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FFF: Forgotten Civil War Atrocities Breed More Carnage

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civil war atrocity photo captured from FFF website CaptureThis is the 150th anniversary of General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.  Many commentators are touting Lee’s surrender as a triumph for freedom.  While it was a great blessing that slavery ended, the Civil War set precedents for ignoring atrocities that continue to bedevil America.  Here’s a piece from the January issue of The Future of Freedom:

Forgotten Civil War Atrocities Bred More Carnage
by James Bovard

George Orwell wrote in 1945 that “the nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” The same moral myopia has carried over to most Americans’ understanding of the Civil War. While popular historians have recently canonized the war as a practically holy crusade to free the slaves, in reality civilians were intentionally targeted and brutalized in the final year of the war.

The most dramatic forgotten atrocity in the Civil War occurred 150 years ago when Union Gen. Philip Sheridan unleashed a hundred-mile swath of flames in the Shenandoah Valley that left vast numbers of women and children tottering towards starvation. Unfortunately, the burning of the Shenandoah Valley has been largely forgotten, foreshadowing how subsequent brutal military operations would also vanish into the Memory Hole.

In August 1864, supreme Union commander Ulysses S. Grant ordered Sheridan to “do all the damage to railroads and crops you can…. If the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.” Grant said that Sheridan’s troops should “eat out Virginia clear and clean as far as they go, so that crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their provender with them.” Sheridan set to the task with vehemence, declaring that “the people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war” and promised that when he was finished, the valley “from Winchester to Staunton will have but little in it for man or beast.”

Because people lived in a state that had seceded from the Union, Sheridan acted as if they had automatically forfeited their property, if not their lives. Along an almost 100-mile stretch the sky was blackened with smoke as his troops burned crops, barns, mills and homes.

Some Union soldiers were aghast at their marching orders. A Pennsylvania cavalryman lamented at the end of the fiery spree, “We burnt some sixty houses and all most of the barns, hay, grain and corn in the shocks for fifty miles [south of] Strasburg…. It was a hard-looking sight to see the women and children turned out of doors at this season of the year.” An Ohio major wrote in his diary that the burning “does not seem real soldierly work. We ought to enlist a force of scoundrels for such work.” A newspaper correspondent embedded with Sheridan’s army reported, “Hundreds of nearly starving people are going North … not half the inhabitants of the valley can subsist on it in its present condition.”

After one of Sheridan’s favorite aides was shot by Confederate soldiers, Sheridan ordered his troops to burn all houses within a five-mile radius. After many outlying houses had been torched, the small town at the center — Dayton — was spared after a federal officer disobeyed Sheridan’s order. The homes and barns of Mennonites — a peaceful sect that opposed slavery and secession — were especially hard hit by that crackdown, according to a 1909 history of Mennonites in America.

By the end of Sheridan’s campaign the former “breadbasket of the Confederacy” could no longer even feed the women and children remaining there. In his three-volume Civil War history, Shelby Foote noted that an English traveler in 1865 “found the Valley standing empty as a moor.” The population of Warren County, Virginia, where I grew up, fell by 11 percent during the 1860s thanks in part to Sheridan’s depredations.

Historian Walter Fleming, in his classic 1919 study, The Sequel to Appomattox, quoted one bedeviled local farmer: “From Harper’s Ferry to New Market, which is about eighty miles, the country was almost a desert…. The barns were all burned; chimneys standing without houses, and houses standing without roof, or door, or window.” John Heatwole, author of The Burning: Sheridan’s Devastation of the Shenandoah Valley (1998), concluded, “The civilian population of the Valley was affected to a greater extent than was the populace of any other region during the war, including those in the path of Sherman’s infamous march to the sea in Georgia.”

Unfortunately, given the chaos of the era at the end of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, there are no reliable statistics on the number of women, children, and other civilians who perished thanks to “the burning.”

Abraham Lincoln congratulated Sheridan in a letter on Oct. 22, 1864: “With great pleasure I tender to you and your brave army the thanks of the nation and my own personal admiration and gratitude for the month’s operation in the Shenandoah Valley.” The year before, in his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln had justified the Civil War to preserve a “government by consent.” But, as Massachusetts abolitionist Lysander Spooner retorted, “The only idea … ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this — that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.”

Some defenders of the Union military tactics insist that there was no intent to harshly punish civilians. But, after three years of a bloody stalemate, the Lincoln administration had adapted a total-war mindset to scourge the South into submission. As Sheridan was finishing his fiery campaign, Gen. William Sherman wrote to Grant that “until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources.” Sherman had previously telegrammed Washington that “there is a class of people — men, women, and children — who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.” Lincoln also congratulated Sherman for a campaign that sowed devastation far and wide.

The carnage inflicted by Sheridan, Sherman, and other northern commanders made the South’s postwar recovery far slower and multiplied the misery of both white and black survivors. Connecticut College professor Jim Downs’s recent book, Sick from Freedom, exposes how the chaotic situation during and after the war contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of freed slaves.

Ironically, a war that stemmed in large part from the blunders and follies of politicians on both sides of the Potomac resulted in a vast expansion of the political class’s presumption of power. An 1875 American Law Review article noted, “The late war left the average American politician with a powerful desire to acquire property from other people without paying for it.” The sea change was clear even before the war ended. Sherman had telegraphed the War Department in 1863, “The United States has the right, and … the … power, to penetrate to every part of the national domain. We will remove and destroy every obstacle — if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper.” Lincoln liked Sherman’s letter so much that he declared that it should be published.

After the Civil War, politicians and many historians consecrated the conflict and its grisly tactics were consigned to oblivion. The habit of sweeping abusive policies under the rug also permeated post–Civil War policy towards the Indians (Sheridan famously declared that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”) and the suppression of Filipino insurgents after the Spanish-American War. Later historians sometimes downplayed U.S. military tactics in World War II that killed vast numbers of German and Japanese civilians.

The same pattern is repeating with the Vietnam War. The Pentagon is launching a major effort to commemorate its 50th anniversary — an effort that is being widely denounced as a whitewash. The New York Times noted that the Pentagon’s official website on the war “referred to the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which American troops killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians, as the My Lai Incident.” That particular line was amended but the website will definitely not be including the verdict of David Hackworth, a retired colonel and the most decorated officer in the Army: “Vietnam was an atrocity from the get-go…. There were hundreds of My Lais. You got your card punched by the numbers of bodies you counted.”

The failure to recognize how wars routinely spawn pervasive brutality and collateral deaths lowers Americans’ resistance to new conflicts that promise to make the world safe for democracy, or rid the world of evil, or achieve other lofty-sounding goals. For instance, the Obama administration sold its bombing of Libya as a self-evident triumph of good over a vile despot; instead, chaos reigns. As the administration ramps up bombing in Syria and Iraq, both its rhetoric and its tactics echo prior U.S. misfires. The proclaimed intentions of U.S. bombing campaigns are far more important than their accuracy. And the presumption of collective guilt of everyone in a geographical area exonerates current military leaders the same way it exonerated Sheridan’s 1864 torching of Mennonite homes.

Since 1864, no prudent American should have expected this nation’s wars to have happy or uplifting endings. Unfortunately, as long as the spotlight is kept off atrocities, most citizens will continue to underestimate the odds that wars will spawn debacles and injustices that return to haunt us.

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Mises Inst.: The Washington Intellectual Gravy Train

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JPB Mises Intellectuals #2 CaptureThe Mises Institute’sThe Austrian” Newsletter

The Washington Intellectual Gravy Train

by James Bovard

Intellectuals have long been glorified as champions of truth and defenders of society’s highest values. But in Washington, they serve as Leviathan‘s Praetorian Guard. Intellectuals are thriving in DC thanks in large part to the ruinous policy advice they proffer.

The District of Columbia has 120 times more political scientists per capita than the rest of the nation. But rather than producing “good governance,” the 3,200 political scientists and legions of other would-be Brain Trusters provide endless excuses to further extend the federal sway. Intellectuals usually come to Washington to help politicians leash other Americans, not to leash the government. And since they presume their preferred policies are better than freedom, intellectuals propel government programs to force their inferiors to “take their medicine.”

Washington think tanks have proliferated at the same time federal policies have become far more intrusive and harebrained. There are now roughly 400 think tanks in the Washington area, some of which are little more than “cash machines for power” for politicians. Clifford May, the president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, commented in 2005: “It is the job of think tanks to create political capital. It is the job of politicians to spend it.” May’s think tank extols politicians who advocate bombing Muslim nations. Journalist Ken Silverstein, in an excellent report last year on think tank corruption, noted, “The Lexington Institute, a Virginia-based think tank, has never met a weapons program it didn’t like. That is not surprising since a good chunk of its funding — about $2.5 million in 2010 — comes from defense giants like Boeing, Lockheed and Northrop Grumman.”

Some think tanks are fronts for political operatives. Jack Abramoff, the most powerful lobbyist in Washington, placed an aging beach lifeguard at the head of American International Center, a think tank he created to funnel money to himself and his favorite causes. The scam was fruitful until Abramoff’s other machinations won him admission to federal prison. Newt Gingrich’s boutique think tank, the Center for Health Transformation, pocketed $37 million from health care corporations and industry groups before going bankrupt in 2012 after Gingrich’s presidential campaign floundered. Gingrich used his op-eds and speeches to tout positions favored by his think tank donors and omitted mentioning who was bankrolling his operation.

Think tanks are increasingly lackeys for foreign governments. The New York Times last June exposed how the government of Norway paid the Center for Global Development $5 million to hustle Washington officials to boost foreign aid spending. The Brookings Institution received a windfall from the government of Qatar to set up a research institute that, according to the Qatar government, would devote itself to “reflecting the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones.” After an especially tawdry fixed election in 2011, the Kazakhstan government image was burnished by two think tanks on its payroll — the Center for Security and International Studies and the Institute for New Democracies. The Atlantic Council, another prominent DC think tank, pockets cash from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and NATO.

Some think tanks offer little more than an intellectual version of “rent-a-mobs” of political protestors. In the same way that medieval kings grabbed any shabby pretext to invade neighboring countries, today’s politicians perennially seek pretexts to further invade citizens’ lives. And there is never a shortage of intellectuals who, like the courtiers of medieval courts, assure their masters that God — or at least social science — blesses their aggression.

Washington think tanks provide a sheen of intellectual legitimacy to Leviathan. The profusion of think tanks and policy wonks also spawn the illusion that ideas drive policy in Washington. But in most cases, the ideas are simply pretenses to sanctify the pursuit of power.

The role of intellectual grafters in contemporary Washington is epitomized by Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who received a $297,000 federal contract for aiding the push for the Affordable Care Act and earned the nickname, “the Oracle of ObamaCare.” He boasted in 2009 of his “black box” software program he used to gin up the numbers to promote the Obama legislative agenda. Invoking a secret computer model is the contemporary version of the tricks Merlin the magician practiced in King Arthur’s court. Gruber told a conference of economists in 2013 that the administration had to bamboozle the public about ObamaCare due to “the stupidity of the American voter.” His comments sparked a conservative firestorm but the liberal New Republic exonerated him as an “independent-minded professor” devoted to the public good.

The more power politicians capture, the more profitable lying about government becomes. Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek, in his famous 1944 essay in The Road to Serfdom, “Why the Worst Get on Top,” showed why, once government acquires vast power, “the readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion.” In the same way, Washington is biased in favor of intellectuals who defend torture, total government surveillance, and the president’s assassination prerogative. The advocates and apologists for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq continue to be esteemed inside the Beltway as foreign policy visionaries.

The bigger government becomes, the more the “intellectual playing field” is tilted in favor of servility. Kowtowing is also spurred by Medals of Freedom, National Humanities Awards, and other honorifics bestowed by the White House and federal agencies. Regardless of how badly previous government policies failed, the expert consensus is almost always in favor of new programs and new interventions. Washington intellectuals fret far more about public distrust of government than about federal oppression of American citizens.

The closer that intellectuals get to politicians, the more weaselly they usually become.

The Washington definition of “independent thinker” is merely someone without a visible receipt for his opinions. Americans should be as wary of “gravy train intellectuals” as they are of congressmen and other serial perjurers.

JPB Mises Intellectuals #1

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MP3 of Ernie Hancock Interview on Rand Paul, Cigars, TSA Tyranny, and D.C. Rascals

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ernie hancock snippetFreedomsPhoenix Chief Hellraiser Ernie Hancock and I had a rollicking hour this morn on his Liberty Radio Network program. Plenty of federal agencies took a whupping. I alternated at times between admitting that “I don’t know shit” about some ongoing controversy & striving to “draw the Curtain of Mercy” on other topics.

Ernie had excellent observations on the Rand Paul campaign. Apparently, he has been courted to throw his support behind them like he did for Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012 (Ernie’s “Revolution” campaign spurred massive youth support for Ron Paul). But Ernie has the impression that Rand is triangulating his positions and relying too much on focus groups rather than the hardline principles that drove his father’s campaigns. Ernie’s goal is to sway far more people to “free your mind” and political action is usually a delusory path to that goal. I mentioned that much of the media’s coverage of the Rand’s @filibuster on the Patriot Act was more critical of the opponents of federal surveillance than of the NSA crime wave.

Ernie asked if there were any rays of hope on the horizon. I said it was encouraging how young people in Turkey rose up against the government after they were brutally suppressed in demonstrations 2 years and toppled the prime minister’s party – thanks in part to their social media activism.

He asked about the reaction to Operation Jade Helm in Washington. I said that folks around here don’t give a rat’s patooie about it and assume that anyone who is concerned is a rube or paranoid.

Ernie opened up with a lot of questions on the FDA war on cigars. I mentioned that, when folks see me smoking, they often ask me if I was smoking a Cuban cigar. I explain that freelance writers are not allowed to smoke Cuban cigars. I have not smoked that many Cubans over the years, but most of those I have fired up have been inferior to relatively cheap (and mild) Dominican stogies. I mentioned that in the 1990s, when cigars became high status, some guys would hold cigars in a way so people could see the fancy brand band on the cigar. Those are the kind of dweebs who would benefit from the FDA’s proposal to largely exempt $10+ cigars from regulation.

I mentioned that if I am smoking cigars, it is rare for people to come up and proselytize to me – except about the evil of smoking. And for those folks, a single puff of smoke usually sends them on their way.  Another bright side: for every day that I smoke cigars instead of doing cocaine, I save $500.

Ernie asked about a couple recent articles that have gone viral. I said that that was thanks to the effort of good folks who would retweet or post ’em on Facebook – which I greatly appreciated.

Ernie asked my view on the U.S. dollar and currency crises.  I prefaced my response: “It’s always a bad move for people to take financial advice from a college dropout.”

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King John Butchered Authors of Magna Charta

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… or at least he tried to butcher them.  On this day 800 years ago, King John was compelled to sign Magna Charta, formally accepting a limit to his prerogative to ravage everything in England.  But the ink on his signature was barely dry before he brought in foreign forces and tried to wipe out the barons who had compelled him to sign the Charta.  The English almost lost their newly-recognized rights within months of the signing because they were not sufficiently suspicious of the King. As David Hume noted in his magisterial History of England, “The ravenous and barbarous mercenaries, incited by a cruel and enraged prince, were let loose against the estates, tenants, manors, houses, parks of the barons, and spread devastation over the face of the kingdom. Nothing was to be seen but the flames of villages and castles reduced to ashes, the consternation and misery of the inhabitants, tortures exercised by the soldiery to make them reveal their concealed treasures…”

Few people recall that Pope Innocent speedily sought to annul the charter and formally absolved King John of any obligation to obey Magna Charta.  English liberties received a boost from the death of King John less than a year after Runnymede.

The real lesson of Magna Charta is that solemn pledges do not make tyrants trustworthy.  Similarly, American presidents are required to pledge upon taking office that “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully… preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” At this point, that oath does little more than spur cheers from high school civics teachers.  It has been more than 40 years since any president paid a serious price for trampling the law.  And presidents have a prerogative to trample constitutional rights as long as they periodically proclaim their devotion to democracy.

In the final realm, Magna Charta was simply a political promise – and it would only be honored insofar as private courage, resolution, and weaponry compelled sovereigns to limit their abuses.

For an excellent analysis of why the heritage of Magna Charta did not prove a panacea in this nation, see Anthony Gregory’s The Power of Habeas Corpus in America (Cambridge, 2013).

magna charta signing CHhWQjxUwAAFs0N

Here’s David Hume’s account of what happened after Magna Charta was signed (copied from the excellent Liberty Fund online version of Hume’s history):

John seemed to submit passively to all these regulations, however injurious to majesty: He sent writs to all the sheriffs, ordering them to constrain every one to swear obedience to the twenty-five barons.s He dismissed all his foreign forces: He pretended, that his government was thenceforth to run in a new tenor, and be more indulgent to the liberty and independance of his people. But he only dissembled, till he should find a favourable opportunity for annulling all his concessions. The injuries and indignities, which he had formerly suffered from the pope and the king of France, as they came from equals or superiors, seemed to make but small impression on him: But the sense of this perpetual and total subjection under his own rebellious vassals, sunk deep in his mind, and he was determined, at all hazards, to throw off so ignominious a slavery.t He grew sullen, silent, and reserved: He shunned the society of his courtiers and nobles: He retired into the Isle of Wight, as if desirous of hiding his shame and confusion; but in this retreat he meditated the most fatal vengeance against all his enemies.u He secretly sent abroad his emissaries to inlist foreign soldiers, and to invite the rapacious Brabançons into his service, by the prospect of sharing the spoils of England, and reaping the forfeitures of so many opulent barons, who had incurred the guilt of rebellion, by rising in arms against him.w And he dispatched a messenger to Rome, in order to lay before the pope the Great Charter, which he had been compelled to sign, and to complain, before that tribunal, of the violence, which had been imposed upon him.

Innocent, considering himself as feudal lord of the kingdom, was incensed at the temerity of the barons, who, though they pretended to appeal to his authority, had dared, without waiting for his consent, to impose such terms on a prince, who, by resigning to the Roman pontiff his crown and independance, had placed himself immediately under the papal protection. He issued, therefore, a bull, in which, from the plenitude of his apostolic power, and from the authority, which God had committed to him, to build and destroy kingdoms, to plant and overthrow, he annulled and abrogated the whole charter, as unjust in itself, as obtained by compulsion, and as derogatory to the dignity of the apostolic see. He prohibited the barons from exacting the observance of it: He even prohibited the king himself from paying any regard to it: He absolved him and his subjects from all oaths, which they had been constrained to take to that purpose: And he pronounced a general sentence of excommunication against every one, who should persevere in maintaining such treasonable and iniquitous pretensions.

The king, as his foreign forces arrived along with this bull, now ventured to take off the mask; and, under sanction of the pope’s decree, recalled all the liberties which he had granted to his subjects, and which he had solemnly sworn to observe. But the spiritual weapon was found upon trial to carry less force with it, than he had reason from his own experience to apprehend. The primate refused to obey the pope in publishing the sentence of excommunication against the barons; and though he was cited to Rome, that he might attend a general council, there assembled, and was suspended, on account of his disobedience to the pope, and his secret correspondence with the king’s enemies.z Though a new and particular sentence of excommunication was pronounced by name against the principal barons;a John still found, that his nobility and people, and even his clergy, adhered to the defence of their liberties, and to their combination against him: The sword of his foreign mercenaries was all he had to trust to for restoring his authority.

The barons, after obtaining the Great Charter, seem to have been lulled into a fatal security, and to have taken no rational measures, in case of the introduction of a foreign force, for reassembling their armies. The king was from the first master of the field; and immediately laid siege to the castle of Rochester, which was obstinately defended by William de Albiney, at the head of a hundred and forty knights with their retainers, but was at last reduced by famine.30th Nov. John, irritated with the resistance, intended to have hanged the governor and all the garrison; but on the representation of William de Mauleon, who suggested to him the danger of reprizals, he was content to sacrifice, in this barbarous manner, the inferior prisoners only.b The captivity of William de Albiney, the best officer among the confederated barons, was an irreparable loss to their cause; and no regular opposition was thenceforth made to the progress of the royal arms. The ravenous and barbarous mercenaries, incited by a cruel and enraged prince, were let loose against the estates, tenants, manors, houses, parks of the barons, and spread devastation over the face of the kingdom. Nothing was to be seen but the flames of villages and castles reduced to ashes, the consternation and misery of the inhabitants, tortures exercised by the soldiery to make them reveal their concealed treasures, and reprizals no less barbarous, committed by the barons and their partizans on the royal demesnes, and on the estates of such as still adhered to the crown. The king, marching through the whole extent of England, from Dover to Berwic, laid the provinces waste on each side of him; and considered every state, which was not his immediate property, as entirely hostile and the object of military execution. The nobility of the north in particular, who had shewn greatest violence in the recovery of their liberties, and who, acting in a separate body, had expressed their discontent even at the concessions made by the Great Charter; as they could expect no mercy, fled before him with their wives and families, and purchased the friendship of Alexander, the young king of Scots, by doing homage to him.

 The barons, reduced to this desperate extremity, and menaced with the total loss of their liberties, their properties, and their lives, employed a remedy no less desperate; and making applications to the court of France, they offered to acknowledge Lewis, the eldest son of Philip, for their sovereign; on condition, that he would afford them protection from the violence of their enraged prince. Though the sense of the common rights of mankind, the only rights that are entirely indefeasible, might have justified them in the deposition of their king; they declined insisting before Philip, on a pretension, which is commonly so disagreeable to sovereigns, and which sounds harshly in their royal ears. They affirmed, that John was incapable of succeeding to the crown, by reason of the attainder, passed upon him during his brother’s reign; though that attainder had been reversed, and Richard had even, by his last will, declared him his successor. They pretended, that he was already legally deposed by sentence of the peers of France, on account of the murder of his nephew; though that sentence could not possibly regard any thing but his transmarine dominions, which alone he held in vassalage to that crown.1216. On more plausible grounds, they affirmed, that he had already deposed himself by doing homage to the pope, changing the nature of his sovereignty, and resigning an independant crown for a see under a foreign power. And as Blanche of Castile, the wife of Lewis, was descended by her mother from Henry II. they maintained, though many other princes stood before her in the order of succession, that they had not shaken off the royal family, in chusing her husband for their sovereign.

Philip was strongly tempted to lay hold on the rich prize which was offered to him. The legate menaced him with interdicts and excommunications, if he invaded the patrimony of St. Peter, or attacked a prince, who was under the immediate protection of the holy see.c But as Philip was assured of the obedience of his own vassals, his principles were changed with the times, and he now undervalued as much all papal censures, as he formerly pretended to pay respect to them. His chief scruple was with regard to the fidelity, which he might expect from the English barons in their new engagements, and the danger of entrusting his son and heir into the hands of men, who might, on any caprice or necessity, make peace with their native sovereign, by sacrificing a pledge of so much value. He therefore exacted from the barons twenty-five hostages of the most noble birth in the kingdom;d and having obtained this security, he sent over first a small army to the relief of the confederates; then more numerous forces, which arrived with Lewis himself at their head.

The first effect of the young prince’s appearance in England was the desertion of John’s foreign troops, who, being mostly levied in Flanders, and other provinces of France, refused to serve against the heir of their monarchy.e The Gascons and Poictevins alone, who were still John’s subjects, adhered to his cause; but they were too weak to maintain that superiority in the field, which they had hitherto supported against the confederated barons. Many considerable noblemen deserted John’s party, the earls of Salisbury, Arundel, Warrene, Oxford, Albemarle, and William Mareschal the younger: His castles fell daily into the hands of the enemy: Dover was the only place, which, from the valour and fidelity of Hubert de Burgh, the governor, made resistance to the progress of Lewis:f And the barons had the melancholy prospect of finally succeeding in their purpose, and of escaping the tyranny of their own king, by imposing on themselves and the nation a foreign yoke. But this union was of short duration between the French and English nobles; and the imprudence of Lewis, who, on every occasion, showed too visible a preference to the former, encreased that jealousy, which it was so natural for the latter to entertain in their present situation.g The viscount of Melun, too, it is said, one of his courtiers, fell sick at London, and finding the approaches of death, he sent for some of his friends among the English barons, and warning them of their danger, revealed Lewis’s secret intentions of exterminating them and their families as traitors to their prince, and of bestowing their estates and dignities on his native subjects, in whose fidelity he could more reasonably place confidence.h This story, whether true or false, was universally reported and believed; and concurring with other circumstances, which rendered it credible, did great prejudice to the cause of Lewis. The earl of Salisbury and other noblemen deserted again to John’s party;i and as men easily change sides in a civil war, especially where their power is founded on an hereditary and independant authority, and is not derived from the opinion and favour of the people, the French prince had reason to dread a sudden reverse of fortune. The king was assembling a considerable army, with a view of fighting one great battle for his crown; but passing from Lynne to Lincolnshire, his road lay along the sea-shore, which was overflowed at high water; and not chusing the proper time for his journey, he left in the inundation all his carriages, treasure, baggage, and regalia. The affliction for this disaster, and vexation from the distracted state of his affairs, encreased the sickness under which he then laboured; and though he reached the castle of Newark, he was obliged to halt there, and his distemper soon after put an end to his life,17th Octob. Death and character of the king. in the forty-ninth year of his age, and eighteenth of his reign; and freed the nation from the dangers, to which it was equally exposed, by his success or by his misfortunes.

nyt illustration for magna carta untitled[great illustration from 6/15/2015 New York Times]

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MP3 of Magna Carta Turkey Shoot on Scott Horton Show

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Scott Horton and I had a rowdy chat on the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta on his radio show.  Everyone seems to have forgotten how King John tried to slaughter the barons after he promised to limit his power.  Following is the nub of my comments in this interview:

From the mid-1200s onwards, English kings were compelled to pledge that they would obey the Great Charter. Magna Carta was not perfect and it was probably trampled more often than it was respected until recent centuries.

But Magna Carta established the principle that the king forfeits his right to reign if he violates the law of the land. Magna Carta gave footing for people who wanted to put a leash on the king’s power when he went too far. It set a moral and philosophical standard by which the subsequent monarchs could be judged and condemned.

The Magna Carta was written as if it was a recognition of pre-existing rights. In contrast, Attorney General Janet Reno famously told federal law enforcement officers in 1995: “You are part of a government that has given its people more freedom . . . than any other government in the history of the world.” But if freedom is a gift from the government to the people, then government can take freedom away at its pleasure. The federal government was only allowed to come into existence because politicians promised in the Bill of Rights to recognize and respect pre-existing rights of American citizens

magna charta signing CHhWQjxUwAAFs0N

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Germany Should Release Courageous Al Jazeera Journalist Ahmed Mansour

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The German government seized one of Al Jazeera’s best known and most courageous journalists, Ahmed Mansour, this weekend at the behest of the Egyptian government.  Al Jazeera has done some of the best work of any media organization in the world exposing the abuses and oppression of the Egyptian government.  It is appalling that a western government would even consider becoming complicit in Egypt’s growing tyranny.

Mansour was the only journalist who remained in Fallujah in April 2004 when the Bush administration determined to brutally punish that city after four Blackwater security guards were killed there. Mansour continued broadcasting despite the demands by the U.S. military that he exit the locale.   His reports showed that the U.S. bombing campaign was inflicting far more damage on civilians and the city than the U.S. government admitted. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denounced his reporting as “vicious and inaccurate.” Mansour wrote a book, Inside Fallujah: An Unembedded Narrative – about his experience during that clash. (He has written at least 16 other books.)  Here is a confidential U.S. government report on its Fallujah debacle released by Wikileaks.  The U.S. military had previously bombed Al Jazeera’s office in Iraq, killing at least one journalist.

I had dinner with Mansour a couple times when I was in London in 2006 for an hour-long interview on his talk show – the most popular program on Al Jazeera with 25 million live viewers. Every place we went in London,  he was enthusiastically greeted by people who recognized him (OK, we were going to Arabic restaurants, but…). If my memory serves, Ahmed had been previously violently attacked when he was reporting in Egypt during the Mubarak reign. Here is a link to the video of that interview and an Arabic transcript. (I have not been able to track down an English translation.)

Egypt recently issued an arrest warrant claiming that Mansour “tortured an unidentified lawyer in Tahrir Square during the uprising against President Hosni Mubarak in 2011.”  The fact that the warrant does not even bother naming that the person that Mansour purportedly tortured should have been sufficient to get it laughed out of any respectable courtroom.  Germany is considering turning Mansour over to the Egyptian government to face the trumped-up charge.

The Egyptian regime – which came to power after overthrowing an elected ruler – has proven its contempt for both law and decency many times.  The New York Times notes, “Mr. Sisi’s government and its supporters, on the other hand, have talked about Al Jazeera as if it were a terrorist organization seeking to bring down the government.” Al Jazeera has shown far more courage in exposing Egyptian government atrocities than has the Obama administration or the U.S. State Department.

Here is the type of shameless persecution sanctified by the Egyptian government’s legal shams: “A criminal court here sentenced 529 people to death on Monday after a single session of their mass trial, convicting them of murder for the killing of a police officer in the city of Minya during riots after the ouster of former President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, state media reported. The swift conviction of so many in one stroke was a sudden acceleration of the sweeping crackdown against Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters and against other dissenters that has unfolded since his removal last summer.” (That ruling made it appear that the Egyptian government had adapted the FBI/Waco model of justice.)

If Germany sends Mansour to Egypt, it would be akin to western governments rounding up escaped Soviet dissidents in the 1970s and sending them back to Moscow.  In 2011, Al Jazeera broadcast comments by a 23-year-old female protestor Salma Al-tasi in Tahil Square: “We do not trust a government that sends thugs to kill us.” And what sort of government rounds up journalists abroad and sends them to a regime that wants to kill them?

UPDATE: The German government just announced Mansour’s release.  But it is an outrageous that he was ever detained at the behest of the Egyptian government.

A photo/poster from the 2011 Egyptian protests against the Mubarak regime

A photo/poster from the 2011 Egyptian protests against the Mubarak regime

The post Germany Should Release Courageous Al Jazeera Journalist Ahmed Mansour appeared first on James Bovard.

FFF: Eric Holder’s Leviathan-Loving Legacy

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holder 1375399994from the Future of Freedom Foundation

Eric Holder’s Leviathan-Loving Legacy

by James Bovard

Last summer, Attorney General Eric Holder solemnly declared, “The name ought to be changed. It’s an offensive name.” Holder observed that despite the organization’s “storied history,” it could “increase their fan base” by changing their name — “if they did something that from my perspective that is so obviously right.”

Unfortunately, Holder was referring to the name of the Washington football team, not the Justice Department itself. For almost a hundred years critics have rightly scoffed that the executive branch’s most political arm is misnamed and that it is folly to expect justice from the bosses at Main Justice headquarters.

When Holder announced plans to resign after a six-year reign as attorney general, the media showered him with accolades. The New York Times noted that Holder “relished his place in history as the nation’s first African-American attorney general.” In a farewell ceremony at the White House, Holder gushed, “I have loved the Department of Justice ever since, as a young boy, I watched Robert Kennedy prove during the civil rights movement how the department can and must always be a force for that which is right.” In Holder’s view it is safe to trust the Justice Department with practically unlimited arbitrary power as long as noble people such as himself are in command.

Holder championed Barack Obama’s power to assassinate people — including Americans — solely on the basis of the president’s secret decrees. On March 6, 2012, Holder defended presidentially ordered killings: “Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process; it does not guarantee judicial process.” TV comedian Stephen Colbert mocked Holder: “Trial by jury; trial by fire; rock, paper, scissors, who cares? Due process just means that there is a process that you do.” For Holder and the Obama administration, reciting certain legal phrases in secret memos was all it took to justify extrajudicial executions.

Holder insisted that drone attacks “are not [assassinations], and the use of that loaded term is misplaced; assassinations are unlawful killings … the U.S. government’s use of lethal force in self-defense … would not be unlawful.” The new definition of “lawful killing” had become any termination secretly approved by the president or his top advisers. Holder insisted that targeted killings would take place only when there was “an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States” — that the United States is merely taking desperate defensive steps to prevent a slaughter of American troops or civilians. But, as a Los Angeles Times editorial noted, “Holder defined ‘imminently’ broadly to include action that would head off ‘future attacks.’”

Holder sought to reassure Americans by stressing that Congress was overseeing his boss’s targeted-killing program. But no one on Capitol Hill demanded a hearing or an investigation after U.S. drones killed American citizens in Yemen. The craven attitude in Congress was exemplified by House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King (R-N.Y.): “Drones aren’t evil; people are evil. We are a force of good and we are using those drones to carry out the policy of righteousness and goodness.”

Though Holder had criticized the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretaps before he took office, he became the key defender of the National Security Agency’s email dragnet. After a 2009 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Russell Feingold complained, “I was disappointed by Attorney General Holder’s unwillingness to repeat what both he and President Obama had stated in the past — that President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program was illegal. For an administration that has repeatedly stated its intention to restore the rule of law, this episode was a step backward.”

Even after Edward Snowden had revealed that the NSA was illegally vacuuming up millions of Americans’ email and other communications, Holder falsely proclaimed in June 2013 that “the government cannot target anyone … unless there is an appropriate and documented foreign intelligence purpose for the acquisition, such as for the prevention of terrorism, hostile cyber activities, or nuclear proliferation.” But confidential documents revealed that the NSA’s definition of “terrorist suspect” is so ludicrously broad that it includes “someone searching the web for suspicious stuff.”

Holder was far more enthusiastic about prosecuting whistleblowers than about deterring crimes by federal agencies. The New York Times noted that “Holder’s Justice Department started more investigations than any of his predecessors into government officials who disclosed information to reporters.” The Justice Department used extremely broad subpoenas to vacuum up journalists’ email and phone records and spent years hounding Times reporter James Risen for articles that exposed some of the follies and deceits of U.S. foreign policy.

Holder has continued the tradition of previous attorneys general of exonerating government officials who commit politically approved crimes. Though Obama admitted that U.S. government officials were guilty of torture, the only CIA official that Holder prosecuted was John Kirakou, a courageous whistleblower who publicly admitted that the CIA was waterboarding. Holder is also complicit in the Obama administration’s decision to suppress a massive amount of information about illegal interrogation practices that occurred during the prior administration. Law professor Jonathan Turley commented last December, “Holder and the Justice Department proved as much [torture] enablers as did their predecessors in the Bush administration. Soon after taking office, President Obama shocked many by going to the CIA and assuring employees that, despite his recognition of the torture, no one would be prosecuted. Holder and the Justice Department played as great a role in fulfilling that pledge as Justice did in facilitating the [torture] program itself.”

Loot and killing

Holder was lavishly praised early this year after he announced that the Justice Department would cease sharing some loot seized from Americans with state and local police under the asset-forfeiture program. A Justice Department official, speaking anonymously, said that Holder’s policy shift sought to “eliminate any possibility that the adoption process might unintentionally incentivize unnecessary stops and seizures.” But that was the same incentive that reform advocates condemned in the 1990s and that Holder fought to keep in federal law at the time. In 2009, shortly after he took office, Holder bragged at the Asset Forfeiture National Leadership Conference, “As Deputy Attorney General, it was my privilege to testify before Congress [in 1999] in support of asset- forfeiture legislation. In that testimony, I emphasized the critical role that asset forfeiture plays not only in the fight against illegal drugs, but in the broader fight against other types of crime.” He also stressed to senators at the time that “the Asset Forfeiture Program provides vitally important funding for law enforcement.”

Holder reversed course last month only after a Washington Post exposé proved that his favored program created an incentive for lawmen to wrongfully confiscate property from thousands of innocent Americans. He proposed no compensation to the victims of the seizure frenzy he helped unleash.

Newspapers have also lavished praise on Holder for his declaration this year on Martin Luther King Day about “the troubling reality … that we lack the ability right now to comprehensively track” police shootings across the nation. But there was a law on the books that Congress enacted in 1994 to require attorneys general to collect and publish annual data on “the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers.” Holder, like prior attorneys general, ignored the mandate. And the Justice Department continues covering up killings by federal agents, including a rash of fatal shootings by Border Patrol agents and the FBI killing of 27-year-old Ibragim Todashev during questioning at his Florida apartment in 2013 regarding the Boston Marathon bombing.

Holder’s behavior regarding that attack captured his often boundless arrogance. When Rep. Louis Gohmert of Texas suggested that “the FBI blew the opportunity to save people’s lives” after it interviewed but failed to keep track of accused Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Holder went ballistic: “You don’t know what the FBI did. You don’t know what the FBI’s interaction was with the Russians. You don’t know what questions were put to the Russians, whether those questions were responded to. You simply do not know that. And you have characterized the FBI as being not thorough or taken exception to my characterization of them as being thorough. I know what the FBI did. You cannot know what I know.” And Holder has made sure that members of Congress and mere mortal private citizens don’t know what he knows — and thus he could continue preening as if he and all his agents should be above criticism.

Since Obama was lawfully elected, Holder’s Justice Department has acted as if anything that Obama’s appointees chose to do is automatically legal. Thus, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission concocted a new rule to punish businesses that refuse to hire ex-convicts. Thus, the Department of Housing and Urban Development devised an arbitrary new standard to punish businesses that fail to give preferential treatment to minorities (a policy that the Supreme Court will very likely strike down later this year). Nor has Holder had any complaints about the White House’s frenetic rewriting of the Affordable Care Act to protect Democratic candidates from an anti-Obama-care backlash.

After Obama himself, Holder bears primary blame for leaving the 2008 promise of “hope and change” in the ruins. Holder’s record is profoundly disappointing to anyone who expected the Obama administration to renounce the abuses of the previous administration. Instead, he has championed a Nixonian-style legal philosophy that presumes that any action the president orders is legal.

This article was published in the May issue of the Future of Freedom.

On Twitter @jimbovard

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Ruby Ridge 23rd Anniv. of Federal Killings

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Playboy-Ruby-Ridge-1995

Federal killings at Ruby Ridge, Idaho began 23 years ago today. Below are some articles I wrote on this case in 1995. Also included is the counterattack on my Wall Street Journal piece from FBI director Louis Freeh, who claimed that I “grossly mischaracterized” the details of the FBI’s killing of Vicki Weaver.

I wonder how much controversy such a killing would excite nowadays. It is amazing how much further government prerogatives have stretched in the past two decades. And it is perhaps even more amazing how much more docile many Americans have become towards unmitigated government BS.

The artwork above is from an article I wrote for the June 1995 issue of Playboy. James Petersen did a great job editing that piece; the artist was Amy Crehore.

Playboy June 1995

HEADLINE: Overkill; the FBI’s gun battle with Randy Weaver

BYLINE: Bovard, James

The story has been told in The New York Times, The Washington Post and Soldier of Follune magazine. Somewhere you’ve read or heard about the 11-day stakeout that resulted in the death of a 14-year-old boy, a 42-year-old mother, a federal marshal and one yellow Labrador retriever. It is an American tragedy, one that must be retold until some sense of truth or justice emerges.

Randy Weaver lived with his wife and four children in a cabin in the rugged Idaho mountains 40 miles south of the Canadian border. The cabin had no electricity or running water, but the family survived, as had generations of pioneers. According to his lawyer, Weaver was “a little man who wanted to be left alone.”

According to the government, he was a heavily armed white supremacist, a former Green Beret, a member of a cult that believed a Jewish-led conspiracy controlled the government. He stood convinced that God had created separate races for a reason, and that the races should remain separate. Weaver was, said one agent, “extremely irritable, and saw people plotting against him.”

Weaver had every reason to be paranoid. People were plotting against him. No fewer than three government agencies targeted Randy Weaver.

ENTRAPMENT?

Agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were the first to turn their attention on Weaver. In 1989 Kenneth Fadley, a BATF informant, persuaded Weaver to sell him two sawed-off shotguns, carefully pointing out where he wanted the barrels cut – one-quarter of an inch below the legal length.

Prior to the sting operation, Weaver had no criminal record. The agents had noticed Weaver and members of his family at a meeting of the Aryan Nation, a white supremacist movement based in the panhandle of Idaho. According to Weaver the BATF then threatened him, saying that unless he promised to infiltrate the Aryan Nation and turn informer, they would prosecute. He refused; charges were filed in December 1990.

A court date was set, then changed. A probation officer sent a letter to Weaver with yet another date. When Weaver failed to appear, a warrant was issued.

WYATT EARP MEETS RAMBO

Federal agents launched an elaborate 18-month surveillance of Weaver’s cabin and land. The agency this time was the U.S. Marshal. Service (headed by former Meese Commission star Henry Hudson), which is responsible for serving high-risk warrants. The service seems to take its cue not from the Constitution but from Hollywood. (As described in “One-Line Pedophiles” in the March Playboy Forum, Henry Hudson spent a small fortune trying to entrap two men to make snuff movies.) David Nevin, a lawyer involved in the subsequent court case, noted: “The marshals called in military aerial reconnaissance and had photos studied by the Defense Mapping Agency. They prowled the woods around Weaver’s cabin with night-vision equipment. They had psychological profiles performed and installed $130,000 worth of long-range solar-powered spy cameras. They intercepted the Weavers’ mail. They even knew the menstrual cycle of Weaver’s teenage daughter, and planned an arrest scenario around it. They actually bought a tract of land next to Weaver’s where an undercover marshal was to pose as a neighbor and build a cabin in hopes of befriending Weaver and luring him away.” All this despite the fact that the BATF had initially served Weaver a warrant without encountering violence (agents faked a car breakdown; when he stopped to help, they arrested him). According to several reports, Hudson’s Special Operations Group thought it was up against Rambo. Had the government bothered to look carefully at service records, it would have known better. According to Soldier of Fortune, Weaver never completed Special Forces training. He was an engineer in support personnel for the Green Berets.

“Although the marshals knew Weaver’s precise location,” reports Nevin, “throughout this elaborate investigation, not a single marshal ever met face-to-face with Weaver. Even so, Weaver offered to surrender if conditions were met to guarantee his safety. The marshals drafted a letter of acceptance, but the U.S. attorney for Idaho abruptly ordered the negotiations to cease.”

On August 21, 1992 six U.S. marshals outfitted in full camouflage and painted faces entered Weaver’s property. They carried automatic weapons. They had been told to avoid contact with the Weavers, but had visited a shooting range the night before to sight in their weapons. The group leader was familiar with the terrain: It was deputy marshal Arthur Roderick’s 24th visit to the cabin. One of the Weaver family’s dogs, Striker, caught scent of the agents and ran barking down the hill. Weaver’s 14-year-old son, Sammy, and Kevin Harris, a 25-year-old family friend who lived with the Weavers in the cabin, followed.

What happened next is a horrible vision of law enforcement agents out of control. Lawyers, for the defendants say that Roderick shot the dog, shattering its haunches. Sammy, Weaver fired two shots at the man who had just killed his dog. Randy Weaver called out to his son. Sammy yelled, “I’m coming, Dad,” then turned to run to safety. A bullet from a U.S. marshal nearly tore off his arm; a second bullet entered his back, killing him.

At some point during the exchange deputy marshal William Degan stood up and yelled “Freeze.” Harris fired, killing the marshal. Federal agents testified in court that Degan had been killed by the first shot of the exchange, but were unable to explain how it was that the marshal had fired seven shots from his gun before he was shot.

Who was writing this script?

FBI MUTANT NINJAS

The surviving marshals trooped down the mountain and called for help. As Weaver retrieved his son’s body, the FBI’s elite paramilitary Hostage Rescue Team boarded a plane in Washington, D.C. Almost 400 state and federal agents surrounded the site of the standoff. Although no shots came from the cabin, FBI team commander Richard Rogers changed the standard rules of engagement. The HRT sharpshooters were told to shoot any armed adult male on sight, whether he posed an immediate threat or not.

The next day, August 22, Randy Weaver – with daughter Sara and Kevin Harris – walked from his cabin to the little shack where his son’s body lay. As he lifted the latch on the shack’s door, Weaver was shot from behind by FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi. Weaver struggled back to the cabin while his wife, Vicki, stood in the doorway, holding their ten-month-old infant in her arms and calling for her husband to hurry.

Horiuchi testified that after shooting Weaver in the back, he followed Kevin Harris through his telescopic sight, leading slightly. He fired as the man rushed through the door of the cabin. According to The New York Times, Horiuchi, who claimed he could hit a target at a distance of 200 meters within a quarter of an inch, said he had “decided to neutralize that male and his rifle.” Instead, he hit Vicki Weaver in the temple, killing her. The bullet that passed through Vicki Weaver’s skull wounded Harris.

The paramilitary team then switched to psychological warfare. As The Washington Times’ Jerry Seper reported, “Court records show that while the woman’s body lay in the cabin for eight days, the FBI used megaphones to taunt the family. Good morning, Mrs. Weaver. We had pancakes for breakfast. What did you have?'”

Weaver surrendered after 11 days.

At the subsequent trial, the government sought to prove that Weaver had conspired for nine years to have an armed confrontation with the government. An Idaho jury found Weaver innocent of almost all charges and ruled that Kevin Harris’ shooting of the U.S. marshal had been in self-defense.

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Louis Freeh justified the FBI shooting of Randy Weaver because sniper Horiuchi saw one of the suspects raise a weapon in the direction of a helicopter carrying other FBI personnel. But other federal officials testified at Weaver’s trial that there were no helicopters in the vicinity of the Weavers’ cabin at the time of the shooting.

Freeh also said the FBI’s next shot – the one that killed Vicki Weaver – was justified and that the killing was accidental. Freeh declared, “The question is whether someone running into a fortified position who is going to shoot at you is as much a threat to you as somebody turning in an open space and pointing a gun at you. I don’t distinguish between those.” Not even when the fortified position is a cabin filled with children?

Freeh found 12 FBI officials guilty of “inadequate performance, improper judgment, neglect of duty and failure to exert proper managerial oversight.” However, the heaviest penalty that Freeh imposed was 15 days unpaid leave, and that for only four agents. As The New York Times reported, Freeh has imposed heavier penalties for FBI agents who used their official cars to drive their children to school.

One of the most disturbing aspects of Freeh’s actions has been his treatment of Larry Potts, Freeh’s pick as acting deputy FBI director. Potts was the senior official in charge of the Idaho operation and defended the shoot-to-kill orders. Despite the finding of a Justice Department confidential report that the orders had violated constitutional rights, Freeh recommended that Potts face only the penalty of a letter of censure. That is the same penalty that Freeh received when he lost an FBI cellular telephone.

In a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno, Idaho Senator Larry Craig asked: “When does the Department of Justice consider it acceptable to fire on an armed citizen first – even if he or she is not threatening the life of any other person – and ask questions later? I am not alone in believing that firearms restrictions do not prevent violent crime; it is appalling that in this case, the enforcement of such restrictions actually led to the sacrifice of three lives. In this sense comparisons drawn between the north Idaho action and the Waco case are inevitable and deeply troubling.”

The Weaver case presents a great challenge to the competency and courage of the congressional leadership now in Washington. If Congress is not willing to look into such misconduct, who will protect the Constitution? Will Congress let the Justice Department and the FBI get away with murder?

James Bovard is author of “Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty.”

**********

The Wall Street Journal
January 10, 1995
No Accountability at the FBI
By James Bovard

FBI Director Louis Freeh last week announced that no FBI agents would be fired or severely punished for their role in the botched attack on Idaho white separatist Randy Weaver and his family in 1992, which led to the death of Mr. Weaver’s son and wife. The announcement, which drew denunciations from both the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Rifle Association, is the conclusion of a patchwork of deception that has continued for more than two years.

Mr. Freeh, in his statement on Friday, declared that “the [Randy Weaver case] crisis was one of the most dangerous and potentially violent situations to which FBI agents have ever been assigned.” But this is patent nonsense. Given the growing importance of this case, a review of the facts is in order.

Randy Weaver lived with his wife and four children in an isolated cabin on Ruby Ridge in the Idaho mountains, 40 miles south of the Canadian border. Mr. Weaver did not favor violence against any other race, but believed that the races should live separately. Because of his extreme beliefs, he was targeted for a sting operation.

In 1989, an undercover agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms approached Mr. Weaver and pressured the mountain man to sell him sawed-off shotguns. Mr. Weaver at first refused, but the agent was persistent and Mr. Weaver eventually sold him two shotguns — thereby violating federal firearms law. A court official sent Mr. Weaver a notice to appear in court on the wrong day; after Mr. Weaver did not show up on the correct date, a Justice Department attorney (who knew of the error) got a warrant for his arrest. Federal agents then launched an elaborate 18-month surveillance of Mr. Weaver’s cabin and land.

David Nevin, a defense lawyer involved in the subsequent court case, noted later: “The U.S. marshals called in military aerial reconnaissance and had photos studied by the Defense Mapping Agency. . . . They had psychological profiles performed and installed $130,000 worth of solar-powered long-range spy cameras. They intercepted the Weavers’ mail. They even knew the menstrual cycle of Weaver’s teenage daughter, and planned an arrest scenario around it.”

On Aug. 21, 1992, six heavily armed, camouflaged U.S. marshals sneaked onto Mr. Weaver’s property. Three agents threw rocks to get the attention of Mr. Weaver’s dogs. As Mr. Weaver’s 14-year-old son, Sammy, and Kevin Harris, a 25- year-old family friend living in the cabin, ran to see what the dogs were barking at, U.S. marshals killed one of the dogs. Sammy Weaver fired his gun in the direction the shots had come from. Randy Weaver came out and hollered for his son to come back to the cabin. Sammy yelled, “I’m coming, Dad,” and was running back to the cabin when a federal marshal shot him in the back and killed him.

Kevin Harris responded to Sammy’s shooting by fatally shooting a U.S. marshal. Federal agents falsely testified in court that the U.S. marshal had been killed by the first shot of the exchange; evidence later showed that the marshal had fired seven shots before he was shot himself.

After the death of the U.S. marshal, the commander of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team was called in, and ordered federal agents to shoot any armed adult outside the Weaver cabin, regardless of whether that person was doing anything to threaten or menace federal agents. (Thanks to the surveillance, federal officials knew that the Weavers always carried guns when outside their cabin.)

With the massive federal firepower surrounding the cabin — the automatic weapons, the sniper rifles, the night vision scopes — this was practically an order to assassinate the alleged wrongdoers. Four hundred government agents quickly swarmed in the mountains around the cabin. Most important, the federal agents at that time made no effort to contact Mr. Weaver to negotiate his surrender.

The next day, Aug. 22, Randy Weaver walked to the little shack where his son’s body lay. As he was lifting the latch on the shack’s door, he was shot from behind by FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi. As he struggled back to the cabin, his wife, Vicki, stood in the doorway, holding a 10-month-old baby in her arms and calling for her husband to hurry. The FBI sniper fired again and hit Vicki Weaver in the temple, killing her instantly. (Mr. Horiuchi testified in court that he could hit within a quarter inch of a target at a distance of 200 yards.)

Reuters reported on Aug. 25, three days after the shooting: “FBI Agent Gene Glenn said that the law enforcement officers were proceeding with extreme care, mindful that Weaver’s wife Vicki and three remaining children . . . were also in the cabin. ‘We are taking a very cautious approach,’ he said in a statement to reporters.” An internal FBI report completed shortly after the confrontation justified the killing of Mrs. Weaver by asserting that she had put herself in harm’s way, the New York Times reported in 1993.

Though federal officials now claim that the killing of Vicki Weaver was an accident, the Washington Times’s Jerry Seper reported in September 1993: “Court records show that while the woman’s body lay in the cabin for eight days, the FBI used microphones to taunt the family. ‘Good morning, Mrs. Weaver. We had pancakes for breakfast. What did you have?’ asked the agents in at least one exchange.”

Neither Randy Weaver nor Mr. Harris fired any shots at government agents after the siege began. Mr. Weaver surrendered after 11 days. An Idaho jury found him innocent of almost all charges and ruled that Kevin Harris’s shooting of the U.S. marshal was self-defense. Federal Judge Edward Lodge condemned the FBI and issued a lengthy list detailing the Justice Department’s and FBI’s misconduct, fabrication of evidence, and refusals to obey court orders.

Justice Department officials launched their own investigation. A 542-page report was completed earlier this year that recommended possible criminal prosecution of federal officials and found that the rules of engagement “contravened the Constitution of the United States.” Yet Deval Patrick, assistant ttorney general for civil rights, rejected the findings last month and concluded that the federal agents had not used excessive force.

FBI Director Louis Freeh concluded that there was no evidence to show that Mr. Horiuchi intended to shoot Mrs. Weaver. Yet Bo Gritz, the former Vietnam War hero who represented the government when it finally negotiated Randy Weaver’s surrender after the death of his wife, declared that the government’s profile of the Weaver family recommended killing Mr. Weaver’s wife: “I believe Vicki was shot purposely by the sniper as a priority target. . . . The profile said, if you get a chance, take Vicki Weaver out.”

Mr. Freeh justified the FBI shooting of the Weavers because sniper Horiuchi “observed one of the suspects raise a weapon in the direction of a helicopter carrying other FBI personnel.” But other federal officials testified at the trial that no helicopters were flying in the vicinity of the Weavers’ cabin at the time of the FBI sniping.

One of the most disturbing aspects of Mr. Freeh’s slaps on the wrist last week is his treatment of Larry Potts, Mr. Freeh’s pick as acting deputy FBI director. Mr. Potts was the senior official in charge of the Idaho operation and signed off on the shoot-without-provocation orders. Despite the finding by the Justice Department that the orders violated the Constitution, Freeh recommended that the only penalty Mr. Potts face be a letter of censure — the same penalty Mr. Freeh received when he lost an FBI cellular telephone.

The Weaver case is by far the most important civil-rights/civil-liberties case the Clinton administration has yet resolved — and it resolved it in favor of granting unlimited deadly power to federal agents. If the new Republican congressional leaders let the Justice Department and the FBI get away with what may have been murder, they will be accomplices to a gross travesty of justice.

Mr. Bovard writes often on public policy.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Wall Street Journal
Copyright (c) 1995, Dow Jones & Co., Inc.
Thursday, January 26, 1995
Letters to the Editor: No Coverup at the FBI

On Jan. 10, you published an editorial-page piece by James Bovard entitled “No Accountability at the FBI” concerning my decision to discipline FBI employees for their actions associated with the crisis at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992. I am disappointed that Mr. Bovard would write an article that contained misstatements and distorted facts.

Although this crisis occurred before I became director, I have made it a priority to ensure that all the allegations of misconduct by the FBI and its employees were examined and all necessary remedial action taken. Contrary to Mr. Bovard’s opening canard, there has been no “patchwork of deception” at the FBI. That I publicly announced that FBI employees had exhibited errors of judgment, neglect of duty, inadequate performance and failure to exert proper managerial oversight — within two weeks of completion of the administrative review I ordered on Oct. 31, 1994 — belies Mr. Bovard’s allegations that the FBI has sought to cover up any wrongdoing by the FBI or its employees.

The deaths of Deputy United States Marshal William Degan, Vicki Weaver and Samuel Weaver are undeniably tragic. Sadly, Mr. Bovard compounds the tragedy by mischaracterizing the circumstances surrounding these deaths.

Deputy Marshal Degan was shot and killed as he and fellow marshals were withdrawing from the area of the Weaver cabin after conducting a surveillance preparatory to executing the arrest warrant outstanding for Randall Weaver. Mr. Degan and his colleagues were acting under explicit orders not to engage the Weavers during the surveillance. Contrary to Mr. Bovard’s assertion, the deputy marshals did not try to provoke a confrontation; their intent was to retreat from the area without violence and they attempted to do so. Mr. Bovard’s unfair omission of facts misleads the reader and seeks to diminish the enormity of a tragedy that did not have to happen.

The circumstances of Vicki Weaver’s death are also grossly mischaracterized. Her death was accidental. The FBI sniper was firing at a person he reasonably believed had, only seconds before, threatened to shoot at a helicopter carrying fellow law enforcement officers. The shot was fired to prevent the armed subject from gaining the protective cover of the cabin from which it was believed that he and others could fire upon the law enforcement officers on the scene. Vicki Weaver was standing unseen on the cabin porch behind the outwardly opened door. Mr. Bovard fails to note that the bullet that wounded its intended target and that also accidentally struck and killed Vicki Weaver was fired along a path parallel to the front of the Weaver cabin and not at or into the cabin. Mr. Bovard’s inference that her death was intentional is clearly refuted by the conclusion of two offices within the Justice Department that Vicki Weaver’s death was accidental and not criminal conduct.

I support the public’s right to know about the workings of its government and the integral role the press plays in ensuring an informed public. The FBI should be held accountable for its actions. I do not believe, however, that articles such as Mr. Bovard’s, which ignore or twist the truth, further the important objective of public accountability.

Louis J. Freeh
Director
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Washington
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Wall Street Journal
Monday, February 27, 1995
Letters to the Editor: The FBI Should Face the Facts

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Louis Freeh, in his Jan. 26 Letter to the Editor, denies the allegations from my Jan. 10 editorial-page article that the FBI has engaged in a coverup regarding its actions at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992. Unfortunately, Mr. Freeh’s comments indicate that his agency is not yet willing to face the facts.

Regarding the shooting of the U.S. marshal, Mr. Freeh asserts that “the deputy marshals did not try to provoke a confrontation; their intent was to retreat from the area without violence and they attempted to do so.” This is the same explanation that U.S. marshals on the witness stand first offered to the Idaho jury. After hours of cross-examination, a U.S. marshal admitted that the conflict began when a marshal shot and killed one of the Weaver’s dogs. Most American dog-owners would consider the shooting of their dog a provocation. And this is a peculiar way to “retreat from the area without violence.” Mr. Freeh does not even attempt to refute the fact that a U.S. marshal shot 14-year-old Sammy Weaver in the back as the boy was running away from the scene of the clash with the marshals.

Regarding the FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi’s killing of Vicki Weaver, Mr. Freeh asserts that the death was accidental and that “the FBI sniper was firing at a person he reasonably believed had, only seconds before, threatened to shoot at a helicopter carrying fellow law-enforcement officers.” The only thing that the FBI’s “helicopter rationale” for the shooting of Randy Weaver lacks is a helicopter. This was the same argument federal prosecutors made at trial in Idaho and it was thrown out of court by the federal judge. Other federal officials testified at the trial that no helicopters were flying in the vicinity of the Weavers’ cabin at the time of the FBI sniping. Chuck Peterson, an Idaho lawyer who was part of Mr. Weaver’s defense team, observed, “The Federal judge threw out the [federal charge that Weaver aimed at] the helicopter because it was so incredibly weak — it was not supported by anything.”

Mr. Freeh then states that the shot that killed Vicki Weaver “was fired to prevent the armed subject from gaining the protective cover of the cabin from which it was believed that he and others could fire upon the law-enforcement officers on the scene.” But Randy Weaver had never fired upon the FBI agents — he was merely a wounded man trying to struggle into his home and the arms of his family. Mr. Freeh’s doctrine essentially means that if a government agent shoots and wounds a private citizen, then the government agent must be presumed to have a right to kill the private citizen — because otherwise the citizen might shoot back at the government agent.

This is a peculiar guide for law enforcement in a free society, for a society in which lawmen are not supposed to be able to wantonly shoot private citizens based on mere suspicion.

Mr. Freeh mentions, regarding the shot that killed Vicki Weaver, that the shot “wounded its intended target and . . . also accidentally struck and killed Vicki Weaver. . . .” Mr. Freeh’s letter implies that the “intended target” was Randy Weaver; however, the sniper at trial claimed that he was shooting at Kevin Harris, a family friend staying in the cabin, who was near the door and was not even accused of aiming at the helicopter. Apparently, since he was in the vicinity of Randy Weaver, that was sufficient for the FBI to attempt to kill him. Mr. Freeh’s wording implies that the bullet first hit the “intended target” and then hit Vicki Weaver. However, the bullet first passed through Vicki Weaver’s head before hitting Kevin Harris. The sniper’s testimony at trial indicated that he may have thought that Vicki Weaver was actually Kevin Harris — but that is a lame excuse for shooting a mother who posed no threat to the federal agents.

Mr. Freeh seeks to justify the shot that killed Vicki Weaver by stating that she was standing (while holding her 10-month old baby) “unseen behind the outwardly opened door.” He claims that the shot was an accident, which others who have examined the case or were involved in the surrender negotiations deny. But what sort of hostage rescue team takes deadly shots by an open door of a single-room cabin occupied by a woman and children?

Mr. Freeh declares, “I support the public’s right to know about the workings of its government and the integral role the press plays in ensuring an informed public.” This is a fine sentence for a letter to the editor, but it is ironic that it comes just after a sentence in which Mr. Freeh invokes a confidential 542-page Justice Department report that he claims vindicates his agency. Why is the Justice Department refusing to allow the public access to its own review of the case? This confidential document reportedly concludes that the FBI rules of engagement “contravened the Constitution of the United States.”

In a case in which three people were shot dead, Mr. Freeh says he has taken “all necessary remedial actions” — i.e., “I publicly announced that FBI employees had exhibited errors of judgment, neglect of duty, inadequate performance and failure to exert proper managerial oversight. . . .” If this case was about how some city policeman’s negligence resulted in a major traffic jam, then Mr. Freeh’s action might be appropriate. But this is a case in which a federal judge and an Idaho jury basically found that the U.S. government was lying from top to bottom in the allegations it made in federal court. (The judge commented that 75% of the evidence that the U.S. government had presented at the trial had actually helped the defense.) Is it proper that FBI acting Deputy Director Larry Potts, the person in charge of the operation, received the same “penalty” (a letter of censure in his file) that Mr. Freeh himself received when he lost a cellular telephone?

Mr. Freeh claims there has been no “patchwork of deception” at the FBI regarding this case. But even the press statement issued on the day that Mr. Freeh announced the wrist-slaps on his subordinates contained false information. The FBI claimed that Mr. Weaver had been convicted of the original weapons violations charge. Actually, an Idaho jury ruled that Mr. Weaver had been illegally entrapped and instead convicted him only of failing to show up for the trial in 1991. The FBI claims to have been studying the Weaver case for more than two years — but still cannot even get the basic facts straight.

The American people look forward to learning the truth of the Randy Weaver case. Unfortunately, that truth will have to come from someplace other than the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

James Bovard

Washington

*****

Below is a copy of the headline in a local paper after a jury found Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris not guilty on almost all charges.

Fedslosebig

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9/11 and the Triumph of Leviathan

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Terrorism & Tyranny book cover 2889153688_02bf4627ab_oThis is the 14th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and America continues to suffer from the political exploitation of that day.  When Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil  came out in 2003, many people condemned that book as alarmist. The final sentence of the first chapter asked: “And what are the prospects for the survival of American liberty from an endless war against an elusive, often ill-defined enemy?”  Unfortunately, the damage to our rights and liberties has only worsened since then.

Following are some epigrams and the first chapter from that book:

Nothing happened on 9/11 that made the federal government more trustworthy.

The Patriot Act treats every citizen like a suspected terrorist and every federal agent like a proven angel.

The worse government fails, the less privacy citizens supposedly deserve.

There is no technological magic bullet that will make the government as smart as it is powerful.

The U.S. government is far more efficient at making enemies than at defending Americans.

Killing foreigners is no substitute for protecting Americans.

Perpetual war inevitably begets perpetual repression. It is impossible to destroy all alleged enemies of freedom everywhere without also destroying freedom in the United States.

A lie that is accepted by a sufficient number of ignorant voters becomes a political truth.

Citizens should distrust politicians who distrust freedom.

In the long run, people have more to fear from governments than from terrorists. Terrorists come and go, but power-hungry politicians will always be with us.

Habeas corpus is an insurance policy to prevent governments from going berserk.

*******

INTRODUCTION   TERRORISM & TYRANNY: TRAMPLING FREEDOM, JUSTICE, AND PEACE TO RID THE WORLD OF EVIL (ST. MARTIN’S/PALGRAVE, SEPTEMBER 2003)   James Bovard

The war on terrorism is the first political growth industry of the new millennium. After the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W. Bush promised to lead a “crusade” to “rid the world of evil-doers.”1 Unfortunately, the political fallout from the 9/11 attacks could fatally blight both individual liberty and public safety.

After the terrorists killed thousands of Americans, the United States had the right and the duty to retaliate against the perpetrators—the Al Qaeda network —and destroy their ability to ever strike the United States again. Bush’s initial response to the attacks received almost universal support among the American public and pervasive support from foreign governments.

But as time passed, the Bush administration continually broadened the war. The response to attacks by a handful of killers is morphing into a campaign to vanquish all potential enemies of U.S. hegemony and to impose American political values on much of the world.

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Americans’ trust in government soared after the terrorist attacks. In the days after the attack, flag waving and patriotic appeals swept the land: polls showed a doubling in the number of people who trusted government to “do the right thing.”2 The national media rallied to the cause with headlines such as “The Government, Once Scorned, Becomes Savior” (Los Angeles Times), “Government to the Rescue” (Wall Street Journal), and “Government’s Comeback” (Washington Post).3 The government failed—so the government became infallible.

The surge in trust was spurred by a profusion of false government statements in the aftermath of the attacks. The Bush administration did everything possible to portray the United States as a blindsided innocent victim. Yet, from the 1995 warnings from the Philippines that Muslim terrorists were plotting to use hijacked airplanes as guided missiles to attack America, to the warnings to the Federal Bureau of Investigation that Arab students at flight schools were acting suspiciously, to the warning that Al Qaeda operatives had infiltrated the United States, to the failure by the National Security Agency to translate key emails on the pending attack, the feds were asleep at the switch.

After 9/11, the Bush administration rushed to increase the power of federal agencies across the board. Within hours after the attacks, Attorney General John Ashcroft began strong-arming Congress to enact sweeping antiterrorism legislation. Ashcroft’s constant shrill warnings of new terrorist attacks resulted in maximum intimidation and minimum deliberation by Congress.

Because of the actions of a handful of terrorists on September 11, federal agents could have more power over all Americans in perpetuity. The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required To Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA-PATRIOT) Act treats every citizen like a suspected terrorist and every federal agent like a proven angel. The Bush administration carried off the biggest bait-and-switch in U.S. constitutional history. Rather than targeting terrorists, Bush and Congress awarded new powers to federal agents to use against anyone suspected of committing any one of the three thousand federal crimes on the books.

The Bush administration converted the terrorist assault into a trump card against American privacy. The Patriot Act entitled the FBI to cannibalize the nation’s email with its Carnivore wiretapping system. The FBI is crafting a computer virus that can be inserted via email into targeted computers, allowing government access to everything a person types. FBI agents can now easily get warrants to compel public libraries and bookstores to surrender records of what books people borrow or buy. Federal agents have issued over 18,000 counterterrorism subpoenas and search warrants since 9/11; in many other cases, FBI agents have snared personal or proprietary information via arm-twisting and intimidation, no warrant required. The number of “emergency” searches conducted solely on the Attorney General’s command (and approved ex po facto by federal judges) is skyrocketing. Operation TIPS, the Terrorist Information and Prevention System, raised the specter of millions of informants—from truck drivers to letter carriers to cable television installers—reporting any “out of the ordinary” behavior to the feds. The Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness surveillance system aims to create a vast database dragnet, potentially creating hundreds of millions of dossiers on Americans containing all their phone bills, all their medical records, and everything they purchase (from books to magazines to plane tickets to guns)—all in the name of preemptively detecting terrorists. The Pentagon is also financing research to track people by their gait and by their odors.

The Patriot Act gave the feds the right to financially strip-search every American. It created new financial “crimes without criminal intent”—empowering the Customs Service to confiscate the bulk cash of American travelers who fail to fill out a government form. The president and federal regulators can now ban any foreign bank or institution from the U.S. market unless it bares its books to U.S. investigators. The Justice Department is exploiting Patriot Act powers to confiscate bank accounts for alleged crimes with no relation to terrorism. Federal officials continually bragged of the total amount of alleged terrorists assets frozen. But there were no press releases confessing that
much of the money was later returned after no evidence of wrongdoing could be found.

The Patriot Act created the new crime of “domestic terrorism,” defined as violent or threatening private actions intended “to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.” This definition reaches far beyond the box-cutter crowd. It could take only a few scuffles at a rally to transform a protest group into a terrorist entity. This could allow the government to drop the hammer on environmental extremists (even those not spiking trees), anti-trade fanatics (even those not trashing Starbucks), and anti-abortion protesters (even those not attacking doctors). If the violence at a rally is done by a government agent provocateur—as happened at some 1960s antiwar
protests—the government could still treat all the group’s members as terrorists. Likewise, anyone who donates to an organization that becomes classified as a terrorist entity—be it Greenpeace, the Gun Owners of America, or Operation Rescue—could face long prison terms.

Six days after the terrorist attack, Ashcroft effectively canceled the “Great Writ” of habeas corpus with a decree announcing that the government would henceforth lock up suspected aliens for a “reasonable period.” Over one thousand “special interest” detainees were jailed in the months after 9/11; however, no evidence surfaced linking any of those people to the terrorist attacks. Many suspects were locked up and not charged for weeks or months afterwards and effectively held incommunicado. More than six hundred people were deported after secret trials. When a New Jersey judge denounced the government’s refusal to release the names of detainees as “odious to a democracy,”6 Ashcroft responded by issuing an emergency regulation trumping the state court decision. Georgetown University law professor David Cole observed: “Never in our history  has the government engaged in such a blanket practice of secret incarceration.”7 Even after the Justice Department released or deported most of the “special interest” detainees, President Bush continued to describe all of them as “terrorists” and “murderers.”

Airports have far more potholes after 9/11. Despite the success of all the hijacking attempts on 9/11, Bush raced to lavishly praise Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and Federal Aviation Administration Chief Jane Garvey. The feds promised to greatly improve airport safety. The result is institutionalized panic-mongering and an unending comedy of errors: hundreds of evacuations and scores of thousands of travelers delayed because of unplugged metal detectors, sleeping security guards, pairs of scissors discovered in trash cans, or other dire breaches of regulations. New search policies have become a Molesters Full Employment Act, with airport screeners obsessing on the underwiring of bras or poking and prodding beyond the bounds of decorum. Federal airport security agents have confiscated more than five million nail clippers, cigar cutters, screwdrivers, and other prohibited items since early 2002. But covert government tests showed that firearms, knives, and dummy explosives have continued to gush through the new improved checkpoints. Congress mandated that more than $5 billion be spent purchasing and installing bomb detection machines that are notoriously unreliable and generate endless false alarms every day. Travelers can now be arrested if they commit the new crime of raising their voice at the federal agent pawing the socks and underwear in their carry-on luggage.

At the same time that Bush is making government more powerful, he is making it much less accountable. The Bush administration seized on the national security emergency atmosphere to erect stonewalls around all federal agencies. On October 12, 2001 Ashcroft announced that the Justice Department was reinterpreting the Freedom of Information Act to make it far more difficult for Americans to discover what the federal government actually does. Bush issued an executive order gutting the Presidential Records Act, which required the routine release of most of a president’s papers 12 years after their term ended.10 (Bush’s action will keep secret the actions of his father and many of his own top advisors during the Reagan administration.) White House spokesman Ari Fleischer pressured the news media not to broadcast or even print a transcript
of videotapes from Osama Bin Laden, warning that “if you report [the information] in its entirety that could raise concerns.”11 At the same time that the Bush administration rations the truth, it is generous with fabrications. Bush’s solicitor general, Theodore Olson, informed the Supreme Court: “It’s easy to imagine an infinite number of situations where the government might legitimately give out false information.”12

While Bush perennially invokes freedom to sanctify his antiterrorism policies, freedom to dissent may be on the endangered list. Ashcroft informed a congressional committee in December 2001: “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.” 13 The federal Homeland Security Department is urging local police departments to view critics of the war on terrorism as potential terrorists. In a May 2003 terrorist advisory, the Homeland Security Department warned local law enforcement agencies to keep an eye on anyone who “expressed dislike of attitudes and decisions of the U.S. government.”14 Such an expansive definition of terrorist suspects is especially pernicious because the Justice Department is advocating the nullification of almost all federal, state, and local court consent decrees restricting the power of local and state police to spy on Americans. Homeland Security officials also urged local lawmen to be on alert for potential suicide bombers who could be detected by such traits as a “pale face from recent shaving of beard.” They “may appear to be in a ‘trance,’” or their “eyes appear to be focused and vigilant”; either their “clothing is out of sync with the weather” or their “clothing is loose.” Perhaps to ensure that there will never be a shortage of suspects, federal experts advised local agencies of another tell-tale terrorist warning sign: someone for whom “waiting in a grocery store line becomes intolerable.”15

Perpetual Wars, Endless Enemies
Shortly after 9/11, President Bush announced: “So long as anybody’s terrorizing established governments, there needs to be a war.”16 The Bush administration quickly organized what Bush labeled a “freedom-loving coalition”—which included many of the most oppressive governments in the world. But as long as a foreign leader recited Bush’s catechism on terrorism, his government was automatically certified as a partner in Bush’s crusade against evil.

A week after the 9/11 attacks, Bush proclaimed he wanted Osama bin Laden “dead or alive” and made bin Laden the poster boy for the war on terrorism. Six months later, when asked about Osama at a press conference, Bush groused that bin Laden is “just a person who’s now been marginalized” and insisted: “I just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you.”17 From the initial targeting of al Qaeda, the enemies list expanded to include Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Somalia, and Libya, as well as an array of private groups.

The more foreign nations the United States bombs, the more domestic tranquility Americans will presumably enjoy. Bush declared on February 27, 2002: “We owe it to our children and our children’s children to rid the world of terror now, so they can grow up in a free society, a society without fear.”18 Bush assumes that there is a fixed sum of terror in the world and all that is necessary is to use enough force to “bring justice” to the culprits. Bush’s policies may spawn new terrorists faster than the U.S. military can kill existing terrorists.

Bush proclaimed that “either you’re with us, or you’re against us in the fight for freedom; either you stand beside this great Nation as part of a coalition that will defend freedom and defend civilization itself, or you’re against us.”19 Bush often speaks as if all he need do is pronounce the word “freedom” and all humanity is obliged to obey his commands—as if he were the World Pope of Freedom and his infallible proclamations are sufficient to justify scourging all slackers.

Bush rarely misses a chance to proclaim that the war on terrorism is being fought to save freedom—either U.S. freedom, or world freedom, or the freedom of future generations. On January 31, 2002, Bush proclaimed: “We are resolved to rout out terror wherever it exists to save the world for freedom.”20 Bush contrasts freedom and terror as if they are two ends of a seesaw. Because terror is the enemy of government, government necessarily becomes the champion of freedom. This simple dichotomy makes sense only if terrorists are the sole threat to freedom.

The Evolution of Terrorism
Terror was first explicitly used as a political tactic during the French Revolution. Terror had been used for thousands of years by despots to crush resistance but the French revolutionaries were likely the first to claim to be idealists for maximizing oppression. Maximilien Robespierre gushed that terror is “justice prompt, severe and inflexible,” “an emanation of virtue,” and “a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy.” For Robespierre, terror tactics exemplified “the despotism of liberty against tyranny.” The revolution featured not only the guillotining of thousands of aristocrats, but also the ritualized mass drownings of people in Nantes and the extermination of the populace of entire towns who failed to enthusiastically support the “despotism of liberty.” Britain’s Edmund Burke, the most eloquent enemy of the French Revolution, denounced “thousands of those hellhounds called terrorists.”

By the mid-twentieth century, the term “terrorism” was routinely used to condemn those who attacked politicians, government forces, or established regimes. The Nazis denounced French Resistance saboteurs as terrorists. Terrorism has permeated Middle East conflicts since the 1940s, when Menachem Begin and his Irgun gang helped drive the British out of Palestine by blowing up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people. In the 1950s, Algerians terrorized Paris and other French cities, eventually driving the French out of northern Africa and ending colonial rule. The United States revved up its military intervention in Vietnam to deal with what the Kennedy administration perceived as a “small war of terrorism and political subversion” by a few thousand Viet Cong.23 In the late 1960s, Palestinians became the premier terrorists in the Western world; the kidnapping of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich heralded the era of televised political murders.

After President George W. Bush announced a war on terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, one British wit declared that this was the first time in history that war had been declared on an abstract noun. Actually, many politicians had declared war on terrorism in the preceding decades—from Germany’s Helmut Schmidt, to various Israeli leaders, to Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s war on terrorism eventually crippled his administration, as revelations about the Iran-Contra scandal (trading weapons to gain release of hostages held by terrorists) raised the specter of both his impeachment and his senility. The first U.S. war on terrorism ended when a bomb exploded on Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, demonstrating the abysmal failure of the U.S. government to protect American citizens.

While Bush portrays his war on terrorism as a simple question of “good versus evil,” the concept of terrorism is murkier than many government officials would like to admit. Brian Jenkins, one of the most respected U.S. experts on the subject, observed in 1981: “Terrorism is what the bad guys do.”24

The U.S. State Department defined terrorism in 1981 as “the use or threat of the use of force for political purposes in violation of domestic or international law.”25 Since government use of force is almost automatically lawful (based on government edicts and sovereign immunity), governments by definition cannot commit terrorist acts. For decades, U.S. representatives to the United Nations have been adamant that “state terrorism” is a near impossibility. Private cars packed with dynamite are evil, while guided missiles launched from government jet fighters that blow up cars driven by terrorist suspects are good, regardless of how many children are in the back seat at the time of the “surgical strike.”

A core fallacy at the heart of the war on terrorism is that terrorism is worse than almost anything else imaginable. Unfortunately, governments around the world have committed far worse abuses than Al Qaeda or any other terrorist cabal. By treating terrorism as the supreme evil, and insisting that governments can never be guilty of terrorism, the Bush administration makes the crimes of government morally negligible. From 1980 to 2000, international terrorists killed 7,745 people, according to the U.S. State Department.26 Yet, in the same decades, governments killed more than 10 million people in ethnic cleansing campaigns, mass executions, politically caused famines, wars, and other slaughters. During the 1990s, Americans were at far greater risk of being gunned down by local, state, and federal law enforcement agents than of being killed by international terrorists.

Despite continual victory proclamations out of Washington, there is no end in sight for Bush’s war on terrorism. An August 2002 United Nations report announced that Al Qaeda “is, by all accounts, ‘alive and well’ and poised to strike again how, when and where it chooses.”27 Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet warned a congressional panel on October 17, 2002 that Al Qaeda has “reconstituted, they are coming after us, they want to execute attacks” and that “the threat environment we find ourselves in today is as bad as it was the summer before September 11.”28 Though the war on Iraq was justified to thwart terrorism, many experts believe that the bombing and invasion of an Arab country actually fueled terrorist fires. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, a British think tank, warned in May 2003 that Al Qaeda is “more insidious and just as dangerous” as before 9/11.29

Despite scores of billions of dollars of new government spending, despite the hiring of legions of new federal agents, and despite the U.S. military campaigns to overthrow the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, Americans continue to be at grave risk.

The federal government must vigorously defend America against terrorists. But is the United States suffering more from political exploitation of terrorism than from terrorists? Is the Bush administration’s aggression creating more terrorists than it is vanquishing? And what are the prospects for the survival of American liberty from an endless war against an elusive, often ill-defined enemy?

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Barrons: Supreme Neglect of Liberty at Highest Court

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bill of rights voidBARRON’S, September 21, 2015
Supreme Neglect of Liberty at the High Court

By James Bovard

Author James Bovard writes how America’s highest court has turned a blind eye to fundamental rights.

In its recent landmark decision on gay marriage, five Supreme Court justices proclaimed that “the Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach…to define and express their identity.”

While the court proudly created a new freedom, it continues to fail to safeguard freedoms that generations of Americans once enjoyed. Instead, the court perennially turns a blind eye to government agencies that cut vast swaths through the Bill of Rights.

As the court showed in numerous rulings this past term, the primary purpose of “law” nowadays is to provide an opening for presidents to do as they please. In a June decision, six justices saved Obamacare for a second time by effectively ruling that a federally run insurance exchange is close enough for government work to “an exchange established by the State.”

The court’s contortions were even greater in a fair-housing decision handed down the same day. The court sanctified the use of disparate-impact analysis for housing discrimination, thereby creating vast liability for local governments, insurers, and other businesses due to unintentional statistical discrepancies. Five justices sided with the Obama administration, ignoring the actual words of the 1968 Fair Housing Act and instead invoking the logic of previous court rulings on other subjects. As a result, any locality with a lower percentage of minorities than the national average could find itself a target of federal housing enforcers.

Political Shelter

Unfortunately, the court has long relied on verbal contortions to sanctify political power grabs. In 2005, in the Kelo v. City of New London decision, the Supreme Court declared that the “public use” requirement in the Takings clause of the Fifth Amendment really meant “public purpose.” Even cases in which the government seizes one person’s land to directly give it to another private citizen can meet this standard, according to the court—since anything that helps politicians presumably serves a public purpose.

It isn’t just landowners whom the court has put at the mercy of officialdom. In a series of rulings beginning in the 1990s, the court green-lighted a vast expansion of confiscation, even without criminal conviction, based on contorted ancient precedents. For instance, the court invoked an 1827 case involving the seizure of a Spanish pirate ship that had attacked U.S. ships to uphold the confiscation of an automobile jointly owned by a husband and wife, after the husband was caught with a hooker on the front seat. Hundreds of thousands of citizens have seen their cash, cars, or other property commandeered merely because a government agent suggested that it might have been linked to some illicit use.

The Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights says it protects Americans against unreasonable, warrantless searches and seizures of their property and papers. But the Supreme Court has swallowed one dubious pretext after another to sanctify government intrusions. It has continually defined privacy down, until government searches are almost never considered “unreasonable.”

Two years ago, the court rejected a challenge to the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretaps because the plaintiffs couldn’t prove they had been spied on. (Ten years ago, the NSA was condemned in a Barron’s editorial, “Unwarranted Executive Power,” Dec. 26, 2005.) The court effectively ruled that, as long as NSA spying is kept secret, no likely victim could challenge it in court.

The National Security Agency’s victory was short-lived; a few months later, Edward Snowden’s leaks showed how it had become a giant vacuum cleaner that illicitly seized tens of millions of Americans’ e-mail and phone records and other personal data.

Defending Abuse

The court has turned a blind eye to most of the civil-liberties abuses that have occurred since 9/11. Millions of Americans have been outraged by the intrusions and arrogance of the Transportation Security Administration, but the court has refused to accept any case challenging the TSA’s compulsion of travelers to submit to its “whole-body scanners,” which take explicit photos that are so revealing that they disclose whether a male has been circumcised. The court has also done nothing to curb the Obama administration’s vendetta against journalists and whistle-blowers whose revelations embarrass federal policy makers. The court’s acquiescence makes it far easier for agencies to cover up outrageous conduct.

One case the court got right in June also illustrates the high cost of awaiting judicial deliverance. In 1949, the Agriculture Department set up a Raisin Administrative Committee, which, invoking the Agriculture Marketing Agreement Act of 1937, claimed the right to confiscate up to 47% of raisin farmer’s harvests to drive up raisin prices.

When the Supreme Court first heard this case in 2013, Justice Elena Kagan groused that the 1937 statute could be “the world’s most outdated law.” Two years later, the court finally ruled that confiscating farmers’ crops without compensation violated the Fifth Amendment. The Obama administration had defended raisin confiscations with the bizarre claim that the Takings clause of the Constitution protects only land, not other forms of property.

Dozens of farmers have filed challenges to the confiscations of crops of many kinds by Agriculture Department-empowered committees over the past half-century. While generations of farmers were plundered, the Supreme Court either never heard their cases or failed to clearly rebuff this classic example of bureaucratic tyranny. So the raisin case was a giant—though rare—step in the right direction.

Unreliable Guardians

The Founding Fathers never expected the Supreme Court to become a rubber stamp for Leviathan. But counting on the Supreme Court to defend your freedom is like trusting a politician to keep his campaign promises. Many recent court decisions should teach Americans that the court’s nine political appointees will rarely ride to the rescue of their constitutional rights.

JAMES BOVARD is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy, Lost Rights, and eight other books.

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World Bank Ravages the Third World – 30th Anniv.

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world-bank-wrecking-ball-image-for-blog-9-30-2015_edited-1

Rehabbing the World Bank

This is the 30th anniversary of my first attack on the World Bank in the national media. Reposted below are some of my attacks on the Bank from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.  I discuss in Public Policy Hooligan how I nabbed some of the confidential documents exposed below. The Bank continues propping up tyrants and bankrolling destructive economic policies around the globe.  It should have been abolished decades ago.

Wall Street Journal
September 30, 1985
Behind the Words at the World Bank
By James Bovard

As some 9,000 interested parties gather in Seoul this week for the World Bank’s annual meeting, accolades will be heard for the bank’s new awareness of the private sector, and its crucial role in spurring international development. But what changes the bank has made in recent years don’t add up to an improvement.

Bank President A.W. Clausen often praises private
enterprise these days, but the vast majority of World Bank
loans still go to strengthen government bureaucracies and
reinforce their control over the economy. Loans to communist
countries alone have increased fourfold since 1981 and will
constitute 13.4% of the bank’s 1985 lending. The bank has
been the driving force behind the nationalization of oil and
natural gas throughout the Third World. And all the while, it
has shown too little concern for human-rights violations in
its projects.

The bank has given the government of Indonesia more than
$600 million to remove — sometimes forcibly — several
million people from the densely populated island of Java and
resettle them on comparatively barren islands elsewhere in
Indonesia. Despite reports of violence, the bank continues
lauding the project as “the largest voluntary migration” in
recent history.

The London-based Anti-Slavery Society for Human Rights
reported to the United Nations that at least one supposedly
vacant island being given to the migrants was already
inhabited — and that the Indonesian army cleared the island
by setting the original inhabitants’ crops on fire. Indonesia
is sending hundreds of thousands of migrants to the island of
Irian Jayaand the island’s original inhabitants claim they
are being driven from their lands by the Indonesian army. The
Indonesian government is also resettling Javanese on the
island of East Timor — which the army seized in 1975.
According to a 1983 Washington Post account quoting relief
workers, an estimated 150,000 of the island’s 700,000
inhabitants were killed or left to die of starvation in the
ensuing strife.

The transmigration project is supposed to make the
migrants more productive. But the project mainly moves poor
farmers from small amounts of good land to large amounts of
nearly worthless land. The government often fails to honor
its promises to provide water, roads, schools and tools. It
costs about $6,000 to move each family, yet most families
that are moved end up making little or no income from their
new habitats, and many who previously supported themselves in
Java have gone on welfare.

The Polonoroeste project in Brazil is a similar fiasco.
The bank has poured almost half a billion dollars into a
scheme to move landless farmers into cleared areas in the
Amazon tropical forests. But about all the project succeeded
in doing was building a road and encouraging tens of
thousands of people to move to an area with terrible farm
land and almost no infrastructure. The project has
pointlessly cut down hundreds of square miles of rain forests
and engendered much violence between the new arrivals and the
indigenous Indians. The bank specified in the original loan
agreement with Brazil that the Indians’ rights must be
respected, but then did nothing when the Indians’ lands were
trampled. After two years’ uproar by U.S. environmental
groups and extensive congressional hearings, the bank has
temporarily stopped funding the project.

To its credit, the bank has contributed funds to help
privatize a few government corporations in Africa and Asia.
But at the same time the bank is spending a few million
dollars to resurrect private companies that previous bank
loans often helped nationalize, it is pouring billions into
maintaining state-owned enterprises (SOEs) throughout the
Third World.

The bank’s latest kick is “public sector improvement
loans” — basically, transferring the cost of socialist
inefficiency from the recipient government to the World
Bank’s donors. Morocco received $200 million for “actions to
improve public investment planning and the functioning of the
public enterprise sector.” Chile received $11 million to help
the government “orient and guide the process of resource
allocations” among SOEs. Ecuador received $14 million “to
increase the public sector’s contribution to economic growth
by improving the management of key public enterprises.”

The bank’s biggest socialistic binge is occurring in
energy projects. Most World Bank energy loans either displace
foreign private investment or deter the development of
private companies in recipient countries. World Bank 1985
energy loans include $92 million to the Yugoslavian
government for oil and gas exploration, $233 million to the
Pakistani government oil companies, $248 million to the
Indian government for coal-mine development, and $110 million
to the Bangladesh government for natural gas exploration.
These loans do nothing to increase development — but only
add to the size of Third World governments, breeding more
bureaucrats and fewer entrepreneurs.

The biggest change at the bank since Mr. Clausen took over
in 1981 is the huge increase in lending to communist
countries. Since 1981, China, Romania, Ethiopia, Yugoslavia
and Hungary have received more than $6 billion — including
almost $2 billion in 1985. Even though China has easy access
to commercial credit, Mr. Clausen favors doubling World Bank
lending to China from the current $1 billion a year. Nor is
World Bank financing being used to pry China away from
socialism — the bank gave China a $47 million zero-interest,
50-year loan for the development of its state farms.

The bank also is busy subsidizing America’s trade
competitors. South Korea received $556 million in World Bank
loans this past year for purposes like providing “much needed
capital for economically and financially viable industrial
projects” and enhancing rail capacity in the Seoul industrial
corridor. South Korea is better managed than most World Bank
borrowers — but, like most borrowers, it has long had easy
access to commercial credit and need not rely on the bank’s
subsidies.

The bank, like most international organizations, has tried
to use the African famine to drum up support to boost its own
budget. Though much of Mr. Clausen’s rhetoric is devoted to
Africa’s dire straits, barely 10% of the bank’s 1985 loans
have gone to sub-Saharan Africa. And the biggest beneficiary
was Ethiopia.

This past year, much to the bank’s embarrassment, its loan
volume fell 7%. A classified internal World Bank memo late
last year outlined plans to relax all types of loan
requirements in order to spur borrower demand. The bank
subsequently abolished its one-quarter percent “handling fee”
on loans. The bank currently has $17 billion in unlent cash
reserves.

Despite the bank’s inability to meet its loan goals, Mr.
Clausen wants to expand. Earlier this year he said he hoped
to request a $40 billion increase in callable capital
(existing total: $55.8 billion), though he may be retreating
from that goal now. Whatever, Mr. Clausen wants the bank to
have a larger role in managing the international debt crisis
— which would be akin to appointing Mrs. O’Leary’s cow chief
of the Chicago Fire Department.

Mr. Clausen and his predecessor, Robert McNamara, beat the
bushes to encourage more commercial lending to Third World
governments. Now we have a debt problem that is indeed
serious, and foolish American banks are in trouble. But if
the U.S. wants to bail out its banks it should give them the
money directly and not launder the handouts through the World
Bank and Third World governments.

Mr. Clausen’s term as bank president expires in mid-1986.
The U.S., as the bank’s largest shareholder, has effective
power to appoint a new bank president. One hopes the Reagan
administration will find a replacement, but in the meantime
the funding issue must be addressed.

The bank can sustain a lending level of $13 billion a year
simply by relying on its principal repayment and interest
earnings. Its 1985 lending amounts to $14.4 billion. That’s
more than enough to cover good projects to well-managed
countries that do not have access to commercial credit. A
poorer bank would be a wiser bank — and a better friend to
the Third World.

—tagline: Mr. Bovard is a Washington-based freelance journalist.

******

Wall Street Journal
September 23, 1987
World Bank Confidentially Damns Itself
By James Bovard

The World Bank is preparing to ask the U.S. for an
additional $10 billion in cash and guarantees to expand its
lending. The bank claims that it must boost its lending in
order to encourage market-oriented reforms in Third World
countries. But the bank’s own confidential reports reveal
that its structural-adjustment program has been a dismal
failure.

World Bank President Barber Conable and other bank
officials are now preaching a private-sector gospel,
stressing that the private sector is the key to economic
growth and a strong future. They are right on this score —
and it is good that someone at the bank finally recognizes
the true source of economic growth.

But every time the bank loudly praises the private sector,
it silently damns its own record. The bank financed and
approved the massive expansion of government power throughout
the Third World. A 1987 World Bank study by Keith Marsden and
Therese Belot implied that World Bank aid and other foreign
aid was a major culprit in the nationalization of African
economies: “Foreign loans have reinforced the heavy public
sector bias of African investments.”

The bank’s flagship structural-adjustment lending (SAL)
program was launched in 1980 to encourage policy reform. SALs
have allowed the bank to greatly increase its loans in the
1980s.

But, SALs are often used to perpetuate government control
rather to induce pro-market reforms. A 1986 confidential
study surveyed 10 countries that received SALs and concluded
that only two countries substantially reduced their budget
deficits. The report noted that “not infrequently,” World
Bank officers were more interested in preparing new loans
than in supervising the structural-adjustment process.

What have SALs gone for? In the Ivory Coast, the SAL was
used to pay the debts of floundering government enterprises.
In Senegal, the SAL bankrolled the budgets of
government-owned agricultural companies. In Pakistan, bank
aid was used to “rationalize” state-owned companies, but
auditors concluded that efficiency had not been increased and
that the companies are still inefficient and losing money.

The 1986 report noted, “Under most of the 15 SALs in the
10 countries, restrictions placed on the use of SAL funds
were minimal.” It appears that most of the money was used to
conduct business as usual, thus perpetuating government
waste. The World Bank encourages recipient governments to
spend SALs for export subsidies — which only perpetuates
distortions in the domestic economy.

The bank has a very generous measure of success of its
SALs. The bank officially judged Bolivia “to have complied
with the spirit of the Loan Agreement” in the early 1980s,
though bank auditors disagreed, concluding that the SAL “was
unsuccessful; reforms were minimal and short-lived.”

The SALs’ timid efforts to require reform are often
defeated because governments can easily acquire foreign aid
elsewhere. The 1986 bank report noted: “The availability of
alternative financial sources, often without strict
conditionality [including other loans from the World Bank],
reduces the need for the bank to provide a SAL. . . . In
Jamaica and Senegal, availability of substantial foreign aid
led governments to decide initially that it was not necessary
to devalue or to substantially reduce budget deficits.”

A 1985 confidential bank report by leading development
expert Elliot Berg and consultant Alan Batchelder concluded:
“The SAL’s seemingly hard and all-encompassing conditionality
is largely illusory . . . the Bank must shrink from the
ultimate sanction, cancellation. Cessation of disbursements
is too strong a response by the Bank to banal acts of
non-performance. In the one case where it was done (Senegal)
the SAL was replaced by new [World Bank] credits.”

SALs often neglect key problems because of World Bank fear
of offending the recipient government. One bank official who
has worked extensively with SALs complained that the Mexican
structural adjustment loan made no mention of imposing limits
on corruption or on capital flight — two of Mexico’s biggest
problems. The bank reportedly did not even push Mexico to
install a decent auditing system to control graft.

Yugoslavia received a $275 million structural-adjustment
loan in 1983 to improve “the efficiency and competitiveness
of the economy.” But the Yugoslavian economy today is a
shambles, with hyperinflation, high unemployment and
oppressive debt. A 1987 World Bank report concluded that
“real interest rates are still negative, and the intended
reforms related to financial discipline, investment criteria
and foreign exchange and credit allocation are not yet in
place.”

Most bank project loans also fail to spur reform. A 1985
bank audit report concluded that, though most recipient
governments promise to make reforms when borrowing bank
money, the promised reforms are rarely made, and that “a
typical reaction by the Bank” to noncompliance has been to
conclude that additional loans are necessary to further
encourage policy reform.

The bank recently gave Jamaica $34 million to reform its
government sugar estates, the latest in a series of loans
since 1978. The bank’s press release claimed, “Since the
early 1980s, the government has been implementing a major
rationalization of the state-owned sugar industry as part of
its broader economic adjustment effort in order to make it
financially viable.” Yet, a 1985 confidential World Bank
report on Jamaica concluded, “Despite major effort, little
progress has been made at improving management of the
government’s sugar estates.”

Some foreign-aid advocates imply that a wave of
privatization is sweeping the Third World. But a recent 1987
bank study on privatization “found few instances of formal
liquidations in the 28 countries reviewed. . . . Sales of
large numbers of enterprises are also few, occurring in only
two countries, Chile and Bangladesh.”

The bank cannot force governments to reform because the
bank is often more eager to lend than Third World governments
are to borrow. A 1987 bank audit report concluded that some
bank projects suffered from “an unseemly pressure to lend,”
and that Third World governments have been pressured by bank
officers to borrow money for projects that later turned out
to be fiascos.

As more and more countries receive SALs, the bank will
likely be able to find a few success stories. Thailand and
Turkey received SALs after they had begun pro-market reforms.
But the vast majority of SAL recipients continue to have
self-defeating economic policies before, during, and after
their SALs.

As the 1985 Berg-Batchelder study concluded: “Why don’t
governments change the policies that are holding back their
development? . . . What has money got to do with all this
anyway? Why do external donors have to pay money to induce
LDC governments to do things that we (and presumably they)
believe will make them better off?”

The vast majority of pro-market reforms do not require
foreign cash to implement. If governments would only respect
the lives and property of their citizens, allow people to
start their own businesses, and roll back bureaucratic
control, then countries could boost their living standards
without boosting their debt load.

If the bank is serious about providing capital only to
countries following productive economic policies, how can it
justify giving a single dollar to Ethiopia? The bank recently
lent Ethiopia $14 million for, among other things,
“institutional development of the Ministry of Agriculture.”
But the ministry is heavily involved in the government’s
murderous villagization program, whereby the Marxist rulers
are trying to force 33 million peasants (three-quarters of
the population) to move their homes and live in
government-supervised villages. This is economic development?

If the U.S. does pledge an additional $10 billion for the
bank, one of the major beneficiaries could be the Soviet
Union, which is currently seeking access to bank-subsidized
loans. Barber Conable stated last fall that he would be
“happy” to consider Soviet membership, and Undersecretary of
State John Whitehead said in March that the U.S. “would like
to see the Soviet Union become a member of” the World Bank,
the IMF and GATT.

Has the World Bank helped the Third World? Some countries
have benefited — but most of the long-term aid recipients
have ended up with heavy debt loads, swollen public sectors
and overvalued exchange rates. Instead of spurring reform,
most aid has simply allowed governments to perpetuate their
mistakes.

If the bank has not straightened out Third World economic
policies after handing out over a hundred billion dollars,
why should we trust it with more money?

*************

Wall Street Journal

Tuesday, June 21, 1988
World Bank Unit’s Lip Service to Private Sector
By James Bovard

Treasury Secretary James Baker lauds the International
Finance Corporation, the private-sector affiliate of the
World Bank, as “the flagship of the private sector in the
Third World.” The World Bank is lobbying Congress for an
additional $14 billion U.S. commitment to expand World Bank
lending, and the IFC is seen as a model for what an expanded
World Bank could do. But many, if not most, IFC loans go to
government-controlled enterprises and the IFC has a growing
enthusiasm for investing in Communist countries.

According to Sir William Ryrie, the IFC’s chief executive
officer under titular head Barber Conable, “The main
initiative and drive and the bulk of the capital required
[for IFC investments] must come from the private sector.”
Yet, the IFC invested $17 million in an automobile plant in
China in 1985 where the only private-sector involvement was a
stake of less than 10% held by Peugeot. Private foreign
investment in China has nosedived in very recent years due to
increased Chinese government restrictions on foreign
investors. Yet, according to Toerstein Stephansen, director
of the IFC’s Asian/Pacific branch, “Money is available and we
can, each year, provide up to $100 million in investment to
projects in China.”

The largest recipient of IFC loans is Yugoslavia, with
almost $400 million in such aid. Yet Yugoslavia’s private
sector has fallen, according to Radio Free Europe, from 27%
of gross national product in 1962 to 5% in 1986.

The IFC has invested heavily in the Yugoslavian banking
system, and thus is likely eventually to show losses from
last year’s banking collapse, as well as from the nation’s
inflation rate of as much as 200%. (Until recently,
Yugoslavian government controls held interest rates on loans
at rates far below the inflation rate).

Despite the IFC’s purported commitment to private
enterprise, it recently invested $3.2 million to help set up
a new government-controlled bank in Hungary to make loans to
state-owned enterprises and cooperatives — and this at a
time when the Hungarian government levied heavy new taxes on
the limited private enterprises that do exist.

The IFC is eager to begin lending to Poland, as a March 24
confidential project analysis sent to the chairman of the
IFC’s Investment Committee shows. In it, Douglas Gustafson,
the IFC’s director of investment for Europe and the Middle
East, says of a proposed $18 million loan to a Polish fruit
and vegetable cooperative:

“Given the continuing uncertainties about how and when the
IMF may [give aid to Poland,] there is a real danger that the
Polish authorities may become frustrated with the
international financial institutions. IFC has the possibility
to act as a bridge during this interim period, by providing a
relatively small loan and demonstrating the good intent of
the World Bank Group. . . . A fast, early investment by IFC
would have enormous effect on IFC’s standing in Poland, would
demonstrate IFC to be a flexible, responsible institution and
would increase the number of investment possibilities in the
pipeline. IFC would achieve a great deal of good will by an
early investment.”

The World Bank wants to be loved by its bankrupt Communist
borrowers — and also wants to maximize the “investment
possibilities” for increased World Bank handouts and growth.
Poland has a $40 billion debt that it will never repay — yet
the World Bank is worried about winning Poland’s “good will.”

To maintain an appearance of private-sector orientation,
IFC loans are prohibited from being guaranteed by
governments. Yet, the Polish loan would be guaranteed by Bank
Handlowy, which is fully owned by the Polish Ministry of
Finance. The IFC skirts this requirement by claiming that
Bank Handlowy is a “commercial bank,” and notes in the
project analysis: “This approach is similar to that adopted
in Yugoslavia and Hungary.” The investment is justified
partly on the analysis of the borrower’s net worth, which the
IFC calculates based on an exchange rate of 175 zlotys to the
dollar — even though the black-market exchange rate in
Poland is roughly 1,300 to the dollar.

Outside of the East Bloc, many IFC projects look like
international versions of Urban Development Action Grants,
funding activities that could occur regardless of IFC
handouts. The IFC chipped in $6 million for a Ramada
Renaissance Hotel in Grenada, $7 million for a Sheraton Hotel
in Fiji, $3.6 million for the expansion of an
Intercontinental Hotel in Kenya. As with UDAGs, projects
often are justified by the number of “jobs created.” An IFC
press release claimed that a $28 million IFC-supported P.T.
Bali Holiday Village resort in Indonesia would create “some
300 direct jobs.” But, since the average Indonesian
per-capita income is $550, spending almost $90,000 per new
job is not quite a bargain.

IFC loans often simply underwrite partnerships between
multinational corporations and Third World governments. The
IFC lent $9 million to Yemen Hunt Oil Co. in 1985 to build a
refinery, in a project that also received a $20 million
guarantee from the U.S. Overseas Private Investment
Corporation. Hunt Oil Co. has been in partnership with the
Yemen Arab Republic since 1981 — and it is hard to see how
providing an IFC cash injection long after the partnership
began achieved anything.

The IFC claims that 41 of its 92 investments last year
were in companies that were entirely private-sector. Yet,
many of the companies the IFC claims are completely private
have an extensive government role. In Zambia, the IFC says
Zambia Cashew Co. and the Gwembe Valley Development Co. are
completely private, but according to Cecilia Momeka of the
Zambian Embassy in Washington, the government owns 51% of
every corporation in the country. In Togo, the IFC claims
that an $850,000 loan went to a private steel mill, but the
mill actually is owned by the government and leased for 10
years to a private individual. Moreover, as part of the
leasing agreement, Togo promised to keep a 41% tariff on
imported steel.

In Argentina, the IFC claims that loans went to three
totally private entities in Argentina, but the Argentine
government owns stock in all three. In Ghana, the IFC claims
an oil-exploration program it is helping is private, but the
Ghanaian government owns substantial shares in the
corporation. And in China, the IFC claims that China
Investment Co. is completely private-but the company will be
investing in joint projects between the government of China
and foreign investors, which the Chinese government will
largely control. In Zimbabwe, the IFC lent $10 million to udc
Ltd., a Zimbabwean finance organization, for lending to
Zimbabwean businesses. The IFC classifies this project as
strictly private-sector. However, every loan that udc Ltd.
makes must first be approved by Zimbabwe’s Ministry of
Industry and Technology or Ministry of Trade and Commerce.

Some IFC loans may actually increase political control
over the economy. The IFC has provided five loans to the
Panafrican Paper Mills in Kenya since 1970. As part of the
Kenyan government’s contributions to helping the
public-private entity, it sharply increased tariffs on
imported paper. The results looked good on Panafrican’s
balance sheets but clobbered the Kenyan people with higher
paper prices.

The IFC’s 1985-89 five-year plan calls for a 7% annual
increase in loan-investment volume, currently at $1.1
billion. To meet its growth targets, the IFC is planning to
increase its investments in South Korea at a time when the
private sector is doing just fine on its own. South Korea has
already attracted a flood of foreign private investment
without the IFC, and the IFC is in Korea largely to boost its
loan and equity investments and to snare easy profits.

The IFC, along with the World Bank in general, is based on
the idea that a handout provides a stronger incentive than
sheer necessity to adopt sound economic policies. Many
economists in recipient countries disagree.

Martin Tardos, director of the Hungarian Academy of
Science’s Institute of Economics, notes: “The World Bank
money has made life easier for the Hungarian government and
made it possible to avoid deep market-oriented change. The
World Bank was not setting conditions for real changes and it
accepted the rhetoric for the reality.” In Poland, private
citizens have vast dollar reserves saved up in their
mattresses. Yet because they have no security for their
investments, they don’t invest in Polish companies, as Jan
Vanous of Planecon Consultants in Washington observes. It is
absurd to inject dollars into a country when its own people
have no faith in the economic system.

The IFC, like the World Bank in general, has failed in its
effort to buy economic reform from Third World and Eastern
European politicians. Necessity is still the best incentive
for sound economic reform. Insofar as the World Bank reduces
the pressure of necessity without securing real reform, it
has betrayed the citizens of the Third World and East Europe.

*****************
The New York Times July 30, 1989, Sunday,

HEADLINE: BUSINESS FORUM: THE WORLD BANK;
Fostering America’s Interests Abroad . . . But It Lends to Oppressive Regimes

BYLINE: By JAMES BOVARD; James Bovard is the author of ”The Farm  Fiasco.”

Barber Conable, the former New York Congressman, took over the World Bank in
l986 promising to reorganize and redirect it. But, after three years, little has
changed and the bank, the largest multilateral institution in the world,
continues financing regimes that oppress people and mangle economies.
The New York Times, July 30, 1989

Last September, Congress approved a 4 billion pledge of callable capital to
allow the bank to borrow more money and rapidly increase its lending. Mr.
Conable boasts that the bank committed over $20 billion to the third world and
East Europe in l988, and World Bank officials have already spoken of lending up
to $24 billion in l989.

Unfortunately, the bank is setting new lending records by providing more and
more capital to less and less creditworthy regimes. Eight nations have ceased
repaying World Bank loans, and the bank has set up a special program to give new
money to governments to repay their old loans.

South Korea continues to receive extensive World Bank aid, even though it is
a major industrial power with a huge manufacturing trade surplus. Yet when Mr.
Conable was lobbying for this year’s $14 billion American pledge, he denied that
South Korea was receiving any subsidy from the World Bank, because the interest
rate charged on the Koreans’ loan was a shade above the bank’s borrowing rate.
But all World Bank loans are effectively subsidized by being underwritten by the
United States and other Western governments, and Korea has received loans at
below-market interest rates from the bank.

Mr. Conable also misrepresented the nature of the World Bank’s efforts in
Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Government is brutalizing its own people and doing its
The New York Times, July 30, 1989

best to make Idi Amin look like a moderate. The Government has begun a program
to forcibly move three-quarters of the country’s poulation into
Government-controlled villages, and last February peasants who resisted the
Government’s notorious resettlement program were massacred by the Ethiopian
army. Even so, the World Bank has continued providing a huge amount of aid –
including over $100 million in l988 – to the Ethiopian Government.

During the l980’s, the fastest growing part of the bank’s portfolio has been
loans to communist governments. Mr. Conable told Congress, ”The World Bank has
been instrumental in encouraging communist governments to decentralize and
liberalize their economies and introduce economic market incentives.” But in
November l986, an internal review by the World Bank’s North African, Middle
Eastern, and European section examined World Bank loans to Hungary, Romania and
Yugoslavia and concluded: ”The major problem has been the unwillingness of
these countries to allow bank involvement in policy issues. Projects have been
prepared to meet Five-Year Plan objectives which could not be questioned or
analyzed by the bank.” World Bank money has therefore gone to finance the usual
priorities of the communist governments.

The World Bank is priding itself on its structural adjustment program that
allegedly exists to finance market-oriented reforms by recipients. But an August
l988 confidential World Bank analysis of the effects of structural adjustment
The New York Times, July 30, 1989

lending showed that African countries that received adjustment loans are now
doing significantly worse economically than African countries that had not
received such loans. Worldwide, among governments that received structural
adjustment loans, comparing the period before and after receiving the loans, the
World Bank study found that average external debt-export ratios increased from
272 percent to 392 percent, inflation increased in the majority of countries,
and the average ratio of government expenditures to gross domestic product
increased sharply, from 27.0 percent to 30.5 percent. The rise in government
spending was predictable, since structural adjustment loans have been used to
increase tax collection, raise civil service salaries and bail out floundering
state-owned companies. These efforts epitomize the World Bank’s concept of
”free market.”

Mr. CONABLE declared in l987, ”Our common goal should be to restore the
major debtor countries to full creditworthiness within five to seven years.” At
times, he talks as if creditworthiness were a mysterious vapor that the bank can
create simply by dispersing more billions to needy governments. Many Latin
American countries are not creditworthy largely because they are not
trustworthy. Much of their problem is that their own citizens, if they can save
a few dollars, send it out of the country as soon as possible before a
politician steals it.
The New York Times, July 30, 1989

The World Bank’s ”have money, must lend” syndrome will continue to be a
curse to the world’s oppressed citizens and a threat to financial stability. Mr.
Conable should retire as soon as possible.

******

 

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FFF: Supreme Court’s Dreadful Record on Constitutional Rights

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protect_serve_and_get_away_with_it_poster-rd94ebe25e9e3483581591af43fd20952_i5r39_8byvr_1024 The Future of Freedom Foundation posted online today the following article from the June issue of the Future of Freedomffflogo

The Supreme Court’s Dreadful Record on Constitutional Rights
by James Bovard

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the legality of the Affordable Care Act this past March. Several justices questioned whether a ruling against Obamacare would be “unconstitutionally coercive” to state governments that did not create health-care exchanges. The Supreme Court is sometimes hypersensitive about the authority of state governments when federalism issues are raised. But at the same time, the justices have rubber-stamped a vast increase in government coercion of private citizens.

For instance, the Affordable Care Act trounces freedom by giving the IRS the right to heavily fine persons who do not purchase federally approved insurance policies, in the process canceling millions of people’s insurance policies, entitling the Health and Human Services Department to outlaw many low-cost health-insurance options, and compelling individuals and businesses to subsidize other people’s abortions and contraception.

Unfortunately, that is typical of the oppressive practices the Supreme Court has countenanced in recent decades.

In 2005, the Supreme Court blessed the condemnation of private homes under eminent-domain authority so local politicians could redistribute the land to favored businesses. The case of Kelo v. New London involved fifteen Connecticut homeowners who were objecting to government plans to seize their homes to turn over their property to a private developer. There was nothing wrong with the homes being seized — the government did not even attempt to allege blight. Instead, it was simply that the government had a comprehensive plan that it believed would provide more revenue for itself and more economic stimulation than permitting people to continue residing in their homes.

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, declared that “public use” in the Fifth Amendment really meant “public purpose” — and, apparently anything that helps the government serves a public purpose. Stevens declared that even cases in which the government seizes one person’s land to directly give it to another private citizen could meet that standard: “Quite simply, the government’s pursuit of a public purpose will often benefit individual private parties.”

Stevens declared that the Court would avoid “intrusive scrutiny in favor of affording legislatures broad latitude in determining what public needs justify the use of the takings power.” Thus, the Court frowned upon examining the rationales or motives of politicians seizing private property — as if requiring evidence for the use of blunt force is “intrusive.” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor dissented in the Kelo decision, warning that “the specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.”

Expanding police power

Supreme Court decisions on asset forfeiture have helped police confiscate cars, cash, and other property from scores of thousands of Americans without a criminal conviction. In 1996, the Supreme Court upheld the seizure of an automobile jointly owned by a husband and a wife after the husband was caught with a prostitute on the front seat. The Clinton administration brief to the Supreme Court blamed the wife for her husband’s illicit use of the auto, claiming that she had not taken “all reasonable steps to prevent illegal use of the car.”

Chief Justice William Rehnquist based his pro-government decision heavily on an 1827 case involving the seizure of a Spanish pirate ship that had attacked U.S. ships. Rehnquist did not deign to explain the legal equivalence of piracy in the 1820s and prostitution in the 1990s. He ruled that since the property had been involved in breaking the law, there was no violation of due process in its seizure. He basically granted government unlimited power to steal: if it wants to “lawfully acquire” private property without compensation, all it needs to do is write more confiscatory laws. The nationwide epidemic of legalized looting became so embarrassing that Attorney General Eric Holder recently promised to curb the abuses.

In 1982, the Supreme Court upheld the authority of government agents to intrude onto private land without a warrant as long as they did not venture into areas where individuals were involved in “intimate activities” (i.e., nudist camps). U.S. Solicitor General Rex Lee, arguing the government’s position in the case, told the Court, “The posting of ‘No Trespassing’ signs, as a practical matter, gives a landowner little assurance that outsiders will not enter his property…. Nor does the existence of a fence surrounding an open field necessarily increase the expectation of privacy in that field. Fences around large areas of rural property are usually designed to mark a boundary or to keep animals in rather than to keep people out, and they pose little impediment to entry by a person…. [An] individual may lack a legitimate expectation of privacy in an area like a field, where private activities do not ordinarily take place, even if the field is private property.”

The Court’s decision made it clear that government agents could roam far and wide: “A thickly wooded area nonetheless may be an open field as that term is used in construing the Fourth Amendment.” The resulting “open fields” doctrine makes it practically impossible to convict a government agent of trespassing.

The Supreme Court has utterly failed to curb the power of police over average citizens. Instead, it has continually granted new powers to law enforcement. In 2001, it sanctified the arrest of a Texas mother whose only crime was that her child wasn’t wearing a seat belt during a short drive — even though Texas law did not authorize arrests for such offenses. The Supreme Court declared, “If an officer has probable cause to believe that an individual has committed even a very minor criminal offense in his presence, he may, without violating the Fourth Amendment, arrest the offender.” The Court explained that if arrests were limited only to offenses for which the statute book includes arrests as punishments, the result could be a “systematic disincentive to arrest.” Instead, the Court’s ruling created a systematic bias in favor of accosting and handcuffing citizens. The Court also worried that putting any limits on the police’s right to arrest people for petty offenses could result in “personal liability” for officers who make such arrests.

Justice O’Connor, in a stout dissent, warned that “such unbounded discretion carries with it grave potential for abuse.” O’Connor also mocked the Court majority for stressing that there was little evidence of “an epidemic of unnecessary minor-offense arrests.” The fact that governments did not keep statistics on such abuses somehow justified entitling government agents to commit more abuses. According to Capt. Steve Powell of the Colorado State Patrol, “Ninety percent of the cars out there are doing something that you can pull them over for. There are a jillion reasons people can be stopped — taillights, windshields cracked, any number of things.” Since almost everybody is violating some arcane government edict, the Court practically gave lawmen the prerogative to jail whomever they pleased.

Expanding arbitrary control

Supreme Court decisions have helped Congress and multiple presidents camouflage the arbitrary federal fiats that increasingly dominate Americans’ lives. The Court has granted federal agencies vast sway over private companies by pretending that racial hiring quotas are not coercive. Instead, they are merely “goals and timetables” — regardless of whether bureaucrats ravage companies that fail to hire and promote by race and gender.

In a 1982 case, Supreme Court Justice Stevens ruled that while a government hiring plan did severely discriminate against white teachers, the teachers’ injury was “not based on any lack of respect for their race.” This is a contemptible judicial sleight-of-hand: judging “equal rights” not by whether a government-enforced policy preserved neutrality but by whether the victims of discrimination felt stigmatized by their race. It is absurd to define coercion according to the supposed self-esteem of the victim, rather than the nature of the government action. It is like judging a government prohibition on a newspaper’s publication by whether a judge believes that the editors of the newspaper will feel that the censorship insults their intelligence, rather than by whether censorship occurs. In a 1987 decision written by Justice William Brennan, the Supreme Court upheld a discriminatory government hiring program because it did not “unnecessarily trammel the rights of white employees.” The Supreme Court has used the same phrase in other cases, implying that it is legitimate to trammel the rights of certain groups — as long as they are not “unnecessarily” trammeled. Naturally, the Supreme Court has never stooped to define how much trammeling is necessary and how much is too much.

The Court has turned a blind eye to almost all the civil-liberties abuses of the war on terror. It has done nothing to curb the Obama administration’s crackdown on journalists and whistleblowers. It has refused to accept any case challenging the Transportation Security Administration’s whole-body scanners that take explicit “birthday suit” photos of almost every airline passenger. Instead, the Court has often defined out of existence Americans’ Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches.

Nine years after revelations that the National Security Agency was illegally commandeering Americans’ email and phone records, the Court has done nothing to curb an abuse far worse than the British “general warrants” that helped provoke the American Revolution. In a 2013 decision, the Court effectively absolved warrantless federal spying on citizens because the victims could not prove they had been spied on — a ludicrous precondition for objecting to a secret surveillance regime.

Even when the feds have clearly violated a statute such as the Anti-Torture Act, the Court either refuses to accept key cases or effectively grants immunity to all the officials involved in breaking the law. The court’s acquiescence makes it far easier for agencies to cover up outrageous conduct that would shock Americans if it was exposed.

America’s prisons are overflowing in part because the Supreme Court has objected to few of the 4,500+ criminal statutes Congress enacted. Thanks to the threat of ruinous mandatory minimum penalties, 97% of defendants plead guilty. As Justice Antonin Scalia noted in a 2012 dissent, the current system “presents grave risks of prosecutorial overcharging that effectively compels an innocent defendant to avoid massive risk by pleading guilty to a lesser offense.”

Does the Court believe that unlimited compulsion of citizens is okay but that any pressuring of state governments is a cardinal sin? If the Court saves Obamacare to avoid “unconstitutionally coercing” state governments, it will be another milepost on the Supreme Road to Serfdom. States’ rights are no substitute for individual liberty.

The post FFF: Supreme Court’s Dreadful Record on Constitutional Rights appeared first on James Bovard.

My Playboy Greatest Hits

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playboy NXnmPiiKOZlztUJ4LnKMfiSKFDW7d9DvW47RdT12n2MZ4QiFjlLZvCjoEdhLMkqOSo Playboy is becoming proudly birthday-suit free.  Lots of jokes this week about how guys will now be able to honestly say “I only read it for the articles.” From 1994 through 2002, I wrote a bunch of pieces for Playboy on No-Knock Raids, Ruby Ridge, Waco, Janet Reno, IRS, Surveillance, Pork Barrel Prisons, the Drug War, AmeriCorps, the Patriot Act, and a bunch of other topics. My editor was Jim Petersen – one of the sharpest wordsmiths and most principled editors I have had the pleasure of knowing.

Most of the articles dealt with political & bureaucratic obscenities. Admittedly, a few of the illustrations were zesty and some of my exchanges in the magazine with hostile critics got more explicit. My favorite retort involved wheedling in a reference to Philadelphia furniture in response to an indignant Princeton philosopher whose book I had flailed.

Below are links to the text of most of my Playboy pieces.

“Drug Courier Profiles,” Playboy, November 1994.

“Oops – You’re Dead! No-Knock Raids,” Playboy, December 1994.

“Informants – Uncle Scam wants you,” Playboy, March 1995.

“Overkill – Ruby Ridge,” Playboy, June 1995.

“Asset Forfeiture: Uncle Sam wants your stuff,” Playboy, October 1995.

“No-knock victory; U.S Supreme Court ruling on police raids,” Playboy, October 1995.

“Zoning: Conform … or else,” Playboy, March 1996.

“Zoning vs. The First Amendment,” Playboy, March 1996.

“IRS: Stand and Deliver,” Playboy, April 1996.

“Blown Away: Supreme Court Asset Forfeiture Ruling,” Playboy, August 1996.

“Know your banker: he may be working for big brother,” Playboy, December 1996.

“Prison sentences of the politically connected,” Playboy, April 1997.

“The return of the Hitler youth?” Playboy, November 1997.

“Time out for justice: why talking about drugs is worse than murder,” Playboy, December 1997.

“The Firing Range; FBI actions at Ruby Ridge, Idaho,” Playboy, October, 1998.

“Asset Forfeiture: The King’s Riches -when does a fine become excessive?” Playboy, December 1998.

“Ken Starr’s Greatest Hits,” Playboy, March 1999.

“Beyond Perjury,” Playboy, May 1999.

“Attention Deficit Democracy,” Playboy, June 1999.

“When You Put A Price Tag On Freedom, Guess Who Pays,” Playboy, October 1999.

“Janet Reno, Whitewash Queen,” Playboy, February 2000.

“Flash Bang – You’re Dead,” Playboy, March 2000

“Officer Laptop : do we really need more cops?” Playboy, August 2000.

“Feeling Your Pain: Abuse of the Americans with Disabilities Act,” Playboy, October 2000.

“Drug Czar Wanted,” Playboy, March 2001.

“Snowjob – Drug Warrior Corruption,” Playboy, March 2001.

“Killer Cops,” Playboy, December 2001.

“Pork Barrel Prisons,” Playboy, February 2002.

“Patriot Act: Terrorizing the Bill of Rights,” Playboy, April 2002.

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USA TODAY: End Federal Agents’ License to Kill

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Federal ATF agents at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, 1992

USA TODAY

End Federal Agents License to Kill

by James Bovard

Do federal agents need a license to kill in order to protect us?  Unfortunately, federal judges are giving law enforcement agents blanket immunity when they shoot Americans while the agents are on the job. It would be difficult to imagine a greater violation of equal rights under the law or a bigger mockery of due process.

After Larry Jackson, Jr., of Austin, Texas, was killed by a policeman in 2013, a local prosecutor indicted the policeman on manslaughter charges. Jackson’s family claimed that he had been executed by the policeman but a federal judge granted immunity from prosecution because the policeman “was acting in his capacity as a federal officer.” The ruling in the Austin case could extend federal immunity from prosecution for shootings to “hundreds, if not thousands, of state and local police officers who participate in federal task forces,” the Washington Post noted.

Federal officers have been involved in 33 killings so far this year. The Justice Department almost never prosecutes federal agents for shootings in the line of duty, and the feds have invoked the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution to block state and local prosecutions of federal agents in recent decades. The ruling in the Austin case “raises the question of when, if ever, a federal law enforcement officer can be charged with a crime for killing someone in the line of duty,” the Post noted.

The best-known case of immunity for federal officers involves Lon Horiuchi, the FBI sniper who in 1992 gunned down 42-year-old Vicki Weaver as she stood in a cabin doorway in Ruby Ridge, Idaho holding her 10 month-old-baby. Horiuchi previously shot her husband, Randy Weaver, who was outside the cabin and under indictment on a federal firearms charge. A confidential Justice Department report condemned Horiuchi for taking a shot with a high-powered rifle through a cabin door when he believed someone was standing behind it. But other Justice Department and FBI officials warned that permitting Horiuchi to be prosecuted would have “an enormously chilling effect on federal operations, especially law enforcement.” A local prosecutor indicted Horiuchi on manslaughter charges anyhow.

But federal judge Edward Lodge ruled in 1998 that Horiuchi could not be tried for killing Vicki Weaver because he was a federal agent on duty, and thus effectively exempt from any jurisdiction of state courts. Lodge focused 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 guilty. The judge even blamed Vicki Weaver for her own death. Lodge decreed 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 unjustifiably shoots one family member, the government apparently receives a presumptive right to shoot any other family member who fails to hide.

The U.S. Marshals Service has been involved in 18 killings this year — more than any other law enforcement agency in the nation. But U.S. marshals enjoy de facto immunity for any use of force in the line of duty. Marshals Service spokesman Drew Wade told the Washington Post that “he could not recall a case that led to criminal charges.”

Prior to Horiuchi killing Vicki Weaver, 14-year-old Sammy Weaver and a family friend encountered a team of three undercover U.S. marshals who had taken up a “defensive position” not far from the Weaver’s residence; one of the marshals fatally shot Sammy. According to the friend, Sammy was leaving the scene when he was shot.

Even though the marshals’ statements and testimony on the conflict were riddled with contradictions, the Marshals Service gave its highest valor award to the marshal who killed the young boy and the other undercover marshals who provoked a firefight (in which one marshal was killed).

Judges tend to presume that killings by federal agents are immune from prosecution even though agencies are notorious for covering up the confrontations. As the Post noted, “details about shootings involving federal officers tend to be particularly closely held.” It took the Post almost two months to simply learn the name of a man killed during a recent FBI pornography raid in Chester, Penn.

It is absurd to presume that police are guilty any time they shoot a private citizen during a confrontation. But it is equally absurd to presume that all law enforcement agents are sacrosanct and all their killings justified. America is at risk of becoming a two-tiered society: those whom the law fails to bind and those whom the law fails to protect.

James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy and a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.

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Free FFF Books on Gun Control Today

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The Future of Freedom Foundation is offering two free Kindle books on gun control.  The Tyranny of Gun Control includes a few essays I wrote on the topic in the 1990s, as well as essays by Sheldon Richman, Jacob Hornberger, and Richard Ebeling.   FFF is also offering a free copy of Scott McPherson’s zesty new book, Freedom and Security: The Second Amendment and The Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

These Kindle editions are free today only – so  – get ’em while they are gratis.

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