LewRockwell &#187; James Bovard

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The Lethal Hypocrisy of the State

James Bovard — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, on the fifteenth anniversary of the attack on the federal office building in Oklahoma City, former President Bill Clinton had an op-ed today in the New York Times headlined: “Violence is Unacceptable in a Democracy.” The article settles any doubts about whether Clinton was one of the most talented demagogues of modern times.

Casting a net of collective guilt over much of the 48 contiguous states, Clinton announced that the 1995 bombing was the fault of people who believed “that the greatest threat to American freedom is our government, and that public servants do not protect our freedoms, but abuse them.” People who distrusted government helped echo ideas which somehow persuaded “deeply alienated and disconnected Americans” to carry out the attack.

In other words, people who harshly criticize the government are guilty of — or at least complicit in — mass murder.

It would be difficult to contrive a storyline to better exonerate all government actions. We still know far too little about the actual facts of the Oklahoma City bombing. We do know that the perpetrators were guilty of a heinous crime and deserved the harshest punishment. But that is a topic for a different day.

Clinton declared that “we do not have the right to resort to violence — or the threat of violence — when we don’t get our way. “

Unless you’re the government.

The four million Americans arrested for marijuana violations during Clinton’s reign were victims of government violence and government threats of violence. The “fact” that Clinton never inhaled did not prevent the drug war from ravaging far more lives during his time in office. The number of people arrested for drug offenses rose by 73% between 1992 and 1997. The Clinton administration bankrolled the militarization of local police, sowing the seeds for a scourge of no-knock raids at wrong addresses and a massive increase in efforts to intimidate average citizens in big cities around the country.

During Clinton’s reign, the IRS seized over 12 million bank accounts, put liens on over 9 million people’s homes and land, directly confiscated more than 100,000 people’s houses, cars, or real property, and imposed over 100 million penalties on people for allegedly not paying sufficient taxes, paying taxes late, etc. The IRS knew that millions of citizens were assessed taxes and penalties that they did not owe. A 1997 audit of the IRS’s Arkansas-Oklahoma district found that a third of the property seizures carried out violated federal law or IRS regulations. Former IRS district chief David Patnoe observed in 1998: “More tax is collected by fear and intimidation than by the law.” The Clinton administration fought tooth and nail against a law Congress passed in 1998 to curtail IRS depredations against innocent Americans.

Clinton’s op-ed mentions, almost as an aside, that the Oklahoma City bombing occurred on the second anniversary of the final assault at Waco. In 1995, Clinton denounced the Branch Davidians as “murderers” for their response to the 1993 Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms attack on their home. Clinton used that label even though a Texas jury found no such guilt — and even though the BATF apparently shot first and did not have a proper warrant for its no-knock, military-style raid.

Clinton was commander-in-chief when the FBI 54-ton tanks smashed into the Davidians’ home, collapsing 25% of the ramshackle building on top of residents before a fire commenced that left 80 people dead. His administration did almost everything it could to cover up the details of federal action at Waco, spurring the widespread distrust which Clinton later denounced.

The federal raid in April 2000 to seize six-year-old Elian Gonzalez was Clinton-style non-violence at its best. The late-night surprise attack went as planned — nabbing the boy and leaving shattered doors, a broken bed, roughed-up Cuban-Americans and two NBC cameramen on the ground, writhing in pain from stomach-kicks or rifle-butts to the head. But a photographer caught the image of a souped-up Border Patrol agent pointing his submachine gun toward the terrified boy.

Clinton administration officials rushed to explain why the raid was practically a demonstration of Gandhi’s teachings in action. A few hours after the raid, Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder asserted that the boy “was not taken at the point of a gun.” When challenged about the machine-gun photograph, Holder explained: “They were armed agents who went in there who acted very sensitively.” Attorney General Janet Reno stressed that the photo showed that agent’s “finger was not on the trigger.” Two days later, Reno declared, “One of the things that is so very important is that the force was not used. It was a show of force that prevented people from getting hurt.” By Reno’s standard, any bank robbery in which no one gets shot is merely a nonviolent exchange of bags of money. White House spokesman Joe Lockhart, responding to a question about the use of excessive force, stressed that the agents “drove up [to the Gonzalez house] in white mini-vans” — as if the vehicle’s color proved they were on a mission of mercy.

Frightening Us into Submission

James Bovard — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 06:00:00 +0000

Former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge has a new book out that reveals that he almost resigned because the Bush administration was hustling bogus terror alerts before the 2004 election. Ridge’s revelation was not surprising to people who had closely followed the tactics Bush used to snare a second term.

During the 2004
campaign, residents of swing states were under constant bombardment
by throat-grabbing political ads. In late September, the Bush campaign
released a television ad titled “Peace and Security.” The
New York Times described the ad: “A clock ticks menacingly
as a young mother pulls a quart of milk out of a refrigerator in slow
motion, a young father loads toddlers into a minivan and an announcer
intones ominously, ‘Weakness invites those who would do us harm.’”

The most memorable
Bush ad, released a few weeks before the election, opened in a thick
forest, with shadows and hazy shots complementing the foreboding music.
A female announcer ominously declared, “In an increasingly dangerous
world, even after the first terrorist attack on America, John Kerry
and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America’s intelligence
operations by $6 billion — cuts so deep they would have weakened
America’s defenses.” The ad then focused on a pack of wolves
reclining in a clearing. The voiceover concluded, “And weakness
attracts those who are waiting to do America harm,” as the wolves
began jumping up and running toward the camera. At the end of the
ad, the president appeared and announced, “I’m George W.
Bush and I approve this message.”

One liberal cynic
suggested that the ad’s message was that voters would be eaten
by wolves if Kerry won. A Bush advisor told ABC News that “the
ad was produced and tested months ago. Voter reaction was so powerful
that we decided to hold the ad to the end of the campaign and make
it one of the closing spots.”

The theme

Since the 2004 election largely turned on who would be the best protector, the Bush campaign sought to make Americans view criticism of the president as if it were a weapon of mass destruction. Zell Miller, a Democratic senator and the keynote speaker for the Republican National Convention, delivered the angriest prime-time speech at a modern political convention. Watched by a national television audience of millions, Miller revealed that political opposition is treason: “Now, at the same time young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats’ manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief.”

There was no evidence
that such criticism of Bush’s foreign policy was ripping America
asunder — but trumpeting the accusation made Bush critics appear
a pox on the land. Miller denounced Kerry’s record on national
defense and suggested that he would leave the military armed with
only “spitballs.” When Miller was pressed for evidence of
his charges in a post-speech interview, he angrily talked of challenging
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews to a duel. Every word in Miller’s
speech was preapproved by the Bush campaign. In the following weeks,
Bush often appeared with Miller at campaign stops, signifying his
embrace of Miller’s message.

The theme echoed

The Zell Miller “criticism-as-treason” theme permeated the campaign. New York City’s former police commissioner, Bernie Kerik, stumping around the nation for Bush, told audiences, “Political criticism is our enemy’s best friend.” The Washington Post noted on September 24, 2004, “President Bush and leading Republicans are increasingly charging that Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry and others in his party are giving comfort to terrorists and undermining the war in Iraq — a line of attack that tests the conventional bounds of political rhetoric.” When the United States’s handpicked leader of Iraq, Iyad Allawi, visited the White House, Bush declaimed that Kerry’s criticisms of his Iraq policy “can embolden an enemy.”

Other prominent
Republicans jumped on the bandwagon. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), chairman
of the Senate Judiciary Committee, condemned Democrats for “consistently
saying things that I think undermine our young men and women who are
serving over there.” John Thune, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate
in South Dakota, denounced Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle: “His
words embolden the enemy.” Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman
condemned the Kerry campaign for “parroting the rhetoric of terrorists”
and warned, “The enemy listens. All listen to what the president
said, and all listen to what Senator Kerry said.”

In the first two
debates, Bush repeatedly implied that Kerry’s criticisms of his
policies in Iraq proved Kerry was unfit to be president. Bush kept
coming back to Kerry’s use of the phrase “the wrong war
in the wrong place at the wrong time” as if Kerry had greatly
sinned against the American people by saying such a thing. Apparently,
by definition, anyone who criticizes a ruler is unfit to correct that
ruler’s mistakes.

Each time Kerry
talked of Bush’s failures in Iraq, Bush claimed that Kerry was
attacking U.S. troops, and many citizens believed him. Each Kerry
criticism of a specific debacle became further proof of his lack of
patriotism. Following media reports about the looting of an Iraqi
ammo dump after its capture by American forces, Kerry criticized the
Bush administration for neglecting to secure the explosives, some
of which may have later been used to attack U.S. troops. Bush erupted:
“Senator Kerry is again attacking the actions of our military
in Iraq, with complete disregard for the facts. Senator Kerry will
say anything to get elected.” Bush spokesmen condemned Kerry
for criticizing before all the facts were out — at the same time
the administration continued withholding facts. The Bush team wanted
Americans to believe that anyone who criticized the Iraq war was opposed
to defending America.

The theme expanded

The expanding concept of treason plugged the president’s growing credibility gap. It was as if the Democrats were not allowed to say anything critical about Iraq, and the Bush campaign was not obliged to say anything honest about it. Thus, Bush needed only to perpetuate his wars to perpetually silence his critics.

The demonization
of criticism helped anger ill-informed voters, fostering intolerance
that helped Bush win reelection. Apparently, criticism was inherently
more dangerous than perpetuating disastrous policies. This would make
sense only if blind obedience provides the equivalent to body armor
for the entire nation.

The same “support
Bush or betray America” paradigm had helped Republicans capture
the Senate in the 2002 congressional elections. In mid-2002, when
he was White House political director, Mehlman created a PowerPoint
presentation for Republican candidates urging them to “highlight
fears of future terrorist attacks.” (A copy of the disk with
the project was dropped in a park near the White House.) In September
2002, after Democrats balked at some anti-union provisions in the
administration’s legislation to create a Homeland Security Department,
Bush declared his opponents are “not interested in the security
of the American people.”

Treating voters like children

Bush’s tactics were aided by a coterie of talking heads who portrayed his campaign as much more lofty than it was. Republican pollster Frank Luntz asserted two days after the election, “Some will claim that Mr. Bush won on Tuesday because he waged a campaign of fear. The exact opposite was the case. Americans turned to him precisely because they saw him as the antidote to that fear.” But that was exactly the point of the Bush campaign strategy — to fan fear and portray Bush as the antidote. Luntz’s rewriting of history was perhaps inspired by his work for many Republican politicians and organizations. In a June 2004 confidential memo to Republican candidates, he urged them to remember, “‘9/11 changed everything’ is the context by which everything follows. No speech about homeland security or Iraq should begin without a reference to 9/11.”

White House Chief
of Staff Andrew Card, in a talk to Republican National Convention
delegates in September 2004, praised Bush’s role as the protector
of the nation and assured them that “this president sees America
as we think about a 10-year-old child. I know as a parent I would
sacrifice all for my children.” Card’s comment generated
almost no controversy. Yet viewing Americans as young children needing
protection makes a mockery of democracy. Is servility now the price
of survival?

Fear-mongering
subverts self-government. The more fears government fans, the fewer
people will recall the danger of government itself. The more frightened
people become, the more prone they will be to see their rulers as
saviors rather than as potential oppressors. After promising freedom
from fear, a politician can simply invoke polls showing widespread
fears to justify seizing new power. The more government frightens
people, the more legitimate its power grabs become.

We now have the
Battered Citizen Syndrome: the more debacles, the more voters cling
to faith in their rulers. Like a train engineer bonding with the survivors
of a train wreck that happened on his watch, Bush constantly reminded
Americans of 9/11 and his wars. The greater the government’s
failure to protect, the greater the subsequent mass fear — and
the easier it becomes to subjugate the populace. The craving for a
protector drops an iron curtain around the mind, preventing a person
from accepting evidence that would shred his political security blanket.

Unfortunately,
few Americans seem to have learned the lessons of recent presidents.
As a result, politicians can count on seizing new power after their
next debacle. Nothing will change, except for the name of the oppressor.

Transmission Belts for Government Lies

James Bovard — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Why do politicians so easily get away with telling lies? In large part, because the news media are more interested in bonding with politicians than in exposing them. Americans are encouraged to believe that the media will serve as a check and a balance on the government. Instead, the press too often volunteer as unpaid pimps, helping politicians deceive the public.

In 1936, New York Times White House correspondent Turner Catledge said that President Roosevelt’s “first instinct was always to lie.” But the Washington press corps covered up Roosevelt’s dishonesty almost as thoroughly as they hid his use of a wheelchair in daily life.

President Bill Clinton benefited from a press corps that often treated his falsehoods as nonevents — or even petty triumphs. Newsweek White House correspondent Howard Fineman commented that Clinton’s “great strength is his insincerity…. I’ve decided Bill Clinton is at his most genuine when he’s the most phony…. We know he doesn’t mean what he says.”

Flora Lewis, a New York Times columnist, writing three weeks before 9/11, commented in a review of a book on U.S. government lies on the Vietnam War, “There will probably never be a return to the discretion, really collusion, with which the media used to treat presidents, and it is just as well.” But within months of her comment, the media had proven itself as craven as ever. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, who did some of the best exposés of George W. Bush’s falsehoods in his first term, noted that it was not until July 2002 that “the White House press corps showed its teeth” in response to administration deceptions. Even the exposés of FBI and CIA intelligence failures in May 2002 did not end the “phase of alliance” between the White House and the press, as political scientist Martha Kumar observed.

Deference to the government is now the trademark of the American media — at least at times when the truth could have the greatest impact. The media were grossly negligent in failing to question or examine Bush’s claims on the road to war. When journalists dug up the truth, editors sometimes ignored or buried their reports. Washington Post Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks complained that, in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, “There was an attitude among editors: ‘Look, we’re going to war; why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?’” New York Times White House correspondent Elisabeth Bumiller explained the press’s conduct at a Bush press conference just before he invaded Iraq: “I think we were very deferential because … nobody wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time.”

After the war started, the falsehood of Bush’s claims was often treated as a one-day story, buried in the back of the front section or on the editorial page. Afterward, most papers quickly returned to printing the president’s proclamations as gospel. Eric Alterman, author of When Presidents Lie, observed,

Virtually every major news media outlet devoted more attention to the lies and dissimulations of one New York Times reporter, Jayson Blair, than to those of the president and vice president of the United States regarding Iraq. Given that these two deceptions took place virtually simultaneously, they demonstrate that while some forms of deliberate deception remain intolerable in public life, those of the U.S. commander in chief are not among them.

Docility

The media’s docility to the Bush administration repeated the pattern established during the first Gulf War (and during much of the Vietnam War). Chris Hedges, who covered the 1990—91 Gulf War for the New York Times, later explained, “The notion that the press was used in the war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort.” Hedges noted that journalists were “eager to be of service to the State,” which “made it easier to do what governments do in wartime, indeed what governments do much of the time, and that is lie.”

Far from being irate about presidential lies, the media often enjoy sharing a laugh with the commander in chief over such technical inaccuracies. On March 24, 2004, President Bush performed a skit for those attending the Radio and Television Correspondents’ annual dinner in which he showed slides of himself crawling around his office peaking behind curtains while he quipped to the crowd, “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere…. Nope, no weapons over there…. Maybe under here?”

Bush’s comic bit got one of the biggest laughs of the night. The Washington Post Style section hailed the evening’s performance with a headline — “George Bush, Entertainer in Chief.” The media dignitaries made no fuss over the comments — until a mini-firestorm erupted a few days later, spurred by criticism by Democrats and soldiers who had fought in Iraq. Greg Mitchell, the editor of Editor and Publisher, labeled the press’s reaction as “one of the most shameful episodes in the recent history of the American media, and presidency.”

The character of the Washington press corps also shone bright in its nonresponse to the Downing Street Memo. On May 1, 2005, the London Times printed a memo from a British cabinet meeting on July 23, 2002, that reported the findings of the visit by Britain’s intelligence chief to Washington to confer with CIA chief George Tenet and other top Bush administration officials. The memo quoted the intelligence chief:

Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

The fact that the top level of the British government was aware that the Bush administration was fixing — i.e., manipulating and contriving — intelligence and facts to justify going to war was a bombshell in the United Kingdom. The decision to “fix” facts was illustrated by the torrent of false accusations and statements that Bush and his top officials made against Iraq in the following months. Throughout 2002, Bush continued to say that he had hoped to avoid going to war with Saddam. In his State of the Union address in late January 2003 and in his subsequent speeches, he talked about the United States as a victim, repeatedly asserting that “if war is forced upon us, we will fight.” Bush had long since decided to attack, regardless of how many UN weapons inspectors Saddam permitted to roam Iraq.

Yet the memo was almost completely ignored by the American mainstream media for the first month after its publication in Britain. As Salon columnist Joe Conason commented, “To judge by their responses, the leading lights of the Washington press corps are more embarrassed than the White House is by the revelations in the Downing Street memo.”

Deceit has become ritualized in U.S. foreign policy. From 2002 onwards, the White House Iraq Group spewed out false information that the New York Times and other prominent media outlets routinely accepted without criticism or verification. After many of the assertions were later discovered to be false, the White House and much of the media treated the falsehoods as irrelevant to the legitimacy of the U.S. invasion. The lack of attention paid to political lies is itself symptomatic of the bias in favor of submitting to rulers regardless of how much people are defrauded.

Katrina

Hurricane Katrina provided an opportunity for the media to ritually renounce their own servility. As the nonresponse and pervasive debacle became undeniable and the death count soared to more than a thousand, many talking heads pointed out the government’s “failures” and proudly showed their indignation. A New York Times headline summed up the broadcast media’s change in tone: “Reporters Turn From Deference to Outrage.” One BBC commentator observed, “Amidst the horror, American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back, thanks to Katrina,” which he suggested could provide an antidote to the “timid and self-censoring journalistic culture that is no match for the masterfully aggressive spin-surgeons of the Bush administration.” NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams explained, “By dint of the fact that our country was hit [in 2001] we’ve offered a preponderance of the benefit of the doubt [to the government] over the past couple [sic] of years. Perhaps … this is the story that brings a healthy amount of cynicism back to a news media known for it.” But such periodic affirmations of independence are as credible as an alcoholic who, regaining consciousness after tumbling down the stairs, piously announces the end of his boozing days. There will be other bottles — and other stairs.

The pursuit of respectability in Washington usually entails acquiescing to government lies. Many if not most members of the Washington press corps are government dependents. Few Washington journalists have the will to expose government lies. That would require placing one in an explicitly adversarial position to the government. It is not that the typical journalist is intentionally covering up government lies, but that his radar is not set to detect such occurrences. Lies rarely register in Washington journalists’ minds because they are usually supplicants for government information, not dogged pursuers of the truth. Raising troublesome questions will not help you get any “silver platter” stories.

The vast majority of the media docilely repeated Bush’s claims through most of his presidency. Television networks very likely devoted a hundred times as much air time to peddling government falsehoods as they did to exposing them. The constant barrage of falsehood drowns out the occasional blips of truth. The government only needs the number of people who recognize its lies to be small enough that its latest power play will not be thwarted. The goal is not to prevent well-informed citizens from being nauseated or disgusted by the president’s lies. Instead, it is to neutralize the mass reaction to presidential falsehoods, even those that have catastrophic consequences.

If Americans wish to retain the remnants of their liberty, they cannot trust the media to warn them about government tyranny. In order to recognize government deceit, there is no substitute for more citizens to make more effort to find the truth for themselves.

Rounding Up the Innocents

James Bovard — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 05:00:00 +0000

Many Americans have been lulled into a false sense of security by the end of the George W. Bush administration. In reality, the government continues to pose grave perils to people’s rights and liberties. And it could take only one shocking incident for the government to once again show its heavy-handed ways.

Prior to the September 11, 2001, attacks, the dark side of the Bush administration was barely evident. But within days after those attacks, the government seized almost any conceivable excuse to lock up anyone it chose to target. At a time when many people are lowering their guard against Leviathan, we should recall how quickly the government razed restraints on its power.

The Bush administration brought the same mentality to locking up suspects after 9/11 that the Soviet Union used for the potato harvest from collective farms. It didn’t matter how many bushels of potatoes were rotten, or how many bushels were lost or pilfered along the way, or how many bushels never really existed except in the minds of the commissars who burnished the official reports. All that mattered was the total number. In the same way, the success of the immediate federal response to 9/11 was gauged largely by the number of people rounded up, regardless of their guilt or innocence.

Less than three months before the 9/11 attacks, the Supreme Court ruled that immigrants within the United States are protected by the Constitution “whether their presence here is lawful, unlawful, temporary or permanent.” Justice Steven Breyer, who wrote the majority opinion, specified that “terrorism” might be one of the “special circumstances where special arguments might be made for forms of preventive detention and for heightened deference to the judgments of the political branches with respect to matters of national security.”

The Bush administration responded to the Supreme Court decision by presuming that practically any alien could automatically be considered a terrorist suspect. After 9/11 the Bush administration quickly requested that Congress pass legislation to formally suspend all habeas corpus rights for aliens.

A petition for a writ of habeas corpus — Latin for “produce the body” — seeks to end unlawful detention of a person by requiring the government to bring the detained person before a judge to be either formally charged or released. Thomas Macaulay, in his History of England, proclaimed the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 “the most stringent curb that ever legislation imposed on tyranny” and hailed it as a law that adds to “the security and happiness of every inhabitant of the realm.” The British legislation was part of the common-law heritage incorporated into American law at the time of the nation’s founding. The Supreme Court declared in 1969 that the writ of habeas corpus is “the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action.”

Rule by decree

Attorney General John Ashcroft did not wait for a green light from Congress before making himself Czar of All Aliens. The INS, at Ashcroft’s behest, issued a new emergency regulation on September 17 expanding the time from 24 hours to 48 hours that the agency was allowed to detain aliens while deciding whether to formally charge or deport them. The edict also provided for “an exception to the 48-hour general rule for any case arising during or in connection with an emergency or other extraordinary circumstance, in which case the Service must make the determinations as to custody or release … within an additional reasonable period of time.” The official announcement of the new regulation repeatedly stressed that “this 24-hour period is not mandated by constitutional requirements.”

And since a 24-hour period is not mandated by the Constitution, the Justice Department was entitled to suspend habeas corpus for any immigrant it labeled a terrorist suspect — or a potential material witness — or who was caught with box-cutters.

The following day, Ashcroft characterized the new rules as “an administrative revision to the current INS regulations regarding the detention of aliens,” adding that “this rule change will apply to these 75 individuals who are currently detained by the INS on immigration violations that may also have information related to this investigation.” As immigration lawyer Michael Boyle later testified to Congress,

This exceptionally vague and open-ended provision allows detention without reason for virtually any period of time that the jailer chooses, with no recourse or explanation. It, in effect, allows an individual to be held for long periods for no better reason than that someone in government thinks they [sic] look suspicious.

The “reasonable period” edict illustrates how an innocuous phrase can create a gaping legal sinkhole that threatens to swallow the rights of 10 million people — the number of legal immigrants in the United States.

On September 21, Michael Creppy, the chief immigration judge of the INS, acting on Ashcroft’s command, ordered immigration judges to close all hearings of “special interest” detainees rounded up after 9/11 and to refuse to confirm or deny to anyone outside the courts whether such hearings were scheduled. That made it very difficult, if not impossible, for relatives to keep track of locked-up husbands, sons, or brothers and also thwarted lawyers’ efforts to keep in touch with clients.

In the days after the attacks, Attorney General Ashcroft told FBI Director Robert Mueller “that any male from eighteen to forty years old from Middle Eastern or North African countries who [sic] the FBI simply learned about was to be questioned and questioned hard. And anyone from those countries whose immigration papers were out of order — anyone — was to be turned over to the INS,” Newsweek columnist Steven Brill reported in his book After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era. Brill noted that Ashcroft told FBI and INS agents that the goal “was to prevent more attacks, not prosecute anyone. And the best way to do that was to round up, question, and hold as many people as possible.”

Detaining the
innocent

While detainees were portrayed as would-be terrorists, most of the actual cases mocked the Bush administration’s ominous overtones:

A Moroccan teenager in Virginia was turned in to the feds by a high-school guidance counselor who discovered the boy’s tourist visa had expired. (The teenager registered for high school near the time of the terrorist attacks.) The New York Times noted on February 3, 2002, “The youngster has been detained for four months.” No evidence was found linking the boy to terrorist groups.
Nacer Fathi Mustafa, a 29-year-old American citizen, was traveling back to the United States with his Palestinian father on September 15 after purchasing leather jackets in Mexico for a Florida truck stop he manages. The Mustafas were arrested after a federal official claimed that their passports had “obviously been altered with the introduction of an additional clear sheet on top of the genuine laminate.” The Mustafas’ lawyer, Dan Gerson, later noted, “The agent attempted to cast the Mustafas in the worst light, stating that, when questioned, ‘The Mustafas declined to offer any explanation,’ when in fact they denied knowledge of any alterations.” The elderly father was jailed briefly and then released on condition that he wear an electronic ankle bracelet. The son was held for 67 days before a government laboratory concluded the passport had not been altered. The Mustafas sued the government to get reimbursement of their legal fees (more than $15,000), asserting that the feds had acted in bad faith. Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew A. Bobb scorned their lawsuit: “Both defendants’ passports revealed they had traveled to the Middle East, a factor that could be considered in light of the fact the terrorists who caused the Sept. 11 devastation had traveled from the Middle East into the United States.”
On September 19 the FBI nabbed Mohammed Butt, a 55-year-old Pakistani living in a house with other aliens in Queens, New York. A priest had called the FBI to report local suspicions about the house’s residents: they did not cut the grass and failed to say hello. And as one 63-year-old neighbor astutely noted, “They hang their laundry — even their underwear — on the fence. Who does that?” Butt had entered the United States a year earlier and had overstayed a six-month visa. The FBI quickly decided it had no use for Butt and turned him over to the INS. He was being held in the Hudson County jail when he died of a heart attack. Butt repeatedly filled out forms requesting medical assistance in the days before his death but was scorned by the jailers. Human Rights Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get information on Butt and his death but the INS refused to provide any information unless Human Rights Watch could provide Butt’s “written consent” and “written signature” permitting the INS to release the information.
Two Moroccan men in their 20s living in Richmond, Virginia, were arrested by police during a September 13 traffic stop and handed over to the INS. The INS locked them up because they were working part-time at a pizza joint, in violation of their student visas. Their lawyer, Syed Hyder, declared, “I’ve been told no one has any evidence against these boys. But since the FBI had at one time expressed an interest in them, the INS had to hold them.”
Raza Nasir Khan, a pizza cook, got swept up after he asked a state Fish and Wildlife agent for a map while he was hunting with his bow and arrows in Delaware on the morning of September 19. The agent suspected the Pakistani — who possessed a global-positioning-satellite device (as do many hunters) and was within a few miles of a nuclear power plant — and alerted the FBI. FBI agents descended upon his apartment the next night and discovered three firearms. Khan, an avid hunter, had applied to have his visa extended but because it had not yet been renewed, he was guilty of a felony. (Illegal aliens are prohibited from possessing firearms.) A few days later, federal Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents captured Khan on his way to the pizzeria. He was jailed and held without bond. Federal magistrate Mary Pat Thynge conceded, “There is nothing here to suggest [and] there were no indications that this individual was a terrorist…. There is no indication to me that there is a terrorism circumstance here.” Richard Andrews, a federal prosecutor in Wilmington, observed, “Mr. Khan was arrested because of Sept. 11 in the sense that [federal agents] would not have gone out to interview him but for Sept. 11.”

Attempting to help the government investigate the terrorists landed at least two people in jail:

Mustafa Abujdai, a Palestinian living in Texas, was locked up after he voluntarily contacted the FBI after 9/11 to inform them “he had met with two men in Saudi pilot’s uniforms at a restaurant in Dallas, Texas, and that they had attempted to recruit him for flight-training school,” according to his lawyer, Karen Pennington. One of the Saudis was one of the 9/11 suicide pilots. Abujdai, who was married to an American, was interrogated for 15 hours, and then was jailed for more than two months for overstaying his visa. Abujdai claimed other jail inmates heavily abused him.
Eyad Mustafa Alrababah, a Palestinian living in Connecticut, was also locked up after he voluntarily went to the FBI office in Bridgeport to tell them that he recognized pictures of four of the hijackers and had driven them to Virginia in June. He was locked up as a material witness, held in solitary confinement for more than 120 days, and kept incommunicado for much of the time.

In the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration constantly misrepresented how much power it was seeking over aliens. In a September 25 speech to FBI agents, Bush declared, “We’re asking Congress for the authority to hold suspected terrorists who are in the process of being deported until they’re deported…. We believe it’s a necessary tool to make America a safe place. This would, of course, be closely supervised by an immigration judge.” But everything that Bush and Ashcroft subsequently did sought to minimize, if not obliterate, judicial supervision of their roundup.

On September 30,
Attorney General John Ashcroft announced on CNN, “We’ve
arrested and detained almost 500 people since the September 11 terrorist
attacks…. We seek to hold them as suspected terrorists, while
their cases are being processed on other grounds.”

But early on, it was obvious that many of the people being nabbed were innocuous. Human Rights Watch reported the following cases:

“Upon arriving at the Newark, New Jersey, train station on October 11, 2001, Osama Sewilam asked a policeman for directions to his immigration attorney’s office. The policeman asked him where he was from, and he replied, ‘Egypt.’ The policeman asked him if he had a visa. He said it had expired and that was why he was going to see his lawyer. The policeman took him to the police station and called the FBI. Sewilam was deported on March 15, 2002.”
“Ansar Mahmood, a twenty-four-year-old Pakistani who was a legal permanent resident in the United States, decided to have his picture taken on October 9, 2001, to send to his family, according to a newspaper report. After work, he drove to the highest point in Hudson, New York, a hilltop overlooking the Catskills Mountains, but the view also included the main water treatment plant for the town. Two guards had been posted there that day because of the anthrax scare. While one of the guards took Mahmood’s picture, the other called the police. The FBI’s investigation of Mahmood uncovered that he had helped an undocumented friend from Pakistan find an apartment and he was charged with harboring an illegal immigrant.”

Allegations began popping up that post—9/11 detainees were being beaten or prevented from contacting a lawyer. Ashcroft announced on October 16, “I would be happy to hear from individuals if there are any alleged abuses of individuals, because that is not the way we do business.” He promised that “we will respect the constitutional rights and we will respect the dignity of individuals.” But the fact that many detainees were held incommunicado made it tricky for them to personally contact the attorney general.

The FBI had a form affidavit it presented to judges to justify indefinite secret confinement of targeted aliens. In scores, if not hundreds, of cases, the FBI warned,

At the present stage of this vast investigation, the FBI is gathering and culling information that may corroborate or diminish our current suspicions of the individuals that have been detained…. In the meantime, the FBI has been unable to rule out the possibility that [the detainee] is somehow linked to, or possesses knowledge of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. To protect the public, the FBI must exhaust all avenues of investigation while ensuring that critical information does not evaporate pending further investigation.

The FBI declared that “the business of counter-terrorism intelligence gathering in the United States is akin to the construction of a mosaic…. The FBI is gathering and processing thousands of bits and pieces of information, however, to see if it can be fit into a picture that will reveal how the unseen whole operates.”

The FBI implied that mere mortals could not even hope to grasp the meaning of the details agents were sniffing out: “What may seem trivial to some may appear of great moment to those within the FBI or the intelligence community.” The “mosaic” form affidavit pushed the hottest button to intimidate judges — the same tactic Ashcroft successfully used on Congress to railroad through the USA PATRIOT Act. The FBI’s constant invocation of the need to build “mosaics” is ironic in light of a 2002 joint congressional investigation’s conclusions about the FBI’s analytical incompetence.

National security and power

Ashcroft portrayed arbitrary power as the key to national survival. On October 25, he told the U.S. Conference of Mayors,

Today’s terrorists enjoy the benefits of our free society even as they commit themselves to our destruction…. If you violate a local law, you will be put in jail and kept in custody as long as possible. We will use every available statute. We will seek every prosecutorial advantage.

In Ashcroft’s view, any breach of any law or regulation automatically entitles the government to absolute power over the suspected violator. This “maximum prosecution mentality” is far more dangerous now than it was in earlier decades. There are far more levers for government to use against those it seeks to destroy.

The following day, Bush signed the PATRIOT Act, which gave Bush and Ashcroft almost everything they wanted — except for formally suspending habeas corpus. The law increased the length of time that an alien could be locked up without charges to seven days. If the attorney general certifies that he has “reasonable grounds to believe that the alien is engaged in any activity that endangers the national security of the United States,” the detention can be extended almost indefinitely. No evidence is required: the attorney general’s rote assertion is sufficient.

Shortly after the president signed the USA PATRIOT Act the Justice Department announced that it could henceforth eavesdrop on telephone calls and meetings between anyone detained in a terrorist investigation and his lawyers. A Federal Register notice stated that the monitoring would be carried out whenever the attorney general certified “that reasonable suspicion exists to believe that an inmate may use communications with attorneys or their agents to facilitate acts of terrorism.” Since it required no evidence for the feds to label someone a terrorist threat, it would presumably require scant suspicion to justify pervasive eavesdropping. Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, complained in a letter to Ashcroft that there are “few safeguards to liberty that are more fundamental than the Sixth Amendment. When the detainee’s legal adversary — the government that seeks to deprive him of his liberty — listens in on his communications with his attorney, that fundamental right and the adversary process that depends upon it are profoundly compromised.”

Roundups and detentions

The Bush administration sought to allay rumors of mass roundups of Muslim men. On November 5, 2001, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer announced, “Most of the people, the overwhelming number of the people, were detained, they were questioned, and then they’ve been released.” Fleischer added that President Bush “is fully satisfied that anybody who is continuing to be held is being held for a wise reason.” But a Justice Department spokesman contradicted the White House, declaring on the same day that most of the people rounded up after 9/11 were still held by the government.

The Justice Department responded to the imbroglio by announcing it would cease disclosing the total number of people locked up in the 9/11 investigation. As Time noted, “Ashcroft spokeswoman Mindy Tucker said the department would no longer issue daily or even weekly updates [of the number of detainees], because the task of making and synchronizing lists was too labor intensive.” Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff later said that the feds ceased giving out updated totals of detainees because it “loses meaning.” The media widely reported statements by senior federal officials that 1,200 suspects had been detained in the 9/11 investigations.

At a November 27 Washington press conference Ashcroft announced, “We’re removing suspected terrorists … from our streets to prevent further terrorist attacks.” He declared that, thanks in part to “arrests and detentions, we have avoided further major terrorist attacks, and we’ve avoided these further major terrorist attacks despite threats and videotape tauntings.” Videotape tauntings were, in Ashcroft’s mind, almost as dangerous as a hijacked jetliner.

Ashcroft derided suggestions to release the names of detainees: “I am not interested in providing, when we are at war, a list to Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda network, of the people that we have detained that would make in any way easier their effort to kill American citizens — innocent Americans.” He denied that any of detainees’ rights had been violated: “The Justice Department will not sacrifice the ultimate good to fight the immediate evil.”

Ashcroft proclaimed that it is “simply not true” that “detainees are not able to be represented by an attorney or to contact their families.” He sounded deeply hurt by the scurrilous attacks on the Justice Department: “I would hope that those who make allegations about something as serious as a violation of an individual’s civil rights would not do so lightly or without specificity or without facts. This does a disservice to our entire justice system.”

Ashcroft bragged at the press conference that 104 people had been charged with crimes as a result of the post—9/11 investigation. One of those honorees was Franois Guagani, a French citizen who was caught as he was crossing the border on a bus into Maine on September 12. Guagani was arrested because he was entering the United States after having been deported for previously violating his immigration status. Because he had box-cutters in his luggage (he worked as a carpenter), he was included on the list of people formally charged by the Justice Department in the terrorism investigation. (He was sentenced to 20 months in prison.)

None of the other criminal charges that Ashcroft invoked had any link to the 9/11 attacks. The charges were a smorgasbord of credit-card fraud, false statements to federal officials, immigration violations, theft, and so on.

On December 6, 2001, Ashcroft testified under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding his policies on people arrested in the United States as “suspected terrorists.” He denounced his critics:

Charges of “kangaroo courts” and “shredding the Constitution” give new meaning to the term “the fog of war.” Since lives and liberties depend upon clarity, not obfuscation, and reason, not hyperbole, let me take this opportunity today to be clear: Each action taken by the Department of Justice … is carefully drawn to target a narrow class of individuals — terrorists. Our legal powers are targeted at terrorists. Our investigation is focused on terrorists.

But the mass roundup within the United States after 9/11 never apprehended anyone subsequently officially linked to the 9/11 attacks. An Inspector General report later revealed that many of the detainees had indeed been blocked from contacting attorneys and that some of them had been beaten or otherwise physically abused by guards in federal prisons.

Unfortunately, the follies of the post—9/11 crackdown have been largely forgotten. Thus, there is little chance that “lessons learned” will prevent similar abuses if there is another significant terrorist attack within the United States.

Delusions of Democracy

James Bovard — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 05:00:00 +0000

When Barack Obama was inaugurated on January 20, there was euphoria across the land and millions of people cheered in the streets of Washington. Many people are convinced that American democracy has been redeemed and that the federal government no longer poses a peril to individual rights. Since the people’s choice is now at the helm of the U.S. government, Americans are free.

The Founding Fathers scorned the doctrine that the election of one person could purify or redeem an entire political system. The notion that choosing a supreme leader is the epitome of democracy is the result of philosophical doctrines that spread shortly before the American Revolution.

Early Americans’ thinking on representative government was shaped by the abuses inflicted by the British Parliament. The Sugar Act of 1764 resulted in British officials’ confiscating hundreds of American ships on the basis of mere allegations that the shipowners or captains were involved in smuggling; Americans were obliged, in order to retain their ships, to somehow prove that they had never been involved in smuggling — a near-impossible burden.

The Stamp Act of 1765 obliged Americans to purchase British stamps to be used on all legal papers, newspapers, cards, dice, advertisements, and even academic degrees. After violent protests throughout the colonies, Parliament rescinded the Stamp Act but passed the Declaratory Act, which announced that Parliament “had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.” The Declaratory Act meant that Parliament had the right to use and abuse the colonists as it chose.

Many American colonists believed that, for them, British representative government was a fraud. The “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms,” issued by the Second Continental Congress on July 6, 1775, a few weeks after the Battle of Bunker Hill, highlighted the crimes of the British Parliament. (The Declaration of Independence, issued almost a year later, concentrated on King George III as the personification of British abuses.) This Declaration, written by John Dickinson and Thomas Jefferson, complained that “the legislature of Great-Britain, stimulated by an inordinate passion for power … attempted to effect their cruel and impolitic purpose of enslaving these colonies by violence….” The Continental Congress demanded to know,

What is to defend us against so enormous, so unlimited a power? Not a single man of those who assume it, is chosen by us; or is subject to our control or influence….

Freedom and democracy

Americans and British profoundly disagreed on the source of their freedom. Many British believed that freedom depended on vesting unlimited power in Parliament, since they believed the only threat to their freedom came from the king and his lackeys. Sir William Meredith praised the British constitution in 1769 because it was the privilege of the Englishman alone “to choose those delegates to whose Charge is committed the Disposal of his Property, his Liberty, his Life.” In 1768, the speaker of the House of Commons announced, “The freedom of this house is the freedom of this country….” As Professor John Phillip Reid observed in 1988,

This new or “radical” constitutional theory was a departure from the British tradition of defining liberty without having its preservation depend on specific institutions, presaging the nineteenth century and the general British acceptance of what in the eighteenth century had been constitutional heresy — that liberty and arbitrary power are not incompatible, if the power that is arbitrary is “representative.”

Because Parliament supposedly automatically had the concerns of the entire British Empire at heart, Americans were told they had “virtual representation,” regardless of the fact that they could not vote for any member of Parliament. The British claimed that the Americans were free because they were permitted to petition members of Parliament with their grievances, even though their petitions were routinely not accepted or read.

“Slavery by Parliament” was the phrase commonly used to denounce British legislative power grabs. Americans believed that the power of representatives was strictly limited by the rights of the governed, a doctrine later enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Pamphleteer John Cartwright in 1776 derided “that poor consolatory word, representation, with the mere sound of which we have so long contented ourselves.” James Otis, an influential Massachusetts lawyer, asked,

Will any man’s calling himself my agent, representative, or trustee make him so in fact? At this rate a House of Commons in one of the colonies have but to conceive an opinion that they represent all the common people of Great Britain, and … they would in fact represent them.

One New York critic declared in 1775 that it was inconceivable that Americans’ liberty should depend “upon nothing more permanent or established than the vague, rapacious, or interested inclination of a majority of five hundred and fifty eight men, open to the insidious attacks of a weak or designing Prince, and his ministers.”

The influence of Rousseau

At the same time that the Americans were fighting a revolution against the fraud of representation, continental Europe was becoming entranced by a new doctrine. From the 1600s onwards, the abuses of monarchs made representative government increasingly attractive. Unfortunately, at a time when most continental Europeans had scant political experience, the doctrines of Jean Jacques Rousseau swept the intellectual field.

Rousseau’s 1762 book, The Social Contract, merged contemporary romanticism and mysticism with 18th-century political thought. Rousseau gave people an engraved invitation to delude themselves about the nature of majorities, government, and freedom. He asserted that representative governments are based on the “general will,” which, naturally, could be different from the conscious will of the people themselves:

It follows from what has gone before that the general will is always right and tends to the public advantage; but it does not follow that the deliberations of the people are always equally correct. Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived, and on such occasions only does it seem to will what is bad.

Regrettably, Rousseau provided few hints on how either rulers or ruled could recognize the general will. The fact that people opposed surrendering more power to government simply proved they did not know their own will.

Rousseau waved a philosophic magic wand over representative government and pretended that his doctrine of the general will had solved all its problems. As historian William Dunning noted in 1920, “The common interest and the general will assumed, through [Rousseau's] manipulation, a greater definiteness and importance than philosophy had hitherto ascribed to them. They became the central features of almost every theory of the State.”

Rousseau’s doctrine of the general will became the invocation of rulers seeking unlimited power. Hitler’s Volk was the Teutonic rendition of Rousseau’s doctrine. J.L. Talmon, author of The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, concluded that Rousseau “was unaware that total and highly emotional absorption in the collective political endeavor is calculated to kill all privacy … and the extension of the scope of politics to all spheres of human interest and endeavor … was the shortest way to totalitarianism.”

America’s Founding Fathers

In contrast to Rousseau, the Founding Fathers were keenly aware of the potential abuses of popular government. The American Revolution was based on cynicism about the fraud of representation in the British Parliament. The French Revolution, following Rousseau’s doctrine, was based on the delusion that the people are infallible and that democratic government automatically pursues the common good. One revolution was based on distrust of government, the other on messianic expectations from a change in form of a government.

While John Adams navely declared in 1775 that “a democratical despotism is a contradiction in terms,” few Americans held that belief by the mid 1780s. Judge Alexander Hanson declared in 1784, “The acts of almost every legislature have uniformly tended to disgust its citizens and to annihilate its credit.” One commentator in the 1780s, noting the early dashed hopes of democratic governments, declared that the usurpation of “40 tyrants at our doors, exceeds that of one at 3,000 miles.” James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers,

Complaints are every where heard … that [government] measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice, and the rights of the minor party; but by the superior force of an interested and over-bearing majority.

Unfortunately, the doctrines of Rousseau have had far more influence on subsequent thinking about democracy than the insights of Madison and other Founding Fathers. Throughout American history, more attention has been paid to the rhetoric of democracy than to its substance. Lysander Spooner, a Massachusetts abolitionist, ridiculed President Lincoln’s claim that the Civil War was fought to preserve a “government by consent.” Spooner observed, “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.”

George W. Bush’s presidency became a disaster in part because he behaved as if winning votes entitled him to unlimited power at home and abroad. Obama’s rhetoric is thus far not as bad as the worst of the Bush team’s verbal strutting. (Who could forget White House counsel Alberto Gonzales’s 2004 assertion of a “commander in chief” override of federal law?)

But many of Obama’s supporters have Rousseau-like doctrines that could make it easy for the new president to spurn the leashes the Constitution imposes on all presidents and federal officials. Unfortunately, most Americans seem to have learned little from the Bush presidency, aside from the fact that George W. Bush was a liar and a buffoon. American democracy needs a strong dose of the Founders’ realism on representative government.

Will the Feds Declare Martial Law?

James Bovard — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 05:00:00 +0000

The New York Times reported last week that the Bush administration considered sending in the U.S. military to arrest the so-called Lackawanna Six in 2002. Ironically, one of the worst prosecutorial overreaches by the Justice Department in the war on terror almost resulted in a temporary period of martial law.

The Lackawanna Six was a group of half-a-dozen Yemeni-Americans from a Buffalo suburb who traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the spring and summer of 2001 and attended an al-Qaeda training camp. Some members of the group asserted that they fled the camp after they heard appeals for violence against America.

After the six were arrested by the FBI and local police in September 2002, the Justice Department announced that it had "identified, investigated and disrupted an al-Qaeda-trained, terrorist cell on American soil." President Bush hyped the arrests of an “al-Qaeda cell” in Buffalo in his State of the Union address a few months later. While the president, the Justice Department, and legions of federal officials speaking anonymously to the media touted the Lackawanna Six as terrorists, the feds never dared make such a suggestion in court. Salon noted that “prosecutors never offered evidence that the Lackawanna defendants intended to commit an act of terrorism.” A secret FBI report in early 2005 admitted: "To date, we have not identified any true ‘sleeper’ agents in the U.S." nor any “evidence of concealed cells or networks acting in the homeland as sleepers."

But the feds did “persuade” the defendants to plead guilty to “material support of terrorism” — an amorphous charge that could mean something as simple as paying for their food at the camp. The feds coerced the plea bargain by threatening to label the men “enemy combatants” and send them to Guantanamo — and to charge them with treason, for which they could be executed. Neal Sonnett, chairman of the American Bar Association’s Task Force on Treatment of Enemy Combatants, observed: "The [Lackawanna] defendants believed that if they didn’t plead guilty, they’d end up in a black hole forever. There’s little difference between beating someone over the head and making a threat like that."

Georgetown University law professor David Cole commented: "It’s the first time in American history where people are going to prison for going to a training camp.” Virginia lawyer and human rights activist Elaine Cassel commented: “The idea is, ‘Let’s go out and arrest people before they actually commit a crime, or even think of a crime.’" The Bush team considered sending in the military in part because of the lack of evidence. The New York Times noted that the Justice department was concerned “that there might not be enough evidence to arrest and successfully prosecute the suspects in Lackawanna.” Vice President Cheney reportedly “argued that the administration would need a lower threshold of evidence to declare them enemy combatants and keep them in military custody.”

In other words, the idea was that it would require less evidence to totally nullify all of a person’s rights (including the “right” not to be tortured) then to arrest him on a felony charge. This judicial philosophy keeps getting stranger and stranger.

Some Pentagon officials supported Cheney’s proposal to send in the troops to grab the Lackawanna Six. Other administration officials objected, and Bush eventually decided to avoid the overt appearance of martial law for this roundup.

Cheney was invoking a secret memo from Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel’s John Yoo, who had written: “The president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States.”

Since some of Yoo’s memos leaked out in recent years, we have heard that they are irrelevant because they were only academic-type posturing. But the New York Times article makes it clear that Cheney and others wanted to seize new powers and fundamentally change the nature of the United States.

This case illustrates how there are no idle pro-Leviathan legal errors. Instead, any such error is like a ticking time bomb — waiting to be exploded under the people’s rights and liberties.

But apologists for Bush would insist that it would not have been a dictatorship because one lawyer in the Justice Department assured the vice president that the White House was entitled to such power. Supposedly, it only takes one weasel lawyer to nullify all the constitutional checks-and-balances accumulated over centuries. Some Bush administration officials viewed using the military for the Lackawanna arrests as “testing the Constitution.” In reality, it would have tested how much dictatorial power Americans would permit the Bush team to seize. And the mainstream media might have raised scant protest. As one wag quipped online: “If the tanks rolled down the streets on the same day the American Idol winner was named, you’d never even hear about the tanks.”

His Other Crime

James Bovard — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 05:00:00 +0000

Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who died on July 6, was best known for ratcheting up the Vietnam War thanks to the false claims he provided to President Johnson, Congress, and the American people.

Despite his lies that vastly expanded an unnecessary conflict and cost more than a million American and Vietnamese lives, McNamara is being touted as a great man. A New York Times op-ed praised him as the most compassionate member of the Johnson administration’s cabinet.

After McNamara resigned as defense secretary in early 1968, LBJ appointed him as president of the World Bank. A Washington Post tribute praised him as “a chieftain of foreign financial aid” and stressed that he “was often described as ‘the conscience of the West,’ for his relentless efforts to persuade the industrialized world to commit more capital to improving life in the have-not nations.” World Bank lending increased twelve-fold (to $12 billion a year) during McNamara’s 13-year reign.

But rather than a boasting point, McNamara’s time at the World Bank is as much his lasting infamy as his Vietnam record. A World Bank biography noted that during McNamara’s tenure, “the previous Bank strictures against lending to public sector banking institutions or enterprises were relaxed.” The official sketch of McNamara’s presidency noted that “his reliance upon government intervention sometimes meant turning a blind eye to coercive practices … and could lead the Bank to ignore the inefficiency and economic cost of government policies.”

McNamara’s favorite foreign leader was Julius Nyerere, ruler of Tanzania, which received more bank aid per capita than any other country in that decade. In the early 1970s, with World Bank aid and advice, Nyerere sent the Tanzanian army to drive the peasants off their land, burn their huts, load them onto trucks, and take them where the government thought they should live. The peasants were then ordered to build new homes “in neat rows staked out for them by government officials.”

Nyerere wanted to curb his countrymen’s individualist and capitalist tendencies and make them easier to control. He even outlawed people’s sleeping in their gardens at night, which meant that monkeys were free to help themselves to their crops. In many cases, the new government villages were far from the farmers’ own lands, and so they simply gave up tilling the land, with the result that hunger in Tanzania soared.

McNamara’s World Bank financed the brutal policies of the Vietnamese government in the late 1970s. The bank gave a $60 million no-interest “loan” to the government of Vietnam in 1978, even after widely circulated reports in the West of massive concentration camps and brutal repression. The bank announced that the loan would finance “an irrigation project that will boost rice production.” But a confidential bank report admitted that “the main effort to deal with the employment problem [in the south] consists of the creation of New Economic Zones — agricultural settlements that are intended to [forcibly] resettle 4 or 5 million people by the end of 1980.” Farmers who resisted the government’s “reorganization” were sent out in leaky boats, and thousands drowned in the South China Sea.

Beginning in 1976, the Bank poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a scheme by the government of Indonesia to remove — sometimes forcibly — several million people from the densely populated island of Java and resettle them on comparatively barren islands. One Australian critic noted that transmigration was largely “the Javanese version of Nazi Germany’s lebensraum.”

McNamara’s profusion of aid allowed politicians in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere to seize far more power over farmers, businessmen, factory owners, and other productive individuals. The result was a profusion of state monopolies that helped destroy hope for entire generations.

As Counterpunch editor and author Alexander Cockburn observed, “The managerial ideal for McNamara was managerial dictatorship. World Bank loans surged to Pinochet’s Chile after Allende’s overthrow, to Uruguay, to Argentina, to Brazil after the military coup, to the Philippines, to Suharto after the ’65 coup in Indonesia, and to the Romania of Ceausescu.”

As long as McNamara could continue boosting the raw amounts of World Bank loans, he could continue pretending that he was saving the world. McNamara bankrolled socialist governments based on the same type of phony statistics that he used to justify expanding the U.S. war in Vietnam. He could strut like a vanquisher of either communism or world poverty as long as he embraced statistical hooey.

Even after laying wreckage to much of the globe, Robert McNamara was still treated by much of the mainstream media as the “best and the brightest.” (The Washington Post appointed him to its board of directors). Citizens should be wary of those who would place halos over humanity’s brutal oppressors.

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Oppose Obama

James Bovard — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 05:00:00 +0000

The REAL ID Act may be on the verge of receiving its final coffin nails. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is pushing a replacement bill that poses many of the same threats as REAL ID. The history of REAL ID should inspire friends of freedom to once again vigorously oppose any and every federal grab for their personal information.

The feds had sought legislation to create national ID cards in the 1990s but were rebuffed by a Republican Congress. But, after 9/11, “everything changed” — at least in Washington. Regardless of the reasons why the CIA and FBI failed to stop the hijackers, the solution was far more snooping and the potential creation of hundreds of millions of dossiers on American citizens. Almost overnight, it became widely accepted that the government must have unlimited powers to search anywhere and everywhere for enemies of freedom. The worse the government’s failure to protect Americans, the further it permitted itself to intrude.

There was scant opposition when the House of Representatives initially considered REAL ID in early 2005. The Senate unanimously approved the bill, attached as a rider to an appropriations bill for military spending. Rep. Ron Paul was practically the lone Republican sounding the alarm. At the time the bill passed, he warned, “This REAL ID Act establishes a massive, centrally-coordinated database of highly personal information about American citizens: at a minimum their name, date of birth, place of residence, Social Security number, and physical characteristics.”

REAL ID provided a blank check for the feds to demand more information at any time in the future. The new law granted “open-ended authority to the Secretary of Homeland Security to require biometric information on IDs in the future. This means your harmless looking driver’s license could contain a retina scan, fingerprints, DNA information, or radio frequency technology,” as congressman Paul warned.

Back in 2005, it was not fashionable in Washington to be afraid of federal surveillance. Luckily, in the subsequent years, civil liberties activists have raised Cain around the nation. More than half of all the state legislatures have passed resolutions or laws restricting REAL ID’s bite in their state. But in order to understand what the feds may try next, it is important to consider how REAL ID was sold, how it was expanded, and why it remains a threat.

At the time REAL ID was being promoted, advocates of federal surveillance claimed that national identification cards were necessary to make Americans safe. In reality, national ID cards would do far more to control than to protect Americans. Savvy foreign terrorists could find ways to evade the requirements for such cards — the same way that they easily evaded ludicrous airport security systems on September 11, 2001.

REAL ID was intended to greatly increase federal levers over the movement and lives of Americans. In 2008, Homeland Security czar Michael Chertoff announced that Americans who lived in states who had not revised their drivers licenses to meet REAL ID mandates could be banned from boarding an airplane within the United States. Since the Transportation Security Administration was part of Chertoff’s fiefdom, he could snap his fingers and the TSA would block anyone who did not present the proper papers from catching a flight. (Chertoff’s attempt to bludgeon state legislatures into submission backfired).

Celebrate Torture Day

James Bovard — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:00:00 +0000

Since 1997, every June 26 has been formally recognized as the International Day of Support for Victims of Torture. Political leaders around the globe take the occasion to proclaim their opposition to barbarism.

On June 26, 2003, President George W. Bush proudly declared: “The United States is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture, and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment.”

This was one of the most fraudulent assertions since 1936, when the new Soviet constitution guaranteed Soviet citizens complete freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly. But this “perfect constitution” did nothing to prevent Stalin from sending millions of people to their deaths in the Gulag and in front of firing squads.

Similarly, Bush’s anti-torture proclamation did nothing to stop his administration from formalizing perhaps the most brutal abuses in modern American history. Top Bush administration officials created twisted rationales to authorize simulated drowning, “walling” (throwing detainees up against a wall, repeated ad nauseam), sleep deprivation (as long as it did not last more than 11 days), head slappings, and other methods to shatter people’s will and resistance.

The fact that the Bush administration engaged in torture in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo, and secret prison sites around the world is now no longer in dispute. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is rapidly become complicit in Bush torture crimes.

President Obama is vigorously opposing proposals for a “truth commission” to investigate and expose the extent of U.S. interrogation abuses in the post-9/11 era.

After Obama promised not to interfere with a federal court ruling ordering the release of hundreds of photos of detainee abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, he reversed himself last month and promised U.S. senators that he would do everything he could to assure that Americans never see the pictures.

Obama’s Justice Department helped sway a federal appeals court to decree that top Bush administration officials have zero personal liability to British citizens allegedly tortured at Guantanamo. (At the same time, the Justice Department has trumpeted its role in convicting football star Michael Vick after he was accused of torturing dogs.)

CIA chief Leon Panetta is trying to persuade a federal judge to suppress detailed information from almost a hundred videotapes of CIA “extreme interrogation” sessions. Panetta is fretting that disclosing the official documents would “constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy” of CIA torturers.

President Obama will probably make the usual huff-and-puff proclamation against torture on June 26. But as long as he is protecting the torturers and torture policymakers, any anti-torture assertion he makes will be worth less than a plug nickle.

Obama should either enforce the law or formally call for Congress to withdraw from the United Nations Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. And if he chooses to follow that path, he should also urge Congress to repeal the 1996 Anti-Torture Act.

And to be honest with the American people about the nature of the government that rules them, Obama should demand a constitutional convention. If torture is de facto legal in America, the Eighth Amendment — which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment — must be repealed.

The Fifth Amendment will also need the ax, since it declares that no one “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” The fact that both the Bush administration and the Obama administration are willing to use tortured confessions to prosecute so-called enemy combatants is proof positive that it is time to expunge this relic of bygone fastidiousness.

It is up to Obama to show that he takes U.S. law more seriously than Stalin took the 1936 Soviet constitution. If Obama denounces torture at the same time he is protecting the torturers, then Obama deserves be hooted off the national stage.

Nobody Here But Us Non-Torturers

James Bovard — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 05:00:00 +0000

It is now more than four and a half years since Americans first saw the photos depicting the brutalizing of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. At that time, some commentators thought that the photos would be a political disaster for the Bush administration, perhaps even imperiling the president’s reelection. However, the Bush administration managed to exploit patriotism, blind trust, and reflexive servility to defuse the crisis.

It is important to understand how the Bush administration managed to blunt the torture scandal, since it is likely that other presidents will use similar tactics to whitewash other atrocities in the future.

On April 28, 2004, CBS broadcast photos of graphic abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, showing bloodied prisoners, forced simulation of masturbation and oral sex, the stacking of naked prisoners with bags over their heads, mock electrocution by a wire connected to a man’s genitals, guard dogs on the verge of ripping into naked men, and grinning U.S. male and female soldiers celebrating the degradation. Three days later, the New Yorker, in an expos by Seymour Hersh, published extracts from a March 2004 report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba that catalogued U.S. abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, including

breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape … sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

On the day after Hersh’s article was posted on the Internet, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admitted in a television interview that he had not yet bothered to read the Taguba report.

Minimizing
the damage

The Bush administration quickly portrayed the leaked photos as aberrations resulting from a handful of deviant National Guard members. However, a government consultant informed Hersh that the Abu Ghraib photos were specifically intended to be used to blackmail the prisoners abused, “to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.” Hersh noted that “the notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq.”

The Abu Ghraib photos were only the tip of the iceberg. Far more incriminating photos and videos of abuses existed, which Pentagon officials revealed in a slide show for members of Congress. However, the Bush administration slapped a national security classification on almost all the photos and videos not already acquired by the media. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress that the undisclosed material showed “acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel, and inhuman.” Highlights included “American soldiers beating one prisoner almost to death, apparently raping a female prisoner, acting inappropriately with a dead body, and taping Iraqi guards raping young boys,” according to NBC News. Suppressing those videos and photos enabled the Bush administration to persuade many people that the scandal was actually far narrower than the facts would later show.

On May 5, 2004, Bush granted an interview with Alhurra Television, an Arabic-language network owned and controlled by the U.S. government. He stressed,

We have nothing to hide. We believe in transparency, because we’re a free society. That’s what free societies do. They — if there’s a problem, they address those problems in a forthright, upfront manner. And that’s what’s taking place.

A minute later, he announced what the results of the investigation would be: “We’re finding the few [U.S. troops] that wanted to try to stop progress toward freedom and democracy.” Three days later, in his weekly radio address, Bush assured Americans that the abuses had been committed by “a small number of American servicemen and women.”

On May 7, Rumsfeld informed the House and Senate Armed Services Committees that he was taking “full responsibility” for “the terrible activities that occurred at Abu Ghraib” and was personally appointing a commission to investigate the problem. He urged members of Congress to recognize the real victims: “If you could have seen the anguished expressions on the faces of those of us in the Department upon seeing the photos, you would know how we feel today.” Rumsfeld complained that “people [in Iraq] are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon.” Rumsfeld, like Bush, stressed the idealistic upside:

Judge us by our actions. Watch how Americans, watch how democracy deals with wrongdoing and scandal and the pain of acknowledging and correcting our own mistakes and, indeed, our own weaknesses.
The Taguba
report

In reality, Rumsfeld was already deeply involved in putting a lid on the scandal. Seymour Hersh revealed last year in the New Yorker that Taguba was vindictively forced into retirement by the Pentagon because of his courageous report. Taguba said Rumsfeld deceived Congress in May 2004 when he portrayed himself as a blindsided victim of a leak when testifying shortly after the Taguba report and the Abu Ghraib photos were posted online. Rumsfeld claimed to have not seen Taguba’s report when they met the day before he first testified, even though Taguba had submitted more than a dozen copies to the Pentagon and elsewhere in the military command structure. Doug Feith, who set policy for detainees in Iraq, emailed a message around the Pentagon prohibiting officials from reading the Taguba report. Feith also warned that Pentagon officials should not discuss the report with anyone, even family members. One Pentagon consultant declared that the Bush team’s “basic strategy was ‘prosecute the kids in the photographs but protect the big picture.’” Suppressing the worst evidence was key. Taguba told Hersh that he had seen “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” That could not have been spun away as mere college fraternity hazing.

Taguba had been ordered to focus only on the actions of the military police at Abu Ghraib. He could not examine the responsibility of senior officers or the Pentagon for the atrocities he found. Col. Tom Pappas, the commander of the battalion that carried out the abuses photographed at Abu Ghraib, “was granted immunity in return for his testimony against a dog handler,” as author Andrew Cockburn derisively noted.

Attacking the
critics

On May 15, 2004, Pentagon Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Lawrence Di Rita revealed that newspaper editorial writers were as abominable as the soldiers who rampaged at Abu Ghraib. Di Rita declared that the Washington Post’s criticisms of Bush administration detainee policies put its editorial page “in the same company as those involved in this despicable behavior in terms of apparent disregard for basic human dignity.”

The Republican Party quickly exploited Abu Ghraib to portray Democrats as anti-American and unpatriotic. The Republican National Committee chairman, Ed Gillespie, accused Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) of exploiting the scandal as a fundraising method and declared that Democrats

do not see the reprehensible images from Abu Ghraib Prison as the isolated, aberrant acts of a few soldiers who should be brought to justice…. These hasty calls for [Rumsfeld's] resignation reflect a cynical political ploy, or an inaccurate and sadly unfortunate view of the honor of our Armed Forces.

Yet Kerry specifically commented that the prisoner scandal did not reflect “the behavior of 99.9 percent of our troops.” That did not dissuade the Bush-Cheney campaign chairman, Marc Racicot, from denouncing Kerry for having suggested that all U.S. troops in Iraq are “somehow universally responsible” for the Abu Ghraib abuses. Many Republicans and much of the conservative media convinced themselves that the torture scandal was a fabrication of the liberal media and of the “hate America” crowd. At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on May 10, 2004, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) fumed, “I’m probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment” the Abu Ghraib prisoners received.

On May 25, the Bush administration responded to the growing PR debacle by bringing seven Iraqis whose hands had been chopped off at Abu Ghraib during the Saddam era to the White House for a meeting and photo session with President Bush. (The men received new mechanical hands, thanks to private donors in Texas.) The White House subsequently touted the “get-together” as the “President’s Meeting With Tortured Iraqis.”

The Bush administration distracted public attention from the Abu Ghraib scandal with a new terror alert. On May 26, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced,

Credible intelligence from multiple sources indicates that Al Qaeda plans to attempt an attack on the United States in the next few months. This disturbing intelligence indicates Al Qaeda’s specific intention to hit the United States hard…. [An] Al Qaeda spokesman announced that 90 percent of the arrangements for an attack in the United States were complete.

He assured one and all that the attack plans had been “corroborated on a variety of levels.” But Homeland Security officials told the media that “there was no new information about attacks in the U.S., and … no change in the government’s color-coded ‘threat level.’”

The Ashcroft warning quickly became a laughingstock — at least to people who followed the news. NBC News reported on May 28 that Ashcroft’s primary al-Qaeda source was “a largely discredited group, Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, known for putting propaganda on the Internet” that had falsely “claimed responsibility for the power blackout in the Northeast last year, a power outage in London, and the Madrid bombings.” One former White House terrorism expert commented, “The only thing they haven’t claimed credit for recently is the cicada invasion of Washington.” The group’s warning consisted of one message emailed two months earlier to a London newspaper. Newsweek reported that the White House

played a role in the decision to go public with the warning…. Instead of the images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, the White House would prefer that voters see the faces of terrorists who aim to kill them.

From the first days of the torture scandal, the Bush administration followed a “deny everything and praise American values” strategy to defuse the controversy over Abu Ghraib.

In a May 28, 2004, interview, a French journalist mentioned Abu Ghraib and asked President Bush, “Do you feel responsible in any way for this moral failure in Iraq?” Bush replied,

“First of all, I feel responsible for letting the world see that we will deal with this in a transparent way, that people will see that justice will be delivered. And what I regret most of all is that the great honor of our country has been stained by the actions of a few people.”

Bush reminded the Frenchman that “America is a great and generous and decent country.”

The Bush strategy of down-playing Abu Ghraib was helped by comments by prominent Republicans demonizing anyone whom the Americans locked up in Iraq. On June 3, Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) sneered at those who complained about Abu Ghraib. He explained to a Mississippi television interviewer, “Hey, nothing wrong with holding a dog up there, unless the dog ate him.” Lott explained, “This is not Sunday school; this is interrogation; this is rough stuff.” He pointed out that some of the Abu Ghraib detainees “should not have been prisoners in the first place, probably should have been killed.” But U.S. military intelligence officers told the Red Cross that between 70 and 90 percent of detainees in Iraq “had been arrested by mistake.”

On June 17, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, at a Pentagon press conference, portrayed the government as the victim and blamed the news media:

The implication is that the United States government has, in one way or another, ordered, authorized, permitted, tolerated torture. Not true. And our forces read that, and they’ve got to wonder, do we?

He added,
I have not seen anything that suggests that a senior civilian or military official of the United States of America … could be characterized as ordering or authorizing or permitting torture or acts that are inconsistent with our international treaty obligations or our laws or our values as a country.

Yet in December 2002 Rumsfeld personally authorized “the use of techniques including hooding, nudity, stress positions, ‘fear of dogs’ and physical contact with prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay base.” Numerous commentators suggested that Rumsfeld’s authorization was itself a war crime.

On June 22, Bush responded to criticism:

Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country…. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being.

Instead of the issue’s being Bush’s orders, the issue was the American “soul and being.” Repeating largely meaningless denials and invocations satisfied most Bush supporters.

The torture
memos

On the same day, White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales announced that some parts of the Bybee memo (the Justice Department memoby Office of Legal Counsel attorneys Jay Bybee and John Yoo, which claimed that the president did not need to obey U.S. criminal law) were being formally disavowed, calling the memo’s claims “irrelevant and unnecessary to support any action taken by the president.” Gonzales stressed the PR problems caused by the memo: “It was harmful to this country in terms of the notion that we may be engaged in torture.” He spoke of the “quaint” memo and other advocacy of vigorous interrogation methods as mere “documents … generated by government lawyers to explore the limits of the legal landscape as to what the Executive Branch can do within the law and the Constitution as an abstract matter.” He made it clear that the Bush administration was not disavowing its claim to absolute power:

I must emphasize that the analysis underpinning the President’s decisions stands and [is] not being reviewed. The Commander-in-Chief override power discussed in the opinion is, on its face — on its face — limited to our conflict with al-Qaeda. There is no indication that it applies to our conflict in Iraq.

His qualifying phrases “on its face” and “no indication” reserved the Bush administration’s options. Gonzales’s claim that the president has the right to override the law and the Constitution received little coverage in the American media.

The politics
of torture

The Democrats made a few languid gestures in opposition. On June 23, Democratic senators sought to issue a subpoena for Bush administration documents on detainee abuses. Republicans defeated the measure by a largely party-line vote, 50-to-46. The “talking points” issued to Republicans by the Senate Republican Policy Committee warned,

Because of an out-of-control media and widespread hysteria, the White House and Pentagon have been forced to reveal secret interrogation techniques just to prove our men and women in uniform aren’t torturers and murderers…. The forced disclosure will now complicate efforts to get information from terrorists who will train to withstand these techniques…. It’s high past time we remember who [our] enemies are.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) condemned Democrats’ criticism of Bush torture policies as “not only false — they dangerously undermine troop morale, put our troops at risk, and impede our efforts to win the global war against terrorism.”

In reality, it was the Bush administration policies that placed American troops at risk. By effectively proclaiming a right to torture captives, the U.S. government would legitimate similar abuses by foreign regimes against U.S. troops.

The following day, Bush was interviewed by a petite female Irish journalist who told him that most Irish people are “angry over Abu Ghraib. Are you bothered by what Irish people think?” Bush replied, “Listen, I hope the Irish people understand the great values of our country. And if they think that a few soldiers represent the entirety of America, they don’t really understand America then.” He was furious at the question and the White House is said to have protested to the woman’s superiors.

On June 26, in his annual proclamation on the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, Bush assured the world,

The American people were horrified by the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq…. They were inconsistent with our policies and our values as a nation…. The United States will continue to lead the fight to eliminate [torture] everywhere.

After the Abu Ghraib torture scandal had percolated for six weeks, the New York Times and CBS News polled people on whether “members of the Bush administration are telling the entire truth, are mostly telling the truth but are hiding something, or are mostly lying” in their statements on Abu Ghraib. Only 15 percent of respondents said the administration was telling the “entire truth”; 52 percent said they were “hiding something”; and 27 percent said they were “mostly lying.”

Yet, even though the public was not buying Bush’s story, the Democrats lacked the courage to vigorously challenge or even to strongly condemn his policies. At the Democratic National Convention in Boston at the end of July, Abu Ghraib was barely mentioned. Though the torture scandal had sparked fury and protests in America and around the world, the Democratic Party ignored the issue in a convention that celebrated the theme of former Navy officer John Kerry’s “reporting for duty.” The Democrats may have feared being labeled unpatriotic for mentioning the torture. But regardless of how they muzzled themselves, the Democratic candidate was soon savagely maligned by the “Swift Boat Vets for Truth” advertisement barrage.

Suppressing
the truth

The Pentagon sought to rewrite the narrative in Iraq as well as in America. On September 14, U.S. military authorities proudly unveiled Camp Liberty, a new tent compound to house Iraqi detainees next to Abu Ghraib. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the camp commander, declared that Camp Liberty and other changes in the treatment of Iraqi prisoners are “restoring the honor of America.” The camp was used for Iraqis cleared of wrongdoing who were on the verge of being released. The New York Times noted that as detainees were released a soldier would give them “$25, in the form of a crisp new $20 bill and a $5 bill, and a 12-page glossy pamphlet on Iraq’s interim government, ‘Iraq. Development.’” The Bush administration’s use of the word “liberty” to try to expunge Abu Ghraib atrocities illustrated how all limits were waived in degrading the American political vocabulary. This was the second re-christening, since Pentagon officials had speedily christened part of the Abu Ghraib complex Camp Redemption in May, when the leaked photos were first rattling the world.

Despite the Abu Ghraib scandal, Bush ran for reelection as the anti-torture candidate. In a campaign speech in Missouri, he denounced Saddam: “For decades he tormented and tortured the people of Iraq. Because we acted, Iraq is free and a sovereign nation.” It was as if torture subverts freedom only if done on a dictator’s orders, not when inflicted by the greatest democracy in the world. In the closing weeks of the campaign, Bush constantly reminded audiences, “Think about how far that country has come from the days of torture chambers and mass graves. Freedom is on the march, and America and the world are better for it.”

But political lies were marching far further and faster than freedom in the 2004 presidential election. Investigations completed after the 2004 election, as well as disclosures of FBI and military memos and documents, proved that torture was far more systematic in the U.S. military and the CIA after 9/11 than the Bush team admitted before his reelection victory.

The media flinched, the public shrugged, the politicians lied, and Bush snared a second term. When he was asked about Iraq by a reporter shortly before his second inauguration, he declared that Americans had had their “moment of accountability” regarding his Iraqi policies. In his own eyes, his reelection was a total absolution for anything he did in the first term.

Bush will be leaving office on January 20. Americans may have seen only the tip of the iceberg of the abuses that the U.S. government committed during his presidency. Whether Americans learn the details of the torture abuses of the Bush era will be an acid test for the health and survival of American democracy.

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Obama Is Grabbing Your Medical Records

James Bovard — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 06:00:00 +0000

The computerization of personal healthcare records is one of the showpieces of the new stimulus bill. President Obama promised, “We will make the immediate investments necessary to ensure that within five years all of America’s medical records are computerized.” Congress ponied up $19 billion to subsidize the digitization of patient files and creation of electronic healthcare tracking systems. The ultimate goal is “the utilization of a certified electronic health record for each person in the United States by 2014.”

Shoved into a 1,400-page bill passed in a panic, the plan went largely undebated. But the implications are horrifying. Doctors will be coerced into a massive federal healthcare scheme, and government will serve as the leaky repository of patients’ most intimate information. Much as the Patriot Act pried, this measure intrudes on a far more personal level. No patient left behind — or alone.

The president promises that computerizing doctors’ records will “cut red tape, prevent medical mistakes, and help save billions each year.” But in fact, the federal mandate is likely to destroy the progress being made with voluntary efforts to computerize records in a way that assures confidentiality and individual control of health data.

At this point, fewer than 20 percent of the nation’s physicians have gone full-speed on computerization. Obama’s plan offers between $44,000 and $64,000 to doctors who computerize patient records and up to $11 million per hospital. “On the stick side of the equation,” the Wall Street Journal reported, “the measure includes Medicare payment penalties for physicians and hospitals that are not using electronic health records by 2014.” If records are digitized on the federal dime, it will be far easier for politicians to claim the resulting information.

More Freedom Hokum

James Bovard — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Perhaps no American president has praised freedom as often as George W. Bush. From his declarations that the United States was attacked because of freedom, to the names “Operation Enduring Freedom” and “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” to his proclamations of a “calling” from history to defend freedom, freedom quickly became the cloak draping all of Bush’s actions after 9/11.

This past July 24, President Bush celebrated “Captive Nations Week” by giving a speech on advancing his “freedom agenda.” The captive audience at the federal Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center was chock full of bureaucrats, so no hoots were heard and no dead cats were thrown on stage, despite the president’s absurdities. The bureaucrats were buttressed by many limousine loads of foreign diplomats, to add tone to the event.

American presidents have been verbally desecrating freedom for a long time, but Bush is accelerating the downward spiral. He told the audience,

Over the past seven years, we’ve spoken out against human-rights abuses by tyrannical regimes like those in Iran, Sudan, and Syria and Zimbabwe. We’ve spoken candidly about human rights with nations with whom we’ve got good relations, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia and China.

This is from a president whose foreign and military aid have bankrolled many of the world’s worst tyrannies — including Uzbekistan, where dissidents have been boiled alive.

Bush assured humanity,

I have a message for all those throughout the world who languish in tyranny: I know there are moments when it feels like you’re alone in your struggle. And you’re not alone. America hears you. Millions of our citizens stand with you, and hope still lives — even in bleak places and in dark moments.

Bush did not mention Guantanamo in this context, because presumably those people languishing in solitary confinement after years of torture are no longer recognized as human beings by the U.S. government — at least with respect to having any rights that U.S. interrogators need to respect. The detainees at the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan are similarly without any rights that the U.S. government deigns to recognize.

Bush added,

Today I renew my call for the release of all prisoners of conscience around the world — including Ayman Nour of Egypt, Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, Oscar Biscet of Cuba, Riad Seif of Syria.

But what of the 20,000 Iraqis who are being held without charges in U.S. prison camps in Iraq? The Bush administration has fought the Iraqi government tooth and nail to retain its right to conduct mass roundups and lockups of Iraqis. Simply because the names of such detainees are unknown it is certain that they will never pop up in presidential speeches.

The only thing necessary is for U.S. officials to label someone a “suspect” — and then that person’s “conscience” becomes irrelevant.

Bush declared, “To protect America, we must defeat the ideology of hatred by spreading the hope of freedom.”

Bush has tried to spread the hope of freedom by attacking numerous countries and threatening to attack even more. But freedom cannot be forcibly exported without being subverted at home. Perpetual war will inevitably beget perpetual repression. It is impossible to destroy all the alleged enemies of freedom in the world without also destroying freedom in the United States. The amount of military power the United States would have to acquire and use — the number of preemptive attacks — the likelihood of terrorist counterattacks that would be exploited by American politicians for domestic crackdowns — the perpetual fear that would engulf the American public — all these would overwhelm the parchment barriers bequeathed by the Founding Fathers.

Bush’s crusade for freedom

Bush used his crusade for freedom to sanctify all his power grabs:

Since 9/11, we recognized that we’re at war and we must stop new attacks before they happen — not wait until after they happen. So we’re giving our intelligence and law enforcement and homeland-security professionals the tools they need to stop terrorists before they strike again.

It was unclear whether Bush was referring to the torture instruments the CIA and military interrogators have used in recent years or to the warrantless wiretap program that the National Security Agency has conducted to track the phone calls of millions of Americans. But his “giving our professionals the tools they need” should chill anyone who has paid attention to the reports from the various secret U.S. prisons scattered around the globe since 9/11.

Bush is encouraging Americans to judge the actions of the federal government solely by his proclaimed goal — freedom — and not by what the government does. But the issue is not whether Bush personally loves or hates freedom. The issue is that he constantly invokes freedom in order to unleash government.

He declared, “We’ve seen that free societies don’t harbor terrorists, or launch unprovoked attacks on their neighbors.”

Since Iraq is not a neighbor, Bush’s unprovoked invasion of that nation does not count. But no matter how many foreign nations he attacked without reasonable provocations, he could repeat such claptrap and still be cheered by certain crowds in Washington.

He declared,

During the Cold War, the nations of Central and Eastern Europe were part of the Warsaw Pact alliance that was poised to attack Western Europe. Today, most of those nations are members of the NATO alliance, who are using their freedom to aid the rise of other young democracies.

It comes as no surprise that such rhetoric plays well with the foreign diplomats who throng in Washington and filch favors and aid for their countries. In reality, the expansion of NATO eastward is one of the greatest follies of the last two presidents. (Bill Clinton was as idiotic as Bush on this score.) It is as if NATO was not satisfied to see the Soviet Union withdraw its troops and abandon its foreign conquests. Instead, there seems to be a vested interest in taunting the Russian Bear. NATO should have been dissolved at the same time that the Warsaw Pact ended. Instead, it had to find new enemies to justify its existence — which was bad news for the women and children of Serbia (which NATO bombed for months in 1999).

Bush picked up the gauntlet — or at least the cant — of Franklin Roosevelt:

Combating hopelessness is in our moral interests — Americans believe that to whom much is given, much is required. So the challenge for America in the years ahead is to continue to help people in struggling nations achieve freedom from corruption, freedom from disease, freedom from poverty, freedom from hunger, and freedom from tyranny.

Why did the president not also promise to give all the world’s babies freedom from diaper rash? The notion that the United States can assure the world’s population “freedom from poverty” or “freedom from hunger” is pure rhetorical self-indulgence. It pretends that the wish — or maybe the whim — of the president of the United States is all that is necessary to change history. But since the audience for his speech was stocked with flunkies, this absurdity slipped by without proper obnoxious retorts.

Foreign-aid follies

Bush bragged, “We’ve increased the budget for the National Endowment of Democracy by more than 150 percent since 2001.”

But this is simply meddling money for the U.S. government. The National Endowment for Democracy has given grants that helped finance coup efforts in Haiti and Venezuela and tampered with election results in many other nations. The endowment’s front groups massively intervened in Iraqi elections. The U.S. government often seems far more interested in fixing elections than in safeguarding democracy.

Bush hailed his reforms of foreign aid:

We’ve transformed the way we deliver aid by creating the Millennium Challenge Account [MCA], which is a new approach to foreign assistance, which offers support to developing nations that fight corruption, and govern justly, and open their economies, and invest in the health and education of their people. The challenge for future presidents and future Congresses will be to ensure that America’s generosity remains tied to the promotion of transparency and accountability and prosperity.

Once again, this is simply a sham masquerading as a panacea. Practically every president since Eisenhower has announced that he is was going to “fix” foreign aid. Instead, the boondoggles roll on. Bush’s MCA is a pipsqueak compared with other U.S. foreign-aid programs — which bankroll exactly the same type of behavior that the MCA is supposed to prevent. The U.S. government under Bush has bankrolled many of the most corrupt governments in the world, including Nigeria, Bangladesh, Tajikistan, Paraguay, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan.

Bush concluded his speech:

Even now, change is stirring in places like Havana and Damascus and Tehran. The people of these nations dream of a free future, hope for a free future, and believe that a free future will come. And it will. May God be with them in their struggle. America always will be.

Ironically, the only people America “always will be” with are those people in nations on Bush’s latest revised Enemies List.

Bush told the audience, “I love what our country represents.” Where else could a failed son of a one-term floundering president pull enough connections to make himself the most powerful person in the world? But Bush’s affection for the worship he receives is another sign of American political degeneracy.

Smile and Cower to the TSA

James Bovard — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 05:00:00 +0000

The Transportation Security Administration has created more gantlets at American airports than most travelers realize. It has continually changed the rules for flying since it first deployed its 40,000+ army of screeners across the land. Americans are at much greater risk of being arrested or fined in the airport for not kowtowing to federal agents. The rise of the TSA vivifies how low contemporary Americans have fallen. James Madison observed in The Federalist Papers,

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be … so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow.

Today, “law” and regulations have become tools to force people to behave in ways government officials approve of, rather than a clear line that citizens can respect in order to live their lives in privacy and peace. Government agencies now routinely covertly change their regulations. The rule of law — the classical concept endorsed by the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 as a restraint on government power — has been replaced by the “rule of memo,” whereby federal officials on a whim create new rules to bind private citizens.

Americans of the Revolutionary era glorified the law because it was seen as a means to restrain government and to secure the rights of the citizens. Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek defined the rule of law in 1944:

Government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand — rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers.

The rule of law aims to minimize discretionary power. But the TSA maximizes its discretion to change the rules travelers must obey at any time.

Fining for
fun

TSA agents are entitled to reverential treatment, regardless of how much damage they inflict on people’s travel schedules or luggage. The TSA slapped fines on almost 5,000 people in 2003, yet never made any public announcement that people faced fines for violations. There were no warnings and people who received a fine in the mail were never informed of their right to contest or appeal the fine. TSA waited until early 2004 to announce the fine system, at which time the maximum fine was raised from $1,100 to $10,000.

TSA agents at Baltimore-Washington International Airport confiscated a small steak knife from the briefcase of Susan Brown Campbell, a California lawyer. After she received a $150 fine in the mail, she called TSA seeking information on how to challenge the fine. A TSA lawyer phoned Campbell and, as she later stated, was “very, very intimidating,” warning “that the penalty could be up to $10,000.” Campbell was told she would have to travel back to Baltimore to contest the fine. TSA punished Campbell’s insolence by doubling her fine to $300.

Travelers can be heavily fined for inadvertently possessing the same kind of object TSA now approves giving to first-class passengers during flights. It ruled in September 2003 that airlines would be permitted to provide metal knives to first-class passengers at mealtime. TSA spokeswoman Yolanda Clark said of a typical airline knife, “Even though it’s stainless steel, it has rounded edges and the chances of it actually being used to bring down an aircraft are probably minimal.” The metal knives given to first-class passengers may be potentially more dangerous than most items seized at TSA checkpoints. But the agency has no plans to boost its seizure totals by launching raids on first-class cabins.

The fines are an extension of the power the feds awarded themselves in a February 2002 Federal Register notice, which announced that people could be arrested if they acted in a way that “might distract or inhibit a screener from effectively performing his or her duties…. A screener encountering such a situation must turn away from his or her normal duties to deal with the disruptive individual, which may affect the screening of other individuals.” Practically any comment or behavior that makes a TSA screener “turn away” from whatever he was doing can thus be a federal offense.

A thousand people were arrested in airports at TSA’s behest in 2002, and roughly 1,500 were arrested in 2003. (Many of those arrested were caught with firearms or bona fide dangerous weapons.) Since the TSA is now intercepting 15,000 prohibited items a day from travelers, the new system of fines could raise enough money to pay for fancy new epaulets for every TSA agent’s uniform.

TSA agents can fine Americans up to $1,500 for any alleged “nonphysical interference” at a TSA checkpoint. There is no formal definition for this offense. TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis said the offense included “any nonphysical situation that in any way would interfere with the screener and his or her ability to continue to work or interfere with their ability to do their jobs.” This penalty would seem to be limited solely by the imagination or the malice of TSA agents.

TSA agents can slap fines on Americans based on “attitude,” which TSA classifies as one of the “aggravating factors” in determining financial punishments. TSA has issued no guidance on the precise amount of obligatory groveling at airport checkpoints. People who question TSA commands are probably far more likely to be fined.

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2005 that individual TSA airport “federal security directors” have sweeping discretion to impose penalties on travelers — or not. The frequency of fines ranged from 300 per million passengers to zero per million passengers. The Manchester, New Hampshire, airport had by far the highest rate of fines for travelers. The airport’s manager, Kevin Manger, complained, “Far too much discretion has been given to the federal security directors.”

Ann Davis explained why the 160 federal security directors had such varying policies: “I’m sure they and their regulatory staff have differing philosophical approaches.”

But passengers hit with TSA fines are not facing a philosophical conundrum. Instead, they are being hit by the Iron Fist of Uncle Sam. It is not a philosophical dispute: it is an issue of arbitrary power and intimidation.

The TSA’s system of fines is a travesty of the Administrative Procedures Act — which guarantees Americans due process rights in dealings with federal agencies. Instead, TSA simply concocted a system of fines, failed to give people warning or notice, failed to define the key terms, failed to notify violators of their right to appeal. And if people are unsatisfied with the TSA’s “justice” — they must go through the Coast Guard’s administrative law judge system to dispute the fee. This guarantees years of delay and makes it far more difficult for an American citizen to let a jury of his peers in a federal courtroom decide the justice of the government’s action.

Petty tyrants

The TSA has made little or no effort to control the attitude or arrogance of many of its own screeners. In March 2004, airline passengers filed almost 3,000 formal complaints with the federal government over the conduct of TSA screeners. Hundreds of people complained about the rudeness of TSA screeners. And yet, none of these complaints by taxpayers and citizens will result in a single attitude fine for a TSA employee. (Air travelers filed four times more complaints against the TSA than against airlines.)

These fines have nothing to do with preventing terrorist attacks. The 9/11 hijackers intensely studied American airport-security procedures. Once the system of attitude fines becomes known, savvy hijackers will simply work around it — the same way that the hijackers learned how to bypass obstacles at airport checkpoints prior to the 9/11 attacks.

The TSA’s attitude-fine regime may soon become far worse. The TSA is unleashing a horde of “behavior detection officers” into airports, aiming to have 500 spread across the land by the end of this year. The BDOs will be surveilling passengers for “body language and facial cues … for signs of bad intentions.” The TSA’s latest intrusion is based on an Israeli model. McClatchy Newspapers reported last August that

Jay M. Cohen, undersecretary of Homeland Security for Science and Technology, said in May that he wants to automate passenger screening by using videocams and computers to measure and analyze heart rate, respiration, body temperature and verbal responses as well as facial micro-expressions.

There is no word yet on whether the TSA will begin fining passengers who break into a sweat because of all the government nonsense they encounter at airports.

Attitude fines exemplify that TSA aims to rule airports by fear. Anyone who is not properly docile can be treated as a public enemy. The attitude fines illustrate how power has gone to the heads of TSA chiefs. Amidst a surge of private and congressional complaints about TSA abuses, the TSA aspires to shut the American people up, once and for all. Intimidating people is the same as protecting them, and exalting federal agents the same as protecting public safety, apparently.

The Hero of the Vietnam War

James Bovard — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Daniel Ellsberg is the kind of American who should receive a Medal of Freedom. Except that the Medals of Freedom are distributed by presidents who routinely give them to “useful idiots” and apologists for their wars and power grabs. It should be renamed the Medal for Enabling or Applauding Official Crimes in the Name of Freedom.

Ellsberg knowingly risked spending a life in prison to bring the truth about the Vietnam War to Americans. He had hoped truth would set Americans free from the spell of official lies. But the experience in Iraq indicates that Americans have learned little if anything from the Vietnam-era deceits.

The following year, Ellsberg’s book — Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers — came out. I should have read this book before writing the “Lying and Legitimacy” chapter in Attention Deficit Democracy. Ellsberg’s bitter experiences would have curbed my youthful idealism. His book hit the streets at a time when Americans were still inclined to see Bush through a 9/11 holy haze. His lies on Iraq were not widely recognized until after Baghdad had fallen and the WMDs failed to materialize.

Ellsberg tells the story of how, as a former Marine lieutenant with a doctorate from Harvard, he was hired by John McNaughton, the assistant secretary of defense, and started work in August 1964 on the day the Gulf of Tonkin crisis ignited. He relates receiving the “flash” wire dispatches from the USS Maddox.

Within hours after the U.S. destroyer reported being attacked by North Vietnamese PT boats, the ship’s commander had wired Washington that the reports of an attack on his ship may have been wildly exaggerated: “Entire action leaves many doubts.”

But it didn’t matter, because this was just the pretext that Lyndon Johnson was looking for. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara raced to proclaim that the attack was unprovoked. But at a National Security Council meeting on the evening that the first report came in, Johnson asked, “Do they want war by attacking our ships in the middle of the Gulf of Tonkin?” CIA chief John McCone answered,

No. The North Vietnamese are reacting defensively to our attack on their off-shore islands. They are responding out of pride and on the basis of defense considerations.

The fact was that the United States had orchestrated an attack by South Vietnamese commandos on North Vietnamese territory before the alleged conflict began. But Johnson lied and commenced bombing, and Congress rushed to cheer him on.

In Vietnam, as in Iraq, the U.S. government pushed hard to get an election to sanctify its puppet regime. Ellsberg, who spent two years in Vietnam after his time in the Pentagon, aided some of the key U.S. officials in this effort who sought an honest vote. But when U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge heard their pitch, he replied,

You’ve got a gentleman in the White House right now [Johnson] who has spent most of his life rigging elections. I’ve spent most of my life rigging elections. I spent nine whole months rigging a Republican convention to choose Ike as a candidate rather than Bob Taft.

Lodge later ordered, “Get it across to the press that they shouldn’t apply higher standards here in Vietnam than they do in the U.S.”

But Lodge’s comments were downright uplifting compared with a meeting that Ellsberg attended with former Vice President Richard Nixon, who was visiting Vietnam on a “fact-finding mission” to help bolster his presidential aspirations. Former CIA operative Edward Lansdale told Nixon that he and his colleagues wanted to help “make this the most honest election that’s ever been held in Vietnam.” Nixon replied, “Oh, sure, honest, yes, honest, that’s right … so long as you win!” With the last words he did three things in quick succession: winked, drove his elbow hard into Lansdale’s arm, and slapped his own knee.

It’s hard to imagine any U.S. government official even suggesting to Bush, in his fly-bys at Camp Cupcake in Iraq, that the United States should make sure that the Iraqi elections were fair and square.

Ellsberg’s memoirs vividly explain how top officials are corrupted by possession of what they consider to be top-secret information. Ellsberg warned Henry Kissinger shortly after Nixon’s 1968 election victory that having access to classified information is “something like the potion Circe gave to the wanderers and shipwrecked men who happened on her island, which turned them into swine.”

The Pentagon Papers

In 1967, the Pentagon ordered top experts to analyze where the war had gone wrong. The resulting study contained 47 volumes of material exposing the intellectual and political follies that had, by that time, already left tens of thousands of Americans dead. After the study was finished, it was distributed to the key players and federal agencies. However, the massive study was completely ignored. At the time the New York Times began publishing excerpts in 1971, “the White House and the State Department were unable even to locate the 47 volumes.” New York Times editor Tom Wicker commented at the time that “the people who read these documents in the Times were the first to study them.”

Ellsberg helped write a portion of the papers dealing with the Kennedy administration. He was struck by the incorrigibility of U.S. policy. No matter how many Ivy League grads and whiz kids were at the helm,

There was a general failure to study history or to analyze or even to record operational experience, especially mistakes. Above all, effective pressures for optimistically false reporting at every level, for describing “progress” rather than problems or failure, concealed the very need for change in approach or for learning.

The same failures permeate the U.S. military’s experience in Iraq. The Pentagon and White House have concocted one bogus standard after another to sanctify whatever recent policy change they announced.

Ellsberg was a gung-ho liberal Cold Warrior until the late 1960s. As he read the confidential documents that formed the basis of the Pentagon Papers, he realized that he had greatly underestimated the amount of perennial presidential deceit in America. He grasped that

the concentration of power within the executive branch since World War II had focused nearly all responsibility for policy “failure” upon one man, the president. At the same time, it gave him enormous capability to avert or postpone or conceal such personal failure by means of force or fraud. Confronted by resolute external resistance, as in Vietnam, that power could not fail to corrupt the human who held it.

Ellsberg became active with anti-war demonstrators and has great anecdotes of idiot cops at D.C. protests. The motto of the 1971 May Day anti-war protests was “If they won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.” This is an ideal that should not be forgotten by those in our time who have wearied of surge and postsurge nonsense.

Publishing the Papers

I was surprised to learn how hard Ellsberg had to struggle to find anyone with the gumption to go public with the 7,000 pages. Sen. George McGovern at first was interested but ducked out on putting the Papers in the Congressional Record, as did Sen. William Fulbright. On the other hand, Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska had no fear and pulled out all the stops to get the information out.

The New York Times’s publication of the Pentagon Papers was the big breakthrough. Nixon’s Justice Department raced to get an injunction blocking publication, and later did the same when the Washington Post began publishing material Ellsberg sent it. Ellsberg responded by sending chunks of his report to newspapers around the country. The Nixon administration’s rage and machinations were the best PR the Pentagon Papers could have received.

Nixon henchman H.R. Haldeman said to Nixon on the day the Papers first hit the New York Times that the result would be that “the ordinary guy” comes to believe that

you can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say; and you can’t rely on their judgement. And the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this.

Unfortunately, Haldeman’s fear was not borne out. Ellsberg was disappointed at the response to the Pentagon Papers: “There remained enormous resistance in the minds of voters and commentators to believing that these generalizations applied to an incumbent president.” This has been a perennial pitfall for American democracy: assuming that the most recently elected politician is an entirely different species from all the rascals who preceded him. It was especially ironic that so many Americans were so slow to recognize Nixon’s treachery.

At the start of his trial for leaking the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg declared,

This has been for me an act of hope and of trust. Hope that the truth will free us of this war. Trust that informed Americans will direct their public servants to stop lying and to stop the killing and dying by Americans in Indochina.

This was the type of idealism that spurred Henry Kissinger to label Ellsberg “the most dangerous man in America.”

In the new century, Ellsberg has continued speaking out, condemning official lies, and appealing to Americans to recognize that wars are far bloodier and more costly than leaders claim. In July 2006, he warned that if the United States attacks Iran, “I have no doubt that there will be, the day after or within days an equivalent of a Reichstag fire decree that will involve massive detentions in this country.” He has publicly urged other Pentagon and administration insiders to take the risk to leak key documents in order to serve truth instead of the current regime.

Unfortunately, even when government officials risk their freedom and careers to leak information, the media sometimes refuse to publish it — or they bury it until after an election — as the New York Times did with its information on Bush’s illegal warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ phone calls.

Who knows how many other leaks have never seen the light of day because of a media that kowtowed to President Bush and Vice President Cheney as if they were gods?

Warring As Lying

James Bovard — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Americans are taught to expect their elected leaders to be relatively honest. But it wasn’t always like that. In the mid 1800s, people joked about political candidates who claimed to have been born in a log cabin that they built with their own hands. This jibe was spurred by William Henry Harrison’s false claim of a log-cabin birth in the 1840 presidential campaign.

Americans were less naïve about dishonest politicians in the first century after this nation’s founding. But that still did not deter presidents from conjuring up wars. Presidential deceits on foreign policy have filled cemeteries across the land. George W. Bush’s deceits on the road to war with Iraq fit a long pattern of brazen charades.

In 1846, James K. Polk took Americans to war after falsely proclaiming that the Mexican army had crossed the U.S. border and attacked a U.S. army outpost — “shedding the blood of our citizens on our own soil.” Though Polk refused to provide any details of where the attack occurred, the accusation swayed enough members of Congress to declare war against Mexico. Congressman Abraham Lincoln vigorously attacked Polk for his deceits. But Lincoln may have studied Polk’s methods, since they helped him whip up war fever 15 years later.

In 1917, Woodrow Wilson took the nation to war in a speech to Congress that contained one howler after another. He proclaimed that “self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies” — despite the role of the British secret service and propaganda operations in the prior years to breed war fever in the United States. Wilson hailed Russia as a nation that had always been “democratic at heart” — less than a month after the fall of the tsar and not long before the Bolshevik Revolution. He proclaimed that the government would show its friendship and affection for German-Americans at home — but his administration was soon spearheading loyalty drives that spread terror in many communities across the land.

In 1940, in one of his final speeches of the presidential campaign, Franklin Roosevelt assured voters, “Your president says this country is not going to war.” At the time, he was violating the Neutrality Act by providing massive military assistance to Britain and was searching high and low for a way to take the United States into war against Hitler.

In his 1944 State of the Union address, Roosevelt denounced those Americans with “such suspicious souls — who feared that I have made ‘commitments’ for the future which might pledge this Nation to secret treaties” at the summit of Allied leaders in Tehran the previous month. In early 1945, Roosevelt told Congress that the Yalta Agreement “spells the end of the system of unilateral action and exclusive alliance and spheres of influence.” In reality, he signed off on Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and the crushing of any hopes for democracy in Poland.

In August 1945, Harry Truman announced to the world that “the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians.” Hiroshima was actually a major city with more than a third of a million people prior to its incineration. But Truman’s lie helped soften the initial impact on the American public of the first use of the atomic bomb. (The U.S. government also vigorously censored photographs of Hiroshima and its maimed survivors.)

Vietnam falsehoods

Presidential and other government lies on foreign policy are often discounted because they are presumed to be motivated by national security. But as Hannah Arendt noted in an essay on the Pentagon Papers, during the Vietnam War,

The policy of lying was hardly ever aimed at the enemy but chiefly if not exclusively destined for domestic consumption, for propaganda at home and especially for the purpose of deceiving Congress.

CIA analysts did excellent work in the early period of the Vietnam conflict. But “in the contest between public statements, always over-optimistic, and the truthful reports of the intelligence community, persistently bleak and ominous, the public statements were likely to win simply because they were public,” Arendt commented. The truth never had a chance when it did not serve Lyndon Johnson’s political calculations.

Vietnam destroyed the credibility of both Lyndon Johnson and the American military. Yet the memory of the pervasive lies of the military establishment did not curb the gullibility of many people for fresh government-created falsehoods a decade or so later. During the 1980s, the U.S. State Department ran a propaganda campaign that placed numerous articles in the U.S. media praising the Nicaraguan Contras and attacking the Sandinista regime. As the Christian Science Monitor noted in 2002, the State Department “fed the Miami Herald a make-believe story that the Soviet Union had given chemical weapons to the Sandinistas. Another tale, which happened to emerge the night of President Ronald Reagan’s reelection victory, held that Soviet MiG fighters were on their way to Nicaragua.” The General Accounting Office investigated and concluded that the State Department operation was illegal, consisting of “prohibited, covert propaganda activities.” There was no backlash against the government when the frauds were disclosed. Instead, it was on to the next scam.

Reagan, Bush,
and Clinton

Reagan paved the way for subsequent presidents in immersing anti-terrorist policy in swamps of falsehoods. In October 1983, a month after he authorized U.S. Marine commanders to call in air strikes against Muslims to help the Christian forces in Lebanon’s civil war, a Muslim suicide bomber devastated a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 242 Americans. In a televised speech a few days later, Reagan portrayed the attack as unstoppable, falsely claiming that the truck “crashed through a series of barriers, including a chain-link fence and barbed-wire entanglements. The guards opened fire, but it was too late.” In reality, the guards did not fire because they were prohibited from having loaded weapons — one of many pathetic failures of defense that the Reagan administration sought to sweep under the carpet.

In 1984, after the second successful devastating attack in 18 months against a poorly defended U.S. embassy in Lebanon, Reagan blamed the debacle on his predecessor and falsely asserted that the Carter administration had “to a large extent” gotten “rid of our intelligence agents.” A few days later, while campaigning for reelection, Reagan announced that the second embassy bombing was no longer an issue: “We’ve had an investigation. There was no evidence of any carelessness or anyone not performing their duty.” However, the Reagan administration had not yet begun a formal investigation.

On May 4, 1986, Reagan bragged, “The United States gives terrorists no rewards and no guarantees. We make no concessions; we make no deals.” But the Iranian arms-for-hostage deal that leaked out later that year blew such claims to smithereens. On November 13, 1986, Reagan denied initial reports of the scandal, proclaiming that the “‘no concessions’ [to terrorists] policy remains in force, in spite of the wildly speculative and false stories about arms for hostages and alleged ransom payments. We did not — repeat — did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages nor will we.” But Americans later learned that the United States had sold 2,000 anti-tank weapons to the Iranian government “in return for promises to release the American hostages there. Money from the sale of those weapons went to support the Contras’ war in Nicaragua,” as Mother Jones magazine noted in 1998.

Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990 provided a challenge for the first Bush administration to get Americans mobilized. In September 1990, the Pentagon announced that up to a quarter million Iraqi troops were near the border of Saudi Arabia, threatening to give Saddam Hussein a stranglehold on one of the world’s most important oil sources. The Pentagon based its claim on satellite images that it refused to disclose. One American paper, the St. Petersburg Times, purchased two Soviet satellite “images taken of that same area at the same time that revealed that there were no Iraqi troops ‘near the Saudi border — just empty desert.’” Jean Heller, the journalist who broke the story, commented, “That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn’t exist.” Even a decade after the first Gulf war, the Pentagon refused to disclose the secret photos that justified sending half a million American troops into harm’s way.

Support for the war was also whipped up by the congressional testimony of a Kuwaiti teenager who claimed she had seen Iraqi soldiers removing hundreds of babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and leaving them on the floor to die. George H.W. Bush often invoked the incubator tale to justify the war, proclaiming that the “ghastly atrocities” were akin to “Hitler revisited.” After the United States commenced bombing Iraq, it transpired that the woman who testified was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador and that her story was a complete fabrication, concocted in part by a U.S. public relations firm. Dead babies were a more effective selling point than one of the initial justifications Bush announced for U.S. intervention — restoring Kuwait’s “rightful leaders to their place” — as if any Americans seriously cared about putting Arab oligarchs back on their throne. (A few months before Saddam’s invasion, Amnesty International condemned the Kuwaiti government for torturing detainees.)

Bill Clinton’s unprovoked war against Serbia was sold to Americans with preposterous tales of the Kosovo Liberation Army’s being freedom fighters, with absurd claims that a civil war in one corner of southeastern Europe threatened to engulf the entire continent in conflict, with wild and unsubstantiated claims of an ongoing genocide, and with a deluge of lies that the U.S. military was not targeting Serb civilians.

Lying and warring appear to be two sides of the same coin. Unfortunately, many Americans continue to be gullible when presidents claim a need to commence killing foreigners. It remains to be seen whether the citizenry is corrigible on this life-and-death issue.

Permission To Declare Martial Law

James Bovard — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Martial law is perhaps the ultimate stomping of freedom. And yet, on September 30, 2006, Congress passed a provision in a 591-page bill that will make it easy for President Bush to impose martial law in response to a terrorist “incident.” It also empowers him to effectively declare martial law in response to what he or other federal officials label a shortfall of “public order” — whatever that means.

It took only a few paragraphs in a $500 billion, 591-page bill to raze one of the most important limits on federal power. Congress passed the Insurrection Act in 1807 to severely restrict the president’s ability to deploy the military within the United States. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 tightened those restrictions, imposing a two-year prison sentence on anyone who used the military within the United States without the express permission of Congress. (This act was passed after the depredations of the U.S. military throughout the Southern states during Reconstruction.)

But there is a loophole: Posse Comitatus is waived if the president invokes the Insurrection Act.

The Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus Act aim to deter dictatorship while permitting a narrow window for the president to temporarily use the military at home. But the 2006 reforms basically threw any concern about dictatorial abuses out the window.

Section 1076 of the Defense Authorization Act of 2006 changed the name of the key provision in the statute book from “Insurrection Act” to “Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order Act.” The Insurrection Act of 1807 stated that the president could deploy troops within the United States only “to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” The new law expands the list of pretexts to include “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition” — and such a “condition” is not defined or limited.

One might think that given the experience with the USA PATRIOT Act and many other abuses of power, Congress would be leery about giving this president his biggest blank check yet to suspend the Constitution. But that would be nave.

The new law was put in place in response to the debacle of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. There was no evidence that permitting a president far more power would avoid future debacles, but such a law provides a comfort blanket to politicians. The risk of tyranny is irrelevant compared with the reduction of risk of embarrassment to politicians. According to Washington, the correct response to Katrina is not to recognize the failure of relying on federal agencies a thousand miles away but rather to vastly increase the power of the president to dictate a solution, regardless of whether he knows what he is doing and regardless of whether local and state rights are trampled.

The new law also empowers the president to commandeer the National Guard of one state to send to another state for as many as 365 days. Bush could send the South Carolina National Guard to suppress anti-war protests in New Haven. Or the next president could send the Massachusetts National Guard to disarm the residents of Wyoming, if they resisted a federal law that prohibited private ownership of semi-automatic weapons. Governors’ control of the National Guard can be trumped with a simple presidential declaration.

Section 1076 had bipartisan support on Capitol Hill, including support from Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), and Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Since the law would give the feds more power, it was very popular inside the Beltway.

On the other hand, every governor in the country opposed the changes. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, warned on September 19, 2006, that “we certainly do not need to make it easier for presidents to declare martial law.” Leahy’s alarm got no response. Ten days later, he commented in the Congressional Record, “Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy.”

A U.S. Enabling
Act

The new law vastly increases the danger from the actions of government provocateurs. If there is an incident now like the first bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993, it would be far easier for the president to declare martial law — even if, as then, it was an FBI informant who taught the culprits how to make the bomb. Even if the FBI masterminds a protest that turns violent, the president could invoke the “incident” to suspend the Constitution.

“Martial law” is a euphemism for military dictatorship. When foreign democracies are overthrown and a junta establishes martial law, Americans usually recognize that a fundamental change has occurred. Perhaps some conservatives believe that the only change when martial law is declared is that people are no longer read their Miranda rights before they are locked away. “Martial law” means: Obey soldiers’ commands or be shot. The abuses of military rule in Southern states during Reconstruction were legendary, but they have been swept under the historical rug.

Section 1076 is an Enabling Act-type legislation — something which purports to preserve law and order while formally empowering the president to rule by decree.

Bush can commandeer a state’s National Guard any time he declares a “state has refused to enforce applicable laws.” Does this refer to the laws as they are commonly understood — or to the “laws” after Bush “fixes” them with a signing statement? Unfortunately, it is not possible for Americans to commandeer the federal government even when Bush admits that he is breaking a law (such as the Anti-Torture Act).

Section 1076 is the type of “law” that would probably be denounced by the U.S. State Department’s Annual Report on Human Rights if enacted by a foreign government. But when the U.S. government does the same thing, it is merely another proof of benevolent foresight. The “comfort blanket” on Section 1076 is that the powers will not be abused because the president will show more concern with the Bill of Rights than Congress did when it rubberstamped this provision. This is the same “pass the buck on the Constitution” that worked so well with the PATRIOT Act, the McCain Feingold Campaign Reform Act, and the Military Commissions Act. As long as there is hypothetically some branch of the government that will object to oppression, no one has the right to fear losing his liberties.

The
military on the home front

Section 1076 is more ominous in light of the Bush administration’s long record of Posse Comitatus violations. Since 2001, the Bush administration has accelerated a trend of using the military as a tool in the nation’s domestic affairs. From its support of the Total Information Awareness surveillance vacuum cleaner, to its use of Pentagon spy planes during the Washington-area sniper shootings in 2002, to the Pentagon’s seizures of Americans’ financial and other private information without a warrant, the Bush administration has not hesitated to use military force and intimidation at home whenever convenient. And Americans may have little or no idea of how far the military has actually gone on the home front, given the Bush team’s obsessive secrecy.

The Pentagon has sent U.S. military intelligence agents on domestic fishing expeditions. In 2004, two U.S. Army intelligence agents descended on the University of Texas’s law school in Austin. They entered the office of the Journal of Women and the Law and demanded that the editors turn over a roster of the people who attended a recent conference on Islam and women. The editors denied having a list; the behavior of one agent was described as intimidating. The agents then demanded contact information for the student who organized the conference, Sahar Aziz. University of Texas law professor Douglas Laycock commented,

We certainly hope that the Army doesn’t believe that attending a conference on Islamic law or Islam and women is itself ground for investigation.

Military officials later declared that U.S. Army intelligence agents had overstepped their bounds. But this did not stop the Bush administration from having a provision inserted in a bill passed in secret session by the Senate Intelligence Committee that would allow military intelligence agents to conduct surveillance and recruit informants in the United States. Wired.com reported,

Pentagon officials say the exemption would not affect civil liberties and is needed so that its agents can obtain information from sources who may be afraid of government agents.

The provision would authorize military agents to go undercover and never inform their targets that they were dealing with a G-man. Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, denounced the provision:

This … is giving them the authority to spy on Americans. And it’s all been done with no public discussion, in the dark of night.

The controversy over the amendment scuttled its enactment, though it is unclear whether that has deterred the military from expanding its domestic spying.

There is no Honesty-in-Absolute-Power mandate in the federal statute books. The more power government seizes, the more easily it can suppress the truth. There is nothing to prevent a president from declaring martial law on false pretexts — any more than there is to prevent him from launching a foreign war on false pretenses. And when the lies become exposed years later, it could be far too late to resurrect lost liberties.

The Religion of 9/11

James Bovard — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Many citizens react to their rulers like little kids who recognize that a stranger is acting suspiciously and may be up to no good — but then decide whether to trust the man depending on the type of candy he pulls from his pockets. It is as if a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup trumps the beady eyes, sweaty forehead, and out-of-season trench coat. Likewise, adults may be wary about a politician — but if the guy promises free prescription drugs or protection and safety, many take the bait.

The nave response to politicians triumphed in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks. By the end of September 2001, almost two-thirds of Americans said they “trust the government in Washington to do what is right” either “just about always” or “most of the time.” Amazingly, the attacks even boosted Americans’ confidence that government would protect them against terrorists.

Many of the most respected and prominent media commentators saw 9/11 as the great sanctifier of government power. The New York Times’s R.W. Apple announced, “Government is back in style.” Wall Street Journal columnist Al Hunt proclaimed, “It’s time to declare a moratorium on government-bashing.” Los Angeles Times columnist Ronald Brownstein declared on September 19, “At the moment the first fireball seared the crystalline Manhattan sky last week, the entire impulse to distrust government that has become so central to U.S. politics seemed instantly anachronistic.” Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam effused,

I think there is the potential that September 11 will turn out to be a turning point for civic America…. There could be some good coming from it if it causes us to become … more open-minded about the role of government.

The 9/11 attacks produced many such summonses to elevate and glorify government. Yet it was U.S. government foreign policies that stirred up the hornets’ nest, breeding hatred that led to the attacks themselves. After two skyscrapers collapse and the Pentagon is in flames, the government is hailed for failing to protect Americans from the enemies its policies helped create. The 9/11 attackers were mass murderers who had no right to kill Americans. But to pretend that the attacks originated out of nowhere or out of hatred for freedom fraudulently exonerates the U.S. government.

The Bush administration did all it could to exploit 9/11 to promote presidential and governmental greatness. However, a 2002 Senate Intelligence Committee investigation found a vast array of federal-intelligence and law-enforcement failures prior to the attack. Because the Bush administration often stonewalled the Senate investigation, 9/11 widows and widowers pressured Congress to create an independent commission to investigate the attacks. Bush and Republican and Democratic congressional leaders stacked the commission with former congressmen, high-ranking government officials, and others entwined in the Washington establishment. Beverly Eckert, a 9/11 widow and activist, complained, “We wanted journalists, we wanted academics…. We did not want politicians.”

Philip Zelikow was appointed executive director of the commission. Zelikow, the co-editor of a Harvard study entitled Why People Don’t Trust Government, had worked closely with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and had co-authored a book with her in 1999. He had also been in charge of the Bush White House transition team on national security matters, had been involved in numerous transition briefings on the subject of terrorism, and was called as a witness before the commission. He recused himself from the commission hearing at which Rice testified. She was the one government official who perhaps most deserved perjury charges from her testimony, yet there was not a single word of criticism of her in the commission’s final report.

The 9/11 report

The 9/11 Commission became the Bush administration’s most famous faith-based initiative. The commission appeared far more concerned with restoring trust than in revealing truth. Bush and Cheney were allowed to testify without a transcript and not under oath. Americans never heard what they said. Instead, the commission offered a synopsis of their comments — as if it would have been impious to quote them directly. The White House was allowed to edit the final version of the commission’s report before it was publicly released.

The commission’s final 568-page report quickly became a bestseller, widely praised in part because it assiduously avoided judgment. There was no mention in the final report of how Bush and Cheney exploited falsehoods about 9/11 to lead the nation to war against Iraq. But, as Amherst professor Benjamin DeMott noted in Harper’s, the report was useless to historians because of a “seeming terror of bias.” He was especially appalled that the commission accepted without challenge Bush’s assertion that the August 6, 2001, President’s Daily Brief was “historical in nature.” DeMott observed, “There’s little mystery about why the Commission is tongue-tied. It can’t call a liar a liar.” He noted,

The ideal readers of The 9/11 Commission Report are those who resemble the Commission itself in believing that a strong inclination to trust the word of highly placed others is evidence of personal moral distinction.

The 9/11 Commission report provided a litany of government missteps while carefully avoiding raising any ire against the government. The failures often appeared to be more acts of God than failings by specific identifiable individuals. It strived for a balance of criticism between the current and prior administrations and between the two political parties. Thus, there was nothing to be done except count our blessings, celebrate our two-party system, and go whip the terrorists.

The 9/11 Commission also compiled ample evidence of government lying. Yet the commission effectively ignored or “rose above” all the falsehoods. There was no sense that the lies of the most powerful officials in the land posed any threat to America. Instead, there were “communication problems” between government agencies.

The mainstream
press

The establishment aided the government by heaping derision on nonbelievers. The Washington Post, in an October 2004 article headlined “Conspiracy Theories Flourish on the Internet,” examined the problems of those who had not accepted the government’s latest version of 9/11. The Post noted sympathetically,

The ready and growing audience for conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has been particularly galling to those who worked on … the bipartisan panel known as the 9/11 commission.

In Washington, “bipartisan” is the ultimate test of credibility — as if there is no chance that the two parties would ever conspire against the truth. Zelikow bemoaned,

We discussed the theories. When we wrote the report, we were also careful not to answer all the theories. It’s like playing Whack-A-Mole. You’re never going to whack them all. They satisfy a deep need in the people who create them.

The Post turned to a Syracuse University political scientist, Michael Barkun, for psychological insights into nonbelievers:

Conspiracy theories are … usually wrong, but they’re psychologically reassuring. Because what they say is that everything is connected, nothing happens by accident, and that there is some kind of order in the world, even if it’s produced by evil forces.

The Post never ran any articles on the psychological maladies of people who insisted on believing the government’s statements on 9/11 despite the contradictions or who insisted on clinging to earlier government claims after the government revised the facts.

Zelikow, who was hired by Rice as her top counsel at the State Department a few months after the Post article appeared, commented,

The hardcore conspiracy theorists are totally committed…. That’s not our worry. Our worry is when things become infectious, as happened with the [John F. Kennedy] assassination. Then this stuff can be deeply corrosive to public understanding. You can get where the bacteria can sicken the larger body.

(If the government was so forthright in its investigation of the Kennedy assassination, why were the Warren Commission records sealed for 75 years?)

Not a single one of the top 300 American newspapers or magazines archived on the LexisNexis database commented on Zelikow’s “bacteria” and “infectious” characterization of disbelief in the government’s version of 9/11. Yet his comment sounded as if the 9/11 Commission saw itself as America’s mental-health czar. Private doubts are the bacteria, and government assertions are presumably the disinfectant. As long as people believe what the government says, no one will get sick.

Some of the allegations regarding 9/11 — such as the charge that no plane had hit the Pentagon — were easily verifiable as false. New American, the magazine of the John Birch Society, ran an article harshly criticizing some of the 9/11 conspiracy theories, though carefully avoiding embracing the government. Yet, as with Waco, the Establishment invoked outlying loons in order to seek to undermine the credibility of all criticism of the government. But the existence of conspiracy nuts does not make the government honest.

The Washington Post never portrayed government officials who put out false statements about 9/11 in the same light as it did the private conspiracy buffs. Despite the fact that private citizens have no power over other Americans and that they have no authority to coerce them or drag them into an unnecessary war, their false statements are presented as a greater threat than those of government officials. The obsession with private lies is misplaced, when the real danger is the government lie — a lie embraced and disseminated by a subservient media, vested with all the prestige and aura of the state, and protected by an iron curtain of government secrecy. And regardless of how many times the government changes the official story, people who continue to distrust the government are delirious.

The government’s appearing to be a necessary evil does not oblige people to trust it. We face a choice of trusting government or trusting freedom — trusting overlords who have lied and abused their power or trusting individuals to make the most of their own lives.

Do Elections Guarantee Liberty?

James Bovard — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 06:00:00 +0000

Elections are sometimes portrayed as practically giving people automatic “remote control” on the government. Elections kindly provide a chance for people to pre-program the government for the following years. The government will be based on the popular will, regardless of the ignorance of the populace or the duplicity of the government.

President Lyndon Johnson declared in 1965 that “the vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.” But the fact that voting rights helped undermine Jim Crow restrictions on blacks did not prevent the government from ladling new restrictions and burdens on all citizens. During the election campaign the prior year, Johnson had promised, “We are not about to send American boys 9,000 or 10,000 miles away to do what Asian boys ought to be doing to protect themselves.” The fact that parents could vote for or against Johnson did nothing to stop him from betraying his promise and sending their sons to die.

In his 1989 farewell address, President Ronald Reagan asserted,

“We the People” tell the government what to do, it doesn’t tell us. “We the people” are the driver — the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast.

But the American people did not choose to “drive” into Beirut and get hundreds of Marines blown up, choose to run up the largest budget deficits in American history, provide thousands of anti-tank weapons to Ayatollah Khomeni, or have a slew of top political appointees either lie or get caught in conflicts of interest or other abuses of power or ethical quandaries between 1981 and 1988.

On the eve of his 1992 election debacle, President George H.W. Bush told a Texas audience,

And tomorrow, you participate in a ritual, a sacred ritual of stewardship…. With your vote, you are going to help shape the future of this, the most blessed, special nation that man has ever known and God has helped create. And so, look at your vote — especially the young people — look at your vote as an act of power, a statement of principle.

Yet few of the people who voted the following day were making a statement of principle in favor of permitting the president to deploy troops (or additional troops) abroad on his whim (as Clinton did in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and elsewhere), permitting the government to waive the Posse Comitatus Act and use military equipment against American civilians (as happened at Waco), or permitting the government to vastly increase its surveillance of the American people. Yet voting in the 1992 election was still “a statement of principle,” regardless of how much the winner scorned the voters’ principles.

Two days after his 2004 reelection victory, President George W. Bush declared,

When you win, there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view … and the people made it clear what they wanted.

But did voters on November 2 “consent” to the destruction of Fallujah in the following weeks? Did they consent to the nomination of a Homeland Security czar who was openly hostile to any criticism of politicians? Did Bush’s National Rifle Association supporters consent to his nominating a man for attorney general who advocated far more federal restrictions on gun ownership? Did voters consent to the illegal wiretapping of the chief of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency, as the Bush administration sought to discredit and remove an impediment to a U.S. war on Iran? If Bush had made “ending tyranny everywhere via preemptive U.S. military attacks” the theme for his fall 2004 campaign, he very likely would have lost the election. Instead, he downplayed this notion — until his second inaugural address.

The only way to suppose voters consented to such government actions is to assume they granted Bush boundless power to use as he sees fit. But this is the type of consent given by people who forfeit their rights and accept a court-appointed guardian to run their lives.

Absolution
through election

Politicians routinely invoke elections as absolutions. Shortly before his second inauguration, a journalist asked Bush, “Why hasn’t anyone been held accountable, either through firings or demotions, for what some people see as mistakes or misjudgments” on Iraq? Bush replied,

Well, we had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 election. And the American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me, for which I’m grateful.

An election victory expunges all abuses from the official record. Unfortunately, the more ignorant and negligent the citizens, the easier it becomes for winners to invoke their election victories to shroud their abuses.

In the aftermath of the November 2004 election, the refrain from both politicians and editorial pages was that the result of the voting showed the “will of the people.” But was it the will of the people to have to choose between George W. Bush and John Kerry, or between Al Gore and Bush, or between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole? (Third-party candidates provided good protest votes but could not block career politicians from office.)

That is like saying that it was the will of the Bulgarian consumer in communist times to choose between an unreliable, ramshackle Trabant from East Germany and an unreliable ramshackle Skoda car from Czechoslovakia. Many American voters felt as frustrated by their choice of presidential candidates as did Eastern Bloc car shoppers in the 1980s. The fact that voters expressed a preference for Bush or Kerry proves nothing about either candidate’s being the will of the individual voter.

King Louis XIV of France declared, “Kings are absolute lords and naturally enjoy the full and free disposal of all the possessions of their subjects.” The only way that the 2004 election could exonerate all of Bush’s first-term actions is if voting levers are naturally vested with absolute power over everything. Voting levers cannot legitimize violations of rights unless voters and election winners have the right Louis XIV claimed for kings to use and abuse everything in the nation.

Electing our
despot

The average American voter had no recourse on November 2, 2004, to make the federal government obey the Constitution or keep the peace. But this was the same situation the voters faced on November 7, 2000, November 5, 1996, and November 3, 1992. Instead, each voter was merely asked to personally consecrate the continued violations of the highest law of the land by whoever won. The current system of government is structured so that voters effectively have to vest near-absolute power in someone. This is simply how the rulers and the establishment have fixed the game. Any choice that would deny nearly boundless power to the rulers is kept out of the sunlight by the powers that be.

Bush’s reelection symbolized that the Constitution is now far less of a restraint on presidential powers. The torture scandal, the power to nullify all rights by using the enemy combatant label, and other gross abuses of power were not major issues in the 2004 presidential campaign. Thus, the first-term abuses became the starting line for the second-term abuses. Bush’s reelection made clear that a president’s proclaimed goals could exonerate his methods — thus largely obliterating many of the safeguards built in by the Framers of the Constitution. But elections based on the winner’s receiving unlimited power are based on far different principles than are elections in which winners remain subservient to the Constitution and the law. This is the difference between voting for a master and voting for a chief law-enforcement officer. America is far closer today to what the Framers dreaded — “slavery by constitutional forms.”

The more power that voting levers confer, the more unreliable elections become as a mode of governance. Instead of being antibiotics for the body politic, elections become simply another quack cure.

French historian Marc Bloch noted that, during the Middle Ages, “the notion arose that freedom was lost when free choice could not be exercised at least once in a lifetime.” The only freedom many people sought was to pick whose “man” they would become. Medieval times included elaborate ceremonies in which the fealty was consecrated. With current elections, people are permitted to choose whose pawns they will be. Voting is becoming more like a medieval act of fealty — with voters bowing down their heads and promising obedience to whoever is proclaimed the winner.

What if being permitted to choose a master once every four years is the primary “freedom” left? Are citizens merely choosing whose vassal they will be? Many citizens today behave like slaves who spent their time wishing for a good master, rather than scouting up information on runaway routes.

America was born as a republic — with limited-government powers, carefully crafted checks and balances, and distinct roles for the people, for legislators, for judges, and for the executive branch. Many Americans these days are content with “democracy” — regardless of how much of the strength and safeguards of the original Constitution have been lost.

“Representative government” is a phrase far less prone to induce mass delusions than is democracy. “Democracy” sounds like automatic pilot — that the government will serve the people simply because that is part of the mission statement. In contrast, the term “representative government” sounds more hit and miss. There is no transcendence in the term “representative government” — nothing to make people believe that government bureaus magically fulfill the rhetoric of presidential speech writers. Representatives are merely representatives, not incarnations of the General Will or the voice of God. Instead, they are usually simply people who preferred the pursuit of power to other ways of making a buck. Even when representative government works tolerably well, it is difficult to inspire the representatives to do much more than hustle for their own reelection.

Putting Government on a Leash

James Bovard — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 06:00:00 +0000

Thailand’s billionaire prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, was deposed in a coup last year by the country’s military. Somchai Hom-la-or, chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, recently declared that “Thaksin and his government committed crimes against humanity.” Thai lawyers and human-rights activists are suggesting that he be indicted and tried by the International Criminal Code for the thousands of killings committed by Thai police and other agents during his war on drugs.

While the odds of Thaksin’s ever having to face charges for atrocities committed by his war on drugs are slim, it is refreshing that people are openly suggesting that an elected leader be held to account for his actions.

Thailand’s war on drugs — vigorously approved by the Bush administration — has received far less attention in the United States than it deserves.

When Thaksin launched his anti-drug campaign in 2003, he declared that “in this war, drug dealers must die.” Interior Minister Wan Muhamad Nor Matha promised that drug dealers “will be put behind bars or even vanish without a trace. Who cares? They are destroying our country.”

The Thai government was concerned about the rising number of Thais taking amphetamine-type pills — popularly known as Yaa-Baa. The crackdown began in early February 2003. Within weeks, government officials were bragging about the number of bad guys killed. A New York Times article noted that “the killings started right on cue. Many victims were on secret, but official, ‘black lists.’”

Throughout Thailand, local officials set up black boxes or mailboxes and encouraged people to accuse anyone suspected of involvement with narcotics — no evidence required. Many people used the anonymous system to accuse business competitors or personal enemies. According to a 2004 U.S. State Department human-rights report, the interior minister warned “governors and provincial police that those who failed to eliminate a prescribed percentage of the names from their blacklists would be fired.”

The central government issued specific quotas for arrests for each state, city, and village. Sunai Phasuk of Forum Asia, a Bangkok-based human rights organization, noted,

Most of [the victims] got killed on the way back from the police office. People found their name on a blacklist, went to the police, then ended up dead.

Thai Senator Tuenjai Deetes observed,

The justice system was destroyed…. Here, the government official or police judged immediately, “You are doing drugs, you must be killed.”

Drugs were planted on the bodies of many victims after they were murdered. Amnesty International complained, “Authorities are not permitting pathologists to perform autopsies and bullets are reportedly being removed from the corpses.”

The interior minister even established an arrest quota for local politicians:

To prove the government is serious and spares no one, in March and April you will arrest big dealers — suspects such as provincial councilors and local politicians — four to five in each province.

Governors were permitted to keep 35 percent of all the drug assets they confiscated, and police detectives were entitled to skim 15 percent of the loot.

Many knowledgeable Thais believed the crackdown had little or no chance of permanently suppressing narcotics. Charan Pak-dithanakul, secretary to the supreme court president, commented,

People may take one look at the death toll and hail the government, but if you scrutinize the names of those killed, there’s not a single big-time dealer.

Many Thai drug gangs operate under the protection of politicians and the military and appeared to easily survive the Thaksin purge.

In early May 2003, the Thai government proudly announced that 2,275 suspected drug dealers had been killed and that 90 percent of the nation’s drug trafficking had been eliminated. The government insisted that it had no role in the vast majority of deaths of drug dealers, except for a small number of dealers whom police supposedly killed in self-defense.

Some of the killings did not enhance the government’s image, including the police slayings of a 9-year-old boy as he and his mother drove along a Bangkok street; a 16-month-old baby killed along with her mother when their car was riddled with bullets; a woman who was in the eighth month of her pregnancy; and a 75-year-old grandmother gunned down as she walked along a street. Thaksin dismissed concerns about widespread violence in the drug crackdown, declaring that being murdered “is not an unusual fate for wicked people.”

U.S. response to the killings

The slaughter evoked muffled comments from the U.S. embassy in Bangkok. On May 7, a U.S. embassy spokesman, who insisted on anonymity, told the Associated Press that the Bush administration has “made very clear that we have serious concerns about the number of killings that may have been associated with Thailand’s war on drugs” and insisted that the Thaksin government “needs to … investigate all unexplained killings and identify and prosecute those responsible.”

The Thai government ignored the anonymous State Department official’s comments. The following month, Thailand’s prime minister was invited to the White House to meet with Bush. Bush upgraded Thailand’s status with the U.S. government to “major non-NATO ally” (thereby entitling the Thai government to a bevy of U.S. government benefits and subsidies, including the right to buy depleted-uranium ammunition). A June 11, 2003, White House statement by the Thai and U.S. governments declared,

The two leaders recognized the long, successful history of cooperation between the United States and Thailand on law enforcement and counternarcotics. President Bush appreciated Thailand’s leadership in hosting one of the largest and most successful U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) operations in the world as well as the U.S.-Thai International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA). President Bush recognized Prime Minister Thaksin’s determination to combat transnational crime in all its forms, including drug trafficking and trafficking in persons.

The White House Joint Statement dismissed the allegations of anti-drug carnage:

Regarding recent press allegations that Thai security services carried out extrajudicial killings during a counter-narcotics campaign in Thailand, Prime Minister Thaksin stated unequivocally that the Thai government does not tolerate extrajudicial killings and assured President Bush that all allegations regarding killings are being investigated thoroughly.

The only reference to the slaughter was a brazen lie by the Thai prime minister that was sanctified in an official White House statement. The prime minister’s pledge made as much sense as if he had promised to personally resurrect all the people wrongfully killed in the crackdown. The Nation, one of the most respected newspapers in Thailand, noted that “the American president saw the halos on Thaksin’s head,” including one from the “drug-suppression campaign.” Thai-land’s interior minister said that Bush praised Thailand’s anti-drug campaign during the White House meeting.

On October 27, Bush visited Thailand and proclaimed, “Thailand is also a force of good throughout Southeast Asia.” A month later, William Snipes, the Bangkok-based DEA regional director for East Asia, hailed the Thai crackdown: “Temporarily, we look at it as successful.” Snipes conceded that whether the reduction in drug activity “is a lasting effect, we will have to wait and see.”

Drug-war “success”

By early December 2003, the official bad-guy body count had risen to 2,625. Speaking at a giant Bangkok victory rally of thousands of government employees, Thaksin proclaimed,

Today is a milestone. More than 90% of ordinary Thais can now lead an honest daily life free from narcotics in their communities…. We are now in a position to declare that drugs, which formerly were a big danger to our nation, can no longer hurt us.

In his annual birthday message on December 5, 2003, King Bhumibol Adulyadej — the king in whose honor Thailand had been rendered drug-free — first said that the alleged killings of drug dealers were a “small thing.” Then he insisted that many of the killings were not the fault of the government. Then he called for an investigation of the killings. The king fretted that, unless the killings were cleared up, “the people will blame the King. This would breach the Constitution which stipulates that the King should not have to take responsibility for anything.”

But the government stonewalled such investigations. Deputy Attorney General Prapan Naiyakowit, the chief investigator of the killings, complained in early December:

In May I completed the probe report on drug-related deaths. Since then, police have not submitted a single report on any individual killing that happened during the anti-drug campaign.

A Thai senate committee concluded that

the government used rhetoric and ceremony to make people hate each other, to destroy the human dignity of suspected drug dealers, and incite people to handle the drug problem with violence and without mercy.

The government’s killing spree intimidated much of the populace. The Thai National Human Rights commissioner, Cha-ran Ditthaapichai, complained of the plight of the 329,000 people on the blacklist: “They feel they are no longer safe and could be exterminated at any time.” Amnesty International reported that the government’s murder spree left many Thais

afraid to leave their homes, and others avoided traveling to areas where they were not known for fear of being suspected as drug traffickers and shot dead.

After 9/11, Bush repeatedly proclaimed that any nation or government guilty of aiding and abetting terrorists would be considered to be as guilty as the terrorists themselves. Yet the U.S. government helped bankroll a Thai government campaign that terrorized the Thai people. The Bush administration gave Thailand $3.7 million in anti-drug aid in 2003 — thus compelling American taxpayers to bankroll Thai state terrorism.

According to the U.S. State Department, 307 people were killed worldwide in international terrorist attacks in 2003. The Bush administration endorsed and helped finance an anti-drug crackdown that killed more than seven times as many people in a single country as were killed by all the international terrorists in the world that year.

It remains to be seen how vigorously the new Thai government will investigate the atrocities of the Thaksin regime. As Chairman Somchai noted, “Saddam Hussein was charged with committing crimes against humanity for the killing of 170 people. In that case, the 2,500 deaths we witnessed here must constitute crimes against humanity.”

If the Thais can help establish a principle of holding leaders responsible for the killings they order, they will be doing a far better service to the cause of democracy than anything the Bush administration has yet offered. Sometimes the threat of a noose is the best way to put government back on a leash.

The FBI’s Threat of Torture

James Bovard — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 05:00:00 +0000

A federal appeals court has concluded that an FBI agent must go to trial on charges he coerced a false confession out of a prime suspect in the 9/11 attacks. But the FBI still insists that its agent did nothing wrong. And the feds swayed the court to suppress that portion of a recent decision detailing how the FBI agent used the threat of torture to break an innocent man.

Abdallah Higazy, a 30-year-old Egyptian student, arrived in New York City to study engineering at the Polytechnic University in Brooklyn on August 27, 2001. A U.S. foreign-aid program reserved and paid for his room at the Millennium Hilton Hotel, next to the World Trade Center. After the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center, Higazy hot-footed it out of the hotel. After the terrorist attack, the hotel was sealed.

Three months later, guests were allowed to retrieve their belongings. When Higazy went to the hotel on December 17, he was arrested and accused of possessing an aviation radio. (A hotel security guard reported finding the radio in a safe in his room.) Higazy denied owning the radio. He was arrested as a material witness and locked up in solitary confinement.

Higazy wanted to clear his name so he agreed to take a polygraph test. FBI agent Michael Templeton wired him up for the test but then proceeded to browbeat him for three hours until he finally admitted to owning the radio. Higazy said the FBI agent warned him, “If you don’t cooperate with us, the FBI will … make sure Egyptian security gives your family hell.” The FBI refused to permit Higazy’s attorney, Robert Dunn, to be in the room while he was given the polygraph. After the interrogation, Higazy was “trembling and sobbing uncontrollably,” according to Dunn.

On January 11, 2002, Higazy was indicted for lying to a federal agent. U.S. Attorney Dan Himmelfarb declaimed that “the crime that was being investigated when the false statements [about the radio] were made is perhaps the most serious in the country’s history. A radio that can be used for air-to-air and air-to-ground communication is a significant part of that investigation.” The Washington Post noted that “federal officials paraded [Higazy] before the media as a terrorist.” The feds never bothered checking with the U.S. foreign-aid program to find out whether Higazy’s story about why he was staying at the hotel next to the World Trade Center was true.

The prosecutorial celebration flopped three days later when an American pilot showed up at the Millennium Hilton Hotel and asked for the aviation radio he had left in his room when the hotel was evacuated on 9/11. It soon became apparent that the hotel security guard (a former cop who had been fired by the Newark Police Department) had lied about finding the radio in Higazy’s room. The case collapsed and, a few days later, Higazy was awarded $3 for subway fare and released from jail. The FBI conducted an internal investigation and absolved Templeton of any wrongdoing.

In late 2002 Higazy sued, asserting that the FBI’s coercive interrogation violated his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. Federal judge Naomi Buchwald dismissed his case, declaring, “[Agent] Templeton’s conduct and threats as a matter of law cannot be classified as conscience-shocking or constitutionally oppressive.” Perhaps Buchwald believed that as long as Higazy’s mother and sister were not brutalized in front of him during the interrogation, the FBI had done nothing wrong.

A federal appeals court overturned this decision on October 19, declaring that Higazy’s case deserved to go to trial. The original version of the decision detailed the tactics Templeton purportedly used to get Higazy’s confession. Two hours later, the court removed that portion of the decision from the Internet. The redacted portion of the decision (captured by bloggers before it was taken down) noted that the FBI agent admitted to knowing that Egyptian “laws are different than ours, that they are probably allowed to do things in that country … yeah, probably about torture, sure.” Thus, Templeton was aware that his threat would terrify Higazy.

The revised court decision replaced such key details with the following mundane notice: “For the purposes of the summary judgment motion, Templeton did not contest that Higazy’s statements were coerced.”

The FBI has long taught its agents that subjects of their investigation have “forfeited their right to the truth,” according to the ethics study guide at the FBI Academy. Perhaps, according to federal lawmen, it is a small step from lying to suspects to threatening to have their kinfolk tortured. The agency has done nothing in the nearly six years since this case began to indicate that the methods used in the Higazy case did not receive the full approval of FBI headquarters.

The initial Higazy arrest and release were landmarks showing how far feds would go to gin up evidence and headlines for the war on terror. The fact that the FBI approved of its agent’s methods — and the fact that a federal judge saw no problem with the interrogation — are further warning signs of constitutional decay. Keep your eyes on this case, because it could help determine how far feds can go to destroy innocent people.

Highway Tyranny

James Bovard — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 05:00:00 +0000

Tens of thousands of innocent Americans are stopped each month at police checkpoints that treat every driver as a criminal. These checkpoints, supposedly started to target drunk drivers, have expanded to give police more intrusive power over citizens in many areas.

The demonization of alcohol is leading to a growing nullification of the constitutional rights of anyone suspected of drinking — or anyone who might have had a drink anytime recently. In 1925, the Supreme Court declared,

It would be intolerable and unreasonable if a prohibition agent were authorized to stop every automobile on the chance of finding liquor, and thus subject all persons lawfully using the highways to the inconvenience and indignity of such a search.

But as the 20th century progressed, judges and prosecutors gained a more rarefied understanding of the Bill of Rights.

In the early 1980s, police departments began setting up checkpoints to stop and check all cars traveling along a road to see whether the driver was intoxicated. As law professor Nadine Strossen wrote, checkpoint “searches are intensely personal in nature, involving a police officer’s close-range examination of the driver’s face, breath, voice, clothing, hands, and movements.” The checkpoints were extremely controversial. In 1984, the Oklahoma Supreme Court banned the practice in that state, declaring that drunk-driving roadblocks “draw dangerously close to what may be referred to as a police state.”

In 1988, the Michigan Court of Appeals, in a case involving driver Rick Sitz, also concluded that the practice was unconstitutional. The Michigan Department of State Police appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. As professor Strossen observed,

The Sitz plaintiffs argued that mass, suspicionless searches and seizures at drunk driving roadblocks violate the Fourth Amendment because they are not based on any individualized suspicion.

But the Supreme Court disregarded the privacy concerns and approved the checkpoints. In a statement that epitomized some judges’ blind faith in police officers, Chief Justice Rehnquist declared,

For the purposes of Fourth Amendment analysis, the choice among reasonable alternatives remains with the government officials who have a unique understanding of, and a responsibility for, limited public resources.

Justice John Paul Stevens dissented, stating,

On the degree to which the sobriety checkpoint seizures advance the public interest … the Court’s position is wholly indefensible…. The evidence in this case indicates that sobriety check points result in the arrest of a fraction of one percent of the drivers who are stopped, but there is absolutely no evidence that this figure represents an increase over the number of arrests that would have been made by using the same law enforcement resources in conventional patrols.

Stevens continued:

A Michigan officer who questions a motorist [seized] at a sobriety checkpoint has virtually unlimited discretion to [prolong the detention of] the driver on the basis of the slightest suspicion…. [The] Court’s decision … appears to give no weight to the citizen’s interest in freedom from suspicionless unannounced investigatory seizures.

He characterized the checkpoints as “elaborate and disquieting publicity stunts.”

In the Sitz decision, the Supreme Court concluded that since checkpoint searches were equally intrusive on all drivers, no individual had a right to complain about an intrusive search. But that stands the Bill of Rights on its head — reading the Fourth Amendment to require the government to equally violate the rights of all citizens, rather than to restrict government violations of any citizen’s rights.

Naturally, once the Supreme Court sanctioned drunk-driving checkpoints, police expanded their use. As long as the car is stopped and the policeman is there, why not check to see whether the driver is wearing a seatbelt — or has his registration with him — or has any open containers of alcohol in the car — or has any guns hidden under the seat or in the glove compartment? And why not take a drug-sniffing dog and walk it around the car to see whether the pooch wags his tail, thereby automatically nullifying the driver’s and passengers’ constitutional rights and entitling police to forcibly search the vehicle?

Checkpoint
tyranny

According to a North Carolina State Police press release, a statewide “Booze It & Lose It” checkpoint crackdown resulted not only in the arrest of drunk drivers but also in the arrest of 137 drivers for firearms violations and 636 for drug violations. The press release noted, “In addition to targeting impaired drivers, law enforcement officers will be keeping watch for other violations of the law.” This is essentially a declaration from the police of their intent to do visual searches — if not more — of all the cars they stop. The checkpoints did nab one drunk “big fish”: State Senator George Miller Jr., who had championed strict drunk-driving laws.

Nebraska police set up a checkpoint consisting of a sign announcing a narcotics checkpoint; police then watched to see which drivers passing the sign showed “furtive movements,” thereby supposedly justifying the police to pursue, stop, and search the auto. (A state court struck down the procedure as unconstitutional.)

One California police chief set up a checkpoint supposedly for the purpose of checking licenses and vehicle registrations. But in reality, the roadblock was a pretext for drug searches, since drug-sniffing dogs would circle all the stopped cars. The local police chief admitted in court that he set up the license-and-registration roadblock because he knew he could not lawfully establish a roadblock that was only “looking for drugs.” (A judge squelched the chief’s program.)

Monroe County, Pennsylvania, police began setting up checkpoints at random points in the Pocono Mountains. Though the checkpoints were supposedly instituted to catch drunk drivers, they were also used to catch drug couriers. One annoyed local resident complained to a local paper that he had been stopped at the roadblock at night and after complying with police requests to show that his car’s equipment was in proper working order, he was approached by a black-hooded police officer who brandished a heavy flashlight and told him repeatedly that he appeared jumpy. Meanwhile, two other police officers shined flashlights into the car. When they saw two jugs of water, they questioned him about why he had so much water with him. The local police chief defended the use of black-hooded drug agents at the late-night checkpoints.

A drunk-driving checkpoint erected by Florida police near Orlando resulted in 65 drivers’ receiving fines for such crimes as not carrying proof of insurance, not wearing a seat belt, nonfunctioning horn (apparently the cars, as well as the drivers, had to pass a toot test), having loud mufflers, and failing to have the correct residential address on a driver’s license. Of a thousand people checked, only seven were arrested for driving under the influence. Thus, almost ten times as many drivers were fined for violations with no relation to drunk driving as were fined for drunk driving. And the amount of time they spent listening to horns honking epitomizes how police squander their shifts merely as revenue agents with guns on their hips.

Checkpoint
politics

Congress made drunk-driving checkpoints even more irrelevant to public safety with a 1995 law that effectively required state governments to penalize as drunk any driver under the age of 21 who had consumed a single beer. That was a follow-up to one of the worst abuses of the Reagan administration — a 1984 law that compelled all states to raise their drinking age to 21 or else lose federal highway subsidies.

Drunk-driving policies are sometimes heavily influenced by politics — especially by politicians’ love of bragging about arrest rates of drunk drivers. Newsday reported in 1994 that in Nassau County, Long Island, police appeared to have a quota for DWI arrests. Officers were permitted to receive lucrative overtime assignments only after making a DWI arrest. Newsday noted,

DWI arrests have been on a downward trend, and that’s a politically thorny issue for elected officials who like to point to successful war-on-drunk-drivers statistics, especially when they are running for election.

In judging policies against drunk driving, it is important to recognize that some widely used statistics may exaggerate the harm done by drunk drivers themselves. Richard Berman of the Alcoholic Beverage Council noted in 1995,

Last year, 17,461 people were killed in “alcohol-related” traffic accidents. Because of the way statistics are developed by the Department of Transportation, an accident does not have to be “caused” by alcohol to be classified as “alcohol-related.” It is estimated that 50 percent of these accidents “related” to alcohol would have occurred anyway. Even more bizarre, an alcohol-related fatality can result from a sober driver who wrongfully hits another car, killing the “innocent” driver who had one beer with dinner.

Furthermore, most of these deaths are not “tragic killings”…. The overwhelming majority of alcohol-related deaths are the drunken drivers and their drunken passengers. (These folks may be accused of suicide, but generally not homicide.) Even less reported is the fact that approximately 10 percent of these reported fatalities are drunken pedestrians hit by non-drinking drivers — weak support for tough laws aimed at drivers.

There is a great difference between vigorous prosecution and penalizing of drunk drivers, and creating laws that presume that every driver deserves to be treated by police as a drunk. Drunk-driving checkpoints greatly increase the police’s power to harass everyone.

Drunk-driving checkpoints epitomize the modern law-enforcement mentality — that it is more important to be politically visible and impose costs on private, law-abiding citizens than to actually solve the problem — as if annoying the public is more important than protecting them.

A Perk of the Presidency

James Bovard — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 05:00:00 +0000

What is the common term for ordering soldiers to kill vast numbers of innocent people?

A war crime.

But not when it is done on the command of the U.S. president.

Killing innocent foreigners seems to be a perk of the modern presidency — akin to the band’s playing “Hail to the Chief” when he enters the room.

Bush is revving up the war threats against Iran. Seymour Hersh reported in the current issue of the New Yorker that the administration is advancing plans to bomb many targets in Iran. British newspapers have confirmed that the Pentagon has a list of thousands of bombing targets. Hardly anyone claims that Iran poses a threat to the United States.

Yet few people in Washington seem to dispute the president’s right to attack Iran. It is as if the presidential whim is sufficient to justify blasting any foreign nation that does not kowtow to the commands of the U.S. government.

Jack Goldsmith, a former top Bush appointee in the Justice Department and now a Harvard Law professor, observes in his new book, The Terror Presidency, “The president and the vice president always made clear that a central administration priority was to maintain and expand the president’s formal legal powers.” And the power to attack foreign nations is one of the most valued prerogatives of today’s Republicans.

Bush’s top advisors — and especially the vice president — are devoted to a Nixonian view of absolute power for the commander in chief. After he was driven out of office in disgrace, Nixon told interviewer David Frost in 1977, “When the president does it that means that it is not illegal.” Frost, somewhat dumbfounded, replied, “By definition?” Nixon answered, “Exactly. Exactly.”

This seems to be the attitude of Bush and his war planners towards Tehran. Pentagon Deputy Assistant Secretary Debra Cagan recently told several British Members of Parliament that “I hate all Iranians.” Perhaps Cagan got her position because of such prejudice towards nations that Bush formally designated as “evil.” At the same time that Congress is considering hate-crime legislation, ethnic hatred may be driving U.S. plans to slaughter Iranians.

For Bush, attacking Iran may simply be a question of checking off another item on his final To Do list — or one more wild swing at making himself a legacy. Bush told a biographer that, after he leaves office, he looks forward to receiving “ridiculous” (in his words) speaking fees of $75,000 per talk. He is also looking forward to putting in some time on his “fantastic” Freedom Institute.

The fact that thousands or hundreds of thousands of Iranians might die is irrelevant. Bush appears far more concerned about baseball statistics than the body counts compiled by the U.S. military abroad. The fact that many Americans could also die — either during the attack or from Iranian retaliation on U.S. forces in Iraq — doesn’t appear to be costing Bush any sleep.

No American politician has ever been sentenced to death for ordering U.S. soldiers to kill innocent foreigners. Such orders have gone out many times — from the Philippines in the early 1900s, to Haiti in the 1910s, to Vietnam in the 1960s. There have been many other conflicts in which American presidents rubber-stamped U.S. military rules of engagement that guaranteed carnage among foreign women and children.

Americans cannot expect to have good presidents if presidents are permitted to make themselves tsars. The president and his top officials should face the same perils common citizens face when they are accused of breaking the law. Seeing a president answer for his crimes would be public education at its best. Consider how the subsequent course of American foreign policy might have differed if Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon had been tried, convicted in federal court, and punished for committing war crimes.

Perhaps Bush thinks that starting another foreign war will help boost demand for his speeches among groups that want to see U.S. forces kill more Muslims. But if he cares about freedom as much as he claims, he will cease acting as though he is above the law. And if Bush refuses to restrain himself, Americans should remember the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson. Sometimes the threat of a noose is the best way to keep the peace.

Bogus Fears

James Bovard — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 05:00:00 +0000

Is a president entitled to frighten voters into submission to perpetuate his power over them? While many people are catching on to Bush’s deceits on Iraq, most Americans have forgotten the scams of his reelection campaign.

George W. Bush was reelected in large part because he boosted the number of Americans frightened of terrorism during 2004. In October 2001, 73 percent of Americans feared another imminent terrorist attack. By early 2004, only 55 percent had such fears. But by August 2004, the figure had rebounded to 64 percent. This 9 percent proved vital for Bush. People who saw terrorism as the biggest issue in the 2004 election voted for him by an almost 7-to-1 margin.

Bush’s reelection campaign intensified Americans’ memories of terrorist carnage. One of the first Bush reelection campaign television ads, in early 2004, entitled “Safer, Stronger,” showed firemen carrying a flag-draped corpse from the rubble at Ground Zero. A second ad, showing an American flag in front of the wreckage of the World Trade Center, featured the motto “Tested” and began with a statement from the president — “I’m George Bush and I approve this message.” An announcer then informed viewers,

The last few years have tested America in many ways. Some challenges we’ve seen before. And some were like no others. But America rose to the challenge…. Freedom, faith, families, and sacrifice. President Bush. Steady leadership in times of change.

The TV ads were followed by five-alarm terror alerts that spurred even more helpful publicity. On May 26, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced,

Credible intelligence from multiple sources indicates that al-Qaeda plans to attempt an attack on the United States in the next few months. This disturbing intelligence indicates al-Qaeda’s specific intention to hit the United States hard…. After the March 11th attack in Madrid, Spain, an al-Qaeda spokesman announced that 90 percent of the arrangements for an attack in the United States were complete.

Ashcroft assured one and all that the attack plans had been “corroborated on a variety of levels.” He also distributed photos of seven Arab terror suspects and urged Americans to “be on the lookout … for each of these seven individuals. They all pose a clear and present danger to America. They all should be considered armed and dangerous.”

The 2002 law that created the Department of Homeland Security made it the lead agency in assessing and publicizing terror threats. However, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge first learned the details of the “Gang of Seven’s” devastating attack plan while watching Ashcroft’s televised news conference. A few hours before Ashcroft’s fireworks, Ridge appeared on CNN and announced, “Americans’ job is to enjoy living in this great country and go out and have some fun.” Homeland Security officials told the media that “there was no new information about attacks in the U.S., and … no change in the government’s color-coded ‘threat level.’”

The Ashcroft warning quickly became a laughingstock — at least to people who followed the news. NBC News reported on May 28 that Ashcroft’s primary al-Qaeda source was “a largely discredited group, Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, known for putting propaganda on the Internet” that had falsely “claimed responsibility for the power blackout in the northeast last year, a power outage in London, and the Madrid bombings.” One former White House terrorism expert commented, “The only thing they haven’t claimed credit for recently is the cicada invasion of Washington.” The group’s warning consisted of one e-mail sent two months earlier to a London newspaper. Newsweek reported that the White House

Just before the Fourth of July weekend, the FBI notified 18,000 law-enforcement agencies of a new terrorism threat: “booby-trapped beer coolers” as well as “plastic-foam containers, inner tubes and other waterborne flotsam.” It was unclear whether this warning rallied the redneck vote for Bush.

The Bush administration followed Independence Day with hints that terrorists could cancel the November 2 election. On July 8, Ridge called a press conference and announced, “Credible reporting now indicates that al-Qaeda is moving forward with its plans to carry out a large-scale attack in the United States in an effort to disrupt our democratic process.” He warned, “These are not conjectures or mythical statements we are making. These are pieces of information that we could trace comfortably to sources that we deem to be credible.” He added, “I think we have to err on the side of transparency to protect the voting rights of the country.” The Homeland Security Department formally requested that the Justice Department “analyze what legal steps would be needed to permit the postponement of the election were an attack to take place.”

Democrats derided Ridge for firing blanks. Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calf.), the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, condemned his warning: “Six days ago, the leadership of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and leadership of the House and Senate were briefed on these so-called new threats. They are more chatter about old threats, which were the subject of a press conference by Attorney General Ashcroft and Director [Robert] Mueller six weeks ago.”

On Sunday, August 1, immediately after the Democratic National Convention, the Bush administration announced “Code Orange” terror alerts for banks and financial institutions in New York, Newark, and Washington, D.C. Ridge, in a press conference that his aides heavily hyped to television news producers, announced that there is “new and unusually specific information about where al-Qaeda would like to attack.” He warned that the attacks could involve “weapons of mass destruction” and “biological pathogens.” He said the new information was “sobering news, not just about the intent of our enemies but of their specific plans and a glimpse into their methods.”

A senior Homeland Security official said that this new information was received by the intelligence community “sometime on Friday” and was “so specific they immediately began trying to corroborate it.” Ridge announced that “we won’t do politics” with terror alerts and then reminded Americans that Bush was personally responsible for saving them: “We must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the president’s leadership in the war against terror.”

The terror alert resulted in the posting of heavily armed, black-clad lawmen outside the stock exchanges and the major banks in both New York and Newark. Truck searches and closures of major roads created huge traffic jams in the Big Apple.

But after the press conference spurred gasps across the land and stole the Democrats’ thunder, news trickled out that the alert was based on evidence gathered before 9/11. Two days after his announcement, Ridge conceded that there was “no evidence of recent surveillance” by terrorist suspects of the buildings and areas placed under heightened alert. But he stressed, “I don’t want anyone to disabuse themselves of the seriousness of this information simply because there are some reports that much of it is dated; it might be two or three years old.”

On August 12, the Associated Press reported that a White House official conceded that “the Bush administration has discovered no evidence of imminent plans by terrorists to attack U.S. financial buildings.” But the lack of evidence did not prevent them from maintaining a high-alert status.

On September 13, Ashcroft held a conference call with all 93 U.S. attorneys around the nation to warn of new terrorist threats. Michael Shelby, the Bush administration’s appointee as chief U.S. attorney in Texas, was reported to have declared at a meeting of the Southern District of the Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council shortly after the conference call that the call had revealed “the high probability that a terrorist incident of the magnitude of the 9/11 attacks would occur in the United States within the next six weeks.” On September 23, FoxNews Network, picking up on the reports of the conference call, quoted one law-enforcement official’s warning that “every day there is new information that raises the level of anxiety.”

Politics and
terrorism warnings

In early October, a Bush advisor told the Washington Post that the president’s reelection campaign’s strategy aimed to stoke public fears about terrorism. A few days before the election, a video of Osama bin Laden popped up in which the terrorist leader warned, “Your security is in your own hands. Any nation that does not attack us will not be attacked.” A Bush-Cheney campaign official gleefully told the New York Daily News, “We want people to think ‘terrorism’ for the last four days. And anything that raises the issue in people’s minds is good for us.” A senior GOP strategist, describing the bin Laden video as a “little gift” for the Bush campaign, added that “anything that makes people nervous about their personal safety helps Bush.”

After all the alerts and sweating, America miraculously obliterated the terrorist threat on Election Day. Ashcroft, in a resignation letter dated November 2 and publicly released a week later, informed Bush, “The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.” After Bush’s victory was secure, the feds also canceled the heightened terrorist alerts for New York, Newark, and Washington, D.C. There was no evidence that the risk was lower simply because Ashcroft was resigning. In the days before Bush’s second inaugural, the feds again reduced terror warnings — perhaps seeking to make Republican donors less timid about coming to Washington to express their gratitude to Bush.

Shortly after resigning in 2005, Ridge complained that the Bush administration often raised the terrorist-alert level on the basis of flimsy evidence. He spoke out to “debunk the myth” that his department was to blame for the frequent alerts. He declared, “More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it…. There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, ‘For that?’”

Election-season terror alerts placed Americans in a psychological crossfire — warning them again and again, vaguely but ominously, and then implicitly promising that their government would protect them. Terror alerts might have made the difference on Election Day. Robb Willer, assistant director of the Sociology and Small Groups Laboratory at Cornell University, examined the relationship between 26 government-issued terror warnings reported in the Washington Post and Bush’s approval ratings. “Each terror warning from the previous week corresponded to a 2.75 point increase in the percentage of Americans expressing approval for President Bush,” Willer concluded. Apparently, the more terrorists there were who wanted to attack America, the better job Bush was doing.

The Founding Fathers hoped that the American people would continue to have the virtues and confidence necessary to perpetuate liberty. Insofar as government is increasingly relying on fear to secure support and submission, government degrades the people. And the more degraded people become, the easier it is for politicians to frighten them into further submission. But the mass production of bogus fears can never produce real legitimacy.

What Do Citizens Owe the Government?

James Bovard — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 05:00:00 +0000

When politicians are not promising new benefits to citizens, they continually remind citizens what they owe the government. From their first years in government schools, children are indoctrinated with the notion that government provides them some grandiose benefit. This seed often produces a harvest of servility in later life.

But few people stop and try to accurately calculate this supposed debt. What does the citizen owe the state? Or, more accurately, what does the citizen owe the politicians and bureaucrats who claim to represent and embody the state?

Every extension of the welfare state results, directly or indirectly, in politicians and bureaucrats feeling entitled to demand more obedience from people. What does the government do for citizens that citizens could not do as well or better for themselves? This is the first question that must be answered before gauging how much obedience people might owe a government. Insofar as government busies itself doing things worse for the citizen than he could have done himself, the citizen is justified in viewing government as a nuisance and a poacher.

In the vast majority of cases, governments possess only what they first seize from private citizens. How can citizens owe government when practically everything the government has it first took from them? The fact that people are forced to pay for certain goods and services indirectly, by taxation, cannot create an ineradicable debt to the people who seized their paychecks. People who are government dependents have a debt not so much to the government itself, but to their fellow citizens who earn the money the government seizes and then renders to them.

Some statists insist that the citizen should be grateful for such government services as mail delivery. Yet, the government is more vigilant in attacking private threats to its monopoly over first-class mail delivery than in expediting the mail. First-class mail service is significantly slower than it was 40 years ago, in part because of an intentional policy of reducing next-day mail deliveries. In areas in which the postal service competes directly with private companies, such as overnight express mail and parcel post, the government has been whupped shamelessly. Citizens cannot be indebted to the government for mail service when it is federal restrictions that prohibit a far wider array of private services.

Public schools

Others will insist that people are indebted to government for public schools. But the parents of most children pay more in taxes than government spends educating their kids. Besides, despite sharp increases in government spending for education in the last 15 years, American high-school students score at the rock bottom in math and science compared with students in other countries.

The government routinely effectively confiscates parents’ money to pay for schools and then fails to educate their kids, yet faces no liability for its de facto breach of implied contract. An investigation by the New Jersey State Department of Education concluded, “The Newark School District has been at best flagrantly delinquent and at worst deceptive in discharging its obligations to the children enrolled in public schools.”

Public high schools graduate an estimated 700,000 functionally illiterate teenagers each year. Regardless of how badly school officials fail to serve students, parents are left no recourse but to file complaints with the same unresponsive bureaucracy. As law professor Judith Berliner Cohen observed,

No plaintiff to date has been able to convince a court that a school owes him or her any more than “a chair in a classroom.” … Insofar as they have been “deluded” into believing that it is not necessary to find alternate means of education, the students are arguably worse off than they otherwise would have been.
Without quasi-monopoly public schools, a far more extensive network of private schools would be available — schools that would be responsive to parents’ desire for their children to learn. The rapid spread of the home-schooling movement (whose students consistently outscore public-school students on standardized tests) vivifies how parents can do better on their own.

Government-provided roads

Nor are citizens indebted to government for providing goods such as roads. Despite heavy federal taxes levied on gas buyers, politicians are allowing more and more of the Interstate Highway System to deteriorate to Third World road conditions. Roughly three-fifths of all interstate highways are in poor or mediocre condition, according to the Federal Highway Administration. Drivers pay more than $140 billion in gas taxes each year, but only about half of that money is actually spent on maintaining and building roads; the rest is spent on other political wish lists.

Roads are a good example of the contempt that government shows for citizens in the services it forces them to finance. As road expert and author Gabriel Roth observed, “U.S. roads suffer from the typical command economy characteristics: poor maintenance, congestion, and insensitivity to consumer needs.” Because traffic jams cost government employees nothing, government agencies scorn sound traffic-control measures. Federal Highway Administration traffic-safety engineers Samuel Tignor and Davey Warren concluded in a 1990 study that most speed zones were “posted 15 m.p.h. below the maximum safe speed; that, on average, speed limits are set too low to be accepted as reasonable by most drivers, and that the posted speeds make violators out of motorists who drive reasonably and safely.” Politicians profit from unnecessarily low speed limits because of the increase in the number of drivers eligible for speeding tickets. Accidents and traffic jams result from policemen’s fixation on ticketing drivers who pose no threat to public safety.

Will Rogers suggested long ago, “The way to deal with traffic congestion is to have business provide the roads and government the cars.” But though this hasn’t been done, politicians still expect thanks from citizens, despite potholes as far as the eye can see.

Police protection

Do citizens owe a vast debt to the state for keeping the peace? Many big-city police departments have effectively abandoned serious efforts to solve robberies and other cases of nonlethal violence; the District of Columbia police, for instance, make arrests in fewer than 10 percent of burglaries and robberies. But D.C. police have set records for arresting citizens detected drinking alcohol on their front porches. They have also been valiant in cracking down on drivers with unfastened seatbelts.

Insofar as government prohibits people from owning or carrying weapons for self-defense, it is scant consolation that a policeman arrives after the crime to chalk off the body. There are more than twice as many private security guards as uniformed policemen in the United States. More citizens than ever before are living in gated communities or relying on home alarm systems. Private citizens use guns to defend themselves more than 2 million times a year, according to Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck. After comparing the effects of more people carrying guns with other popular reforms, economist John Lott concluded that “of all the methods studied so far by economists, the carrying of concealed handguns appears to be the most cost-effective method for reducing crime.”

Military defense

The one area in which it is most plausible that government could provide a unique service is national defense. However, if a government busies itself making enemies, and then praises itself for pledging to protect citizens from the enemies it makes, there is less than a transcendent benefit. The war in Iraq will very likely cost Americans more than a trillion dollars — a high price for Bush’s May 1, 2003, victory strut aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.

What have politicians given to the citizenry that they did not originally take from them? This is the bottom line that must permeate all thinking about the “goods” or “services” that government “provides” to the citizenry. In reality, in the vast majority of cases, politicians give back far less in value than they take. The more the government takes, the less the citizen owes to the government.

Insofar as the government takes from the citizen more than it renders to the citizen, the citizen owes the state the same contempt that he would have for any other con artist.

Citizens cannot be indebted to the state for any political promise that the government fails to fulfill — just as any citizen’s obligation to fulfill a private contract is dissolved by the other party’s failure to fulfill his obligations. Nor can people owe obedience to government for any activity that the people could have done better themselves.

It is the government that owes obedience to the citizens, rather than citizens who owe obedience to the government. But the bigger government becomes, the more difficult it is to make it heel.

Lies Elected Bush

James Bovard — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 05:00:00 +0000

Shortly after he was reelected, President Bush declared that American voters had had their “moment of accountability” regarding the Iraq war. Since he had gotten slightly more than 50 percent of the votes in the November 2004 election, that meant that they had ratified his policies and that Bush was free to do as he chose in the coming years.

Almost all of the Founding Fathers would have recognized Bush’s interpretation as dictatorial tripe. But it is also worthwhile to examine the war frauds by which Bush and Dick Cheney won a second term. This is especially relevant, since Bush and Cheney may use similar frauds to attack Iran.

Bush and Cheney were reelected in large part because they inoculated scores of millions of Americans against the evidence of the deceits and failures of the U.S. war in Iraq. They swayed tens of millions of Americans to take their beliefs from their rulers, not from the facts.

Americans may be more gullible on foreign policy in part because of their greater global ignorance. A 2002 survey for National Geographic found that “roughly 85 percent of young Americans (ages 18 to 24) could not find Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel on a map.” Almost 30 percent of the young adults surveyed could not locate the Pacific Ocean and 56 percent were unable to locate India. As the old saying goes, “War is God’s way of teaching people geography.”

In the days after 9/11, when pollsters asked Americans who they thought had carried out the 9/11 attacks, only 3 percent of respondents suggested Iraq or Saddam Hussein as culprits. But Bush and Cheney strove to make Americans believe that Saddam was linked to 9/11 or closely associated with the terrorist group that carried out the attack. The Saddam—al-Qaeda link was the linchpin for exploiting 9/11 to justify preemptive attacks around the globe.

In his official notification of invasion sent to Congress on March 18, 2003, Bush declared that he was attacking Iraq “to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” Bush tied Saddam to 9/11 even though confidential briefings he received informed him that no evidence of any link had been found. In a speech to troops shortly after Baghdad fell, Bush characterized his attack on Iraq as “one victory in the war on terror that began September 11.”

Months of accusations and insinuations by the Bush administration profoundly affected Americans’ perceptions of Iraq and the war. A February 2003 poll found that 72 percent of Americans believed that Saddam was “personally involved in the September 11 attacks.” Shortly before the March 2003 invasion, almost half of all Americans believed that “most” or “some” of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens. Only 17 percent of respondents knew that none of the hijackers was Iraqi.

Throughout 2004, the Saddam—al-Qaeda link was repeatedly officially debunked. A 9/11 Commission staff report on June 16 concluded that there was no evidence of a “collaborative relationship” between Saddam and al-Qaeda. The findings were trumpeted in headlines across the nation. Despite this broad coverage of the report, 55 percent of Bush supporters wrongly believed that the 9/11 Commission reported that “Iraq was providing substantial support to al-Qaeda,” according to a University of Maryland Program on International Policy Attitudes poll a few weeks later. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll asked Americans “whether you agree or disagree with [the 9/11 Commission] finding [that] Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government did not collaborate with al-Qaeda in attacking the United States on 9/11.” Almost half of the respondents disagreed.

Any lingering doubts on this topic should have been quashed on July 9, 2004, when the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a 511-page report on the CIA and Iraq. The report concluded that the CIA “reasonably assessed … that these contacts [between Saddam and al-Qaeda] did not add up to an established formal relationship.” The report also recognized that the CIA accurately concluded that “to date there was no evidence proving Iraqi complicity or assistance” in the 9/11 attacks. The report noted that the CIA’s accurate judgments on Saddam, al-Qaeda, and the non-link to 9/11 “were widely disseminated [prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq], though an early version of a key CIA assessment was disseminated only to a limited list of Cabinet members and some sub-Cabinet officials in the administration.” Neither Bush nor Cheney permitted the facts to impede their rhetoric on Iraq.

Encouraging Americans to believe that Saddam was behind 9/11, and to see the Iraq war as vengeance for 9/11, made it far easier to justify an unprovoked attack on a nation that posed no threat to America. A September 2004 Newsweek poll found that 42 percent of Americans believed that Saddam was “directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks.” As of mid October, “75 percent of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al-Qaeda, and 63 percent believe that clear evidence of this support has been found,” according to a University of Maryland poll.

The Bush campaign’s portrayal of the invasion of Iraq as a necessary part of the war on terrorism saved the president. The 55 percent of voters who said that the war in Iraq is “part of the war on terrorism” went for Bush by a 4 to 1 margin. The 43 percent who said Iraq was not part of the war on terrorism voted for Kerry by an 8 to 1 margin.

Weapons of mass deception

The Bush team’s invocations of Saddam’s supposed vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction convinced Americans that the United States could not afford to wait for the UN weapons inspection process to continue. In a March 17, 2003, speech giving Saddam 48 hours to abdicate power, Bush declared, “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” Bush also justified the invasion of Iraq by appealing to UN resolutions that, he said, “authorized” the United States and other governments “to use force in ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.”

The constant references to WMDs by Bush administration officials burned the issue into Americans’ minds. Several months later, almost a quarter of Americans wrongly believed that Iraq had actually used its weapons of mass destruction against American forces during the fighting in March and April 2003.

In the weeks and months after the fall of Baghdad, Bush repeatedly asserted that U.S. forces had discovered WMDs or that Saddam had weapons programs. “We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories,” Bush declared to journalists on May 29, 2003. Five weeks later, he again claimed vindication because “we found a biological lab” in a truck trailer. However, CIA investigators concluded that the trailer had nothing to do with an Iraqi WMD program.

On January 28, 2004, David Kay of the CIA testified to two Senate committees on the result of the almost-finished great WMD hunt. As CBS News noted, “Kay was chosen last year as the Iraq Survey Group leader in part because he was convinced weapons would be found.” Kay’s group included a thousand people and cost about a billion dollars (on top of the costs of the invasion supposedly motivated by WMDs). But Kay announced to the Senate Armed Services Committee that “we were almost all wrong” about Iraq’s possessing WMDs. Kay’s tell-tale “almost all wrong” phrase was hyped in front-page headlines across the nation and got massive airtime on television news and talk shows.

Despite the publicity that Kay’s comments received, a March 2004 poll by the University of Maryland found that “63 percent of Bush supporters thought, incorrectly, that [Kay] had concluded that Iraq had at least a major WMD program.”

On October 7, 2004, Americans heard from Charles Duelfer, also of the CIA and the chief U.S. weapons inspector chosen by Bush to go to Iraq and complete the work of the Iraq Survey Group. Duelfer’s team issued a thousand-page final report that offered literary analysis (speculating on how Hemingway’s short story “The Old Man and the Sea” appealed to Saddam Hussein) in lieu of any WMD discoveries. Duelfer’s report was widely seen as the final demolition of the Bush administration’s original casus belli. The report, coming out the day before the second presidential candidates’ debate, generated front-page headlines. Yet a University of Maryland poll taken after the report’s release found that 57 percent of Bush supporters incorrectly believed that Duelfer “concluded that Iraq did have either WMD (19 percent) or a major program for developing them (38 percent).”

WMD delusions persisted through Election Day. Another University of Maryland poll, shortly before the 2004 election, found that “72 percent of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47 percent) or a major program for developing them (25 percent).” Fifty-six percent assumed that most experts believed Iraq possessed WMDs at the time of the U.S. invasion. Bush supporters also wrongly believed that the invasion of Iraq was welcomed around the world.

Bush supporters’ approval of the war depended largely on their delusions. They were asked, “If, before the war, U.S. intelligence services had concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and was not providing substantial support to al-Qaeda,” what should have been done? “Fifty-eight percent of Bush supporters said in that case the U.S. should not have gone to war. Furthermore, 61 percent express confidence that in that case the President would not have gone to war.”

The October 2004 University of Maryland report explained that Bush supporters “continue to hear the Bush administration confirming these beliefs. Among Bush supporters, an overwhelming 82 percent perceive the Bush administration as saying that Iraq had WMD (63 percent) or a major WMD program (19 percent)…. Seventy-five percent of Bush supporters think the Bush administration is currently saying Iraq was providing substantial support to al-Qaeda (56 percent) or even that it was directly involved in 9/11 (19 percent).”

Stephen Kull, director of the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes, commented, “To support the president and to accept that he took the United States to war based on mistaken assumptions likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance, and leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of unsettling information about prewar Iraq.” The more information about the war that people suppressed, the easier it became for them to support Bush and to view opponents of the war as unpatriotic, un-American, or otherwise possessed by demons.

George W. Bush has not yet had his “moment of accountability” for his war in Iraq. If there is justice, then there will be a full investigation of the lies by which the president and his team paved the way to attack.

In the meantime, Americans should remember the Iraq war frauds and radically discount any White House racketeering for the next war.

How Foreign Warring Subverts Freedom at Home

James Bovard — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 05:00:00 +0000

These videos (7-part) are the speech given by James Bovard at The Future of Freedom Foundation’s conference in June.

Perverting Freedom

James Bovard — Sat, 12 May 2007 05:00:00 +0000

Two years ago last month, Bush gave his second inaugural address. As I watched the speech on television, I and perhaps millions of other Americans struggled to answer the obvious question about the speech: Is it puerile or is it merely tripe?

Bush was hailed throughout the greater Washington metropolitan area for a speech that invoked freedom and liberty almost 50 times. The Washington Post headlined its report on the spiel, “An Ambitious President Advances His Idealism.” The Council on Foreign Relations’ Max Boot cheered that Bush “is signaling basically victory or bust … no backing down.” Liberal columnist Andrew Sullivan swooned, “Who could disagree with the stirring, elegant and somewhat sweeping address the president just gave?” Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, gushed that the speech was “powerful,” “subtle,” “historic,” “sophisticated,” “nuanced,” and “profoundly right.”

Though Bush invoked freedom ad nauseam, none of his comments referred to restrictions on U.S. government power. Instead, they sanctified the president’s right to forcibly intervene abroad wherever he believes it is necessary to “spread freedom.” Like Khrushchev banging his shoe on the podium at the United Nations, Bush was shouting “We will bury you!” to anyone whom he and his cronies label an enemy of freedom.

Perverting freedom

It is important not to forget the doggerel that launched the Bush second term. His bombast looks almost as pathetic now as a newsreel of a 1935 Mussolini speech.

He proclaimed,

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

This speech was delivered eight months after the Abu Ghraib photos hit the street and after many documents and other evidence of the torture scandal had floated to the surface. Yet, regardless of his embrace of torture, the American media still treated Bush as a hero of liberty because of his flowery words.

Bush, sounding like an editor at the New Yorker, declared, “Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way.” Supposedly, foreigners would not even recognize their own voice without intervention from Washington.

Bush declared,

All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.

But Bush has used Americans’ tax dollars to bankroll many of the worst oppressors in the world. And he has rubbed Americans’ nose in the hypocrisy by labeling dictatorial regimes as “freedom-loving” in one White House photo opportunity after another for visiting heads of state.

Two years ago, he could still strut about the supposed great victories he had won in Afghanistan and Iraq: “Because we have acted in the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom.” Even at that time, there were clear signs that most Afghans had merely had a change of oppressors, and the rising chaos and bloodshed in Iraq was a far cry from what Americans recognize as freedom.

The speech included the usual pyromania: “By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well — a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.” His praise for “untamed” is ironic, given his passion for discretionary power across the board.

Bush issued a revolutionary challenge to every government in the world:

We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.

He is correct that freedom is “eternally right.” But that does not confer upon him or other U.S. presidents the right to appoint rulers in other nations on Earth. The notion of American uniqueness has gone from a point of pride to a pretext for aggression.

He declared, “The leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know: To serve your people you must learn to trust them.” Yet the more Bush trusts the people, the more he wants to spy on them. His “trust” of the American people did not dissuade his administration from seeking to build the Total Information Awareness network to track every purchase, trip, or phone call that people make. The Homeland Security Department epitomized the Bush administration’s “trust” of Americans when it warned 18,000 local and state law-enforcement agencies to keep an eye on anyone who “expressed dislike of attitudes and decisions of the U.S. government.” Perhaps Bush simply trusts people not to object when the feds destroy their privacy.

He concluded with a final lunge:

America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. Renewed in our strength — tested, but not weary — we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.

And since the U.S. government proclaims liberty everywhere, it is entitled to pay bribes to foreign journalists (as the Pentagon does in Iraq) and interfere in foreign elections (as the National Endowment for Democracy does almost everywhere except Canada).

Freedom vs. power

Bush’s speech epitomized how idealism can provide a license to kill. Unfortunately, many Americans still have not looked beyond the president’s words to recognize the masses of foreigners who have died because of his intervention. (The British medical journal Lancet estimated that the invasion of Iraq has resulted in more than 600,000 dead since 2003.)

Hearing George W. Bush constantly invoke freedom is like hearing Bill Clinton praise chastity. The Bush team has made so many power grabs at home and bankrolled so many dictators abroad. And yet Bush still seems to believe that citing freedom can sanctify everything he does and every war he intends to wage.

“Freedom” has become merely another invocation to sanctify power. The more often Bush praises freedom, the more deference he expects to receive. He uses the word “freedom” as an incantation to lull people to sleep — to douse any concerns about his latest expansion of government power, his latest deployment of U.S. troops, his most recent executive order. He maximizes confusion over freedom in order to minimize resistance. In ancient Rome, as long as the emperor praised the Senate, the republic was presumed to be safe. In contemporary America, as long as the president gushes over freedom, the people’s rights are considered safe. And the more a politician praises freedom, the more leeway he has to destroy it.

Bush’s invocations of freedom are especially suspect, since he talks and acts as if presidential supremacy is the highest freedom. In an interview published a few days before his second inauguration, he was asked, “Why hasn’t anyone been held accountable, either through firings or demotions, for what some people see as mistakes or misjudgments [in Iraq]?”

He replied,

We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 election. And the American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me, for which I’m grateful.

Thus, in Bush’s view, Americans had a single “moment” in which to assent to his policies or oppose them. Since slightly more assented than did not assent, Bush felt entitled to do as he pleased in Iraq and everywhere else.

“Open the door to freedom! Put a strong man at the helm!” was the campaign slogan for National Socialist candidates in the 1932 Reichstag elections. The fact that Nazi politicians invoked freedom to win votes did nothing to protect people from their subsequent tyranny. “Strong leader” is also a favorite Bush phrase. He has used the term “strong leader” in more than a hundred speeches since taking office and, as the Washington Post noted, this “was the subtext of his 2004 campaign strategy.” Vultures of doom are not circling Washington simply because Bush used the same “freedom and strong leader” theme used in 1930s Germany. But it is a warning that political navet and craving for a strong leader can be a fatal combination.

Unfortunately, Washingtonians were not the only ones to get snowed by Bush’s rhetoric. Two days after Bush’s second inaugural, I was stuck in a middle seat of a flight from D.C. to Dallas. I wedged in between a chubby little 14-year-old boy and a tripwire-tense Air Force enlisted man.

The kid asked me, “Did you go to the inauguration Thursday?”

I smiled and said no. I asked whether he did. His eyes lit up, his face awoke, and he declared, “Yes!” He told me he was from Bush’s hometown, Midland, Texas.

“What did you think of the speech?” I asked.

“I loved every word of it!”

“So you think it is a good idea for the U.S. to be spreading freedom?”

‘Oh yes. We have to do that.”

“Are you concerned about going to war to spread freedom?” I asked nonchalantly.

The Air Force dude erupted, “Don’t listen to him! This guy hates America! This guy hates our president! Don’t listen to a single thing he says!” After his foam dried, we exchanged a few words and his hinges nearly failed him as I calmly recited a few Bush and Cheney WMD falsehoods.

Nearing landing, the boy asked a question or two about my views. My replies were fairly tame but he squinted and said warily, “You sound like you hate the government.”

I smiled. “No. I don’t hate the government. I just think its power should be limited.”

His suspicions of me remained.

“What should government be doing? What is its main purpose?” I asked.

The kid paused, struggled briefly, and then replied, “Keep people under control.”

This is the new American vision of freedom that Bush seeks to impose around the world. This type of freedom does far more to empower politicians than liberate citizens. If politicians can redefine freedom at their whim, then they can raze limits on their own power.

Just because a president’s comments are insipid does not mean they are innocuous. Americans cannot preserve their rights if they take their political reality from the person with the most to gain from subverting freedom.

Happy ‘Mission Accomplished’!

James Bovard — Wed, 02 May 2007 05:00:00 +0000

Yesterday was the fourth anniversary of one of the most dishonest propaganda speeches in modern American history.

President Bush did his flight suit strut on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in front of a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished.” While Bush’s popularity has collapsed since then, the pundits and publications that crowned Bush for that speech should also live in infamy.

Bush proclaimed, “With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians." Tell that to Haditha — tell that to all the Iraqi families whose kinfolk were killed at U.S. checkpoints — tell that to the people of Fallujah. The British medical journal Lancet estimated last year that American and allied military forces have directly caused 186,000 Iraqi deaths since 2003. That is the equivalent of several large soccer stadiums full of people no longer available to thank Bush for liberating them.

Bush assured Americans and the world: “We’ve begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated.” With each passing month, we are learning more about how the administration was warned before attacking Iraq that Saddam had long since abandoned the production of chemical and biological weapons. But Bush could still successfully use that hobgoblin in the weeks after Baghdad was captured.

Bush declared, “The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We have removed an ally of Al Qaeda and cut off a source of terrorist funding.” This is ironic in hindsight, since the Bush administration is now using Al Qaeda’s presence in the postwar rubble to justify perpetuating American military occupation.

Bush closed his speech with the following Biblical contortion: “All of you, all in this generation of our military, have taken up the highest calling of history: You were defending your country and protecting the innocent from harm. And wherever you go, you carry a message of hope, a message that is ancient and ever new. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, u2018To the captives, come out; and to those in darkness, be free.”’

I guess the Abu Ghraib exemption to captives coming out did not make the final cut of Bush’s speech. And did Bush think that he was God’s anointed, spreading salvation to the world?

As things deteriorated in Iraq as 2003 progressed, the Bush team scrambled to rewrite the history of that speech. At an October 28, 2003, press conference, Bush was asked about that giant "Mission Accomplished" banner. Bush replied: "The u2018Mission Accomplished’ sign, of course, was put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln, saying that their mission was accomplished. I know it was attributed somehow to some ingenious advance man from my staff — they weren’t that ingenious, by the way."

The design of the banner had the same design, typeface, and background as a large "Jobs and Growth" banner hung at a Bush speaking event in Ohio a week earlier. A few days after Bush’s Abraham Lincoln speech, the Washington Post noted that Bush’s "aides say the slogan was chosen in part to mark a presidential turn toward domestic affairs as his campaign for reelection approaches." After Bush’s October 28 comment on the banner, White House spokesman Dan Bartlett asserted that the slogan was thought up by sailors who then asked the White House to create the banner. The White House arranged for the banner to be created and delivered to the aircraft carrier. But Bush was correct that the banner was not hung up on the carrier by his press secretary, Ari Fleischer.

Nothing has happened since May 1, 2003 to make George Bush a smidgin more honest. The only difference is that Iraq’s carnage is now so obvious that even many of his loyal supporters no longer swallow Bush’s lies.

But we must not forget the politicians, pundits, think tanks, newspapers and magazines who cheered this speech and groveled at Bush’s feet in the years that followed. The more arrogantly Bush acted, the more servile the nation’s political-intellectual Establishment became. While Bush’s days as president are numbered, there will be no purge of the designated deep thinkers who helped pave the way to ruin. Their ideas and bootlicking will likely imperil our rights and liberties for many years to come.

What We Can Learn From the Hungarians

James Bovard — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 05:00:00 +0000