the traction.
Now, it’s interesting; from the first days after the Abu Ghraib photos hit the airwaves, the torture scandal epitomized the worst of the Bush administration. There were a timid media, a cowardly opposition party, a refusal by most Americans to face the grisly facts. There was a web of lies, a lawlessness, but this may be on the verge of unraveling. There are challenges from foreign governments, from some courageous U.S. military officers, and the Supreme Court still could come around and do something good on this. But it’s frustrating to see that the media still act as if Bush deserves deference when he denies the U.S.’s involvement in torturing, or he says that the U.S. wouldn’t do something like this.
In 2005, Bush repeatedly explicitly said the U.S. would not use rendition, which means seizing a suspect in one nation and transferring him to another country where he would be tortured. Bush was explicit on this. However, it turned out that the U.S. has been doing that en masse. There have been books on this. There have been documentaries. But it turned out that Bush lied on this through his teeth, and yet he’s still treated as credible on the torture issue.
Now, it’s interesting how the government uses the illegal doctrines and what it’s done to achieve absolute power over an individual. There was the case of David Hicks, an Australian who was seized in Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo in early 2002. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said that Hicks was one of the most dangerous terrorists in the world. During his five years’ confinement, Hicks was sexually assaulted, beaten with a rifle butt, kept in isolation in the dark for 244 days, prohibited from sleeping for long periods, threatened with firearms during interrogations, and psychologically tormented. Hicks’s abuse became a major issue in Australia, where a Bush ally, Prime Minister John Howard, was involved in a hard fight for reelection. Hicks was the first person tried by the Guantanamo military tribunals. He faced the death penalty. However, the Bush administration wanted to help John Howard, so Hicks was allowed to plead guilty to material support of terrorism and he was sentenced to nine months’ confinement.
Now, this is the kind of penalty that’s generally used for a drunk driving repeat offender. Instead, you have it used for this guy who Rumsfeld said was one of the most dangerous terrorists in the world. As part of his plea agreement, Hicks was prohibited from speaking to the media for one year, until after the Australian election. Hicks was also obliged to sign a statement declaring that he had never been illegally treated by any person or persons while in the custody and control of the U.S. and to swear that his guilty plea was done voluntarily, despite all the beatings he received. That summarizes it: lying about torture was the price of freedom for Hicks. The only way they would let him go is if he would sign these statements.
And my impression is that the same happens often in other terrorist prosecutions, and in a lot of other federal prosecutions as well. Now, it’s interesting, there are still Congressmen and a lot of conservative talk show hosts who say that this concern about torture is all a liberal fantasy. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher of California– whom a lot of people thought of as a fairly Libertarian Congressman– even a couple of days ago, he was mocking an Inspector General’s report on the abuses at Guantanamo, saying it was just like college fraternity hazing. Well, even bad frats usually don’t kill that many people. And a lot of people have died because of U.S. interrogations in the last six years.
As far as how the Bush folks have tried to contain the damage from the torture scandal, they’ve tried a couple of different things. One is simply outright lying, saying that the U.S. government is not doing this, and second is using secrets to buttress their lies. Last October, the New York Times got a leaked Justice Department memo, from early 2005, which permitted the CIA interrogators to use “combined effects on detainees.” These included head slapping, water boarding, frigid temperatures, manacling for many hours, and blasting them with loud music to keep them from sleeping for days on end. The New York Times said this was an expansion and endorsement of the harshest methods ever used by the CIA. This came out at the same time the Bush folks were saying, “We do not torture. We obey the law.” But Bush very quickly came out and said, after the New York Times story came out, “This government does not torture people.” He said that “We stick to U.S. law and our international obligations.” But this is law as contorted by administration lawyers, and as some of their recent memoirs have shown, the Bush administration doctrine is that as long as there is one lawyer who will say to Bush, “Yes, this is legal,” that’s good enough. Rule of law now means to find a single bootlicking lawyer to applaud the president. The whole notion of checks and balances has been lost, and any notion of accountability.
Now, another fascinating part about this New York Times story: it detailed how, after 9/11, the CIA had constructed an interrogation regime by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods. It’s interesting; for decades the U.S. condemned the Soviet Union for using torture. But interrogation systems designed to compel victims to sign false confessions are now the model for protecting America in the new century. It’s hard to convey how much this symbolizes how this nation has changed. And it’s great, the Future of Freedom Foundation has been in the forefront of organizations that have been uncompromising on this issue. And there have been a number of Libertarian organizations that have kept quiet on this, especially here in the D.C. area, or else they have come to it very lately. I mean, it’s always sad if a Libertarian organization is slower than the Washington Post editorial page to condemn a government abuse, but this has happened a lot of times over the last few years.
Now, a final issue on the state of American liberty, American civil liberties: it goes to the question of the rule of law. And I think one of the biggest troubles we have in this country right now is that it is presumed that the U.S. president has a right to kill foreigners– it’s rarely stated that bluntly– but just as long as he doesn’t kill too many of them at one time, and as long as his spokesmen offer certain rationales. There are a lot of international obligations the U.S. signed that would curtail the U.S. ability to kill innocent foreigners. These seem to no longer be binding. To see the rules of engagement the U.S. has used again and again in Afghanistan and Iraq, there has been so little hesitation about just bombing houses full of women and children. And if you look at what the military courts-martial have effectively approved, almost all the murder charges in November 2005 in the village of Haditha, U.S. Marines went on a rampage. Twenty-four civilians, mostly women and children, were killed. At the time, it was a big outrage, but the cases have been dropped one by one. The government has plea-bargained stuff down to wrist slaps, and there’s almost no outrage.
Two years ago, when the news of that massacre was first hitting the airwaves, Americans were shocked. Well, this is how we’re fighting the war. Now it’s buried in page A-27 if it’s carried in the papers at all. And this is another sign of how Americans are becoming coarsened to government barbaric power. And it doesn’t work to say, well, this is only abroad. I mean, it’s not like this is going to have any recoil on us, because the stuff that we allow the U.S. government to do abroad will come back to haunt us. There have been so many atrocities which came back to permeate the U.S. drug war here at home, for instance. And there is an attitude towards human beings which the U.S. government has been showing in recent years abroad, especially in Iraq, especially in Afghanistan. And we see it now, there are so many politicians who are gung ho on attacking Iran, and it’s never quite clear what the average Iranian has done; but there’s very little doubt about how the U.S. government would have the right to kill them in order to teach their government a lesson or to break their government’s power.
And so few people are asking, “Where did the U.S. president get this moral authority to kill foreigners?” Because it’s not in the Constitution. It wasn’t something the Founding Fathers believed; but this is a sign of how deferential people have become to the U.S. government and to the claims of the U.S. president. And these are attitudes that are absolutely irreconcilable with preserving a free society. This whole notion that the president has a right to order foreign attacks the same way that he gets to hear “Hail to the Chief” play when he enters a room: I mean, that is a level of automatic pilot that a lot of the American foreign policy thinking is on. Even seven or eight years ago, people would think that the intellectuals, the policy experts and others, would stand up and resist if the government was going towards barbarism. Well, that didn’t happen very much in the last six years. There were far more intellectuals who jumped on the bandwagon than stood out and called the B.S. for what it was. And because of that, that’s one more reason: it doesn’t matter who wins in November; the U.S. government is going to remain a grave peril to our rights and liberties.
And there is little evidence that Americans have learned much if any lessons from the debacles of the last six, seven years. If you see how the GOP is running their campaign, this strange notion that people want a third term from George Bush, I mean, that’s mystifying. But it’s based on almost a perpetual propaganda operation in which they never admit their failures and never admit that they’ve killed innocent people and never admit that they have tortured innocent people to death, and never admit what they have ordered other people to do. So far, the American people have allowed the Congress and the U.S. government to largely absolve itself from the war crimes and other abuses that have occurred over the last six years. And it’s a great sign that as many people have come out for this conference as have, because these are folks who would not let the government get away with that kind of thing.
But it’s puzzling why the abuses that have gone on have not resonated more. And if anything, what’s happened in the last six years is we’ve learned a lot more about the nature of American conservativism, and it’s a lot darker than many people suspected. There are a lot of individual exceptions, and some magazines, at least one magazine, that’s done some fine work. But to see what conservatives have embraced, to see how conservatives have embraced that expansive definition of treason that I started the talk with, to see how they have this instant push-button hatred towards any nation that the president says is an axis of evil, to see their utter intolerance–
George Bush did not like seeing protests; that’s an understatement. But something which the White House would do before Bush would travel to the place to give a speech, they would send out these little manuals and all of these guidelines on how they’re supposed to prepare for the speech. And there were all these things on how to make sure that troublemakers didn’t get into the speech. They were saying, “Well, it’s good if you have a clearance process, so on and so forth.” But they had a last line of defense, which really epitomizes how this nation has changed: If the system failed and dissidents got into the speech, and if the dissidents started to make noise, then what the rally organizers had to do beforehand is have rally squads, basically young people who are ready to go to any place in the auditorium and chant “U.S.A., U.S.A.” to drown out the protesters. And this is from the White House. This is official White House policy. This is how the White House wanted the local organizers around the country to respond to anybody trying to speak up during a Bush event.
And this is something which came out late last summer from an ACLU lawsuit. The news media paid almost no attention to it, but this symbolizes how this nation has changed in recent years. If Bill Clinton had done that, and if the news of Bill Clinton doing that had come out, can you imagine? Which we would have heard about from the nation’s top talk show hosts every day for a month. Bush did it: page A-13, three paragraphs, right next to the ad for Home Depot. So it has no impact. But hopefully, there are still enough Americans who have kept some of the old values and appreciate, have a clear understanding of the danger of government power, that the government can be pushed back to its rightful place. But in the short term, things look bad, and I would think almost no matter who wins in November, we’re going to have a lousy president for the next four years.
<applause>
Anyhow, that’s my two cents, and I’d enjoy hearing questions or hearing what people in the audience think.
<applause>
Q: <inaudible>
James Bovard: I don’t know.
Q: Jim, you’re a hard guy to listen to <inaudible>
James Bovard: All right, thanks.
Q: A couple months ago, I got a link in an e-mail to a video, an online video, that looked like a documentary that might have been made in <inaudible> based on the accents of the people involved and the narrator. One of the videos was to make the case that Al-Qaeda didn’t even really exist prior to the FBI putting some guy from the Middle East up on the stand in some kind of trial back in the late ’90s. And <inaudible> the whole idea that all <inaudible> has an international network or web of terrorists bent on killing Americans. Are you aware of, maybe not the video, but that idea that Al-Qaeda was kind of a made-up idea and that Osama bin Laden himself was just a two-bit guy, that he may have been a rich guy that funded terrorism but wasn’t the leader of a big network? Any idea whether that has any truth?
James Bovard: I’ve heard that allegation. I honestly don’t know. It’s sad to see how the Bush administration inflated Al-Qaeda after 9/11and tried to make them almost like the new boogeyman. It’s sad to see how many people swallowed the notion that Al-Qaeda posed practically as much or more of a threat than the Soviet Union did at the time they had thousands of missiles pointed at us. It’s sad to see how few people challenge that story as far as exaggerating Al-Qaeda’s peril, but as far as whether it’s basically a federal invention? I’ve heard that; I don’t know.
Q: I’m still baffled about these folks who have been imprisoned in illegal camps and tortured, and how they can somehow sign a statement as a deal in order to get released, that they can’t speak. How can that contract even be enforced?
James Bovard: <Laughs>
Q: A contract is not valid if it’s for an illegal purpose.
James Bovard: Well, unless the government did it. I’m serious on that. I think what happened with Hicks, he was still under confinement during that time in which they had prohibited him from talking to the press. So the government could keep an eye on him real good, I think. I think this is going to fall apart on them though.
Q: How did we actually find out about the case that you mentioned? Did he waive his–
James Bovard: On the Hicks case?
Q: Yes.
James Bovard: There was a lot of great coverage of this in the foreign media: I think the British media, probably the Australian media, some good stuff on some of the Internet sites in the U.S.
Q: But how did they find out about it if he had sworn to secrecy?
James Bovard: That was part of the plea agreement I think the government announced.
Q: So did he break his signed statement to not talk? That’s my question.
James Bovard: I don’t think he has done that yet.
Q: So how do we know that it even happened?
James Bovard: What happened?
Q: That he was tortured and then he was asked to sign this statement for his release?
James Bovard: Hicks did talk to people before the plea agreement, so Hicks gave out a lot of information, and that was part of the added pressure on the John Howard government in Australia and on the U.S. government on that; so Hicks had a lot of active friends. Hicks is kind of a funny case because prior to going to Afghanistan to join the Taliban, Hicks had gone to Kosovo to join the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army. It’s kind of an interesting paradox. It’s a paradox because the Kosovo Liberation Army was a former terrorist group that the U.S. government decided had become freedom fighters, whereas the Taliban was a group that the U.S. decided had become terrorists. I mean, the dude wasn’t lucky. It’s an interesting thing with U.S. procedures: If he’s captured on the battlefield, that’s one thing. But this whole notion of people captured on the battlefield that can be tortured and held year after year after year; I mean, there’s no support for this in recent American history or in any recent international agreement.
Q: You’re talking about all these security procedures that have been implemented. How come nothing really has been done with the borders and ports? Since the government is so concerned with ourselves, it doesn’t seem like much has been done with the borders and ports. I was just wondering if you could maybe comment on that a little bit, and then I’ll ask you the second one, which is–
James Bovard: I thought they were building a fence. I’ve heard a lot about the fence. I don’t think it’s too much of a trouble up in New Hampshire. The ports, they’re doing some things different in the ports. They’ve certainly issued a lot of press releases about that. I don’t know. I don’t think there is a consensus they really cracked down that much on immigration at this point. I noticed the raids a week or two ago in Iowa. If I understood right, the U.S. government is charging many of the immigrants that they grab with a crime and threatening to send them to prison, simply for being an illegal immigrant, which seems like a really dumb idea, given the overcrowding in prisons; but I’m sure the government knows what they’re doing.
Q: The second question, which is a lot more serious, is what kinds of steps have to take place? What kinds of things have to happen for this whole nightmare to start to unravel in a positive way?
James Bovard: <Laughs> I had a good answer and then you throw in that last phrase, you know? You really threw me off track there. Americans need a clear understanding of the perils of government. This is something I’ve been harping on for a great number of years, and I haven’t quite persuaded the majority of this yet, I don’t think. But people look at the government through a very cloudy lens, rose-colored glasses, I don’t know what, but people need to understand; it doesn’t matter what party somebody is with, they’re still a threat to the rights and liberties. And it’s appalling to me to see that there has been so little backlash against the media, because there was that wonderful New York Times story in April about how most of the top experts, the former generals that they were using to comment on Iraq and Afghanistan, were actually being fed information off some false information by the Pentagon. And a lot of these guys were actually getting Pentagon contracts at the same time they were there, supposedly as independent commentators.
And it was a fraud up and down, throughout the networks and the cable stations, cable networks. And yet, as far as I know, nobody’s head has rolled on that. There’s been so much government media complicity, I would hope that would be one of the lessons people would draw from the Bush years, but they haven’t done that yet. There seems to be this notion that once George Bush leaves the White House, everything will be safe. I mean, it was the same B.S. we heard back in 2001 when Bill Clinton left the White House. There were so many conservatives who were convinced that because George W. Bush was a family man that didn’t chase skirts, that the nation had nothing to worry about. And it was utterly false back then, and it will be utterly false in January when the media tell us to trust the next president.
But as far as the steps that will happen as far as what needs to be done? People need to read more. People need to speak up. Americans need to show more courage. There was a line I had in the last chapter of Attention-Deficit Democracy, which they’re selling outside. I was trying to be smooth; it didn’t work. The thing we need in this country is to have the average Congressman fear a meeting with his constituents as much as the average taxpayer fears an audit with the IRS.
<applause>
Q: And I think there are some places in the U.S. where Congressmen do shudder at the thought of meeting their constituents, but very few places. Anger is not a panacea, but certainly, by itself, if it’s not guided, it doesn’t really achieve much. But informed anger, and just to make some of these rascals feel Americans’ wrath, that would be effective.
<applause>
Q: So, short of the great unraveling that Brian was just talking about, and political reform and people getting involved and setting things right, what can the average citizen do? I’m not sure this is your department, but what can the average citizen do to protect his e-mail? Is there anything that we can do? Just do the best we can to make sure they’re not building a database on us? Or is it hopeless?
James Bovard: Well, don’t send e-mails in Arabic. There are some Internet service providers that are a lot better than others, I think, as far as security. There are some that do back flips to make the government happy with them. I don’t have them off the top of my head. Comcast, I’ve heard. I don’t know that Comcast is an ISP at this point, but they–
Q. Comcast is a bad one?
James Bovard: Yeah, oh, yeah. Comcast is way bad. And my impression is Verizon rolled over for the Feds on the warrantless wiretaps and had no troubles with that. As far as a simple issue, the issue of immunity for the telecommunications companies: This is something that Glenn Greenwald will be speaking tomorrow, has done a lot of great work on. This is a real litmus test, whether these telephone companies that violate American law, betrayed their customers, trampled peoples’ privacy, whether they get a pass for violating federal law; these are folks that need to be held accountable. It would be great to see them prosecuted, either now or by the next administration, and to find out what the U.S. government told them. This is not an issue of immunity for private companies. This is an issue of the government allowing it to whitewash its own record. And it’s great that liberals and a lot of leftists have done great work on this issue. It really hasn’t resonated much beyond them, but this is a real telltale issue, and it would be great to see some of these CEOs who broke federal law wearing orange suits.
<applause>
Q: Don’t worry. I won’t ask you about the Freedom of Information Act.
James Bovard: <Laughs> I was ready for you this year.
Q: <laughs> Actually, I was going to make a comment about Australia and John Howard. You said they conveniently waited for Hicks to give his story after the election?
James Bovard: Right.
Q: Well, it didn’t matter because John Howard lost.
James Bovard: Yes, it was great. Great to see that rascal go down.
Q: My question is, though– maybe you’re not aware of it, maybe it’s not even true, I don’t know. I was listening to the great heroic talk show host Charles Goyette.
James Bovard: He’s great. Charles is excellent.
Q: He and Scott Horton, from Antiwar Radio, are the best. I mean, that’s all I listen to. I know he’s here.
James Bovard: Also the best.
Q: Both of them are excellent. But I think he was quoted– I think it was a British media, might have been the Guardian, can’t really remember– is that they actually have torture chambers on warships, or some type of ships, I don’t know. Have you heard this?
James Bovard: Basically, all I know is what I read on Antiwar.com. I’ve seen a little bit on this. It doesn’t sound implausible. The U.S. government told so many lies about the renditions. There were so many false statements about how they weren’t grabbing people and flying them around the world to be tortured, so I assume the U.S. government has already said that it’s false if they’re using ships to hold people and to interrogate them. So I’m sure the government’s right this time. But that’s a huge story, especially if it’s true. And I hope people will follow it out, and I hope that some more stuff can come out of that, because this whole notion of secret prisons around the world– That was one of the worst things about the Soviet system. That was what the books on the Gulag, where it helped change the world opinion of the Soviet Union.
And now, as Amnesty International charged a few years ago, the U.S. government has its own gulag of these secret prisons scattered all over the world. Some of the worst interrogation abuses have gone on in Thailand, which has also done a great job of tyrannizing its own people at times. We have no idea what the U.S. government is doing in our name. And as free citizens, we can’t afford to let the government do atrocities in our own name and say, “Well, we didn’t know. Well, nobody told us.” Well, that’s B.S., because there are good information sources out there. And more importantly, people need to put the heat on the government to tell us what they’ve done.
Q: You mentioned the terrorist watch list. With apologies for being a little bit autobiographical: on my way to Europe last year, in the spring of 2007, on a German airline, I was pulled aside and told I had to be inspected. The man said, “I’ll take care of it, sir.” But he said, “You’re on a watch list.” So what I did is, I inquired. I used to have very sensitive clearances with friends of mine in very senior positions. And may I give you the report, that I am on a watch list, but this is the significant fact I wanted to convey to you and the audience, maybe for your reflection: I was put on that list by two foreign intelligence services. Did you hear that? I would prefer not to say that now in public, but you can well imagine what they are, and they’re related to one another. I mean, they work together. But I was put on that watch list by two foreign intelligence services, and I was told by my friends that they were told I will not be removed from it. So I wanted to indicate that. I mean, it shocked me. They told me there were some things on it that I can do, but I prefer to hide in the open. But I think it’s a significant fact, especially from my own previous background and experience. The second thing I think might be of interest to you, or I’d like your comment on: the last time I saw you is when I was invited to a conference with Pat Buchanan and his neo-conservative <inaudible> with Terry Jeffrey. Well, during the interview, this was in 2004, I think.
James Bovard: I think it was April of 2005.
Q: Five, okay. But I went up to Pat during the break and we were talking about my mutual friend or our mutual friend, Sam Francis. But I asked Pat Buchanan to what extent he had written about or was informed about the revision of the military’s unified command plan, especially the establishment of the Northern Command. And I was surprised to hear Pat say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And it was not the time to go into it, but I just wanted to raise some of the issues, a lot of this is in the open, but before even the Homeland Security Department was actually set up, there was a development of the Northern Command. You know where it’s at, in Colorado Springs. It’s headed by a four-star admiral or a general, and the area responsibility is largely in the continental United States, some Canada and some other things.
But I remember at the time when I was involved with some of these things, raising the question, “Well, if you’re a four-star admiral or a general and this is your area of responsibility, you’ve got to have intelligence in your area of responsibility.” And what are the implications of this? I mean, is our intelligence community going to be applied to doing this? But I have seen very little response from different groups. There are certainly a lot of classified things about it, you can look at the unified command plan and what NORTHCOM is, they’ve made some revisions since it was first up, but Pat had no idea about it. My question to you is, are you aware of this, and have any reflections about a military command, not homeland defense?
James Bovard: I know a little bit about it, but not that much. It certainly has a bad odor to it. It’s the kind of thing where you don’t know that the government’s probably gathering up a lot of information it shouldn’t be having, especially the military. But to go to your first comment on the terrorist watch list, I think the list right now is up to about 900,000 names. And again, most of them are not terrorists. And there are questions about what is the standard for putting someone on that list, and it’s very likely there are a lot of people being put on that list simply because someone didn’t like them. It might be getting towards the old system they had in Bucharest under Ceausescu, where it was easy for someone to finger their neighbor and make any kind of nonsense report, and all of a sudden, that person is targeted. Being on the terrorist watch list, it causes problems. If you travel, it could cause problems with your bank account. It could do a lot of things to mess up your life. And yet, aside from a handful of liberals, very few people have really put their shoulders behind this issue. But that’s a great example, and I appreciate your telling us. Thanks for your courage in speaking up on that.
Q: I’m an engineer in the space industry. And I’d like to paint an even bleaker picture than you do. I work in the scientific community, not on black projects, but I know people that do. And they can’t tell me what they do or they’ll have to kill me, and I’m here. When I talk to these people and I kind of relay my concerns to them, they look at me with an air to, hey, you know what you’re talking about, but they can’t say, they can’t nod, their eyes tell everything. I think in my discussions with these people, all the electronic communications go through the alphabet agencies, period. So we’re in a much bleaker circumstance as a country. These are people that I trust. And I’m frightened of my government, and we shouldn’t be. And as an individual, I don’t know what to do; but hopefully– I’m talking to friends and informing people– but it is almost, to me, it’s like we’re in a fascist regime. We’re nearly like the Stasi mentality, in the East German Stasi. It’s extraordinary that we’ve gone this far. And I hail from Pittsburgh originally. And I remember, we had a lot of World War II vets around. And I was seven years old in my neighborhood. We had the World War II vet that befriended me. He was a really nice gentleman, kept to himself, grew a garden. He befriended me. And we got to be friends for three or four months, but he said, “If there’s one thing you could do for me,” he said, “It’s not to give away your freedom.” He said, “Not to give away your freedom.” He had his friends cut in half for us to be free, and we’ve just handed this over. And I think a lot of people are frightened, and I think we shouldn’t be.
James Bovard: People need to have courage. That’s a great point, don’t give away your freedom. Have the courage to not bow down when the government tells you to be frightened on cue. But I’m getting signs telling me to stop, so I’ll draw the Curtain of Mercy here. Thanks for being such a great audience.

The post My 2008 FFF Speech: Bush’s War on Civil Liberties – Transcript appeared first on James Bovard.

  Here is the transcript from my speech on  ”How Foreign Warring Subverts Freedom at Home” from the June 2007 The Future of Freedom Foundation conference on Restoring the Republic. This has lots of remarks about the NSA scandal, torture, the suspension of habeas corpus, and other cheerful topics.   There were some excellent questions after the speech from folks like Bill Anderson and John Walsh.

One lady asked for suggestions on responding to a problem with her local government.  I assured her:  ”The first rule is to never take legal advice from a freelance writer.”

Here’s the text from the June 1, 2007 speech (first moments of the speech was not captured by the audio or transcript):

Jim Bovard: … and to help keep the Future of Freedom Foundation going forward, and it’s great to talk to an audience as sophisticated and as well informed as this because , that’s not normally the situation in Washington. And I want to thank Bumper for his kind words. I really enjoyed working with FFF over the years, and Bumper has helped protect me against my moderate tendencies. , because there are a number of times where I’m thinking , maybe Bush has got a point, ? But then I talk to Bumper and I say yeah, well, maybe he is a rascal.

When I was sitting down a couple of days ago preparing this speech, I realized I had a simple choice. The first choice would be to take the high road, and the second choice would be to talk about the TSA [Transportation Security Administration]. I’m curious, did anybody here have a bad experience flying in? Okay, well bad news. The feds have got this under surveillance, you’re going to have a hell of a lot worse time getting home. Now, there was an article by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and Heritage was saying that the only change as far as civil liberties since 9/11 is that people have to take off their shoes when they go to the airport. Well, I don’t know what kind of shoes that guy wears, but the fact is that, thanks to 9/11 and thanks to the federal failure, the failure by the Federal Aviation Administration, the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, thanks to their failure to stop the hijackers, we now have an army of occupation of 45,000 federal agents at these airports.

And the feds seem to change the rules each month as far as what you can and cannot do when you’re traveling within the U.S. Toothpaste has come in for a lot of grief lately. , if it’s a large tube then, , you’re a suspected terrorist. The rules on shoes, some months you have to take off your shoes, some not. I guess one bright side of that is it’s made it a lot easier for TSA to hire new agents because there are a lot of shoe perverts out there who are all like oh, here’s some nice ones, you’ve got to check your shoes and make sure they’re dry when they come through those things there.

And TSA is always making up new rules. TSA is pulling one rabbit out of a hat after another. Back in August, September 2003 there was a bombing. Some Chechnyan terrorists apparently blew up a Russian airplane, and there wasn’t really good evidence as far as how the terrorists blew it up. But the TSA assumed that the terrorists were female and that they’d hidden a bomb in their brassiere. So TSA proceeds to treat every ample female in the country traveling as if she was carrying breast bombs. And, there was just a huge scandal. It was something that was kind of started overnight. There was no warning, there was no public discussion. There was no one to tell the TSA, hey, you boneheads are out of your minds.

It didn’t matter, because the TSA had the authority. The TSA makes the rules, it enforces them and it judges all the violators. And this is exactly the type of paradigm that James Madison warned against as the epitome of tyranny. Something that the TSA has started to do a couple of years ago is impose attitude fines of up to $1,500. SA did not announce this either, but if someone is going through the TSA line, it doesn’t matter if they have been delayed for half an hour and missed their flight, or if some TSA person is giving them grief and the person talks back to them, the TSA can fine you up to $1,500. And often, a person has no notice of this until they get a letter in the mail a few weeks or a month or two later.

I assume this is a program to make the government safe from sarcasm. But this is the type of thing that has multiplied since 9/11. You have people making up rules, not telling Americans about them and simply trying to make Americans grovel at the feet of federal agents. And there has been a consistent message from parts of Washington and parts of Congress and the Bush Administration that groveling will make us safe. But it hasn’t worked for people in the past in other countries and it won’t work for Americans now.

Something which is really striking to me about how the war on terror has changed America, it has brought out the latent authoritarianism in this country – more so than even I expected. If you think back a few years ago to how the Dixie Chicks were vilified for just a casual comment that their lead singer made in a concert in England. If you look at how many conservatives have been calling for the New York Times to be prosecuted for treason simply because the New York Times has had some stories about federal lawbreaking. If you look at some of their prominent conservative columnists who are calling for the creation of concentration camps in this country for Muslims or Arabs. And, one person who did this is a best-selling author. These are things that would have been very difficult to imagine, even a few years ago, and to see where the tread lines are going in this country, it’s very, very concerning.

But a lot of the news media tell us that the war on terror is not a threat to you unless you’re a terrorist, or unless you’re a terrorist suspect. And that second category, it kind of blossoms. Looking back to what the feds did after 9/11, the feds have rounded up more than 1,200 people and locked them up and in many cases violated their rights, held them in violation of court orders, and the only thing a person needed to do to be considered a suspected terrorist was to be a Muslim or an Arab who was an illegal immigrant who was encountered by FBI agents in New York or New Jersey. That was what it meant to be a suspected terrorist. Arab students were locked up as suspected terrorists for working at a pizza parlor in violation of their student visa. A Pakistani immigrant was jailed as a suspected terrorist because his neighbors called him in because he failed to cut the grass and he hung his underwear out on the fence. That was pretty suspicious.

There were some FBI agents, the FBI was under a lot of pressure to bring in people for questioning. Some FBI agents were told to look in phone books to find the names of Arabs and Muslims who could be interrogated. These are the standards the government was using after 9/11. Now, it’s gotten worse since then in some ways. The Homeland Security Department in May 2003 urged local police departments to view critics of the war on terror as potential terrorists. The feds told local lawmen to be on alert for potential suicide bombers, and the feds said that the suicide bombers could be recognized by things such as having a pale face from a recent shaving of a beard. Or for instance, a person might appear to be in a trance or their eyes might appear to be vigilant and focused.

And the feds warned the suicide bombers might be someone whose clothing is out of sync with the weather. I’ve heard that from quite a few people who flew in here and didn’t realize that it’s summer here in D.C. The feds also warned that if someone’s clothing is loose that that could be a sign of a suicide bomber. I don’t know how many college campuses these folks have visited recently, but , and perhaps to ensure that there will never be a shortage of terrorists, the feds warned that another telltale warning sign is that someone for whom waiting in a grocery store line becomes intolerable. And these are the experts at Homeland Security. This is what they’re telling eighteen thousand federal, local, and state law enforcement agencies around the country. And this is some of the stuff that’s leaked out. It’s possible there’s much more comical stuff we haven’t heard about yet. But this is what these folks are getting away with.

It’s interesting to see some of the other definitions that federal agencies have used here. The Pentagon is doing a lot of surveillance inside the U.S. now. This is in violation of federal law. They’ve been caught breaking the law a number of times, and each time they have explained well it wasn’t intentional. And that satisfies Congress. And it wasn’t a concern for the Bush Administration because they haven’t been impeded by the law for a long time. But for instance, the Pentagon has got a counterintelligence field activity program that’s out there covertly gathering information on Americans who protest against the Iraq War or who are involved with Web sites that are critical of U.S. military policy. I was talking to Don Rumsfeld about this last week and he said that FFF is not on the list. So , people don’t need to worry about that. But the Pentagon has carried out scores of surveillance of a lot of antiwar protests and gatherings, including one at a Quaker meeting house in Florida. Names of people who go to these kinds of things are added to a Pentagon database which involves terrorism threat warnings. And this is something which would be on your permanent federal record.

And folks might have this notion that well, but there’s due process, so this information would not be used against me. It’s fine to have a healthy fantasy life, but these are not the rules that the government plays by. And the federal law is less and less of an impediment to the Bush Administration every year. Something we learned in late 2005 was that the National Security Agency had conducted thousands of warrantless wiretaps on Americans. This is something that the New York Times was told about a month or two before the 2004 election, but they chose not to publish it and therefore the New York Times may have gotten Bush a second term because they were basically cowardly on this.

But, during the 1970s, there were horrendous abuses of the federal government doing wiretaps on Americans for supposedly national security reasons. There were White House aides, I think Bill Safire was wiretapped, Henry Kissinger had him tapped, and there were no limits on this. It was simply up to the president to decide who would be tapped. Congress recognized that there were horrendous abuses there. There was a law passed in 1978 called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which makes it a crime to do a wiretap without a warrant. It can be a warrant from a secret court, this FISA court, which is pretty much of a joke, because it simply rubberstamps almost everything the government asks for. But there is at least some record there. But the Bush Administration decided that even seeking a warrant was a violation of his dignity, and that the president had his own inherent authority to order wiretaps of Americans’ phone calls.

This is the very clear doctrine that Bush lawyers have established. It’s something that Alberto Gonzales referred to as the Commander in Chief Override. So basically you have the entire U.S. Constitution, well, that’s a technicality because George Bush has to protect America. And that has been their attitude on many areas. And the type of wiretaps that they’re doing, we don’t know who they’re wiretapping. And Congress has not shown a lot of curiosity. But these are the type of scandals which tend to snowball. Things are probably a hell of a lot worse than what they seem, because that has been the type of pattern for every type of Bush violation of law so far.
Something which came out last May, was that the feds have been doing call tracking for millions of Americans. The feds have been tracking every number which a person would call or be called by, creating these massive data warehouses. This is completely illegal under a 1986 federal law. But the feds have just kind of shrugged that off and they haven’t worried about that. Now, it’s interesting what their rule of law has become, because there were a lot of concerns in the Justice Department about whether these secret wiretaps were illegal. But during the time Ashcroft was Attorney General, it basically got rubberstamped every time and the Bush Administration’s attitude was that the Justice Department said it was legal. There was no need to go to a court. It was self-evident that it was legal.

There was a glitch one time because the program was expiring and Ashcroft was in the hospital after having some kind of, was it gall bladder problem? Something like that. And he wasn’t really that conscious. But it was necessary for him to certify that the program was in compliance with the law, or else it would look like Bush and his team were breaking the law. So you had Andrew Card, the White House Chief of Staff, and Gonzales raced over to Ashcroft’s hospital room to pressure him to sign this waiver of federal law to let them keep on wiretapping. Well, as a former Deputy Attorney General Comey testified a few weeks ago, he heard that they were on the way and he raced there to Ashcroft’s hospital bed. It had to be a hell of a scene because John Ashcroft didn’t make much sense when he was sober. And to think of John Ashcroft kind of zoned out on painkillers, and then to have the White House Chief of Staff and Gonzales, who I’ve always had a lot of respect for his scholarship on the law, to have those guys by Ashcroft’s hospital bed and Comey there is arguing and [word missing] apparently came and so they were not able to get this certified as being legal.

But Bush said well, on a temporary basis just keep doing it on my authority. People were concerned about this in the Justice Department, and an investigation was launched early last year on this. But George Bush scuttled the investigation. It was looking at whether Gonzales, as White House Counsel, and Bush, primarily Gonzales but with Bush’s approval, whether they had violated federal law with this warrantless wiretapping. But George Bush effectively scuttled that investigation. Now this was in the papers briefly. If you think back to the early 1970s, Nixon did some similar things and people got really upset. But for some reason, this has rolled off people’s backs like water of a duck’s back. The news media have chosen to make very little hubbub over this. But it looks like a very clear case of a president basically scuttling an investigation into his own criminality. At some point, there’s got to be a conflict of interest there. Now, the thing with the wiretaps, this is something which plays into a lot of the other stuff the Bush Administration is doing. There was a provision in the Patriot Act which greatly expanded the FBI’s authority to use national security letters. And a national security letter is simply an FBI subpoena but it has the force of law. Not only that, but it’s the legal equivalent of an FBI going in there and holding a sword over somebody’s head because someone who receives one of these national security letters is prohibited from telling anybody. They were even prohibited from telling their lawyer up until very recently. And the Bush team said well, this is not really a problem because these are things which were being used very rarely.

Well, they lied. It turns out the FBI was issuing at least 30,000 national security letters a year. And these are 30,000 warrantless searches. These are under supervision of no judge. It’s simply some FBI office asked and said well, should we search this guy’s records and they say yeah, okay, fine. That’s due process with these national security letters. And as the Washington Post noted, these letters empower the FBI to seize records that show where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home or work. And there is no need for a warrant for this because it’s on the FBI’s own authority.

And each national security letter can lasso the personal records of thousands of people. So the 30,000 is a very low number. For instance, in late 2003 and early 2004, the FBI used national security letters to seize personal data on almost a million people who visited Las Vegas around New Year’s. And once again, there was no need to even talk to a judge. It was the FBI going to these hotels and casinos and other entities out there and just kind of saying , give us the information or, very bad things will happen. Something which the FBI did, it threatened to get the gambling profiles of casino guests if the casinos did not surrender more information. So that’s something else that could be added to your federal record.

And the standard for a search warrant, there’s a clear standard in the Fourth Amendment. There has to be probable cause, it has to specify what is being looked for and where it is and there has to be, in theory, a clear link to a suspected crime. But for these national security letters, the only thing necessary is for the FBI agents to certify that the records, which they compel people to give, are sought for or relevant to investigation, to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence agents’ activities. We saw earlier how broad the definition of terrorist was. There is no reason to think that it’s any narrower here. And there’s evidence that the feds could use these to go after online blogs which are criticizing Bush, for instance. Because the FBI’s concept of First Amendment protection at this point is very thin.

And yet, these are things that Americans have heard very little about. But they are fundamentally changing how people interact with the federal government. The government is becoming a much bigger peril to people’s freedom. Now I’ve never understood the basic idea that killing people abroad would not encourage government to respect people at home. But there are a lot of people who seem to think that if America is tough enough in foreign countries, that we will somehow be safe here at home. But it’s the same government, and the same bad habits tend to spread and come back this way. It’s interesting to think back six years ago, , early summer 2001. Who would have thought at that point that the U.S., that the law of the land in this country would be that the government has a de facto right to torture? Six years ago, who would have expected that? And not only that, we have an Attorney General who was a primary advocate of using torture and making the federal government exempt from the law, and this is our chief law enforcement officer, at least for this week.

But it’s interesting, going back and seeing some of the things which have leaked out of the Bush Administration and I think we haven’t even seen the tip of the iceberg in this torture scandal. I think that there’s far worse things that have gone on that we don’t know about. I’ll allude to them in a little bit here. But there was a memo which the Justice Department did in 2002 which laid out their strategy on torture. Now, it started out by basically changing the definition of torture to say if someone was not killed or maimed, he wasn’t tortured. This is a pretty low standard for torture. And the Justice Department memo then explained that even if someone did die during torture, the torturer might not be guilty if he felt that the torture was necessary to prevent some greater evil, if that was how he felt.

And this Justice Department memo concluded by declaring that the president has the right to order torture because he is above the law, at least during the wartime, if the president says it’s wartime, no matter what Congress says. The Justice Department said the president can exempt government officials from federal criminal law, saying that Congress cannot compel the president to prosecute outcomes taken pursuant to the president’s own Constitutional authority. In other words, a federal agent can do whatever the president orders him to and the president has no obligation to prosecute this person, the president can block prosecution, simply because the president’s authority is superior to the law and the Constitution.

This is a memo that leaked out in either late May or June 2004. There was a brief hubbub about it. Some people said , that’s kind of going too far. But this was the Bush Administration’s version of the law of the land. And it still rules, because when it has come to this, with the wiretapping scandal and other scandals, the Administration’s fallback position is well George Bush has inherent authority. If the president says it’s legal, it’s legal. The rule of the law at this point means nothing except presidential supremacy. Because the president is the law. And it’s amazing that there’s been so little controversy on these things.

Now, Congress, there were some Supreme Court decisions in June of last year that overturned some of these policies and made it clear that the court felt that the Bush Administration was violating the law and probably the Constitution. Bumper Hornberger did a lot of fine articles on that back at that point, and the Future of Freedom Foundation has been on the frontline on these issues. But the Bush Administration responded not by trying to change the policies, but by browbeating Congress to rubberstamp torture, which Congress did with the Military Commissions Act last September.

And this is an absolutely fascinating act. I was reading the history. Well, it’s fascinating to see some of the parallels with other history. A turning point in the history of the Nazi regime was the Night of the Long Knives. That was when Hitler ordered the execution of a lot of the top people in the SA, the counterpart to the SS. A lot of them were just rounded up and executed at point blank range. After that happened, the Nazi Reichstag passed a law a day or two later which retroactively legalized all the executions and said they were necessary for the protection of the state. Well, Congress, with this Military Commissions Act effectively retroactively legalized torture. And according to the Pentagon there have been like at least 30 or 34 or more people who have died, either during or as a result of these interrogations. And that’s only for the Pentagon. For the CIA, we have no idea what their body count is from torture because the CIA is simply, , chose not to reveal what it’s doing.

But the parallels, and it’s fascinating to see the standards that Congress approved. For instance, something which I found most chilling in this law was that Congress has approved the use in judicial proceedings of torture confessions. This is an idea that one would have thought that would have been limited to Monty Python movies. But one of the top Justice Department officials said in federal court late in 2004 that the Bush Administration could use tortured confessions in some of the court proceedings, and Congress last September basically rubberstamped that. Now, it’s important that it not be labeled a tortured confession. Instead, it can simply be a confession that occurred under vigorous interrogation, or maybe extreme interrogation, or maybe rough interrogation. But what the Military Commissions Act does, it leaves it up to the president to say what torture is. And now, y’all might recall after 9/11, after the Abu Ghraib pictures came out in May of 2004, George Bush spent a lot of time assuring Americans we don’t torture. Well, some of those photos would have been problematic because you had people bleeding, you had people beaten. There was one guy who had been tortured to death and he was being carried out of Abu Ghraib and , covered on a stretcher. They had an IV hooked up to him to make it look like he wasn’t dead. And there have been a lot of other people who have been killed during interrogation in Iraq by the American military, the CIA, or some of our contractors. But George Bush says don’t worry, that’s not torture.

Now, and it’s up to Bush to define what torture is now. This is problematic, because Bush, trusting George Bush for an honest definition? It’s just not prudent at this point. But Bush appears to be using a John Yoo definition of what torture is. John Yoo was asked, he was the former Justice Department official who wrote that 2002 memo. John Yoo, and he has been out front in favor of torture in the last couple of years since he left the government. And he was asked in a law school debate about a year ago whether it would be okay to crush the testicles of a young boy if the president thought that the boy’s father might have information where a bomb was. John Yoo really struggled with that question. He said , I don’t know, That’s a rough one,– And this is the person who the media is treating as an authority on interrogation policy. He’s appeared at many Washington think tanks, he’s been treated as a visionary thinker. I will not draw any historical parallels with last century, but it’s amazing to see where the standards have followed him.

Habeas corpus is another thing which has fallen by the wayside. A major problem with this Military Commissions Act is that the president can accuse anybody in the world of being an enemy combatant and have that person detained indefinitely. And a person does not have the right to have access to federal courts to challenge once they’ve been labeled an enemy combatant. This is a revolutionary change. This is the president’s right to nullify all rights. And this is something, again, which generated very little controversy at the time that Congress was considering this act. Folks think well, this is only for foreign bad guys, but there is no reason to assume that these powers would be so limited because Bush has not respected any limits on his power so far.

Everything is a stepping stone. Where are they going next? We don’t know and there’s no reason to trust these people. Bush has tried to portray the torture scandal as something done by a handful of people at Abu Ghraib, and some of his apologists and some of his people off the record have said well it was just a bunch of hillbillies from West Virginia, these hillbillies were following orders. And there was a trial for the corporal who was actually from Pennsylvania on this, and my impression was that the corporal was guilty of a lot of stuff, but he was prohibited from introducing into the military court marshal record, he was prohibited from entering into evidence that he was following orders from higher up. And this is how they’ve handled the torture scandal throughout. They have thrown a handful of enlisted men to the legal wolves.

They have had a few officers who got a sanction on their career. We don’t know how high up this goes. However, there was a CIA letter that came out late last year which confirmed that George Bush granted the CIA the authority to use extreme interrogation methods, and it spelled out what these methods were. And this is from George Bush himself. And the actual letter itself has not come out yet. I think it will come out and it’s possible that when that does come out, that might have the same effect as the Watergate tapes had on Richard Nixon. On the other hand, maybe I’m overestimating the American people on that. Maybe people will simply shrug and say well, Fox 24 program at work there so, we’ll just give them the benefit of the doubt on this.

It’s just fascinating to see how deferential Americans have been to the government seizing nearly absolute power in area after area. Something that was great about this country was Americans had a natural skepticism of politicians and of government authority. Or even healthier people trusted government per se. But that’s something which has been lost. I was fascinated by the opinion polls, the opinion numbers in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Trust in government doubled overnight. The percentage of Americans that trusted the government to do the right thing was up in the sixty or seventy percents, and this is after the biggest federal screwup since Pearl Harbor. But it was this surge in trust of government. That was a reason that Bush could con the American people into war with Iraq. And that’s why Bush has gotten away with so much other lawbreaking, because people trusted the government. And if there’s any lesson from the post-9/11 world, it is that the more esteem the government gets, the more dangerous it becomes.

And yet, people are not drawing that lesson, and I’m concerned with the presidential race heating up for 2008. It seems as if people are only looking for a better master. Someone with good intentions, someone who is trustworthy. But it doesn’t matter who’s president. There’s way too much power and that power is going to be abused, and the only answer is to put these rascals on a leash. But I don’t know how much of the old American values are still out there that this is going to resonate with. And I also don’t know how many Americans still give a damn about individual freedom, because to see how far the government has gone and to see how little controversy there has been about these illegal wiretappings and about the torture and about the TSA abuses.

People have rolled over again and again. Where will it stop? I don’t know. So many of these policies have been justified in the name of antiterrorism. But the single most effective antiterrorism step the U.S. government can take is to stop killing innocent foreigners around the world. It’s time to have a supply side anti-terror policy, because so much of what the U.S. Government has done has simply spawned far more terrorists than what the U.S. has vanquished. And there is no evidence that Washington has chosen to recognize that or learn that lesson. Because of that, government has become far more dangerous and has created far more enemies for the American people at the same time as promising to save us. One more good reason to be cynical about government. So on that note, I’m happy to take some questions. Yeah?

Q: [inaudible]

Jim Bovard: Excellent question. Why have the American people dropped their guard against government, why are people trusting the government so much. People have been taught from the time that they’re knee-high to bow down to the flag, to say the Pledge of Allegiance, to put the government on a pedestal, and this has blunted a lot of people’s natural reactions. It’s something that the news media, a major reason that the Bush Administration could con Americans into war was because the news media for the most part was a lapdog if not a bootlicker. This is certainly true of a lot of the right wing media. It was also true of the Washington Post and of the New York Times and the three major networks.

These folks were a complete disgrace, they were cowardly, they were knowingly putting out dubious administration statements as if they were true, and it’s unfortunate there’s been so little backlash against the media, because these folks enabled George Bush to violate the law, to violate the Constitution, and to trample our rights. And most of these, for the Washington media, all that matters is the high-ranking administration officials still come to their table and be their guest at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. That’s their standard, that’s what they’re concerned about, that’s where their bragging rights come from. These folks are afraid to offend the federal government, and that’s probably the reason why we should have no trust in the media. Well, no trust in the media except for Freedom Daily. Bill?

Q: Yeah, I’m Bill Anderson from Cumberland, Maryland. Are we seeing much more of a growth of what I would call military culture in this country? Because I’m thinking it’s not simply just the U.S. adventures, economic adventures abroad, but also when they come home, we’re seeing more and more military retirees or people with military backgrounds in all the bureaucracies. And this is not a slam on people who have been in the Armed Services, but rather I’m wondering, you get this culture of obedience. You simply obey orders because that’s what you do in the Armed Forces. You obey orders. And I’m wondering how far is this seeping into these other agencies that seem to be demanding just absolute obedience?

Jim Bovard: I think that might be part of it. It’s amazing how many Americans have been happy to take orders from the federal government. This is something which I see when I’m traveling and I’m stuck in a TSA line and , naturally I’m always trying to chat people up. So, what do you think of this? And there’s always a fair percentage of people like I’m really glad that they’re there protecting me. And, I’m just sorry I don’t have a title for the Brooklyn Bridge to sell these people there in line. It’s amazing how much BS smart people have swallowed. And there’s a certain percentage of people that when it comes to politics, they will never know their nose from a hole in the ground.

But the thing that struck me, and I see this a lot with the Washington media, is that these folks should know better. After the history of Cointelpro, of the FBI spying and abuse of the 1960s and 70s, there was no reason to assume that the surveillance that the Justice Department was openly conducting after 2002 would not be a peril to our liberties, would not be used to suppress dissent, and would not trample the rights and liberties of American people. But the news media, it just lost its nerve. It just lost its nerve.

Q: No, I’m sorry. The news media has not lost its nerve. I’m a local journalist. But I’ve been in direct–

Jim Bovard: For who?

Q: What?

Jim Bovard: For who?

Q: Well, for the Gazette Newspapers in Gaithersburg in Maryland.

Jim Bovard: Montgomery County, that’s a real hotbed of liberty. A hotbed of liberty.

Q: Well you’ve got to start–

Jim Bovard: Folks here know Montgomery County, right? I don’t need to say anything else. I’m sorry.

Q: Should I move? Why not stay and fight at home? I’ve tried. And I’ve become a community activist.

Jim Bovard: Good.

Q: I’ve talked to Jacob about this. I have spoken at microphones. This involves a usurpation or a taking of private land. The basis of freedom is ownership of private land and our land is threatened.

Jim Bovard: Okay.

Q: It’s the collusion between developers and government, and it starts right with the local level. I can see it. I’ve been speaking before a microphone since last November. I know I’ve been effective because one of the councilwomen has cut me off. She refuses to accept my e-mails anymore.

Jim Bovard: Okay, is there a question?

Q: But here’s the thing. Yes, the question is how do you handle it when you, a journalist, are indirectly threatened with a lawsuit?

Jim Bovard: …

Q: I mean you talk about torture.

Jim Bovard: Okay.

Q: There are ways of torturing journalists.

Jim Bovard: Okay, well, the first rule is never take legal advice from a freelance writer.

Q: I’m a freelance writer.

Jim Bovard: Well, so am I. It varies from circumstance to circumstance. I think that there’s some lawyers here who might be able to give you a lot better advice than I could on that.

Q: Okay, I’m taking paralegal courses this summer. I’m working with lawyers. I’m not going to stop speaking.

Jim Bovard: Okay, good. Good. Keep speaking.

Q: I’m not going to stop writing.

Jim Bovard: Good. Keep speaking. Next question?

Q: I was shocked to hear about the National Security letters that you spoke of. They seem to be such an obvious violation of individual rights. Could they be used as a basis for civil rights suit against the government?
Jim Bovard: I believe the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, I believe, and some other groups are suing the feds on these at this time. And they’ve gotten some discovery in the courts. They have found some stuff. It’s interesting. There’s sort of a stereotype about the ACLU. A lot of people have a visceral, hostile reaction to them. But the ACLU has done some of the best work in the last five years in this country. There are a number of issues I strongly disagree with the ACLU on, but they have been very courageous on a lot of the worst Bush abuses. And it’s interesting on something like torture. The folks in New York, ACLU, Center for Constitutional Rights, Amnesty, those folks have been in the forefront on torture and all of the think tanks in D.C. have done almost nothing on this, or else they’ve been in favor of that. And that includes think tanks that you would have expected to be concerned about these kinds of abuses. But it’s been the organizations in New York, not D.C., that have been in the forefront on that.

Q: Thank you.

Jim Bovard: Yeah.

Q: Gene Carwin of Portland, Maine. My question is how has the war on terror impacted the Freedom of Information Act requests?

Jim Bovard: Well, I hate to sound cynical.

Q: Oh, please do.

Jim Bovard: Because I was trying hard to kind of change my image and come across cheerful. No, the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Act, it was bad before Bush got in, it’s a lot worse now. And there’s, I think, a lot more open contempt. And it’s frustrating that a lot of people think well, Freedom of Information Act, that’s simply like a special interest for journalists. So many people don’t give a darn, that they have no idea how the government’s using the power over them. And it’s been a number of Freedom of Information Act requests which were answered in part, which have alerted people, because there are far greater abuses going on now. But I’ve written a little bit about that. It didn’t do any good. Congress has passed a law to improve how that would be handled, but there’s one Senator who’s putting a secret block on the bill becoming law. And with the way the Senate works, it’s possible for that one Senator to do that secretly and we have no idea which U.S. Senator has sabotaged making the Freedom of Information Act work a little bit better. This is the kind of thing that could make people lose faith in Congress.

Q: Thank you.

Jim Bovard: Thanks. Yeah?

Q: I’m John Walsh, I’m from Cambridge, Mass., and since it did come up, I’m a member of the ACLU. But I’d like to ask you why you think the libertarian outlook hasn’t been more at the forefront of the antiwar movement? I think that the libertarian point of view has a great hold and a great credibility on the American populace but many people don’t regard themselves as liberals don’t know and don’t know about this and don’t have anyone to follow in opposing the war.

Jim Bovard: Yeah, that’s an excellent question. I’ve been surprised that the libertarian message and movement have not resonated far more broadly with the antiwar efforts. There’s a wonderful Web site, antiwar.com. Their chief columnist is speaking here tomorrow I think. And those folks do great work. But the antiwar message has been almost entirely from the liberal left. And I don’t have a good answer for that. I mean the areas which I’ve worked with, it seemed almost not that comparable with the fact that I would be very critical of Bush but yet I would not be in favor of the Democrats. They seem really perplexed by that. And I think part of the trouble is that, what do I say in public? I think the older generation of *** had a better understanding of how the libertarian message fit in. It’s partly Ronald Reagan, at least before he became president, sounded fairly libertarian at times. And I think that the word may have had more resonance with people 15 or 20 years ago. Maybe I’m wrong on that. But I think part of the reason is that parts of the libertarian movement were in favor of the war. There were folks at Cato that were very openly in favor of the war. Some of the people at Reason magazine were openly in favor of the war. People at the Independent Institute, Bumper, Mises Institute, those folks were all staunchly against the war and never wavered or flinched. But , Cato and Reason have a little more visibility than some of the vehemently antiwar folks. But I’ve asked myself that question and I don’t have a good answer. Yeah?

Q: Sam Bostaph, University of Dallas. I’m a libertarian who has cooperated with the antiwar movement, and I can speak to that point. And I would say one of the things that one has to do is bite one’s tongue when you’re around progressive Democrats and the other liberals in the antiwar movement, because so many of their other positions are so repugnant to libertarian views, and it’s difficult to fit in. So you have to focus on that one issue, antiwar or pro-peace, and write and speak to that issue along with them as comrades for that one issue. So it’s an ad hoc alliance.

Jim Bovard: Yeah. Good advice.

Q: And I think a lot of libertarians are unwilling to do that because you do have to mingle and you have to listen to things you don’t want to hear.

Jim Bovard: It drives me to drink.

Q: With regard to a choice between civil liberties and continued existence, which a lot of people perceive, whether it’s correct or not, is immaterial. Choosing continued existence is not a stupid choice.

Jim Bovard: If you trust the government to give you honest answers.

Q: I understand.

Jim Bovard: Hell of a caveat.

Q: Yeah, that’s a big problem, I’ll grant that. Where was I going with this? Jim Bovard: I didn’t mean to interrupt, sorry.

Q: That’s all right. With regard to committing torture, I can envision hypotheticals under which I would do it. Where I’m structuring the society and writing laws, I would certainly outlaw it. Would I always abide by those laws, I don’t think so. With regard to hypotheticals, I’m interested, have you ever thought of a circumstance under which you would commit torture?

Jim Bovard: Well I have worked with some editors who were late in paying.

Q: Well there’s a good example I suppose. I think one can be reasonable and I think one can envision circumstances where one would do that.

Jim Bovard: Okay, it’s interesting how there’s that faith in the hypothetical. Because way back in my youth, I used to write about agricultural policy. And it was fun to see how Congressman and agriculture columnists would have these very complex models. And they would approve that if these 27 things all happened this way, that government intervention would be a net benefit to society. As long as all these 27 things happened the same way. And even if someone did write a proposal like that, it would go before the House Agriculture Committee and some Congressman would say yeah, well it’s important to double the money for my farmers. And boom, it’s all out the window. With torture policy you have people talking about the ticking time bomb scenario.

But who is tortured and why? If you look at the history of recent U.S. policy, you have people– There was a taxi cab driver who was nabbed in Afghanistan. There is now an award-winning movie about his case. He was nabbed out there, he was wrongly suspected of being a terrorist, and what the U.S. agents did was hang him up and beat him to death. And I don’t know what information that they were thinking of, but there was never any reason to first, even arrest the guy, much less interrogate him, much less beat him to death. This is at Bagram Air Force Base, this is the same place that Cheney visited last year. There was a bomb that went off a mile away from him so he was treated like a combat veteran when he got back. Yeah?

Q: What can you tell us about the executive orders that Bush has signed recently, particularly regarding the National Guard and his being able to take that over?

Jim Bovard: Well thanks for asking. I did an article for the American Conservative magazine last month on that. I’ve got a link to that on my Web site, Jimbovard.com. Congress passed a law, a provision in the Defense Authorization Act last September, which basically made it far easier for the president to declare martial law. As I asked in the article, how many pipe bombs does it take to end American democracy? A lot fewer than it did a year ago. Because this law is very vague and expansive and it basically says that the president can seize power and send in the National Guard if there is a terrorist incident or some other incident. And other incident is not defined. And Bush has a history of kind of squeezing a lot out of these kind of vague phrases. But Congress basically gave no oversight to this. Senator Leahy of Vermont did great work. He said this is a law, if we pass this, we could have martial law. It makes no sense to give the president this power. But for instance, with this new law, say for instance it would be possible for the president to use the Mississippi National Guard to suppress an antiwar demonstration in Boston, or it would be possible for him to send the New York National Guard to go down and disarm people in Mississippi if they didn’t give up their personal weapons in response to the next federal gun control act. This is a huge, seismic change. It makes the president more dangerous and almost nobody in Washington paid attention or gave a damn. Yeah?

Q: I’m John Matfis from Boston. It’s always frustrating being a libertarian, as we probably all know, we are all viewed as wackos and crazy and radical and all those kind of things. And then you can come to a group like this and boy, there are other people who believe in freedom.

Jim Bovard: Lots of wackos.

Q: Lots of wackos, so it’s kind of nice to be in that kind of group. But what can we, as individuals, would you suggest we do. I mean we obviously have a lot of people here, and as single people we don’t really have that much power, but as a united group, do you have any suggestions of what we can do to fight against this ever-encroaching federal government and what can we as individuals, how can we make changes to this government policy?

Jim Bovard: There isn’t a silver bullet, but it’s really great that people get more informed, because I’ve known a lot of people whose heart was in the right place but they didn’t really have a tight grasp on a lot of the arguments and issues and so they would not be as persuasive. But have the courage to speak out for your freedom. Have the courage to go out and protest if there’s something which you want to protest on and it doesn’t matter if the government is videotaping it. The government can take the videotapes and put them where the sun doesn’t shine. People need not to be intimidated by the government. Government is perilous but people need to hold their ground. And it’s been frustrating to me, there are folks I’ve known for years and I’ve seen how they kind of rolled over for the post-9/11 abuses. So, and there’s so many people who should know better. There’s so many people who know the lessons of history and have seen what has happened in other countries when governments would be setting the same kind of precedents. Because what Bush and his team, and what the media tell you to do, is look at each abuse in isolation, as a single incident. But , this is a trend line and things, , it’s sort of like dominoes falling. The news media and the White House say well don’t worry, that’s only one domino, yet how many others is it knocking down? So have the courage to speak out. It certainly helps to buy books. People ask me what can people do, I say buy books. That’s the first step. There are some good groups out there like the Future of Freedom Foundation that’s kept the flag high, some of the liberal left groups. So, I wish I had a better answer on that because I’m not satisfied with the answer either.

Q: Ed Elmer from San Antonio, Texas. I just wanted to offer a historical example for how badly torture can backfire for a powerful regime. My example is a relatively harmless Middle Eastern subversive who ran afoul of his government and probably would still be unknown except that the government publicly tortured him to death. You’ve probably heard of this subversive. His name was Jesus Christ.

Jim Bovard: That’s a good point. One other example on the torture. Folks say well, it wasn’t that many people, and so on and so forth, but from one perspective, orture has cost the lives of half a million people in the last few years. Because some of the key evidence that the Bush Administration got for invading Iraq came from torture. And there was one guy especially who was the key person for providing a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. I think I’ve got that detail right. But it was torture and this guy had the wonderful confession and that helped buttress the U.S. going to war against Iraq. And it later turned out that it was total BS, the government should have known it, and now we’ve got thousands of dead Americans. We’ve got tens of thousands of maimed Americans, we’ve got hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis thanks in part to torture. So, it’s a real pleasure to speak to such a fine audience and I appreciate the chance to catch y’all here.

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Leftists, Code Pink, and a smattering of conservatives and libertarians staged a vociferous protest outside the White House while President Obama made his Syria speech this afternoon. The police forcibly cleared the street (though not the sidewalk) shortly before Obama began talking. Some folks suggested that Obama might have delayed his speech because of the noisy chants behind heard inside. (I have no confirmation on that.) I profoundly disagree with the Answer folks on many issues but they raised a ruckus on the right side of the issue today.

Code Pink brought this great cutout today.

The Secret Service (or maybe Park Police) rode in to disrupt a peaceful protest.

This Park Service dude made a point to slowly scan everyone in the audience with his camera.

A group of Syrians who vociferously favored U.S. bombing Syria.  Go figure.

Some conservative and libertarian protestors:

The post Great Antiwar Protest At White House During Obama Speech appeared first on James Bovard.

This great cartoon from Tom Toles this morn almost compensated for all the idiotic editorials the Washington Post publishes on Syria and other subjects.

The only thing the cartoon was missing was a couple of deranged TSA agents descending on the spectator to force him to produce a DNA sample.

Scott Adams has done a superb series on the National Security Agency and its outrages.  You can see the whole story at  www.dilbert.com.  The Saturday installment proffered one technique to respond to federal intrusions:

The post Great Cartoon on our Obscene Surveillance State appeared first on James Bovard.

Folks will raise hell on Capitol Hill on Saturday afternoon to protest NSA surveillance outrages. Weather forecast is encouraging – and it should be a fun time. Among the 100+ sponsoring organizations are Antiwar.com and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

They have a bevy of excellent speakers slated. Last I heard, neither Obama nor Joe Biden will be making cameo appearances at the event.

Here is an excellent video from the Electronic Frontier Foundation on why people should take to the streets to oppose mass suveillance.

Details on the march/rally – which starts at Union Station at noon – are available here. There will also be viewing parties in various places around the nation.

I will probably go to the DC protest and post some photos of protestors afterwards.

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Posted online today by the Future of Freedom Foundation – from the August 2013 issue of the Future of Freedom -

Where’s the Body Count from Shootings by the Police?

by James Bovard

Barack Obama has made curtailing Americans’ right to own firearms one of his highest priorities. Earlier this year, he appealed to “all the Americans who are counting on us to keep them safe from harm.” He also declared, “If there is even one life we can save, we’ve got an obligation to try.” But some perils are not worth registering on Obama’s scorecard.

While the president’s strident warnings about privately owned guns evoked a hallelujah media chorus, his administration is scorning a mandate to track how many Americans are shot and killed each year by government agents. The same 1994 law that temporarily banned the sale of assault weapons also required the federal government to compile data on police shootings nationwide. However, neither the Justice Department nor most local police departments have bothered to tally such occurrences.

Instead, the Justice Department relied on the National Crime Survey of citizens to gauge the police use of force. But as Prof. James Fyfe, one of the nation’s foremost experts on police shootings, observed in 2001, that survey relies on “questions about how often the respondents have been subjected to police use of force. Since dead people can’t participate in such a survey, this work tells us nothing about how often police kill.”

Many police shootings involve self-defense against violent criminals or protection of people against dangerous culprits in the act of wreaking havoc. However, killings by police are not a negligible proportion of the nation’s firearms death toll. Shootings by police accounted for almost 10 percent of the homicides in Los Angeles County in 2010, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Jim Fisher, a former FBI agent and criminal law professor, compiled a database of police shootings and estimated that in the United States in 2011 police shot more than 1,100 people, killing 607. Fisher relied on the Internet to track the casualties, and the actual toll may be significantly higher. (Many police departments are secretive about their shootings and succeed in withholding either numbers or key details from the public.) Fisher’s numbers do not include cases of off-duty police who shoot acquaintances, such as the recent case of the married veteran D.C. policeman convicted of murdering his girlfriend and leaving their 11-month-old baby to die in an overheated SUV to avoid paying child support.

According to the FBI, 323 people were killed nationwide by rifles in 2011 — less than 4 percent of the total deaths by firearms. The official statistics are not broken down by the type of rifle, so it is impossible to know how many of the victims were slain with the type of weapons that Sen. Dianne Feinstein and presumably Obama classify as assault weapons. Nationwide, 10 percent of the killings with rifles were committed by law enforcement officers, according to the FBI. Ironically, the raw numbers of killings by police are tossed into the firearm-fatality totals that some politicians invoke to drum up support for confiscating privately owned guns.

Protecting killers

Not only do government agencies fail to track official violence against Americans; they also sometimes preemptively exonerate all such attacks. A 2001 Justice Department report, “Policing and Homicide, 1976–1998,” labeled everyone in the nation who perished as a result of a police shooting as “felons justifiably killed by police.” There were hundreds, if not thousands, of people shot unjustifiably by the police in those decades, but their innocence vanished in the flicker of a federal label. The Justice Department was so embarrassed by the report’s “lack of distinction between justifiable police shootings and murders, that it did not send out its usual promotional material announcing the report,” according to the New York Times.

The odds of an honest, thorough investigation of a police killing are the same as the odds that a politician’s campaign speech will be strictly assessed for perjury. At the state and local level the deck is often stacked to vindicate all police shootings. Police unions have strong- armed legislation that guarantees their members sweeping procedural advantages in any post-shooting investigation.

For instance, Maryland police are protected by a Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights that prohibits questioning a police officer for 10 days after any incident in which he or she used deadly force. “A lawyer or a police union official is always summoned to the scene of a shooting to make sure no one speaks to the officer who pulled the trigger,” the Washington Post noted in an exposé of the Prince George’s County, Maryland, police. “Between 1990 and 2001 Prince George’s police shot 122 people…. Almost half of those shot were unarmed, and many had committed no crime.”

Forty-seven people were killed by the P.G. police in that time. Among the shootings the P.G. police department ruled as justified: “An unarmed construction worker was shot in the back after he was detained in a fast-food restaurant. An unarmed suspect died in a fusillade of 66 bullets as he tried to flee in a car from police. A homeless man was shot when police mistook his portable radio for a gun. And an unarmed man was killed after he pulled off the road to relieve himself.”

The situation in Clark County, Nevada, which had one of the highest rates of police-committed homicides in the nation, is equally perverse. An excellent Las Vegas Review-Journal series in late 2011 noted, “In 142 fatal police shootings in the Las Vegas Valley over a little more than the past 20 years, no coroner’s jury has returned a ruling adverse to police.” But that nonconviction rate actually convicts the entire system. “The deck is stacked in favor of police well before the case gets to the [coroner’s] jurors. That’s because the ‘neutral arbiter of the facts’ is the deputy district attorney who already believes that no crime has been committed. In a comparison of inquest transcripts, evidence files, and police reports dating to 1990, the Review-Journal found that prosecutors commonly act more like defense attorneys, shaping inquest presentations to cast officers in the most positive light.”

Another problem is that, as Nevada lawyer Brent Bryson observed, “Frequently in fatal shootings, you just have officers’ testimony and no other witnesses. And most people just don’t want to believe that a police officer would behave wrongly.”

Investigations of shootings by police in Las Vegas were stymied in 2010 and 2011 because “police unions balked at inquest reforms, first by advising members not to testify at the hearings and then helping officers file a lawsuit challenging the new system’s constitutionality,” according to the Review-Journal. Las Vegas is so deferential to police that, in cases “where an officer shoots but only wounds or misses entirely … the district attorney looks at the case only if the shooting subject is being prosecuted,” the Review-Journal noted.

Federal cops

Federal agents who kill Americans enjoy similar legal privileges. The Justice Department’s view of the untouchability of federal lawmen is clear from its action in the Idaho trial of FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi. Horiuchi gained renown in 1992 after he shot and killed 42-year-old Vicki Weaver as she stood in the door of her cabin holding her 10-month-old baby. Horiuchi had shot her husband in the back moments earlier, though Randy Weaver posed no threat to federal agents at the time. The FBI initially labeled its Ruby Ridge operation a big success and indicated Vicki Weaver was a fair target; later the agency claimed that her killing was accidental.

Boundary County, Idaho, prosecutor Denise Woodbury filed manslaughter charges against Horiuchi in 1997. FBI Director Louis Freeh was outraged that a local court would attempt to hold an FBI agent legally responsible for the killing. He declared that Horiuchi had an “exemplary record” and was “an outstanding agent and continues to have my total support and confidence.” Freeh added, “The FBI is doing everything within its power to ensure [Horiuchi] is defended to the full extent and that his rights as a federal law-enforcement officer are fully protected.” Justice Department lawyers persuaded a judge to move Horiuchi’s case from a state court to a federal court, where federal agencies have far more procedural advantages. Although a confidential Justice Department report concluded that Horiuchi acted unconstitutionally, Justice Department lawyers argued vigorously that he was exempt from any state or local prosecution because he was carrying out federal orders at the time he gunned Vicki Weaver down.

Federal judge Edward Lodge found in 1998 that the state of Idaho could not prosecute Horiuchi for the killing, in a ruling focusing on Horiuchi’s “subjective beliefs”: As long as Horiuchi supposedly did not believe he was violating anyone’s rights or acting wrongfully, then he could not be tried.

The judge blamed Vicki Weaver for her own death, ruling that “it would be objectively reasonable for Mr. Horiuchi to believe that one would not expect a mother to place herself and her baby behind an open door outside the cabin after a shot had been fired and her husband had called out that he had been hit.” Thus, if an FBI agent wrongfully shoots one family member, the government somehow becomes entitled to slay the rest of the family unless they run and hide.

The greater the automatic presumption that government shootings are justified, the more arbitrary power police will have over Americans. And this growing sense of legal inferiority to officialdom will naturally make gun owners ever more attached to their own firearms. According to Obama and other anti-gun politicians, this is simply evidence of paranoia — and another reason to take away people’s guns before they do harm.

The federal government has no credibility condemning vast numbers of private gun owners as long as it refuses to compile the casualty count from government agents. Washington has deluged state and local law-enforcement agencies with billions of dollars in aid in recent years but will not even ask the recipients for honest body counts. No amount of political tub-thumping can change the fact that Americans are far more likely to be killed by police than by assault weapons.

The post Where is the Body Count from Police Shootings? appeared first on James Bovard.

The New York Times has an excellent column today on how Abe Lincoln destroyed religious freedom during the Civil War with a wink and a nod.  Huntington College professor Sean Scott details how Presbyterian minister Samuel B. McPheeters was expelled from his St. Louis by a northern military commander for refusing to embrace the northern cause.  McPheeters sought to keep politics out of his church and his sermons, but that was unacceptable for the Union commander.  McPheeters traveled to Washington to meet with Lincoln to vindicate his freedom.

Scott writes:

Having heard both parties in person, on Jan. 2, 1863, Lincoln advised Curtis how to proceed. He believed that McPheeters truly sympathized with the South, yet he found no reason for expelling the minister, since he had taken an oath of allegiance and had not been charged with committing any act or neglecting any duty worthy of such treatment.

However, even though he doubted the propriety of punishing a citizen on the mere suspicion of disloyal sentiments, he gave Curtis permission to act in whatever manner he thought best for securing “the public good.” Lincoln then appended one of the most important statements made during the war regarding the proper relation between church and state: “The U.S. government must not, as by this order, undertake to run the churches. When an individual, in a church or out of it, becomes dangerous to the public interest, he must be checked; but let the churches, as such take care of themselves.”

The president clearly disapproved of civil and military authorities becoming entangled in religious affairs by removing certain ministers and appointing others without conclusive evidence of traitorous activity, but by deferring to the judgment of local officials, he practically ensured that such abuses would continue to occur.

We have seen plenty of such “wink and nod” destructions of freedom in recent years. Unfortunately, much of the media and many judges permit presidents and their appointees to destroy due process as long as the president pretends to respect the Constitution.

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From the August 2013 issue of The Future of Freedom -

The Sordid History of IRS Political Abuse

by James Bovard

The power to tax has long conferred the power to destroy one’s political opponents. When the latest IRS politicization scandal erupted in May, many commentators talked as if the abuses were a novelty in American history. But, as David Burnham noted in his masterful 1990 book, A Law Unto Itself: The IRS and the Abuse of Power, “In almost every administration since the IRS’s inception the information and power of the tax agency have been mobilized for explicitly political purposes.”

The IRS has a long history of trying to ruin the political careers of its critics. In 1925, Internal Revenue Commissioner David Blair personally delivered a demand for $10 million in back taxes to Michigan’s Republican Sen. James Couzens — who had launched an investigation of the Bureau of Internal Revenue — as he stepped out of the Senate chamber. Couzens fought the case, and eventually proved that he had actually overpaid his taxes by roughly $1 million. But the precedent of using threats to deflect oversight was firmly established.

President Franklin Roosevelt used the IRS to harass newspaper publishers, including William Randolph Hearst and Moses Annenberg (publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer). He also dropped the IRS hammer on political rivals such as Huey Long and Father Coughlin, and prominent Republicans like former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Perhaps Roosevelt’s most pernicious tax skullduggery occurred in 1944 when he spiked an IRS audit of massive illegal campaign contributions from a government contractor to Texas Rep. Lyndon Johnson. Johnson’s career would likely have been destroyed if Texans had learned of his dirty dealing. Instead, Johnson survived, and scores of thousands of Americans and more than a million Vietnamese died as a result.

John F. Kennedy raised the political exploitation of the IRS to an art form. Shortly after capturing the presidency, he denounced “the discordant voices of extremism” and, in a passage that could have been lifted from Obama’s recent Ohio State University commencement speech, derided people “who would sow the seeds of doubt and hate” and make Americans distrust their leaders.

At a news conference a few days later, a reporter sought his views on the legality of campaign contributions supporting “right-wing extremist groups.” Kennedy replied, “As long as they meet the requirements of the tax law, I don’t think that the Federal Government can interfere or should interfere with the right of any individual to take any position he wants. The only thing we should be concerned about is that it does not represent a diversion of funds which might be taxable to — for nontaxable purposes. But that is another question, and I am sure the Internal Revenue system examines that.”

Actually, Kennedy heavily elbowed the IRS to make sure that it targeted the tax-exempt status of conservative organizations that had criticized Kennedy or his agenda. The IRS launched the Ideological Organizations Audit Project, which targeted numerous right-leaning groups, including the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade and the American Enterprise Institute. Shortly before his assassination, Kennedy specified that he wanted an “aggressive program” against the IRS targets. Kennedy also used the IRS to bolster compliance with “voluntary” price controls, targeting steel executives who defied the administration for audits.

Nixon’s tax enforcers

A 1976 Senate report noted, “By directing tax audits at individuals and groups solely because of their political beliefs, the Ideological Organizations Audit Project established a precedent for a far more elaborate program of targeting ‘dissidents.’” After Richard Nixon took office, his administration quickly created a Special Services Staff (SSS) to mastermind “all IRS activities involving ideological, militant, subversive, radical, and similar type organizations.” More than 10,000 groups and individuals were targeted because of their political activism or slant between 1969 and 1973, including the John Birch Society and Nobel laureate Linus Pauling. The IRS was also given a list of Nixon’s official enemies to, in the words of White House counsel John Dean, “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” Contributors to the Democratic Party were also high on Nixon’s target list.

Nixon’s administration vastly expanded a secret computer database — the “Intelligence Gathering and Retrieval System” the IRS began in 1963 — to sweep up information on individual Americans and groups. By 1975 the IRS had stockpiled data on almost half a million persons and groups; the program was abolished after its existence became known outside of official circles.

The exposure of Nixon’s IRS abuses profoundly weakened him during the uproar after the Watergate break-in. The second article of his 1974 impeachment charged him with endeavoring to “obtain from the IRS … confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.” Congress enacted legislation to severely restrict political contacts between the White House and the IRS.

But the IRS continued its freelance work. After Sen. Joe Montoya of New Mexico announced plans in 1972 to hold hearings on IRS abuses, the agency added his name to a list of tax protestors who were capable of violence against IRS agents. When IRS Commissioner Donald Alexander was challenged on the listing at a 1975 Senate hearing, he replied, “The only connection that I can think of immediately is that Senator Montoya is, after all, the Chairman of the IRS Appropriations Subcommittee, and someone might have thought that he did violence to our appropriation.” Information from an IRS investigation of Montoya was leaked to the Washington Post. Partly as a result of the IRS leak, Montoya lost his reelection bid.

The IRS targets conservatives

In the following decades the IRS regularly sparked outrage by abusing innocent taxpayers, but there was scant controversy about the agency’s politicization until Bill Clinton took office. In 1995 the White House and the Democratic National Committee produced a 331-page report, “Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce,” that attacked magazines, think tanks, and other entities and individuals who had criticized Clinton. In subsequent years many organizations that were mentioned in the White House report were hit by IRS audits. More than 20 conservative organizations — including the Heritage Foundation and the American Spectator — and almost a dozen high-profile Clinton critics were audited.

The Landmark Legal Foundation sued the IRS after being audited. Its brief quoted an IRS official who claimed at a meeting that documents revealing the names of congressmen and their staffers who had requested audits were being or had been shredded. The official went on to recommend tactics for masking such requests in the future. The IRS claimed that it could not find 114 key files relating to possible political manipulation of audits of tax-exempt organizations. The Clinton administration fought vociferously to prevent Americans from learning how it had abused IRS powers. As a Wall Street Journal editorial noted, “The IRS position is incredible. It says letters from politicians asking that someone be audited are confidential tax-return information.”

Bipartisan tax bullying

In perhaps the least recognized media bombshell of the Clinton era, the Associated Press reported in late 1999 that “officials in the Democratic White House and members of both parties in Congress have prompted hundreds of audits of political opponents in the 1990s,” including “personal demands for audits from members of Congress.” Audit requests from congressmen were marked “expedited” or “hot politically,” and IRS officials were obliged to respond within 15 days. The AP noted, “The IRS computer tracking system in Washington denotes the name of a politician who refers a matter. The original letter from the White House or lawmaker is forwarded to the case agent.” Permitting congressmen to secretly and effortlessly sic G-men on whomever they pleased epitomized official Washington’s contempt for average Americans and fair play. But because the abuse was bipartisan, it evinced little or no interest on Capitol Hill.

After Obama’s first presidential election, conservative groups began mobilizing across the nation to resist what they perceived as his socialist policies and programs. By mid-2010, conservative organizations were complaining of harassment by the IRS. The Obama administration perpetually denied that any such targeting was occurring. However, a May 2013 Inspector General report confirmed that IRS employees had devoted far more scrutiny (sometimes amounting to seeming harassment) to nonprofit applications that used the terms “tea party” or “patriot” or that criticized government spending or federal deficits. The Inspector General report concluded, “Developing and using criteria that focuses on organization names and policy positions instead of the activities … does not promote public confidence that tax-exempt laws are being adhered to impartially.” Surprise, surprise.

Congress claims to be vigorously investigating the latest scandal, and further facts may come out in the future. Thus far the media have largely ignored how the Obama-era abuses vivify how the tax code allows rulers to suppress political opposition. This fundamental truth has burst forth only occasionally over the past century — perhaps most eloquently in a 1967 federal appeals court decision overturning the conviction of a leftist Oregon lawyer: “The court will not place its stamp of approval upon a witch-hunt, a crusade to rid society of unorthodox thinkers and actors by using the federal income tax laws” to silence them.

But as long as the federal tax code is incomprehensible to most Americans, the IRS will continue to have vast power over its targets. And we cannot expect politicians to fix the problem as long as they expect to profit from the IRS’s machinations. But, as Alexander Hamilton, later the nation’s first secretary of the treasury, warned in 1782, “Whatever liberty we may boast in theory, it cannot exist in fact while [arbitrary tax] assessments continue.”

Tagline: Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan and nine other books.

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The New York Times has a helpful chronology of how Obama has totally sold out Americans’ privacy and the Fourth Amendment.    I remember how George W. Bush would praise freedom at the same time he announced policies that trampled the Constitution.  I assume Obama will include similar claptrap in his “NSA Vindication” speech on Friday.

I did a word search of the Times piece and it didn’t include the word “weasel.”

The post A Helpful Chronology of Obama’s Sellout on Government Spying appeared first on James Bovard.

A front page Washington Post piece revealed today that Hillary Clinton is racing to finish her memoir so that she can define her legacy in time for her 2016 presidential run.

Shortly after Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State, she promised to reform foreign aid. Egypt has gotten billions of aid in the meantime – thanks in part to Hillary’s shilling.  After her devoted efforts for the Egyptian regime, maybe this cartoon (inspired by last week’s bogus referendum on the new Constitution)  best captures her achievement:

[ a Tom Toro cartoon from the New Yorker]

The post Hillary Clinton’s Legacy: Democracy in Egypt appeared first on James Bovard.

The fine folks at the New Hampshire Liberty Forum are placing online videos of the speeches at last week’s conference.  Here’s the first talk I gave (the “Libertarian Hooligan” speech should be online later).

As I was going through the TSA checkpoint last Sunday at the Manchester, NH airport, I was cross-examined by a TSA Behavior Detection Officer (BDO). The BDO engages in “chat-downs” of travelers to select which passengers are pulled aside for special searches or third-degree interrogation. (I paid tribute to those dudes in a Washington Times piece a few months ago.)

This BDO guy was a colicky, low-watt, middle-aged white guy who looked like he signed on with TSA after receiving a pension for spending 30 years writing parking tickets in some one-horse New England town.

He  asked if I was traveling on business or pleasure.

“Business.”

“What were doing in New Hampshire?” he grumbled.

“I was giving a speech on the TSA.”

“Huh.  How did it go?”

“It was a great audience. They seemed to really enjoy the speech.”

“Okay” -  and he shrugged and signaled I could move along.

I was waiting for his followup question – and I would have told him folks liked the speech because every person there despised his agency and would like to see him thrown out of his uniform and into the street.

The NH Liberty Forum is part of the Free State Project - stockful of  hard-working hardliners who are trying to change their state & the nation.

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From the Future of Freedom Foundation -

A Supreme Rebuff for Ruinous Raisin Regime

by James Bovard

The Supreme Court in June finally opened the door for farmers to escape from one of the most dictatorial bureaucratic regimes in the federal government. But it remains to be seen whether farmers will secure freedom and justice or be dragged into another endless array of court battles and appeals.

The latest squabble has its origins in the New Deal. When Franklin Roosevelt became president in 1933, his secretary of the Department of Agriculture (USDA), Henry Wallace, and others urged him to appoint a temporary “farm dictator.” Congress quickly enacted legislation that vested vast power in the secretary and his deputies. Four years later Congress enacted the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act, which authorized the creation of marketing boards to forcibly boost prices.

Marketing orders were based on the New Deal philosophy of “managed abundance” — prosperity through “universal monopoly and universal scarcity.” Americans quickly realized that it was not in the public interest to give private industry a federal license to conspire to gouge their customers. But such prerogatives have been retained by USDA marketing committees.

The Raisin Administrative Committee, one of the most powerful boards, can confiscate up to half of raisin farmers’ harvest with little or no compensation. The feds perpetually invoke the danger of surpluses to nullify raisin farmers’ property rights. Marvin Horne, a 67-year-old raisin farmer in Fresno, Calif., was fined almost $700,000 for refusing to surrender control of 47 percent of his harvest to the government committee in 2002.

Horne, who has been growing raisins for more than 40 years, has battled the raisin committee for more than a decade. At the start of the clash, he notified the USDA of why he was not submitting:

We are growers that will pack and market our raisins. We reserve our rights under the Constitution of the United States…. The Marketing Order Regulating Raisins has become a tool for grower bankruptcy, poverty, and involuntary servitude. The Marketing Order Regulating Raisins is a complete failure for growers, handlers, and the USDA…. We will not relinquish ownership of our crop. We put forth the money and effort to grow it, not the Raisin Administrative Committee. This is America, not a communist state.

Horne and his lawyers challenged the government because they considered the USDA penalties to be an “unconstitutional taking of private property without just compensation.” They fought all the way to the Supreme Court, which heard arguments on the case in late March. The sordid details of the case seemed to shock the Court’s “liberals.” Many, if not most, justices sounded clueless about how far USDA’s iron fist stretches. Justice Stephen Breyer was dumbfounded by that argument, declaring, “I can’t believe that Congress wanted the taxpayers to pay for a program that’s going to mean they have to pay higher prices as consumers.” Breyer apparently never heard of the USDA’s sugar program, which intentionally inflates prices and costs consumers billions of dollars a year. Actually, the raisin regime is even more perverse — since it intentionally dumps supposed “surplus” raisins on world markets at fire-sale prices. Foreigners often pay much lower prices for California raisins than do Americans.

Justice Elena Kagan suggested that the 1937 Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act, which authorizes the raisin restrictions, could be “the world’s most outdated law.” Though purporting to serve farmers, the act creates endless administrative hoops and legal tripwires for its beneficiaries. Justice Sonia Sotomayor sounded so confused by the case’s administrative and legal tangle that she was in danger of spinning out of her chair.

The Obama administration and the USDA insisted that, even though the government commandeers raisin farmers’ harvest, there was no “taking” because the seizure drives up the price of the remaining raisins. They invoked a federal appeals court ruling that the government need not pay compensation because Horne and his wife “voluntarily choose to send their raisins into the stream of interstate commerce.”

Since farmers chose to sell their crop in interstate commerce, the government claimed that it was entitled to nearly unlimited sway over the harvest. But since when did state lines nullify property rights? The fact that a business’s products are sold beyond its own neighborhood should not automatically turn the producer into bureaucratic cannon fodder. Or should we presume that the USDA is like a medieval robber baron, entitled to seize half of the produce that passes near his fortified checkpoint? Justice Antonin Scalia aptly described the USDA as offering farmers a choice: “Your raisins or your life.”

Market orders

Though federal agricultural boards are empowered to coercively impose “orderly marketing,” the USDA has never defined what that term means. When asked what orderly marketing was, USDA Assistant Secretary for Marketing C.W. McMillan admitted in 1986, “I have no idea what that is. I have never heard anyone define orderly marketing.” In practice, the term “orderly markets” has come to mean simply markets controlled by government officials and boards.

Marketing orders are intended to produce higher prices. In 1984 the USDA’s chief judicial officer, Donald Campbell, declared that the secretary of agriculture’s “statutory duty is to protect the interests of the producers…. The essential purpose of the [Agricultural Marketing] Act is to raise producer prices. If a marketing order can double producer prices in a particular year … that is exactly what Congress had in mind when it passed the Act.”

USDA-finagled higher prices usually lead to increased production and drive down consumption, which increases the amount of surplus. Marketing-order supply restrictions tend to make markets progressively more and more unbalanced. The more successful the USDA is in inflating prices, the greater the apparent need for government supply controls. Ed Schuh, the chairman of the agricultural economics department at the University of Minnesota, observed in 1985, “Ultimately it is the instability of government policy and government intervention that cause the instability in commodity markets.”

Supply controls epitomize the USDA’s paranoia toward price fluctuations — typical of any bureaucracy, where stability is the highest value, and risk and uncertainty are supreme evils. With marketing orders the USDA thinks it is better to have high prices every year than a low price one year and a high price the next year. Its preference is contrary to the inherent nature of agriculture, according to records dating back to 8000 B.C.

Federal marketing orders exemplify the quasi-covert nature of much of contemporary government coercion. If the USDA sent armed agents into every grocery store in the country and arrested shoppers who sought to buy too many California raisins, it would be universally denounced as God’s prize idiot. Instead, the government imposes its controls directly on California farms and fruit handlers — and few Americans recognize how their government is thwarting the bounty of the nation’s farms.

It is unclear why the Obama administration feels obliged to defend the raisin regime. Perhaps the administration’s masterminds presume that it is another government program that cannot possibly be as stupid as it looks. Or perhaps the fact that the program is long-established proves that it deserves all the power it has seized. Many “liberals” have remained totally ignorant on USDA supply controls because they have scant curiosity on how government actually uses its power. Because they presume that government is benevolent, they do not need to sweat the specifics of its good deeds. But it is in the grisly details where Americans’ rights and liberties are increasingly shredded.

There is nothing unique about raisins that requires nullifying the constitutional rights of raisin growers. Markets for raisins are volatile — as are the markets for hundreds of other farm products grown in the United States. (In the absence of government, futures markets are capable of smoothing out extreme swings.) The raisin committee’s sweeping powers have failed to prevent vast swings in prices farmers receive. Many California farmers have simply given up, and the acreage devoted to raisin production has decreased by 75,000 acres since 2000. There is no excuse for restricting the supply of one commodity that should not apply to restricting the supply of all commodities. The same market mechanisms that suffice for radishes, raspberries, and rhubarb could serve raisins just fine.

In June the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the Obama administration and USDA position. In an opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court sent the case back to lower federal courts to rule on the constitutionality of the raisin roundup. Thomas wrote that a raisin handler “who refuses to comply with a marketing order and waits for an enforcement action will be liable for significant monetary penalties if his constitutional challenge fails.” He pointed out the injustice of requiring producers to jump through endless bureaucratic hoops before getting a court ruling: “In the case of an administrative enforcement proceeding, when a party raises a constitutional defense to an assessed fine, it would make little sense to require the party to pay the fine in one proceeding and then turn around and sue for recovery of that same money in another proceeding.”

The decision was hailed as a regulatory rollback by Rachel Brand of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: “This case is about how many hoops individuals or businesses must jump through to stop the government from trampling their property rights. This boils down to the Court preventing regulators from strong-arming businesses with the threat of endless litigation.”

Though it would have been far better if the Supreme Court had directly condemned the USDA takings, at least the Court did not uphold the regulatory regime. The tenor of the justices’ comments in oral arguments serves as a warning to any lower court that might choose to uphold the USDA confiscations.

Tagline: Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan and 9 other books.

This article was originally published in the December 2013 edition of Future of Freedom.

On Twitter – @jimbovard

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The IRS did not start its mischief recently.  Here’s a piece of mine published on April 14, 1994 -

Wall Street Journal  -The Growing IRS Dictatorship

By James Bovard

A Gallup Poll released last week found that two-thirds of Americans believe that the Internal Revenue Service abuses its power. Yet few people realize exactly how much arbitrary power politicians and judges have granted IRS agents over other Americans. The IRS has become the authoritarian means to paternalistic ends.

People can fall under the IRS’s sway even when they believe they are dealing with their own tax accountant. The IRS has conducted hundreds of undercover operations in recent years in which IRS agents have been officially permitted to masquerade as professionals and to entice other citizens to violate tax laws. The IRS admitted in 1989 that it was using 900 controlled informants (double agents) and that 40 of those informants were accountants.

IRS undercover and other agents are practically given official permission to scorn the law of the land. The IRS’s official manual states: “In receiving unsolicited information for the first time from an informant, the Service may accept the information and, in accordance with its value, may pay for such information even if it may have been obtained illegally by the informant.” A federal appeals court ruled on Dec. 30 that evidence illegally seized by an FBI agent can be used by the IRS in a tax prosecution.

The IRS has multiplied its use of force against U.S. citizens in recent years. Since 1980, the number of levies — IRS seizures of bank accounts and paychecks — has increased fourfold, reaching 3.3 million in 1992. Unfortunately, the IRS makes tens of thousands of unjustified seizures each year, according to the General Accounting Office.

The most frequent reason for the wrongful levies is the IRS’s failure to accurately record citizens’ and businesses’ tax payments. The GAO noted: “IRS procedures require that levy notices be reviewed for completeness and readability prior to mailing. This process, however, is normally limited to a check of the name and address appearing on the levy.” This is a pathetic standard of review for seizing private citizens’ savings.

IRS officials have sweeping discretionary power to financially destroy people’s lives. Take, for example, the case of Melvin Powers. In 1983 the IRS decided to investigate Mr. Powers’s 1978 and 1979 tax returns. Mr. Powers was a Houston builder and owner of five office buildings; he had only an eighth-grade education. The IRS had made no effort to examine Mr. Powers’s tax returns during the three years of the statute of limitations. Six weeks before the statute expired, an IRS agent asked Mr. Powers to sign a waiver of his statute of limitations, allowing the IRS to investigate him for another three years. Mr. Powers willingly agreed. In 1986, the IRS disallowed almost all of Mr. Powers’s business deductions for 1978 and 1979 and demanded $7,145,266.71 in back taxes, interest and penalties.

Shortly after the IRS’s assessment, a bankruptcy court trustee “seized all of [Mr. Powers's] operations, caused [Mr. Powers] to vacate his office premises, and took possession of his books and records for all years,” as a 1993 Tax Court decision noted. Then, in early 1991, the IRS reversed itself and conceded that Mr. Powers actually had legitimate losses for the years under scrutiny and thus owed no taxes for those years. After IRS officials canceled the $7 million tax bill, Mr. Powers successfully sued the IRS to cover his legal costs for the case. U.S. Tax Court Judge John Colvin noted last year that the IRS “contends that there is a basis in law for the notice of deficiency because the notice of deficiency is presumed correct” and that the IRS “made no attempt to obtain information about the case before” demanding a $7 million payment.

Amazingly, the IRS declares that it is entitled to impose penalties or seize property for overdue taxes even after the agency admits sending tax deficiency notices to the wrong address. Turn to the case of Clayton and Darlene Powell.

The Powells moved from Adelphi, Md., to Mitchellville, Md., in late 1987, and filed a tax return with their new address in early 1988. A few weeks after the IRS received the Powells’ new address, the agency sent a notice of deficiency for their 1984 tax return to their old address. The local post office — though it had the forwarding address — returned the notice to the IRS. Though the three-year statute of limitations had expired on the Powells’ 1984 return, on Dec. 28, 1988, the IRS sent a notice to their new address giving the couple 10 days to pay $6,864 in back taxes, interest and penalties or have their property seized. The Powells paid and then sued the IRS to get a refund.

The federal appeals court ruled that “the Powells are entirely innocent” and ordered the IRS to issue a refund. The IRS then appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, contending that as long as the IRS mailed a tax deficiency notice to a taxpayer’s “last known address,” the taxpayer must be presumed to have received the notice — even when it is indisputable that he did not receive it.

The Justice Department, in its brief on this case, noted that the IRS “issues more than 2 million notices of deficiency each year and approximately 240,000 of those notices were returned undelivered during the past year.” The Justice Department whined that requiring the IRS to actually notify citizens of tax assessments before final seizure notices would impose “unmanageable detective burdens” on the IRS. “This case threatens to create a ‘window of time’ during which the Internal Revenue Service may be helpless to protect its rights in pursuing delinquent taxpayers,” the Justice Department fretted.

The Supreme Court denied the government’s request to re-examine the Powell case. Yet even though the IRS lost in federal appeals court on this issue and paid back the Powells, the agency has formally chosen to disregard that court’s verdict — to follow a policy of “nonacquiescence,” in legal terms. The IRS believes the court made a mistake and thus that the agency has no obligation to respect its decision. This means average taxpayers will have to spend thousands of dollars in legal costs to re-achieve the basic rights that the appeals court sought to give them. The Powell case epitomizes the IRS perspective that the citizen has an unlimited obligation to comply with its demands — even when the IRS fails to inform the citizen of its demands.

Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland declared in 1933, “The powers of taxation are broad, but the distinction between taxation and confiscation must still be observed.” Unfortunately, this distinction is increasingly lost to the average taxpayer facing the full force of government revenue collectors.

—Mr. Bovard is the author of “Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty,” just out from St. Martin’s Press.

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Libertarian hardline hell-raiser talk show host Scott Horton and I had a rattlin’ good chat yesterday on his radio show about the Cluster Bomb Congress article, asset forfeiture, police brutality, and a couple other damn outrages. Being on Scott’s show always vaccinates me against my moderate tendencies.

You can download or listen to the show by clicking below -

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Twenty-one years ago today, the FBI assaulted and demolished the Branch Davidians’ home outside of Waco, Texas. That assault and the subsequent coverups helped redefine the relation of the federal government to the American people.  Millions of citizens never looked at Washington the same afterwards.

I reposted some of the articles I did in 1995 on Waco for Wall Street Journal and New Republic last year on this blog here.

Following is the start of the chapter on Waco and Ruby Ridge  from Public Policy Hooligan.

“Flummoxing the FBI”

As I was busting tail to finish Lost Rights, I straggled down the steps from my bedroom to my living room one April 1993 morning with the usual deadline hangover (unfortunately, completely unrelated to alcohol). I tossed a slab of the previous night’s pizza in the microwave, fetched the newspapers from the sidewalk, and flipped on the television to see if the world had gone to hell overnight.

As my eyes were still focusing for the day, I saw what looked like tanks smashing gaping holes in the side of a dilapidated building. And then CNN bubbleheads chirped that the FBI had notified the Branch Davidians that “this is not an assault.” But the Davidians’ home outside of Waco was not collapsing solely because of high winds on that Texas prairie.

I was tethered to the TV for half an hour, pacing back and forth while puffing a cigar and cussing blue streaks that would have impressed Huck Finn’s father. At that point, my wife and I were living in a rented split level house in the Maryland suburbs. The only TV in the house was in the living room. The book deadline summoned me back to the desktop computer in my basement office but I periodically ran up the stairs to check the latest abominations.

Fifty-one days earlier, federal Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms agents had attacked this sprawling home occupied by scores of women, children, and men – members of an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventists. Seventy-six ATF agents arrived on cattle trailers, shot the Davidians’ dogs, and then commenced trying to blast and smash their way into the house. The ATF supposedly had an arrest warrant for Davidian leader David Koresh but forgot to bring it along that morning. ATF named its operation Showtime, and made sure that multiple crews from local television stations were nearby to film their triumph.

Things went awry, and the resulting firefight left seven Davidians and four federal agents dead. ATF top brass immediately wailed to the media that their agents had been “ambushed” that morning. That characterization was difficult to reconcile with the facts that the feds launched a surprise assault and were far more heavily armed than the Davidians. Perhaps the feds considered it an “ambush” because the victims shot back.

The ATF targeted Koresh because they suspected he had illegally converted semi-automatic firearms to shoot more than one bullet with each trigger pull. Prior to attacking, the feds had scorned numerous opportunities to easily arrest Koresh. Nine days before the attack, undercover ATF agents (whom Koresh recognized as such) had even gone target shooting with Koresh.

After the ATF raid fiasco, the FBI took over and continually ratcheted up the pressure on the besieged Davidians, bombarding them around the clock with high volume soundtracks of rabbits being slaughtered and Nancy Sinatra singing (choose your poison).

On that April 19th morning, the FBI tank pumped the Davidians’ home full of CS gas, a potentially lethal, flammable compound. Around noon, fires broke out that quickly burnt the compound to the ground; 80 bodies were found in the rubble. FBI spokesmen raced to blame the Davidians for the fire and swore they had proof that the cult members committed mass suicide. (No such evidence was provided.) The spokesmen neglected to mention that the FBI had stopped fire trucks racing to the scene.

FBI operations commander Larry Potts explained the rationale for the final onslaught: “Those people thumbed their nose at law enforcement.” Snap polls just after the Waco fire showed that the American people overwhelmingly supported the FBI’s action. A few days later, the opening of a congressional hearing had to be delayed so senators could pose for pictures with Attorney General Janet Reno, who became a national hero after admitting she authorized the final attack on the Davidians….

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Jon Utley, the publisher of American Conservative and one of the most dedicated and principled pro-freedom and antiwar activists in the nation, celebrated his 80th birthday last month. Hundreds of folks gathered at D.C.’s Metropolitan Club to hear him speak about his life and to hear tributes from a dozen speakers ranging from Human Events publisher Allan Ryskind, to Dan McCarthy, to Fran Griffin. (The event was sponsored by the Committee for the Republic.)

Jon was born in the Soviet Union in 1934. His mother was Freda Utley, a bestselling author who helped awaken Americans to the Soviet peril in the 1940s and beyond. Ms. Utley also wrote one of the first books published in America on the horrendous sufferings in postwar Germany – “The High Cost of Vengeance,” published by Regnery in 1949, available at this link.

His father, Arcadi Berdichevsky, was murdered in Stalin’s Gulag in 1938. Return to the Gulag, a film on his father’s fate, has been shown on PBS and on other venues around the nation. Reason.com described the movie: “In 2004, Utley embarked upon a search to learn of his father’s fate. This documentary traces Utley’s journey through former labor camps and cities in northern Russia and his final uncovering of the horrible truth at the dreaded camp city of Vorkuta within the Arctic Circle.” You can watch the 28-minute documentary here.

Jon has been in the forefront of the antiwar movement since 1990, when he spearheaded a group to oppose George H.W. Bush’s war against Iraq.  He has been a rare voice of reason and grace in conservative circles, patiently pointing out how foreign warring was destroying American freedom – as well as wreaking pointless havoc abroad.  He has also been a generous supporter of groups ranging from the Future of Freedom Foundation to Antiwar.com, where his columns continue to trounce bloodthirsty politicians of all stripes.

Jon has always been kind in his comments and encouragement on my writing. Some years ago, I saw that he was heading to an ACLU awards dinner that featured some fashionable left-wing keynoter who didn’t seem truly concerned with freedom. I asked why he was going to the ACLU event.

Jon replied, “So that somebody will care when government agents take us away.”

Hearing that line from someone whose father vanished in the Gulag makes it impossible to forget.

Happy birthday, Jon, and thanks for all you’ve done for freedom for 60+ years!

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