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Monday, December 31, 2012

U.S. Gov't Asks Federal Judge to Dismiss Cases of Americans Killed by Drones


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As Americans mourn the deaths of 20 children and 6 adults in the Newtown, CT tragedy - and the gun control debate has reached a fever pitch - autonomous killing systems are being funded by American taxpayers, and drone strikes continue to kill an increasing number of civilians abroad.

Barack Obama and the U.S. government policy makers have shown an incredible level of hypocrisy before; on the one hand lamenting such senseless deaths as have occurred in "mass shootings" while conducting their own mass killing, torture, and terror campaigns in foreign lands.

A culture of violence can't have it both ways, though, and the welcoming of drones into American skies by Congress is sure to unleash physical havoc shortly after concerns over surveillance and privacy are dismissed.

As a clear sign of what can be expected, the U.S. government has asked a federal judge to throw out a lawsuit brought by the families of three Americans killed by drone strikes in Yemen. If federal courts rule that these cases are without merit, it will set a dangerous precedent that only the executive branch of government can decide which Americans have a constitutional right to due process, while further enhancing a framework where the government will decide who is fit to be mourned and who should be forgotten.


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This Week's Corrupt Cops Stories


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A small-town Florida department run amok loses its chief--at least temporarily--an Alabama cop gets caught delivering weed, four South Texas cops get caught running cocaine, and a Camden, New Jersey, sergeant goes down for a dope squad run amok there. Let's get to it:

In Bal Harbour, Florida, the Bal Harbour police chief was suspended last Wednesday after a US Justice Department report said the department had misspent millions of dollars in drug money it had seized. Chief Thomas Hunker, 61, has been suspended with pay while an outside law enforcement agency investigates. The Bal Harbour police had developed the habit of conducting undercover operations all over the country to target drug dealers and their cash. Records show the agency doled out $624,558 in payments to informants in less than four years, and ran up $23,704 in one month for cross-country trips with first-class flights and luxury car rentals. The feds have frozen millions that Bal Harbour police helped confiscate, and the Justice Department now wants the village to return more than $4 million. The Justice Department also accused Hunker of professional misconduct for, among other things, conducting unauthorized checks of national criminal records databases for individuals who did not have access to those systems; receiving multiple gifts from people who may have benefited from his influence; allowing a drunk individual to drive a marked police vehicle on a beach, getting a "sweet deal" on his wife's car purchase after the department bought several vehicles from the same dealer; allowing inflated overtime on money-laundering investigations; and improperly paying informants.

In Montgomery, Alabama, a Montgomery police officer was arrested last Wednesday after he was caught delivering more than three pounds of high-grade marijuana to a home in Mobile County. Officer Lyvanh Ravasong is charged with marijuana trafficking. Ravasong went down when he arrived at the residence at the wrong time?as Mobile County Sheriff's deputies were executing a search warrant at the address. Ravasong is also believed to be associated with a 16-acre pot farm discovered in October near Chunchala. Officer Ravasong is now former officer Ravasong.

In McAllen, Texas, four South Texas lawmen were arrested late last week on charges they accepted thousands of dollars in bribes to guard shipments of cocaine. Mission Police Officer Jonathan Trevino, 29, and Hidalgo County Sheriff's deputies Fabian Rodriguez, 28, and Gerardo Duran, 30, were arrested last Friday, while Mission Police Officer Alexis Espinosa was arrested a day earlier. All four were members of an anti-drug trafficking task force called the Panama Unit, but are accused of instead providing protection for traffickers. Trevino is the son of Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Hidalgo. Federal prosecutors said they received a tip in August that task force members had been stealing drugs and set up a sting. The sting resulted in Duran and another task force member escorting 20 kilograms of cocaine north from McAllen, for which they were paid $4,000. The other task force members earned thousands more dollars for escorting four more cocaine shipments in November. It's unclear what the actual charges are, but all four were being held on $100,000 bonds.

In Camden, New Jersey, a former Camden police sergeant was sentenced last Wednesday to eight months in federal prisons for his role as the supervising officer of a corrupt anti-drug squad that stole cash, conducted illegal searches, planted drugs and falsified reports. Dan Morris, 49, had previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to deprive others of their civil rights. He admitted that between May 2007 and September 2008, he conducted illegal searches without a warrant or consent, obtained coerced consents to search residences based on threats and undue pressure, stole money during illegal searches and arrests, and allowed officers he supervised to include facts in police reports that were false. Morris is the third Camden officer to plead guilty in the conspiracy, while a fourth was found guilty at trial, and a fifth was acquitted. The FBI probe of the conspiracy has resulted in the reversal of about 200 drug convictions of suspects arrested by the unit between 2007 and 2009, when the cops were arrested. Morris, a city officer since 1986, was the unit?s supervisor during the time of the investigation.


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Saturday, December 29, 2012

Pundits And Politicans Very Quick To Blame Video Game & Movie Violence For Newtown


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The tragedy last week in Connecticut is still horrifying to think about on many different levels -- but the constant search for blame, and using it to support pet political ideas is troubling. This isn't to say that we don't necessarily need to have a "conversation" on various hot potato political issues, but basing it around an event like this isn't likely to be a productive and informed conversation, but one driven purely by emotions. I understand the desire, and the idea that making use of such a tragedy to create political will to do something, is all too tempting. But I fear what happens when we legislate around emotions, rather than reality. And, no I'm not even going to touch the question of gun control or mental health treatment. Both obviously evoke strong opinions from people on all sides of the issue (and, contrary to popular opinion, there are more than two sides to those issues). Instead, let's talk about the rush to blame video games and TV shows, as seems to happen every single time there's a mass shooting -- and almost always done with no evidence.

We already talked about people rushing to blame a video game, after the incorrectly named "original" suspect in the shootings had, possibly, at some point "liked" the game on Facebook. But, of course, now the politicians are stepping in, and retiring Senator Joe Lieberman is using the tragedy to push forth one of his pet ideas that he's brought up in the past: violent video games and TV must have something to do with it. He's trying to set up a commission to "scrutinize" "the role that violent video games and movies might play in shootings" among other things (yes, including gun control and mental health care).

Lieberman, not surprisingly, was not the only one. A large group of politicians and pundits immediately jumped to the conclusion that video games and movies must have something to do with all of this:

A disturbing number of public figures have lashed out at video games since the atrocity committed at Sandy Hook Elementary on Friday. A bipartisan group of legislators embraced this scapegoating on the Sunday news programs; from Democrats like Sen. Joe Lieberman and Gov. John Hickenlooper to Rep. Jason Chaffetz and former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge.

They were joined by members of the media ? sadly, too many to count.

On MSNBC on Monday, Chris Jansing asked her guests what connection Adam Lanza?s interest in video games had to his murderous shooting spree. She quoted senior White House advisor David Axelrod who tweeted ?shouldn?t we also quit marketing murder as a game?? Liberal contributor Goldie Taylor revealed that she refused to let her child play games until he was 14-years-old.

[....]

On Fox & Friends on Monday, legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. delivered an offensively sermonizing renunciation of entertainment producers and videogame makers who are ?clinging to guns economically.?

?They are glamorizing guns in this country. They are the scourge in terms of these guns,? Johnson Jr. said of game and filmmakers

Of course, time and time again when these shootings happen, the reports later show... that video games and movies played little to no role. Yes, sometimes the killers played these games, but it's difficult to find teenagers these days who have not played a violent video game or watched a violent movie. It's like saying that we should explore "the role that breakfast plays" in such shootings. How many of the killers ate breakfast that day? In fact, studies seem to suggest that, if anything, violent movies may actually decrease incidents of violence.

Bizarrely, the person with the most thoughtful explanation on some of this might be movie critic Roger Ebert, in a review of Gus Van Sant's movie Elephant from nearly a decade ago. That movie portrayed a similar school shooting, and did so by making it clear that sometimes there are no answers and there is no "other thing" to blame. Sometimes (perhaps many times) these things don't make sense, no matter how many times we want them to make sense. But Ebert also points to another factor that rarely gets discussed:

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about 'Basketball Diaries'?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.

Meanwhile, Danah Boyd has a related, but somewhat different perspective on the whole thing, noting how the media frenzy around these events also tends to mess with everyone else who are trying to cope with the situation, and makes sure their lives can never go back to any semblance of normalcy. She talks about running into some kids who had gone to Columbine high school, a few months after those attacks:
What I heard was heartbreaking. They had dropped out of school because the insanity from the press proved to be too much to deal with. They talked about not being able to answer the phone ? which would ring all day and night ? because the press always wanted to talk. They talked about being hounded by press wherever they went. All they wanted was to be let alone. So they dropped out of school which they said was fine because it was so close to the end of the year and everything was chaos and no one noticed.
As she notes, it's not the press's fault either. They're also giving the public what they want -- and, she agrees, that some of these topics are important and should be discussed. But the focus on the people in Newtown isn't helping.
But please, please, please? can we leave the poor people of Newtown alone? Can we not shove microphones into the faces of distraught children? Can we stop hovering like buzzards waiting for the fresh meat of gossipy details? Can we let the parents of the deceased choose when and where they want to engage with the public to tell their story? Can we let the community have some dignity in their grief rather than turning them and their lives into a spectacle of mourning?

Yes, the media are the ones engaging in these practices. But the reason that they?re doing so is because we ? the public ? are gawking at the public displays of pain. Our collective fascination with tragedy means that we encourage media practices that rub salt into people?s wounds, all for the most salacious story. And worse, our social media practices mean that the media creators are tracking the kinds of stories that are forwarded. And my hunch is that people are forwarding precisely those salacious stories, even if to critique the practices (such as the interviews of children).

What happened last week was senseless and tragic and painful to think about in all sorts of ways. And, yes, there are reasons to hope that such an event might lead to ideas that would prevent such things in the future, but the way we go about things on such discussions doesn't provide much hope that we're going to do anything valuable or thoughtful in response. Instead, it becomes a rush to do something purely out of an emotional response, and it's unclear how that helps.

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Arizona Police Officer Caught Hiding Evidence In His Garage, Lying About It -- Keeps Job


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A Tempe, Arizona police officer caught hiding evidence in his garage and lying about it will get to keep his job thanks to a ruling by Tempe police chief Tom Ryff.


Via CBS 5:

TEMPE, AZ (CBS5) - An internal investigation revealed a Tempe officer flat out wasn't doing his job. Reports show he knowingly botched 10 cases.

During the investigation, Officer Tony Trow admitted he was taking evidence home and keeping it in his garage. It was also discovered Trow put off writing a murder report for five years.

[...]An internal investigation revealed from September 2004 to March 2012, Trow stored evidence from five cases in his garage to hide his unfinished work. That included case notes, crime scene photos and even original recordings of interviews. The report from that investigation said those items had been tossed together in cardboard boxes.

It was also discovered Trow didn't write nearly a dozen reports, some dating as far back as 2007.

The report showed Trow also didn't bother to turn in the rape kit of a 17-year-old.

Not only should this cop be fired, he should be criminally charged for tampering with evidence.

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Friday, December 28, 2012

Private Murders versus Government Murders


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The December 14 murder of 20 children and 6 women at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, has garnered vast media attention and caused countless people with no connection to the victims to grieve for them. This is not a new phenomenon: nearly all mass murders carried out by civilians generate the same type of coverage and response.

But what of the far more numerous incidents of government murder of innocents? Most of them hardly make the news at all; fewer still produce widespread outpourings of sympathy.

One does not need to look any further than 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to observe the contrast. Barack Obama was quick to offer an expression of sympathy for the families of the Newtown victims. Yet that very day his administration asked a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit over the drone assassinations of Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki that Obama ordered in 2011. Both al-Awlakis were American citizens; Abdulrahman, the son of Anwar, was just 16 at the time of his death.

The lawsuit was filed by the father of Anwar al-Awlaki and the mother of Khan -- parents who grieve over the loss of their children (and grandson) no less than the parents of Newtown. To Obama, however, these killings were justified on the basis of that nebulous concept "national security," and the grieving relatives do not even deserve their day in court.

A couple of days later, a "suspected U.S. drone strike killed five suspected militants in Pakistan's tribal region," according to CNN. The Obama administration, which maintains a secret "kill list" from which the president can order assassinations, "counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants," the New York Times reported, so those "five suspected militants" might well have been persons who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, much like the children at Sandy Hook. Obama has yet to express any remorse for these deaths, and hardly any Americans are aware of them, let alone care.

Those five deaths are on top of the 2,500 people estimated to have been killed by the CIA and the U.S. military in the course of more than 300 drone strikes on Obama's watch. Among the innocent people killed by U.S. drones during Obama's presidency are at least 64 children -- more than three times as many as were killed at Sandy Hook -- according to a report from the law schools of Stanford University and New York University. Thus far, the president has not wiped away tears in the course of eloquent speeches on the lives snuffed out by his drones, and they have received very little press coverage. Americans who do know about them will, as often as not, shrug them off as "collateral damage."

And while Obama praised "the first responders who raced to the scene" in Newtown, his administration's policy abroad is to strike the same area multiple times with drone-fired missiles, with the second and later strikes invariably killing first responders attempting to help those injured in the first attack. "The secondary strikes," noted the Stanford-New York report, "have discouraged average civilians from coming to one another's rescue, and even inhibited the provision of emergency medical assistance from humanitarian workers."

Such policies, of course, did not originate with Obama. George W. Bush launched wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have together taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. During his presidency U.S. drones attacked a religious school in Pakistan, killing as many as 80 civilians, including 69 children ranging in age from 7 to 17. It being a CIA operation, it was kept under wraps as long as possible, and even now few Americans are aware of this unconscionable action that was performed in their name. Bush certainly did not apologize for it or express solidarity with the grieving relatives of his victims.

The George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations deliberately sabotaged Iraq's sanitation systems and prevented their repair through sanctions. That, too, was not widely reported, and neither president apologized for it. Quite the opposite: Clinton's secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, told a reporter that "the price" -- half a million dead Iraqi children -- was "worth it" to oust Saddam Hussein from power, an objective the bombings and sanctions manifestly failed to achieve.

Under Clinton, too, federal agencies laid siege to the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas, and in the name of saving children from abuse killed 17 kids and another 59 adults inside the compound.

No government employees were ever brought to account for that incident, though some of the surviving Davidians were tried and convicted for daring to resist the feds' assault on their home.

Going back even further, one could point to Harry Truman's atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the Allies' firebombing of German and Japanese cities, which also targeted first responders, under both Truman and his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt. Even today those actions are justified by many Americans on the basis that "all's fair in love and war"; and besides, they "saved American lives" -- the only ones, apparently, that count.

The U.S. government, of course, is not alone in murdering innocent people. One thinks immediately of the great evils of Adolf Hitler's National Socialists, who killed perhaps 11 million people, or the communist regimes of the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere, responsible for the deaths of nearly 100 million. All told, governments killed more than 262 million people in the 20th century outside of wars, according to University of Hawaii political science professor R.J. Rummel. Add to that the war dead, also the responsibility of governments, and the figure becomes astronomical. The vast majority of instances of death by government are unknown to all except researchers such as Rummel. Those that are more widely known often have their apologists.

No sane person sticks up for the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook massacre. Likewise, it's about time people stopped sticking up for governments that perpetrate far worse killings -- and started prosecuting the people who order them and carry them out.
_
Michael Tennant is a software developer and freelance writer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.


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'A slap on the wrist'


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From the Washington Post:
IF A WITNESS hadn?t shot video of two Prince George?s County police officers savagely beating John McKenna, a University of Maryland student, after a March 2010 men?s basketball game, that would probably have been the end of it. The officers didn?t file a report, as required, on their use of force. When initially questioned about the beating, they lied. And when they filled out the initial paperwork on the incident, police said Mr. McKenna had sustained his injuries, including a concussion, from being kicked by a police horse.
Yes, a real eye-opener. Consider: If there was no video, the cover-up would have succeeded. Even with compelling videotaped evidence of wrongdoing, just a slap on the writs?just enough to say, ?something was done about it.?

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Thursday, December 27, 2012

American Children and Foreign Children

by Jacob G. Hornberger

If there is a more emotionally painful experience than a parent's losing a child, I can't imagine what it would be. The emotional wound is raw and goes down to the deepest recesses of a person's heart and soul.

And as we see with the Connecticut massacre of all those little children, it's not just the parents or even just Connecticut residents, who feel the pain and anguish over what has occurred. People all over the country sympathize deeply with the pain being suffered by the parents of those children.

What I find absolutely fascinating, however, is how so many Americans have a totally different reaction when it comes to the deaths of foreign children at the hands of the U.S. national-security state. There is an indifference and a callousness that defies credulity.

Yet, that mindset of indifference and callousness doesn't seem to apply to deaths that occur from natural causes. For example, when there are deaths of foreign children that occur as a result of a tsunami or hurricane, there is a tremendous outpouring of sympathy and help among the American people. There is also tremendous empathy for foreign families who lose children at the hands of a private murderer, as we saw in Norway.

But when the deaths occur as a result of some drone strike, bomb, or sanctions at the hands of the U.S. government, everything seems to shut down within Americans. Sympathy and empathy disappear. People don't want to hear the details. They do their best to shut out any discussion of the episode. The attitude is always, "Regrettable, but now it's time to move on."

Why the difference?

As I argue in my current series, "The Evil of the National Security State," in FFF's monthly journal, Future of Freedom, the answer lies in what the national-security state has done to the American people. In the name of fighting communism and, later, terrorism, it has warped their values and their principles and stultified their consciences.

Ever since the enactment of the National Security Act of 1947, the attitude has been that the national-security state, especially the military and the CIA, must do whatever is necessary to protect "national security." If that means hiring Nazis to help fight the Cold War, so be it. If it means illicit drug experimentation on unknowing Americans, so be it. If it means invading foreign lands without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war, so be it. If it means assassinating foreign leaders, so be it. If it means military coups in foreign countries, so be it. If it means torture, indefinite incarceration, secret prisons, and kangaroo military tribunals, so be it. If it means assassination of American citizens and foreigners, so be it. If it means bombing wedding parties and funeral processions, so be it. If it means killing children with drones or sanctions, so be it.

Throughout the Cold War and then the "war on terrorism," Americans have walked through the entire process in what seems to be a state of extreme numbness. All that has mattered has been "national security," a term that has no real meaning at all and is not even found in the Constitution. As long as national security has been at stake, Americans have chosen to defer to the authority of national-security state officials. Conscience has been set aside for the sake of national security.

One of the best examples of this phenomenon was with respect to the Iraq sanctions. For 11 long years, the U.S. national-security state maintained one of the cruelest and most brutal systems of sanctions in history against Iraq. Year after year, tens of thousands of Iraqi children were dying from illnesses, malnutrition, and disease.

The situation was made worse by what the national-security state had done to Iraq during the Persian Gulf War, a war that Congress never declared. It had knowingly and intentionally destroyed Iraq's water and sewage treatment plants with the specific aim of spreading illnesses and diseases among the Iraqi people. When the war was over, the sanctions prevented those plants from being repaired.

Throughout those 11 years, there was very little outpouring of outrage, anger, and indignation from the American people. There were some groups and individuals who spoke out against the horror but they were few and far between. Most Americans were indifferent to the massive, ever-increasing, death toll.

Even when two high UN officials, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, and Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Program in Iraq, all stricken by conscience, resigned their positions based on what was being called a "genocide" in Iraq, Americans, by and large, remained distant and detached. If the national-security state said that Saddam Hussein had to go, then that's all that mattered. National security was everything.

There were Americans who chose to help the Iraqi people by sending them or providing them with medicines, money, or other such things. The national-security state ended up going after them with a vengeance. They included groups like Physicians for Social Responsibility and Voices in the Wilderness and individuals like Bert Sacks. National-security state officials threatened them with fines. Just recently, Sacks prevailed in the government's relentless crusade against him in the federal courts to recover a $10,000 fine for helping the Iraqi people in violation of the sanctions.

They were the lucky ones, however. American doctor Rafil Dhafir is currently serving a 22-year jail sentence for helping the Iraqi people in violation of the sanctions. What precisely did he do? Send money to Saddam Hussein? To al-Qaeda in Iraq? Nope. He sent money to an Iraqi charity to help the Iraqi people.

Why a criminal prosecution against Dhafir and merely a civil fine against Sacks? Perhaps the answer lies in the radically different nature of the names and national origin of the two.

Only a few Americans cared what happened to Dhafir, Sacks, or anyone else who responded to the dictates of his conscience by helping the Iraqi people deal with the sanctions.

When U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright was asked in 1996 by "Sixty Minutes" whether the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions were "worth it," she responded, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it."

Hardly anyone here in the United States batted an eye at her statement. After all, she was the principal spokesman for the U.S. national-security state. And national security was everything. The sanctions continued for another seven years.

The reaction was entirely different in the Middle East. There, the deep emotional pain and anguish was being suffered not only by Iraqi parents who were losing their children, it was being felt by people all over the Middle East, much as people all over the United States are feeling the pain of losing those children in Connecticut.

Imagine -- year after year of watching children die, needlessly. The anger ultimately boiled into rage, which ultimately manifested itself in terrorism against the United States. In fact, when Ramzi Yousef, one of the terrorists who struck the World Trade Center in 1993, appeared for sentencing, he angrily pointed to the deaths of the Iraqi children from the sanctions as one of the reasons for his terrorism. His point about the sanctions would be repeated later by Osama bin Laden.

Yet, when the 9/11 attacks occurred, many Americans quickly accepted the explanation provided by national-security state officials -- that the anger and rage that motivated the terrorists had nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy. It was all about hatred for America's "freedom and values." And when some of us pointed to the sanctions and other acts of U.S. interventionism as providing the motive behind the terrorist strikes, supporters of the national-security state responded with, "Oh, you're nothing but a justifier! You're justifying the attacks!" They were not even willing to entertain the possibility that people in other parts of the world get just as angry when children in their part of the world are killed as Americans do when children in our part of the world are killed. They simply did what they had been doing their entire lives-- defer to the judgment of the national-security state.

After Saddam Hussein's infamous WMDs failed to materialize, all to many Americans quickly accepted the national-security state's alternative rationale for invading and occupying Iraq -- to help the Iraqi people by bringing them "democracy." Of course, hardly anyone asked U.S. officials to reconcile their new-found love for the Iraqi people with their 11 years of brutal sanctions which brought death to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.

How many deaths of Iraqi children would actually have been worth regime change in Iraq? 100,000? 50,000? 10,000? 1,000? 100?

The answer is: None. The commandment does not say, "Thou shalt not kill except for regime change or some other political goal." It says, "Thou shalt not kill."

But under the principles of the national-security state, God's laws were subordinated to national security a long time ago. And in the name of national security, all too many Americans have rendered their conscience to the national-security state.
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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.


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