Thursday, April 30, 2009
The Ninth Circuit v. the CIA
by Jacob G. Hornberger
The omnipotent power claimed by the CIA was dealt a major blow Tuesday by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Binyam Mohamed et al v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc.
The five plaintiffs are victims of the CIA’s kidnapping, rendition, and torture program. All five were kidnapped overseas by CIA agents, transferred to brutal but CIA-friendly foreign regimes, and tortured.
They filed suit against the provider of the airplane that did the transporting—Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. Before Jeppesen even filed an answer to the lawsuit, the U.S. government intervened and requested an immediate dismissal of the case on the ground that to permit it to go forward would result in the disclosure of “state secrets” that were vital to “national security.”
The district court granted the government’s motion to dismiss. The plaintiffs appealed. The court of appeals reversed the ruling of the district court and remanded the case with orders to reinstate it.
It is important to grasp the essence of the type of government under which we Americans now live. The CIA, which is at the core of federal power, can kidnap any person it wants, anywhere in the world. It can then transport that person to one of its secret prisons or simply transport him to a friendly regime for the purpose of torturing him.
As I have detailed in two blog posts this week, the CIA knows that as long as it is loyally following orders of the president, nothing bad is going to happen to it, even if laws are broken. No criminal prosecutions, just some regrets expressed by the president and promises never to do it again, and life goes on.
This case, however, involved a conspiracy, one that included the CIA and a private company that provided the transport plane. The victims decided to sue the airline company, seeking damages for what was done to them.
In opposing that lawsuit, U.S. officials are effectively saying, “No, you can’t sue the people who help us kidnap, rendition, and torture. Our power is full, complete, and omnipotent. We don’t have to explain, justify, defend, or be held accountable and neither do the people who help us. Everything we do to the victims will be kept secret.”
A 3-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit unanimously disagreed. As the court stated,
Separation-of-powers concerns take on an especially important role in the context of secret Executive conduct. As the Founders of this Nation knew well, arbitrary imprisonment and torture under any circumstances is a “gross and notorious … act of despotism.… But “confinement [and abuse] of the person, by secretly hurrying him to [prison], where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten; is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.”
An interesting sidelight of the decision involved an astute observation on the part of the three judges: that federal officials “abuse” the state-secrets doctrine. That’s a mild, judicious way to put it. The more appropriate word is “lie.” The judges pointed to the original Supreme Court case that established the state-secrets doctrine, U.S. v. Reynolds, which was decided in 1953. In that case, executive-branch lawyers represented to the federal judiciary that the disclosure of a particular report would reveal national-security secrets. On the basis of that representation, the state-secrets doctrine was born and the plaintiffs’ suit was dismissed. In 1996, however, a review of the report revealed that the judiciary had been lied to. Disclosure of the report would have revealed not national-security secrets but rather gross incompetence that would have proved embarrassing to the government.
What happens now? When the case returns to the district court, the government will have the right to object to the disclosure of specific evidence that is secret or classified. But at least the plaintiffs will be able to seek recovery for what was done to them if they can prove their case without the use of secret or classified evidence. One thing is likely: the plaintiffs will have the opportunity to disclose under oath exactly what was done to them, notwithstanding almost certain government objections that their testimony will jeopardize “national security.”
This is assuming, of course, that the Obama Justice Department doesn’t appeal the Ninth Circuit ruling to a full panel of the Ninth Circuit or to the U.S. Supreme Court. Given that Obama has enthusiastically embraced the Bush administrations infringements on civil liberties, don’t be surprised to see the Justice Department appealing the decision.
For more analysis on this decision, see Glenn Greenwald’s blog post on it.
Yesterday, I mentioned that lawyers who spoke at our two conferences on “Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties” are playing an important role in the national torture debate. Today’s Los Angeles Times has an excellent and moving op-ed by Joseph Margulies. And check out this recent insightful and passionate piece on torture by Andrew Napolitano.
And if you haven’t already done so, be sure to watch the conference speeches by Greenwald, Margulies, and Napolitano, which are on our website. They are timeless in nature and as important as ever.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Out of the Darkness
by Jacob G. Hornberger
It is refreshing to see that speakers at our 2007 and 2008 conferences “Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties” have continued speaking out in the defense of civil liberties and in opposition to the pro-empire, pro-intervention foreign policy that holds our nation in its grip.
Many of the lawyers who spoke at the conference are taking a leading role in the national torture debate that is now taking place across the land. These include Bruce Fein, Jonathan Turley, Joseph Margulies, Glenn Greenwald, Joanne Mariner, and Andrew Napolitano.
Consider this excerpt from an excellent article from today’s Asia Times entitled “Farewell, the American Century” by Andrew J. Bacevich, another one of our conference speakers:
“What are we to make of these blunders? The temptation may be to avert our gaze, thereby preserving the reassuring tale of the American Century. We should avoid that temptation and take the opposite course, acknowledging openly, freely, and unabashedly where we have gone wrong. We should carve such acknowledgments into the face of a new monument smack in the middle of the Mall in Washington: We blew it. We screwed the pooch. We caught a case of the stupids. We got it ass-backwards.
“Only through the exercise of candor might we avoid replicating such mistakes.
“Indeed, we ought to apologize. When it comes to avoiding the repetition of sin, nothing works like abject contrition. We should, therefore, tell the people of Cuba that we are sorry for having made such a hash of US-Cuban relations for so long. Obama should speak on our behalf in asking the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for forgiveness. He should express our deep collective regret to Iranians and Afghans for what past US interventionism has wrought.
“The US should do these things without any expectations of reciprocity. Regardless of what US officials may say or do, Castro won’t fess up to having made his own share of mistakes. The Japanese won’t liken Hiroshima to Pearl Harbor and call it a wash. Iran’s mullahs and Afghanistan’s jihadists won’t be offering to a chastened Washington to let bygones be bygones.
“No, we apologize to them, but for our own good — to free ourselves from the accumulated conceits of the American Century and to acknowledge that the US participated fully in the barbarism, folly and tragedy that define our time. For those sins, we must hold ourselves accountable.
“To solve our problems requires that we see ourselves as we really are. And that requires shedding, once and for all, the illusions embodied in the American Century.”
Bacevich expresses the type of thinking that can lead our nation out of the darkness into which it has plunged. If you haven’t seen his speech at our conference or the other speeches, I cannot recommend them highly enough. They are the greatest collection of speeches on how to get our nation back on the right track — the track toward freedom, morality, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
The Dark Core of the Empire
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Among the major obstacles to both criminal prosecutions and a truth commission regarding the CIA’s torture program is the underlying reluctance of U.S. officials to focus attention on the super-secret operations of the CIA.
A criminal prosecution, after all, could get out of control, especially one that is being prosecuted by a genuinely honest, independent prosecutor. Prospective defendants might threaten to reveal things that everyone would want to keep quiet.
At truth commission hearings, witnesses could slip up and disclose things that public officials hoped would be kept secret. Or disclosure of wrongdoing could invite retaliation by disclosure of other wrongdoing.
Given that the distinguishing characteristic of government is force, the CIA is the pure essence of such force. Here is where the federal government is able to initiate force with impunity. Through the CIA, it can kidnap, murder, assassinate, sexually abuse, torture, and steal, without accountability, liability, explanation, defense, justification, or even disclosure.
A good example was the CIA complicity in the murder of a young American journalist, Charles Horman, which I wrote about yesterday. Although the U.S. government acknowledged that the CIA participated in that murder, has there ever been any grand-jury subpoenas or congressional subpoenas issued to the CIA agents who participated in that murder or who possibly issued the orders to do so? No. The Horman case is proof positive that at its core, the federal government is immune from acts of force initiated against others, citizen and noncitizens alike.
A more recent example involves the kidnapping by CIA agents of a man in Italy and his forcible transfer to Egypt for the purpose of torture. Although the CIA agents have been indicted in Italy and although there is an extradition treaty between Italy and the United States, U.S. officials have steadfastly maintained that the agents will not be extradited to Italy for trial.
It is impossible to know all of the horrific things that the CIA has done over the years, and the reason it’s impossible is because the CIA is empowered to keep its operations secret from the American people. If there is any truth to Lord Acton’s dictum that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely, then the CIA has got to be the most corrupt government agency in history, because its power is indeed absolute.
As the core of the U.S. Empire, the CIA is in fact the dark rot of the empire. No light is ever shined into its operations. Its agents can be ordered to initiate force against anyone anywhere in the world and, as we all now know, they will faithfully follow such orders without challenge or question, knowing that they will never be called to account for doing so, either criminally, civilly, or by Congress.
When I was growing up and learning about Nazi Germany, one of laments I often heard was, “How could the German people have let it happen?” The suggestion was that the German people were somehow different from other people in the world.
Nonsense. Human nature is human nature. How many Americans have demanded to visit the secret CIA prisons that have been situated in former communist countries? How many members of Congress have visited such prisons or even demanded the right to inspect them? How many American journalists have reported on what has gone on in those prisons? Of course, not that it would have made any difference anyway since the CIA would have blocked entry into its prisons.
But there’s another reason that no one knows what has gone on inside those super-secret CIA prisons, one that is much more insidious: Americans just don’t want to know what the CIA is doing and has been doing.
Long ago, the CIA and the American people, both directly and indirectly through their elected representatives in Congress, reached a tacit agreement. We’ll give you omnipotent power to do whatever you think is necessary to keep us safe, but all we ask in return is that you keep what you do secret from us. We won’t ask and we don’t want to know.
The reason that criminal prosecutions or a truth commission into the CIA torture scandal are unlikely is because things could easily spiral out of control, permitting Americans to learn things about the dark core of their empire that they hoped would never enter their consciousness. Better to continue maintaining the darkness and the rot … while keeping the core of the empire intact and operational, ready to be used when once again necessary.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Let’s Not Forget CIA Victim Charles Horman
by Jacob G. Hornberger
While we’re on the subject of criminal prosecutions and congressional investigations for the CIA’s kidnapping, torture, sex abuse, rendition, and disappearance program, is it too late to ask the same for the case of Charles Horman? He was the 31-year-old American journalist who was murdered in 1973 by Chilean military thugs with the support and complicity of the CIA.
What was the precise role that CIA officials played in Horman’s murder? We don’t know. And the reason we don’t know is that the Justice Department has never seen fit to initiate a criminal prosecution against the CIA agents who participated in Horman’s murder and Congress has never seen fit to subpoena the CIA agents who participated in the murder to testify about it in a congressional hearing. And needless to say, the CIA hasn’t volunteered the information.
In 1973, the Chilean military instituted a coup against Salvador Allende, a socialist who had been elected president of the country. Led by military strongman Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean military proceeded to inflict a reign of terror on the country, rounding up tens of thousands of suspected terrorists and traitors, torturing them, sexually abusing them, and executing them. It was all done, of course, in the name of national security. Among those executed was Charles Horman, with the complicity of the CIA.
Imagine that: The CIA participates in the murder of an American citizen, and we don’t know why or how because U.S. officials, both in the executive and legislative branches, decided not to look too closely into the matter.
Were CIA agents just “following orders” when they participated in Horman’s murder, the same claim they’re making in the torture scandal?
Alas, we just don’t know.
Who actually committed the murder? Was Horman tortured, sexually abused, or raped before his execution, as so many Chileans were?
Who knows?
Was Horman killed because as a Harvard graduate, he might have sympathized with the Allende regime?
Or was it because he had acquired too much information in interviews that he had conducted with U.S. military and intelligence officials while the coup was taking place?
We just don’t know.
What we do know is that for years U.S. officials lied about the CIA’s role in Horman’s murder and knowingly covered it up. In 1999, however — 26 years after the murder — U.S. officials released a document that revealed that the CIA had in fact played a role in Horman’s murder. While the document had been released to Horman’s family some 20 years earlier, U.S. officials had intentionally redacted that portion that reflected CIA complicity in the murder.
Was this revelation followed by criminal indictments for murder, lying, or covering up the CIA’s role in the murder? Were CIA agents subpoenaed to testify in a congressional investigation into the murder, the lying, or the cover-up?
No.
Wouldn’t you think that there would be a bit of outrage over the murder of an American journalist in which CIA agents have participated, especially an American who was not alleged to have committed any criminal offense against Chile or the United States?
No indictments. No congressional subpoenas.
But of course, let’s not forget that we’re dealing with the CIA here. Who’s going to indict or investigate members of a super-secret, omnipotent federal agency that is at the core of the empire, one whose agents faithfully and loyally serve the empire through assassination, kidnapping, torture, rendition, and disappearances? What Justice Department lawyer or member of Congress is going to rock that boat?
Anyway, think about how indictments and subpoenas into the Horman murder would have demoralized this important federal agency. Much better and safer to simply “move on” and put the past behind us, even when that past includes the murder of a young American journalist.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Stealing Children from Illegal Immigrants
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Advocates of the war on immigrants often claim as a justification for their war that illegal aliens steal jobs away from Americans. Of course, it’s a spurious claim. No one has a right to any particular job. Employers, as owners of their businesses, have the moral right to offer employment or deny employment to anyone they wish. If an employer chooses to use his own money to hire a foreigner, that is his moral right. The employee hasn’t “stolen” the job from an American because no American had any ownership rights to the employer’s money or to employment in his firm.
But even if the immigration warriors’ claims had validity, it doesn’t come close to what the state is doing to illegal immigrants. Ratcheting up its war, the state is now stealing children away illegal immigrants.
A New York Times article entitled “After Losing Freedom, Some Immigrants Face Loss of Custody of Their Children” details the story of illegal aliens who are having their children taken away from them and given to American parents.
For example, consider Encarnacion Bail Romero, a Guatemalan who was swept up in an immigration raid of a poultry plant in Carthage, Missouri. A year and a half after she went to jail, the Jasper County Circuit Court involuntarily terminated her parental rights and delivered her baby boy to his new adoptive parents, a well-heeled American couple who has a beautiful home. According to the judge, Bail, by contrast, didn’t have much to offer her son, given that she was in jail and would ultimately be deported to Guatemala.
Did Bail consent to the termination of parental rights? On the contrary, even though she is a poor, uneducated woman who can read neither English nor Spanish, with the help of a jail guard and an English-speaking visitor she sent a note to the judge from her jail cell clearly stating “I do not want my son to be adopted by anyone. I would prefer that he be placed in foster care until I am not in jail any longer. I would like to have visitation with my son.”
Her note obviously didn’t persuade Judge David C. Dally, who wrote in his decision: “Her lifestyle, that of smuggling herself into the country illegally and committing crimes in this country, is not a lifestyle that can provide stability for a child. A child cannot be educated in this way, always in hiding or on the run.”
I wonder if there were German judges who said the same thing about Jewish parents who were in hiding or on the run with their children for violating Nazi laws.
Let’s recap what’s really going on here.
Here’s a woman who comes from a desperately poor country, Guatemala. She risks her life and her freedom to enter the United States to improve her economic lot in life. She no doubt has heard of the American Dream, where extremely poor people, through hard work, can get rich, maybe even as rich as that American family to which she has now lost her son. Maybe she even fantasizes that her son could one day grow up to be a great success, maybe even a judge. She goes to work for an American employer who is willing to use his own money to hire her.
It’s really a classic case in which morality and the law collide. Because in a moral sense, this woman has done absolutely nothing wrong, and certainly not something that would justify having her child stolen away from her. Sure, in the eyes of the law she is a criminal, but under fundamental principles of morality and natural, God-given rights, it is the law itself that is criminal, not her.
Ultimately, this is the issue that every American, especially every Christian, must face in the federal government’s war on immigrants: When the government enacts and enforces laws that violate God’s laws, will I pursue the laws of man or the laws of my God? Everyone is free to make his own choice, which of course is what free will is all about.
Now, I’m sure there are immigration warriors out there who would exclaim, “Oh, I don’t support the stealing of children from illegal immigrants, just as I don’t support those abusive Border Patrol checkpoints on U.S. highways, or raids on American businesses, or the Berlin Fence along the border, or Border Patrol warrantless trespasses onto private farms and ranches, or roving Border Patrol searches of vehicles. I just favor immigration controls and want them to be enforced.”
Well, doh! Isn’t that sort of like saying, “I support lightning but I stand firmly against thunder”? Once immigration controls are enacted, it is a reasonable assumption that the state will do whatever is necessary to see that they are enforced, including stealing children away from people who violate them.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
The Pursuit of Passion
by Jacob G. Hornberger
A friend of mine who is a piano instructor was telling me that a parent of one of her students told her that her child loves the piano so much that she has trouble pulling him away from it. Apparently, the student, who is 17, practices several hours every day. The reason he’s able to do that is that he’s home-schooled.
Let’s assume that home-schooling was once again made illegal, as it was back in the 1950s and 60s. That boy would be forced into the public-schooling system, where he would be required to spend his time every day attaining what the educrats call a “well-rounded” education, one that would entail one hour each on such subjects as English, Social Studies, history, math, and science.
Suppose the boy were to say to the public-school educrats, “Sorry, I’m not interested in any of those subjects. All that I wish to do is play the piano all day long”
No doubt the educrats would laugh at him and say, “You’re here to get an education, boy, a well-rounded one. Now get to class before the bell rings, if you want to avoid detention”
Of course, some students would simply submit and conform, which is really the primary aim of the system. Despite all its faults and failures, no one can deny that public schooling can claim one great achievement: the production of a compliant, conformist citizenry.
Let’s assume that our piano-loving student, however, isn’t one of those types. Unable to continue spending hours every day at the piano, and forced to listen to boring lectures on subjects that don’t interest him, he becomes angry, frustrated, and distracted. He’s bored in class, doesn’t study for tests, and receives failing grades.
The educrats realize that they have a problem on their hands. The boy is not submitting and conforming. He’s a slow learner, a troublemaker. He’s obviously got a severe learning disability. He needs to be treated so that he can be like everyone else — a responsible student who learns to submit to authority and conform to the dictates of state officials.
The solution is obvious. The boy needs to be drugged, in order to help his mind reach the desired level of submissiveness and conformity. When the boy reaches the point where he is able to honestly declare, “I have become one of you,” the drug treatment can be declared a success and can be ended, assuming that the kid has not become psychologically dependent on it.
Unfortunately, all too many parents, who themselves were made into models of submissiveness and conformity by public schooling, end up trusting the state rather than their children. They are unable to recognize that it is the state’s public schooling system itself that is aberrant and dysfunctional and that their children’s resistance to it is perfectly natural and healthy. They end up supporting the state’s diagnosis and drugging of their children.
Thank goodness though that many parents have been able to achieve the necessary breakthrough, which has enabled them to recognize the damage that this aberrant system of coercion, regimentation, and conformity does to children. They have had the wisdom to remove their children from the government’s system of schooling. If only we could free every child from this aberrant system by separating school and state entirely, as our ancestors did with church and state.
Good for those parents who are letting their kid play the piano to his heart’s content. By being free to pursue his passion, not only will he be better off, so will everyone else, especially those who get to listen to his great piano performances.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
How About Abolishing the CIA Now?
by Jacob G. Hornberger
So, let me see if I have this right. The members of the Gestapo would have been let off the hook for the brutality and murders they committed because they were simply following orders. And those who issued the orders would have been let off the hook because compliant and submissive German lawyers had handed them legal opinions opining that what the Gestapo was doing was legal. And the lawyers would have been let off the hook because they were just issuing legal opinions, not committing the brutality and murders?
What a perfect system? How come every tyranny doesn’t employ it?
Isn’t this a good time for Americans to raise their vision to a higher level than just prosecuting the torturers, those who issued the orders, and the lawyers who said it was legal?
How about doing something much grander, something that would bring everlasting benefits to the American people, such as just abolishing the CIA?
For that matter, wouldn’t this be an opportune time to discuss what should have been discussed at the end of the Cold War, if not sooner — whether the time has come to dismantle America’s standing army and the military-industrial complex?
Not only are the CIA and the military the source of America’s foreign-policy woes, not only are their actions subjecting Americans to a perpetual threat of terrorist blowback, not only are they bankrupting our country financially with their ever-growing expenditures, not only have they shamed our country with their torture and sex abuse antics, but they also just happen to pose the biggest threat to the freedom and well-being of the American people, as the Founding Fathers and President Eisenhower suggested.
Consider the kind of people the CIA looks for and attracts: the type of person who loyally follows the orders of his superiors, no questions asked. These are the people in life who lack the courage and moral fortitude to say no when ordered to do something that’s morally or legally wrong. They are compliant, submissive, subservient, and sycophantic.
Even worse, they honestly think that they’re the good guys in society as they faithfully follow their superiors’ orders to break the law. When they encounter people in society who do possess the courage and moral fortitude to challenge government wrongdoing, they look upon them as bad people — people who hate their country, traitors.
The situation is really no different, in principle, in the military. In fact, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the military has been working with the CIA to develop the methods of torture that have been utilized. Familiar with the torture techniques of the Chinese communists during the Korean War, the military simply used those techniques as a foundation for the U.S. torture program. Let’s not forget that long before 9/11 the U.S. military’s infamous School of the Americas was teaching torture to Latin American military and intelligence officials who faithfully carrying out the orders of their brutal and tyrannical superiors.
In both the CIA and the military, loyalty to the president is paramount. While they take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution,” in their minds they fulfill that oath by faithfully carrying out the president’s orders.
It’s not a coincidence that the military and the CIA established their kidnap, torture, and sex abuse camps overseas. They wanted their operations to be totally free of interference from both the Supreme Court and the Congress, which they view as impediments to the president’s efforts to protect the nation. Again, all that matters to these people is the commander in chief and the will to carry out his orders.
Consider, for example, the invasion of Iraq. Everyone knows that President Bush never secured a congressional declaration of war, as the Constitution requires. Yet, the military faithfully carried out his order to invade and occupy that country, killing as many Iraqis as necessary in the process.
Yet, there was at least one military officer who said no. He was Lt. Eric Watada. He refused to deploy to Iraq on the ground that to do so would be legally and morally wrong.
How did the military view Watada? As a bad guy! They condemned him, reviled him, and criminally prosecuted him. In their minds, supporting and defending the Constitution means faithfully and obediently carrying out the orders of the commander in chief, something that Watada refused to do because to do so would be wrong.
The thought that Watada is the hero for having the courage, conviction, and moral fortitude to stand against unlawful orders is alien to the CIA/military mindset. The way they see it, the job of the CIA agent and the soldier is not to question why, but simply to carry out orders or die.
This is one of the primary reasons that the Founding Fathers and the Framers opposed standing armies. They clearly understood that standing armies inevitably attract the type of people at the CIA — the people in life who loyally obey orders of their superiors, no matter how illegal or immoral, while convincing themselves that they’re the heroes and that those Americans who have the courage and moral fortitude to oppose the wrongdoing are scum.
Another reason the Founding Fathers and the Framers opposed standing armies is just as important: They understood that inevitably rulers get tempted to employ such armies against those citizens who do have what these people do not have — the courage and moral fortitude to oppose government wrongdoing.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
The Cancerous Rot at the Center of the Empire
by Jacob G. Hornberger
In obvious response to growing calls for the prosecution of Bush administration personnel who tortured people or who authorized the torture of people, former Vice President Dick Cheney has called on the CIA to declassify information showing that that the torture delivered “good” intelligence. Maybe he is referring to the 183 times that the CIA waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or to the 83 times the CIA waterboarded Abu Zubadah.
My question is: Why limit torture to suspected terrorists? Why not expand it to suspected murderers, drug dealers, robbers, and kidnappers? After all, can’t those types of people commit just as heinous an act as terrorists?
Consider, for example, the drug dealers along the U.S.-Mexico border. They’re killing law-enforcement officers, judges, and other public officials. Suppose the U.S. military or Border Patrol takes a suspected drug dealer into custody. What would be wrong with torturing him into providing information about plans to kill government officials? Wouldn’t this information be just as valuable as information extracted from a suspected terrorist?
Couldn’t the same be true of suspected kidnappers? Wouldn’t the forcible extraction of information help save the life of a kidnap victim? What would be wrong with torturing the person into telling where the victim is being held?
There are, of course, solid and important reasons why it would be wrong, both legally and morally, for U.S. law-enforcement officers to torture criminal suspects in their custody.
For one thing, the U.S. Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land that controls the conduct of government officials, bars government agents from inflicting cruel and unusual punishments on people. It also protects a person from being forced to give information that might tend to incriminate him.
Secondly, in the United States the American people, through their elected representatives, have, by statute, made it a criminal offense, for law-enforcement officers to torture or abuse criminal suspects.
Third, as a moral matter, ever since the founding of our nation the American people have stood squarely in opposition to the power of government officials to torture people, no matter how heinous the crime and no matter how valuable the information that they might be able to disclose.
Finally, there is always the distinct possibility that a criminal suspect might be innocent or might not posses the information that the torturer is seeking.
Several years before 9/11, I visited The Torture Museum in San Gimignano, Italy. It was the most gruesome place I have ever seen in my life. Here are two links that give you an idea of what the place was like, but don’t click on them unless you’re prepared to see some horrible methods by which government officials have tortured other people, including a depiction of waterboarding in medieval times: https://www.corkscrew-balloon.com/balloon/98/siena/img/torture.html https://www.corkscrew-balloon.com/balloon/99/siena/torture.html
As I was walking through that museum, the last thing I would have ever figured was that a time would come when there would actually be a national torture debate in the United States, one in which people were actually debating whether torture should be permitted along with the relative “benefits” of torture. For that matter, it was the last thing I would have ever thought would be considered when I was taking civics and social studies classes in the public schools I attended as I child.
The fact that a torture debate is even taking place in the United States of America convinces me more than ever that it isn’t external enemies that ultimately bring down an empire. Instead, it’s the cancerous rot that the empire produces from within that ultimately destroys the moral foundation of the society.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Obama Is Just another Political Hack
by Jacob G. Hornberger
While there’s always room for hope, so far it is clear that Barack Obama is just a standard political hack from Chicago who made it to the presidency, primarily through his gift of gab and through voter dissatisfaction with the standard political hacks in the Republican Party.
While Obama has disclosed the Bush torture memos, he has simultaneously promised that U.S. government personnel who broke criminal laws against torture will not be prosecuted because they were simply following orders. At the same time, Obama has expressed his opposition to prosecuting the higher-ups who gave those orders, on the grounds that it’s time to move on.
Despite his much-vaunted opposition to Bush’s invasion of Iraq, Obama has embraced the Iraq occupation by refusing to order an immediate withdraw of all U.S. troops and by promising to keep tens of thousands of troops in Iraq for several more years.
Not only is Obama embracing the Bush administration’s indefinite occupation of Afghanistan, he is doubling down Bush’s bet by increasing the number of U.S. troops there and ordering the killing of people in neighboring Pakistan.
Here at home, Obama is defending and even expanding the Bush administration’s war-on-terrorism powers, which have constituted among the greatest infringements on civil liberties and privacy in our nation’s history.
Obama has announced that the cruel and brutal 50-year-old embargo will continue to hammer the Cuban people, under the old Cold War rationale that Cuba’s communist regime must do more before the embargo can be lifted.
At the same time, Obama is continuing the Bush administration’s policy of unrestrained federal spending, which continues to send our nation down the road to inflation and financial bankruptcy.
After enduring eight years of pro-empire, pro-interventionist policies under the Bush administration, it’s increasingly obvious that we’re in for another four years of such policies under Obama.
How unfortunate. If only Obama could break free of the pro-empire, pro-interventionist box in which he operates. If only he would be able to rise above the standard mindset of an American political hack and instead think terms of a grand vision in favor of restoring a constitutional republic to our land.
Alas, that would require Obama to confront uncomfortable realities about the paradigm of empire and intervention that has held our nation in its grip for so long.
Prior to the election, Obama was often compared to John Kennedy. Let’s follow up on that comparison.
Kennedy came into office as mired in the Cold War muck as Obama is in the war on terrorism muck. The defense establishment and the CIA had the same powerful control and influence then as they do now, enabling them to induce Kennedy into supporting the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
That was followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust, a crisis in which members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were pressuring Kennedy into taking the offense with a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.
As James W. Douglass points out in his excellent book JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, by his third year in office Kennedy was apparently experiencing an epiphany. He was beginning to rise above the mindset of a standard Massachusetts political hack and thinking on a high, grander level. He began recognizing the possibility of ending the Cold War with the Soviets, which of course would have transformed world history.
By this time, Kennedy was beginning to understand President Eisenhower’s famous warning about the enormous threat that the U.S. military-industrial complex posed to the American people. For all practical purposes, Kennedy had declared war on the CIA for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, promising to tear that agency into a thousand pieces. He had fired Allan Dulles as head of the CIA. He had guaranteed that Castro would not be the target of another U.S. regime-change operation. He told close associates that he planned to withdraw all U.S. forces from Vietnam after the 1964 election. He established secret personal communications with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and was attempting to do the same thing with Fidel Castro.
Whether you accept Douglass’s thesis that agents of the CIA and defense establishment took Kennedy out, in an attempt to protect the national security of the United States from his actions, is beside the point. The point is that by the time he was killed, Kennedy was apparently breaking free of the old, decrepit Cold War mindset against America’s World War II ally, the Soviet Union, and trying to figure out a way to end the Cold War and move America in a non-imperial, non-militarist direction.
Alas, it was not to be. Kennedy was killed, and Johnson, a standard political hack from Texas, continued operating in the old ways, expanding the war in Vietnam, continuing the embargo on Cuba, and continuing the Cold War, all to the great satisfaction and contentment of the CIA and the defense establishment, both of which were convinced that all this was necessary to protect the national security of the United States.
And so here we are today — mired in the war on terrorism, a “war” that was brought by the 9/11 attacks, which were a direct result of the U.S. government’s post-Cold War foreign policy of empire and interventionism in the Middle East. That has produced not only the never-ending occupation of Afghanistan and the continued occupation of Iraq, but also a perpetual war on terrorism that guarantees the flow of never-ending profits to the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about, not to mention ever-increasing infringements on the liberties and privacy of the American people.
Can Obama rise to the occasion and move America in a different direction, as Kennedy was starting to do. Who knows? But I wouldn’t put much hope in that prospect. My feeling is that Obama is much more like Lyndon Johnson than John Kennedy.
My hope is in the American people. If they’re able to achieve the necessary breakthrough, the political hacks will come around. Can Americans rise to the occasion and recognize that the root of their foreign-policy woes lies in empire and intervention? Can they come to understand the nature of Eisenhower’s warnings to them as he was leaving office? Can they see that their only solution lies in the restoration of a constitutional republic to our land?
Time will tell. If they do, the years ahead will hold peace, prosperity, and harmony. If they don’t, the years ahead will hold more death, destruction, financial bankruptcy, and loss of liberty.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Three Successes in the War on Immigrants
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Amidst all the failures and destructiveness of U.S. socialism, interventionism, and imperialism, U.S. officials can claim 3 recent successes in their war on immigrants.
The first success story involves a man named Keith Eckel, a 61-year-old farmer in Pennsylvania who is one of the largest tomato growers in the United States.
Not this year though. This year, Eckel isn’t growing any tomatoes at all.
The reason? The federal government’s war on immigrants has shut down his supply of laborers.
For decades, Eckel has been hiring illegal aliens who have been furnishing him all the proper documents indicating that they were legal. However, given the federal crackdown in the war on immigrants, Eckel decided that he couldn’t risk planting millions of tomato plants only to watch them rot in the fields for lack of workers to harvest them. Better to simply not plant any tomatoes at all.
About a year ago, Riverside, New Jersey, enacted legislation imposing criminal penalties on people who employed or rented to illegal immigrants.
According to the New York Times, “Within months, hundreds, if not thousands of recent immigrants from Brazil and other Latin American countries had fled…. The local economy suffered. Hair salons, restaurants and corner shops that catered to the immigrants saw business plummet; several closed. Once boarded-up storefronts downtown were boarded up again.”
Riverside officials recently rescinded the law, hoping that maybe, just maybe, the immigrants will return. As Mayor George Conard put it, “I don’t think people knew there would be such an economic burden.”
At a recent meeting of Google engineers, someone asked where Sanjay Mavinkurve was. He’s a 28-year-old Indian immigrant who helped lay out Facebook when he was a student at Harvard.
It turns out that Sanjay was in Canada, where he resides. While U.S. immigration central planners have given him a work visa, they haven’t done the same for his wife, Samvita Padukone. Like Sanjay, she too was born in India. Rather than live and work with the other engineers at Google in Silicon Valley, Sanjay has chosen to live with his wife in Canada. He is the only engineer in a Google office filled with marketers.
I suppose the response of the immigration central planners would be that Samvita might go on welfare, she might have a baby in the United States, she might burden American public schools with her children, she might have to go to the emergency room, she might take a job away from Americans, and she might be a terrorist (India is next to Pakistan, which is next to Afghanistan, where the terrorists live.).
While the crises and chaos continue to worsen in the drug war, monetary policy, fiscal policy, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Iraq, Afghanistan, the war on terrorism, and foreign policy, at least U.S. officials have three recent successes to crow about in their war on immigrants.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation, publisher of The Case for Free Trade and Open Immigration.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
World Cop and American Daddy
by Jacob G. Hornberger
In its self-proclaimed role as world cop, the U.S. military is now assuming the role of protecting U.S.-owned vessels — and maybe even ships owned by foreigners — from Somali pirates. Actually, the U.S. Navy should butt out of the international piracy field and leave ship-owners to their own devices in dealing with the piracy problem.
Traveling overseas involves risks. If a person doesn’t wish to incur such risks, then he should stay home. For example, traveling in Mexico involves the risk of being kidnapped by drug cartels and being held for ransom. Should the U.S. military invade Mexico in order to free an American being held captive by a Mexican drug gang? No! When an American travels into Mexico, he cannot expect his government to be his daddy by sending troops to extricate him from a bad situation.
Bad things happen all over the world. Some places are more dangerous than others. Each person must come up with the best way to deal with such risks and dangers. As Peter Leeson points out in National Review Online, the ideal solution for dealing with the piracy problem is to place the oceans and waterways under private ownership and control. Absent that, however, each person must decide for himself how best to deal with the possibility of being attacked by the Somali pirates in international (i.e., non-owned) waters.
Of course, there is an obvious and simplistic answer: the ships should arm and defend themselves. Yet, we all know that that’s not the solution that most of the ships have come up with. Instead, they have intentionally remained disarmed. Why is that?
The ship-owner apparently feels that the odds of a successful pirate attack are relatively low. The chances are that most of the time, his ship is going to make it through successfully. He has obviously weighed the cost of violent resistance if the odds go against him and the pirates successfully board his ship. A shootout will likely result in death or serious injury to crew members, which could mean millions of dollars in lawsuits, damages, and attorney’s fees. Ship-owners might well figure that compared to that risk, they’re better off simply paying the one or two millions of dollars in ransom to the pirates, especially given that pirates haven’t been harming the crews they kidnap.
Why don’t the ships hire private security forces to guard them? Possibly because the costs of such forces are much higher or about equal to the amount of the ransom they have to pay the pirates. Moreover, there’s always the possibility that the ship will make it through without being hit. Thus, the company might figure that the risk of being hit by the pirates is too low to justify the hiring of a permanent security force.
Moreover, many countries do not allow armed ships to enter their ports. Thus, it’s possible that ship owners do not wish to forego the benefits of landing in those ports by arming their ships.
By intervening in this process, it appears that the U.S. government has done a wonderful thing. But has it? The implication is that it saved Phillips’ life, but that’s nonsense given that the pirates have not been killing the crews they’ve been taking captive. As soon as they’ve been receiving the ransom money, they’ve been releasing the crews unharmed.
So, what the U.S. Navy has actually done is simply save the ship-owner one million or two million dollars. Yet, the entire Navy exercise wasn’t itself a cost-free endeavor. I’m willing to bet that sending all those Navy vessels to free Phillips cost much more than the one or two million dollars that would have had to be paid in ransom money. Thus, the substantial cost of saving the ship-owner one or two million dollars has simply been transferred to the backs of the American taxpayer.
Moreover, since it was the U.S. government that killed the Somali pirates, who by the way were teenagers, there is now the possibility of revenge or blowback against other Americans, a situation that would probably not have arisen if the killing had been done by the ship’s crew rather than by agents of the U.S. government.
To make matters worse, there are now increasing demands for increased U.S. military intervention in Somalia, which will inevitably lead to more blowback, more crises, more terrorists, more military spending, and more infringements on the liberty of the American people.
The world is a dangerous place with lots of dangerous creatures in it. The American people would be well-served to rein in their government and prohibit it from going abroad in search of dangerous creatures to destroy. Americans who travel overseas should understand that they are doing so at their own risk. If they would rather not incur such risks, they should stay at home.
It’s time to end the U.S. government’s role as world cop and American daddy.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation, publisher of Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax by Sheldon Richman.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Piracy and the IRS
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Of course, it’s just a coincidence but isn’t at least a bit ironic that all the hullabaloo about piracy has occurred near April 15? After all, is the IRS really any different, in principle, from the pirates?
Sure, it’s true that the IRS doesn’t attack ships, take crews hostage, and demand a ransom. But doesn’t it attach liens on ships, houses, cars, and bank accounts whenever it feels that the owner of such things owes income taxes to the federal government?
Moreover, doesn’t the IRS simply seize people’s property without having to go to court, show evidence, and secure a court order? Isn’t that what the pirates do?
And what happens if someone forcibly resists the IRS’s seizure of his property? Won’t the IRS do the same sort of bad things to the resister that the pirates do to people who resist their seizures? In fact, isn’t the firepower at the disposal of the IRS, which is provided by the FBI, U.S. Marshalls, local sheriffs, and possibly even the Pentagon, significantly superior to that of the pirates?
I suppose it could be argued that what the IRS is doing is legal while what the pirates are doing is illegal. But isn’t there a distinction between legal and moral? That is, just because something is legal, does that necessarily mean it’s moral? If it was legal for the government to force everyone to send his children to church every Sunday, how many people would consider that to be moral?
What’s moral about seizing a portion of a person’s income against his will? Why is that any more moral than seizing a person’s ship? If the Somali government enacted a law commissioning the pirates to seize passing ships, would that then make their actions moral?
For most of the first 125 years of American history, the American people lived without any income taxation. Everything people earned in their jobs and businesses belonged to them. They were free to pass their entire life’s savings on to their children, because there was no inheritance tax. That’s how many poor families went from rags to riches in one, two, or three generations.
What is important to note, however, is not so much the economic benefits that came with the absence of income taxation but rather the reason that our American ancestors rejected income taxation. The reason involved the concept of morality. They believed that it was as immoral for government to seize a portion of a person’s income as it is for pirates to seize people’s ships.
The right to keep one’s income was considered a fundamental right, one that preexisted government. Our ancestors considered such a right to be an essential part of a free society. If government had the power to seize people’s income, our ancestors believed, then Americans could not truly call themselves a free people.
Unfortunately, the concepts of freedom and property that formed the founding of our nation have been long forgotten among modern-day Americans. Today, freedom is defined by the level of income-tax rates and the number income-tax deductions that government officials permit people to take.
Sometimes the government is nice and lets people keep more of their income. Sometimes, it’s not so nice and permits people to keep less, especially when government expenditures for both domestic and foreign projects are soaring out of control. There are incessant debates on tax rates and deductions, but who questions the idea that government should even possess the power to seize people’s income?
In actuality, the income tax, with its tax rates and allowable deductions, is like an allowance that a parent gives a child. Having effectively nationalized income, the government decides how much of an allowance everyone will be getting. Of course, the concept of an allowance fits perfectly within the context of a paternalistic welfare state, where the citizenry lookS upon the federal government as a daddy, one that provides their retirement, healthcare, education, and food and keeps them safe from drug dealers, illegal aliens, terrorists, pirates, and other scary monsters in the world.
As Americans continue to encounter crises and chaos with virtually every program emanating from the federal welfare-warfare state, we can only hope that they will finally come to realize that the roots of their woes lies not in freedom and free markets, as the statists are claiming, but rather with socialism, interventionism, and empire. We can also hope that they’ll see that the jugular vein of the welfare-warfare state is the federal income tax, which provides the money to fund the statist junk.
Ditching the income tax and the IRS is an essential part of restoring liberty and a republic to our land.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation, publisher of Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax by Sheldon Richman.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Freedom by Permission
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Through executive decree, President Obama is graciously easing restrictions on travel to Cuba and restrictions on sending money to Cuba. The decree, however, applies only to Cuban-Americans who have family members in Cuba. The rest of the American people will continue to be subject to harsh federal criminal and civil penalties for traveling to Cuba and spending their money there.
What is wrong with this picture? Well, it perfectly encapsulates how modern-day Americans have come to meekly accept the supremacy of the federal government and the subservience of the individual in American life.
It wasn’t always that way, of course. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, the words he used reflected the commonly held convictions of the British colonists who would go on to establish the United States of America.
Jefferson emphasized that people had fundamental, inherent, natural, and God-given rights and that such rights preexist government. People call government into existence to protect the exercise of these rights. The government becomes the servant and the citizen remains the master.
As a servant, the government has no legitimate authority to deprive its master, the citizenry, of their rights. If the servant (government) decides to take away people’s fundamental rights, the people have the right to alter or even abolish the government and bring into existence a new servant, one that acknowledges its proper role of protecting, not infringing upon, people’s fundamental rights.
What are the fundamental rights that people have been endowed with? Most everyone would agree that freedom of travel is one of them. Everyone has the natural, inherent, God-given right to travel anywhere in the world he wishes, so long as he isn’t trespassing on anyone else’s rights.
Even U.S. officials implicitly acknowledge that freedom of travel is a fundamental right with which the federal government cannot legitimately interfere. That’s, in fact, why they haven’t made it illegal for Americans to travel to Cuba. Instead, in a clever sleight of hand, they made it illegal for Americans to spend their money in Cuba. That way, U.S. officials could continue to proclaim to the world, somewhat hypocritically, that the U.S. government respects the fundamental right of freedom of travel.
However, there’s a fundamental flaw in that reasoning. The right to spend one’s money as he sees fit is as fundamental and inherent a right as freedom of travel. After all, it’s your money, isn’t it? Why shouldn’t you be free to do whatever you want with it, including traveling wherever you wish and spending or investing it the way you want? Under what legitimate authority does a servant dictate to a master what he can and cannot do with his own money?
Today’s Americans, notwithstanding their annual July 4 celebrations honoring the Declaration of Independence, have a totally different way of viewing rights and the federal government. In their minds, freedom is a conditional gift bestowed by the federal government, one that U.S. officials can rescind, regulate, and control at will. That’s why they see nothing wrong with the federal government, their master, controlling where they, the servants, travel and spend their money.
How many Americans will ask themselves the following important questions: Under what authority is President Obama easing restrictions on the freedom of the American people? Isn’t freedom a natural and God-given right that no government can legitimately regulate or control? If the government has the legal authority to punish people for exercising fundamental and inherent rights, then how can such rights truly be considered fundamental and inherent? Why should fundamental, inherent, God-given rights be subject to the control of government, especially when government is supposed to be the servant and the citizenry is supposed to be the master?
Cuban-Americans have long accused the Cuban regime of having abandoned the principles of its own revolution. As Cuban-Americans expressly gratitude over President Obama’s easing of restrictions on their freedom, while other Americans give nary a thought to the continued deprivation of their freedom to travel and spend their money the way the want, can’t the same be said of Americans and their Revolution?
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Monday, April 13, 2009
In Search of Constitution-Free Zones
by Jacob G. Hornberger
To gain a good perspective on how the Pentagon and the CIA view the Constitution, all one has to do is consider what they’ve done with their prison camps in Cuba and Afghanistan.
Keep in mind, first of all, what the Constitution is. It is the supreme law of the land that we the people have imposed on federal officials, including those people serving in the military and paramilitary forces of the federal government.
While our American ancestors understood the need for a federal government, they also understood that that same government would constitute the biggest threat to their freedom and well-being. The way they dealt with that threat was to use the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to impose severe limits on the powers of federal officials, including those in the military.
So, what did the Pentagon do? Loyally following the orders of the president, it established a prison camp in Cuba as part of its “war on terrorism.” Why Cuba? Because the feeling was that a prison camp in Cuba would be beyond the reach of the U.S. Constitution and the federal-court system that the Constitution established.
In other words, the Pentagon, the institution that prides itself on taking an oath to “support and defend” the Constitution, established a prison camp that Pentagon officials hoped and intended would a Constitution-free zone. The reason they had that hope and intention was so that they could do whatever they wanted to prisoners without having to concern themselves with the higher law that the American people had imposed on them. That would enable the Pentagon to engage in such acts as infliction of cruel and unusual punishments (e.g., torture and sex abuse), denial of due process, denial of right to counsel, denial of habeas corpus, and violation of other principles found in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The U.S. Supreme Court, however, dashed the Pentagon’s hopes when it held that the Gitmo prison camp was subject to the constraints of the U.S. Constitution and that Gitmo prisoners had the right to test their detention through the writ of habeas corpus, the ancient legal process whose roots stretched all the way back to Magna Carta.
Now, at that point you would ordinarily think that that would have settled the matter. That is, even though the Pentagon set up its Cuban camp for the precise purpose of avoiding the Constitution, once the Supreme Court assumed jurisdiction, wouldn’t you think that under our system of government — one in which the military and paramilitary is supposed to be subordinate to the civilian authority — the military would simply submit to the Supreme Court’s ruling? After all, don’t forget: the Pentagon and the CIA have taken oaths to support and defend the Constitution.
Alas, it was not to be. Rather than submit to the ruling of the Supreme Court, the Pentagon and the CIA instead embarked on a course of action specifically designed to circumvent the Court’s ruling and the Court’s jurisdiction.
Here’s how they did it. As they continued kidnapping people in different parts of the world, instead of imprisoning them at Gitmo they simply imprisoned them at the Pentagon’s Bagram prison camp in Afghanistan. Why Afghanistan? Because then they could tell the federal courts, “You don’t have jurisdiction to review our actions here because this is a theater of war, and you don’t have the power to interfere with our wartime operations in a theater of war.”
A clever trick, right? Unfortunately for the Pentagon and the CIA, however, a D.C. federal judge didn’t buy it. Piercing through the legal sham, he held that detainees kidnapped and deposited at the Bagram prison camp have the same right of habeas corpus to test their detention as the prisoners at Guantanamo.
Unfortunately, under the direction of President Obama, U.S. officials are appealing the decision, arguing the same thing that President Bush did with respect to Guantanamo: that the Bagram prison camp is a Constitution-free zone and, therefore, free of any control by the U.S. federal courts.
Oh well, so much for Obama’s hope-and-change hype that helped him get elected.
Our American ancestors in 1787 understood that the federal government would inevitably attract power-lusting people who hated constitutional restraints on power. They also knew what such power-lusting officials would do in the absence of a Constitution and a Bill of Rights. How wise and prescient our ancestors were!
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Libertarian Border-Control Advocates Have It Wrong
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Among the arguments that libertarian advocates of border controls often use is the sovereignty argument. It goes like this: Since government is the owner of the highways, it can legitimately control who travels on them, much as a private owner has the right to control who comes into his home or business. These libertarians claim that if the highways were privately owned, the private owners would bar foreigners from freely using them and, therefore, the federal government should do the same thing.
There are several flaws, however, with this argument.
While government is the owner of the highways, does that mean that it should have all the rights of ownership that private owners have? Surely not! For example, the government owns and operates the public schools. As the owner, should the government be able to establish one set of schools for blacks and other set of schools for whites? Most everyone today would say no. While private owners should be free to discriminate on any basis they wish, most of us do not want government to be able to do so. Of course, libertarians would agree that the government shouldn’t own schools. But given that it does, I would think that most libertarians would not want the government to discriminate against students on the basis of such things as race, religion, or economic status.
The same principle applies to such things as highways. While libertarians would favor the privatization of highways, as long as government owns them most people, including border-control libertarians, would agree that it would be wrong for government to discriminate against highway users on the basis or race, religion, economic status, and other such factors.
Highways are simply a means by which people are able to get from private property to private property. It is estimated that there are about 10 million illegal aliens in the United States. None of them are sleeping on the highways. They have made their way into private homes and businesses through the consent of the owners of those establishments. To the extent they’ve used the roads, they have done so for the same reason everyone else does — as a means of getting from point A to point B.
When foreigners enter the United States, they are exercising what libertarians consider are fundamental rights: freedom of travel, freedom of association, and economic liberty. They use the highways simply as a convenient means to getting to the private establishments where they exercise such rights.
Thus, there are two important points here. First, in making their sovereignty argument the border-control advocates automatically assume that private owners of highways would prevent foreigners from using their highways to enter the United States. However, how valid is that assumption, given the high number of Americans who have permitted illegal immigrants to enter their homes and businesses all across the United States? Why would private owners of highways be any more willing to give up revenue than private owners of homes and businesses? Have you ever seen any retail store with the following sign in its window: “We don’t wish make money from immigrants. Please take your business elsewhere”?
Second, in making their sovereignty argument, libertarian border-control advocates are calling on government to suppress what libertarians themselves consider to be fundamental, inherent rights that preexist government. How can such rights be fundamental and inherent if government wields the power to suppress them simply because it happens to own the means by which people get from point A to Point B to exercise them?
Additionally, it’s interesting that libertarian border-control advocates never extend their sovereignty argument to state and local governments. In other words, if the federal government, as owner of highways, has the sovereign authority to prevent foreigners from using its highways, why don’t states and localities have the same authority to erect border controls around their respective states and communities?
There is another fatal flaw in the libertarian sovereignty argument, one that I raised many years ago but which, as far as I know, no libertarian border-control advocate has ever addressed. My hunch is that the reason they’ve never addressed it is that they don’t have an answer to it.
Suppose I own a ranch in New Mexico that adjoins the Mexican border. My home is located on the ranch, 5 miles from the highway and near the border. I also own the adjoining ranch on the Mexican side, where my brother, who happens to be a Mexican citizen, resides. One day I invite my brother over for dinner.
On that day, the libertarian border-control advocate happens to be riding with a U.S. Border Patrol agent along the government highway that adjoins my property, in search of people illegally crossing the border. They take a turn to enter onto my ranch but encounter a locked gate. They have no warrant to enter my property but proceed to enter onto it anyway pursuant to the power to control the border. To get past the locked gate, they simply shoot the lock off.
They then travel five miles toward the border, go past my house, and station themselves on my property in order to control the border. Now, keep in mind that the border is simply an imaginary line that divides one large tract of land that I own. The libertarian border-control advocate and the Border Patrol Agent can’t really stand on the border; they’ve got to stand on my property, without my consent, to protect the border.
That evening, my brother approaches the border on his way to my house for dinner. The Border Patrol agent declares, “Don’t cross that imaginary line! We have border controls in this country.”
My brother responds, “I have the fundamental right to travel on my brother’s ranch and to come to his house for dinner. Haven’t you heard of private property and freedom of association?” My brother adds, “You have no right to be standing on my brother’s ranch without his consent. You had no right to shoot the lock off his gate. You are trespassers — both of you.”
My brother proceeds to cross the border, heading to my house for dinner. The Border Patrol agent now has a choice — either step aside and let him pass or initiate force against him, e.g., by shooting him. One can only imagine the spectacle of a libertarian border-control advocate exhorting the Border Patrol agent to enforce the border by shooting my brother, notwithstanding the fact that my brother has engaged in the purely peaceful act of coming onto my property for dinner at my invitation.
How can the libertarian reconcile his exhortation to shoot my brother with the libertarian non-aggression principle? He cannot, which is a fairly good sign that his sovereignty argument is fatally flawed, at least from a libertarian standpoint.
Virtually every part of the federal government’s welfare-warfare state is in crisis and chaos, and its decades-long war on immigrants is no exception. As Americans reflect on all the bad things the welfare-warfare state has brought our nation, today — Good Friday — would be a good place to start questioning the war on immigrants. When asked what the first and greatest commandment was, Jesus replied “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.” Every Christian owes it to himself to ask how it is possible to reconcile America’s war on immigrants with those sacred commandments.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Fujimori’s Lesson for Bush
by Jacob G. Hornberger
If President Bush and Vice-President Cheney think that time is on their side with respect to crimes committed by their administration, this week’s criminal conviction of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori should put those thoughts to rest. Returning to Peru in the hope of returning to power, Fujimori was instead put on trial and convicted of “crimes against humanity,” including the killing of 25 people by military death squad.
Meanwhile, a Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzon, has opened a criminal investigation of six former Bush officials — Alberto Gonzalez, Douglas Feith, David Addington, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and William Haynes — for torture allegations arising out of the Pentagon’s operations at Guantanamo.
Garzon was the judge who secured a criminal indictment of former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet, which led to Spain’s extradition request for Pinochet when he visited London. While the request was ultimately unsuccessful, Pinochet was detained in London for a year awaiting the final disposition of the request.
Some might argue that a Spanish judge has no legitimate jurisdiction over crimes committed by U.S. officials in Cuba or elsewhere. However, U.S. officials are going to be hard put convincing people of that argument.
Chuckie Taylor, the son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, has just been sentenced in U.S. district court to serve 97 years in federal prison for torture crimes committed in Liberia. Thus, if the U.S. government has the power to prosecute, convict, and punish foreign officials for torture crimes committed in foreign countries, how likely is it that the Bush people will convince a Spanish court (or any other foreign court) that U.S. officials cannot be put on trial for committing torture crimes in Cuba or elsewhere?
For many years, U.S. officials have endorsed the idea of an international criminal court for rulers who commit human-rights crimes. Well, except for one big exception — U.S. officials always made it clear that the court would apply only to foreign rulers, not U.S. rulers. The rational was that the United States was different from everywhere else — here, public officials would not be able to escape justice for their crimes.
What nonsense!
Is there any effort by any U.S. Attorney’s office in the country to initiate a grand-jury investigation into the torture allegations at Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, the CIA’s black sites, and elsewhere? Is the Justice Department seeking the appointment of a special prosecutor or initiating its own criminal investigation?
Of course not. And President Obama, the self-proclaimed agent of hope and change, has already signaled his position, by essentially proclaiming: “Let’s put the past behind us and move on.”
Is it any wonder that so much of the world looks upon the U.S. government as a paragon of hypocrisy and double standards? How else can one look upon a regime that calls for an international criminal court for everyone else’s rulers and immunity from its own rulers under the pretentious attitude of “Unlike others, we will prosecute and punish our own officials,” and then, when evidence of criminal wrongdoing surfaces, proclaims “Let’s put the past behind us and just move on.”
My hunch is that Bush and his people will be excluding Europe from those speaking engagements that garner them hundreds of thousands of dollars. They know what happened to Augusto Pinochet. But even sitting at home here in the United States for the rest of their lives might not be totally safe in the long run. Just ask Alberto Fujimori, who just got sentenced to serve 25 years in jail for offenses committed some 15 years ago.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
The Bizarre World of the Pentagon
by Jacob G. Hornberger
If you had any doubts that the Pentagon lives in a bizarre world all its own, such doubts will surely be dispelled when you read this blog post by Glenn Greenwald. The post concerns Clive Stafford, an international human rights lawyer who represents Binyam Mohamed, a British citizen whom the Pentagon recently released from Guantanamo after several years of imprisonment. Upon his return to Britain, Mohamed detailed brutal torture to which he was subjected at Guantanamo.
Before relaying what the Pentagon is doing to Stafford, permit me first to remind everyone what the official position of the Pentagon, President Bush, and President Obama has been from 2001 through the present: “We don’t torture.”
Mohamed secured a major court ruling in Britain ordering the British government to turn over CIA documents in its possession detailing his torture. That major court decision, however, was quickly overturned because of a threat by U.S. officials to terminate intelligence-sharing activities with the British government.
In other words, “we don’t torture” but we will threaten you with severe punitive action if you reveal information that we shared with you on how we tortured one of your citizens.
Stafford drafted a letter to Obama detailing the torture of his client. However, in the abundance of precaution he first submitted the letter to what is called the Privilege Review Board, a board that is presumably composed of U.S. military officials, whose identities are kept secret. The reason he did that is because the Pentagon requires lawyers for Guantanamo prisoners to sign an agreement promising to keep secret what their clients tell them about how they’re being tortured. Of course, don’t forget the mantra — “We don’t torture” — that the Pentagon keeps repeating even as it requires those defense lawyers to sign those non-disclosure agreements.
So, Stafford submitted his letter detailing the torture of his client to that super-secret Privilege Review Board, asking for permission to disclose the details of the torture to President Obama, who is the U.S. military’s commander in chief.
Well, guess what that super-secret Privilege Review Board did. It returned the letter to Stafford, with everything in the letter redacted.
And this from the people who steadfastly claim, with straight faces, that “we don’t torture”!
So, Stafford decided to send Obama not the full letter detailing the torture but instead just the redacted letter. Perhaps he hoped that Obama, who portrayed himself throughout his presidential campaign as a super agent for hope and change, would get the point — that his subordinates were keeping information about how they’ve tortured Mohamed from reaching him.
That didn’t sit too well with the super-secret Privilege Review Board. So, lo and behold, it has now filed criminal charges against Stafford in a Washington, D.C., court, for sending the redacted letter he received to President Obama.
Greenwald also reminds us that the Pentagon specifically asked Mohamed to agree to never disclose what the Pentagon had done to him at Gitmo as a condition of release (even while, again, steadfastly claiming that “we don’t torture”). To his credit, Mohamed refused to do so, unlike Australian David Hicks and American John Walker Lindh, two former Pentagon prisoners who acceded to the Pentagon’s demand that they keep silent about their torture as part of plea bargains entered into with the government.
At the risk of asking some dumb questions, if the Pentagon is telling the truth when it claims that “we don’t torture,” why is it going to such great lengths to keep its prisoners from disclosing how they’ve been tortured? And why is it doing its best to punish lawyers who are simply trying to advise the commander in chief of how the Pentagon is torturing people? Aren’t these the type of things the authorities in China do? Or that they do in Bizarro World?
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
A Fantastic Speech on the Empire
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Last night I saw one of the greatest speeches I’ve ever seen, which took place at our Economic Liberty Lecture Series at George Mason University. The speech was by Bruce Fein, whose Washington Times column we often link to in our FFF Email Update and who was one of the speakers at our conference “Restoring the Republic 2008: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties.” Bruce is one of the nation’s greatest and most able defenders of the Constitution, civil liberties, privacy, and a republic.
The theme of Bruce’s speech was how America’s abandonment of a constitutional republic and its embrace of a worldwide empire are taking our nation down the road to ruin, not only economically but especially with respect to the loss of our rights and freedoms. He showed how throughout history empires have led to disaster, mentioning specifically the Roman Empire, the Soviet Empire, and the British Empire. He reminded the audience that the Roman Empire fell to invaders after previous generations of politicians had imposed massive taxes and debts on the citizenry, which weakened the strength and resolve of the citizens from within.
Bruce pointed out that it is U.S. military involvement overseas, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, that produces the anger and hatred against the United States, which then generates the perpetual threat that U.S. officials use to justify ever-increasing expenditures for the military and the military-industrial complex. He advocated bringing the troops home, which, if nothing else, at least would stop their periodic killing of wedding parties and others as part of the U.S. campaign to find and kill the terrorists.
Bruce oriented his talk around the vision for America set forth by America’s Founding Fathers — a republic, whose aim would be to influence the world through becoming an exemplar of freedom rather an empire whose troops would go abroad to slay “monsters” through force of arms. He pointed out that with the fall of the Soviet Union, there is no nation in the world that has the military capability of invading and conquering the United States, which presents a unique opportunity for the American people to dismantle the nation’s enormous standing army. He pointed out that if a foreign regime were ever to attack the United States, most Americans, both men and women, would quickly and voluntarily come to the defense of their country and their families. In other words, a free people will fight invaders with full resolve, while an enslaved people will oftentimes lack the will to fight, as what happened with the Roman Empire.
In response to a question from the audience, Bruce made an interesting contrast between the war on drugs and the war on terrorism. While observing that the war on drugs had been used to infringe civil liberties and privacy over the years, the war on terrorism is much more insidious because it has a political element to it, which inevitably leads to suppression of dissent. In other words, drug cartels are simply focused on making money by breaking the drug laws. In the war on terrorism, government officials inevitably begin to consider anti-government critics as aiders and abettors of the terrorists and, thus, use their powers to suppress dissent and infringe on privacy, free speech, assembly, and the like.
Bruce concluded his talk with a call on young people to devote their lives to changing the course of our nation — toward dismantling the empire and restoring a constitutional republic to our land. Few things would be more rewarding, he said, than to have played the same type of role today that the Framers played more than 200 years ago.
We are trying to get the video of Bruce’s speech posted on our Conference Classroom this week. In the meantime, here’s the link to his speech at our 2008 conference, in case you haven’t seen it.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Free Speech and Porn Flicks
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Students at the University of Maryland are receiving a valuable lesson about the welfare state and, specifically, the education dole that state officials provide institutions of higher learning. The students had scheduled a showing of a porn flick on campus as part of their studies on constitutional law. A Maryland state legislator threatened a cutoff of state funds to the university, which caused university officials to cancel the showing. Citing the First Amendment, the students are protesting by scheduling an unauthorized viewing of the film on campus.
The state’s threat to cut off funding is a classic case of, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” Once a school goes on the dole, it is inevitably going to be subject to the control and dictates of the state. Once a college or university begins receiving state funds, there is no longer any possibility of its retaining its independence. Like most welfare recipients, university administrators inevitably become dependent on the dole, causing them to quickly comply with state orders that are accompanied by threats to terminate the dole for non-compliance.
That’s, in fact, why Hillsdale College in Michigan has long resisted taking any state funds whatsoever and why it prohibits its students from accepting state aid. To the chagrin of government officials, Hillsdale remains totally independent of government control and regulation.
The incident at the University of Maryland also reflects how state ownership of an educational institution can warp people’s concept of fundamental rights and liberties.
Ordinarily, freedom of speech does not entail the right to present or view a particular film anywhere one wants. Instead, it entails the right to present or view the film on your own property, not on the property of someone else.
As the owner of the institution, the University of Maryland would ordinarily have the right to dictate what films are presented on its campus. If students don’t like the policies or decisions of university administrators, the students have the right to quit and go elsewhere. The First Amendment does not give them the right to present or view the film on property that does not belong to them.
Thus, ordinarily free-speech rights are rooted in private-property rights. The owner decides what will be spoken, written, or presented on his own property. If someone else doesn’t like it, he’s free to go elsewhere. A customer has no right to override the decisions of an owner.
Thus, so-called free-speech rights are fairly easy to reconcile in a private-property, free-market order. The owner decides, and the customer is free to go elsewhere. The problems occur whenever public, or government-owned, property is concerned.
There is a significant difference between government property and private property: the Bill of Rights, which operates as a restriction on government owners but not on private owners. Thus, while private individuals have the right to do whatever they want on their own property, including watching porn flicks, the government is expressly prohibited by the First Amendment (and Fourteenth Amendment) from interfering with free speech.
Since the University of Maryland is a government-owned institution, its actions are restricted by the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Thus, as a government-owned institution, it might well be constitutionally precluded from prohibiting the showing of the porn flick. The issue will turn on whether some court determines whether the porn flick constitutes “legitimate” free speech, a determination that is made, of course, after the court views the film.
The ideal, of course, is a total separation of education and the state, where all colleges and universities are privately owned and privately funded, with the state playing no role in the process whatsoever. In such a case, each college and university would be free to run its affairs the way as it saw fit. If students didn’t like a school’s policies, they would be free to search for a college or university that better suited their preferences.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Friday, April 3, 2009
How the Socialists Destroyed Freedom, Independence, and Self-Reliance
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Have you ever wondered how it is that Americans today have such a completely different attitude toward the federal government than the people who founded our country?
Our ancestors looked upon the federal government as the greatest threat to their freedom and well-being. That’s why they limited its powers to a selected few in the Constitution. It’s also why they used the Bill of Rights to expressly prohibit the federal government from violating people’s fundamental rights and to expressly require it to honor important procedural guarantees when it went after people in criminal prosecutions.
With the exception of libertarians, Americans today don’t look upon the federal government in way our ancestors did. If modern-day Americans had their druthers, they would let the federal government exercise whatever powers it deemed necessary for the welfare and protection of the nation. That’s in fact why such Americans weren’t bothered in the least when the president and the Pentagon established their Constitution-free zone in Cuba as well as a Constitution-free zone in the United States with respect to the war on terrorism.
My hunch is that this marked difference in attitude toward the federal government is due to the welfare state. I think the welfare-statists have been absolutely brilliant in causing Americans to look upon the federal government as their friend and provider rather than as the biggest threat to their freedom and well-being.
I once read a tale about a farmer who lived near some woods inhabited by a group of fierce, wild boars. The farmer started leaving out corn every day, which attracted the boars. Gradually, the man began building a fence around the area where the boars were feeding on his corn. Ultimately, he was able to enclose the fence while the boars were feeding. Over time, they became mild, domesticated animals.
I think that’s pretty much the strategy that FDR and LBJ and other welfare-statists have used on Americans. Such programs as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education grants, SEC regulations, GI Bill, and the like are much like that corn that that farmer put out to soften up and domesticate those wild boars. By getting Americans to begin feeding on the welfare-state corn, the socialists have been able to convert a nation of independent, self-reliant, fearless people into a nation of dependent, fearful people who are ready to surrender their freedoms to the federal government at the first sign of trouble or crisis.
How many times have we heard, “I couldn’t survive without my Social Security” or “I would have died without Medicare” or “I would never have been educated without my education grant or GI Bill”? This has been the great triumph of the welfare-state socialists — making Americans feel so dependent on the federal government’s largess that they could never imagine life without it.
Not only does such dependency damage a person’s sense of self-worth, it also induces a child-like mindset toward the government, one that refuses to challenge the government’s policies at a fundamental level. After all, deep within the psyche of the dependent adult is the fear that the government has the power to cut off his dole anytime it wants.
The relationship of the American citizen and the federal government is today much like the relationship between a child and his parents. A child might throw tantrums about his parents’ rules and policies, but the child will rarely go too far because he knows that he is dependent on his parents for survival.
That’s the way American adults feel toward the federal government — they’ll carp over excesses or abuses but their welfare-state dependency prevents them from going too far. In the last several years, we’ve witnessed this phenomenon firsthand in both foreign and domestic affairs. People will carp about how the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan are not being handled properly or they’ll carp about how the politicians and bureaucrats have mismanaged the housing and mortgage crisis. But the thought that the federal government’s very own policies produced the crises and are now exacerbating them is something that is just too frightening for welfare-state-dependent Americans to accept and confront.
How sad. What began as a nation of fiercely independent, fearless, self-reliant people who distrusted the federal government and who never would have embraced socialistic programs has been turned into a nation of fearful, dependent people who look upon the federal government as their parent and provider. Even sadder is the fact that like those boars feeding on that farmer’s corn, Americans have lost their freedom in the process.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
An Ominous Parallel
by Jacob G. Hornberger
What was momentous about the 9/11 attack was not the attack itself, given that there had been other terrorist attacks in response to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East (e.g., the 1993 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the USS Cole, and U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania) but rather how U.S. officials used the 9/11 attack to assume “war on terrorism” powers. They were able to accomplish that through a clever sleight of hand in which they unilaterally converted terrorism from a crime to an act of war, enabling them to claim what were essentially dictatorial powers to wage war on terrorism.
It was a bold, revolutionary move that has transformed the relationship between the federal government and the American people.
As most everyone knows, because of the 9/11 attack the president and the Pentagon now wield the full power to wage war on terrorism all over the world, including here in the United States, given that the entire world is the battlefield in the war on terrorism.
That means that the president and the Pentagon now wield the power to do everything they’re doing in Iraq and Afghanistan here in the United States. Warrantless searches and seizures. Arbitrary arrests. Indefinite detentions. Kidnapping and rendition. Torture. Gun confiscation and gun control. Denial of trial by jury. Denial of due process of law.
It’s now all permissible so long it’s being done as part of the war on terrorism, a war that most everyone concedes is perpetual in nature. While this Damocles sword, by and large, has been sheathed for the time being here in the United States, if the U.S. were to face terrorist retaliation here at home for what U.S. troops are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, everyone knows that President Obama and the military now possess the power to unsheathe the sword here at home should circumstances necessitate it.
Where did U.S. officials get the idea of using the 9/11 terrorist attack as a justification for assuming war on terrorism powers that ignore constitutional restraints and guarantees? One distinct possibility is that they got it from history, specifically German history.
In February 1933, terrorists committed an arson attack on the German parliament, a pivotal event in German history that became known as the Reichstag fire. The German police arrested and charged an immigrant named Marinus van der Lubbe and four of his associates, all of whom were communists.
Charging that Germany was now facing the twin threats of communism and terrorism, the German chancellor persuaded the German parliament to suspend civil liberties and to give him emergency powers. The suspension of rights was declared to be temporary, but given that communism and terrorism continued to threaten the national security of Germany, the suspension turned out to be permanent in nature.
What’s interesting is the contrast by which war on terrorism powers were acquired in each country in response to the terrorist threat to national security.
In Germany, the chancellor acquired his powers by persuading the German parliament to enact what became known as the Enabling Act.
Here in the United States, the president didn’t go to Congress to acquire his war on terrorism powers but instead did so by simply securing secret legal opinions from his legal advisors stating that since the U.S. government was now at war against the terrorists, the president could ignore constitutional restraints on power so long as he was operating in his role as a military commander-in-chief.
Ironically, the suspects in the German terrorist attack were put on trial in a German court, given that Germany viewed terrorism as a crime, not an act of war (as did the United States prior to 9/11). At the trial, some of the defendants were acquitted. In anger and outrage, the German chancellor established a special court known as the People’s Court that would have jurisdiction over future cases involving terrorism and treason, which would ensure that the terrorists would no longer be set free by the regular courts. The People’s Court was where Hans and Sophie Scholl and other members of the White Rose were put on trial and sentenced to die.
One can’t but wonder whether Germany’s People’s Court isn’t the inspiration for those U.S. officials who call for special courts, rather than U.S. federal courts, to try suspected terrorists here in the United States.
Since the war on terrorism is perpetual in nature, the obvious question arises: If the American people wish to restore the situation to where it was prior to 9/11 — that is, in which terrorism is treated as a crime and where the president and the Pentagon are once again subject to constitutional constraints in terrorism cases — how do they accomplish that?
That’s a good question.
Perhaps another question should first be asked and answered, however: How badly do Americans wish to restore their rights and freedoms and how badly do they wish to restore a limited-government republic to our land?
The answer to the second question might help answer the first.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Foreign-Policy Blowback Comes Later
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Supporters of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan cite the U.S. occupation of Iraq to buttress their case for staying in Afghanistan. “The surge! The surge!” they cry, reminding people that increasing the level of U.S. troops in Iraq has brought stability, peace, and freedom to that country, enabling the U.S. government to rebuild the nation into a shining beacon of democracy and prosperity for the world.
Oftentimes, however, it takes a long time for the adverse consequences of U.S. imperialism and interventionism to manifest themselves.
Consider, for example, the 1953 coup in which the U.S. government, operating through the CIA, ousted the democratically elected prime minister of Iran and replaced him with a U.S.-approved puppet, the Shah of Iran, who proceeded to terrorize and torture his own people for some 25 years, with the support of the U.S. government.
By the time the Iranian people revolted against the Shah’s brutal regime in 1979, they had discovered the CIA’s role in the 1953 coup. In anger and outrage, they took U.S. diplomats hostage. By that time many, however, many Americans had forgotten about what the CIA had done or had never learned about it and, therefore, had no idea that the Iranian hostage-taking was “blowback” for what the CIA had done 25 years earlier.
Yet, keep in mind that in 1953 U.S. officials were celebrating their successful regime change in Iran, just as U.S. officials today are celebrating their successful regime change in Iraq.
Consider World War I, the war in which 112,000 Americans died. At the end of that war, interventionists were celebrating their great success in smashing Germany militarily and at the peace conference at Versailles because U.S. intervention had made the world safe for democracy and finally brought an end to war.
Yet, twenty years later Americans were involved in another war (actually a continuation of the previous one) against Germany, one that ended up taking the lives of some 400,000 Americans. Not only had World War I not made the world safe for democracy or brought an end to war, America’s intervention actually sowed the seeds for Hitler’s rise to power.
At the end of World War II, U.S. interventionists were celebrating their second defeat of Germany. Never mind that their second success against Germany ended up subjecting Eastern Europe, East Germany, and the Baltics to a 45-year occupation by Soviet communists, who had been America’s WW II ally, and never mind that China also ended up in the hands of the communists, a situation that continues to this day.
In 1954, the CIA was celebrating another great success, with its ouster from power of the democratically elected president of Guatemala and his replacement by a brutal Guatemalan army general who was agreeable to doing the CIA’s bidding. Some 40 years later, Guatemalans finally negotiated an end to a brutal civil war that had taken the lives of some 200,000 Guatemalans, a civil war that had its roots in that U.S. coup 30 years before.
In 1991 interventionists were celebrating the successful intervention against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, after indicating to Saddam that the U.S. government had no interest in his border dispute with Kuwait. That intervention not only caused countless Iraqi deaths, it also led to 11 years of brutal sanctions against Iraq, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s infamous statement that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions were “worth it,” the illegal and deadly no-fly zones over Iraq, and the stationing of U.S. troops on Islamic holy lands. By the time the 9/11 blowback came 10 years later, many Americans had forgotten about all this or had never known about it, and, therefore, easily fell for the official line that the terrorists just hate America for its freedom and values.
While interventionists celebrate “The surge! The surge!” in Iraq, we should keep in mind that the blowback from interventionism sometimes occurs long after the original intervention. Of course, what the interventionists have going for them is the fact that when those adverse consequences finally manifest themselves, many Americans will have forgotten their root cause. Perhaps that’s as good a reason as any why those of us who oppose U.S. imperialism and interventionism should continue primarily focusing on the moral arguments for restoring a constitutional republic to our land.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
