Freedom versus The National-Security State

by Jacob G. Hornberger

U.S. officials are poking fun at the fact that Edward Snowden, whose commitment to a free society motivated him to disclose the NSA's massive secret surveillance scheme over the American people (and the people of the world), has fled to China and Russia, two countries that are near the top of the list of violators of civil liberties and privacy.

I find that very amusing. When U.S. officials point their finger at China and Russia, they conveniently ignore the fact that there are three fingers pointing back at them.

In their rage over Snowden, they miss the big point. In communist and totalitarian regimes, such as those in China and Russia, there are no such things as civil liberties and privacy. U.S. officials are absolutely right about that. There is no way that the Chinese people or the Russian people can be considered to be living in a free society so long as their governments wield the power to spy on them and monitor their activities, especially by monitoring their telephone calls or reading their mail. In fact, government surveillance over the citizenry was always one of the hallmarks of the communist regimes in East Germany and Eastern Europe.

But that's the point! That's precisely why Snowden, libertarians, and a few principled liberals and conservatives are objecting to the massive NSA surveillance scheme! Duh! It has no place in a free society. It is antithetical to a free society--not only in China and Russia (and North Korea and Cuba) but also right here in the United States!

U.S. officials take the position that it's bad when the communists spy on their own citizens but good when the U.S. government spies on its own citizens. How ludicrous is that? The fact is that it's bad when any government spies on its own citizens. It's what an unfree society is all about!

The problem is this: Since the first grade, the American people have been inculcated with the notion that they live in a free society. They're convinced that this is true. That's why they tear up at sports events when they're asked to sing "Thank God I'm an American because at least I know I'm free" and when they praise the troops for "defending our freedom" by killing people thousands of miles away from American shores.

Thus, since most every American living today has been born and raised within the national-security apparatus that was grafted onto our constitutional order after World War II, we have ended up with a citizenry that thinks that this entire "national security" scheme constitutes "freedom" and is grateful for it.

Secrecy, secret courts, secret surveillance schemes, MKULTRA, wars of aggression, assassinations, torture, invasions, occupations, coups, support of dictatorships, state terrorism, murder, kidnapping, rendition, torture partnerships with brutal dictatorships, execution, foreign aid, perjury, interference with foreign political and economic systems, interventionism, foreign military bases, militarism, and imperialism.

In the mind of the average American, all this is freedom, owing to the false mindset that has been inculcated within him since the first grade. It's tyranny only when foreign governments do it, not when the U.S. government does it.

The sad part about all this is that not only do modern-day American think that living under a national-security state constitutes freedom, all that matters to them anyway is safety. Many of them really don't care if they live under a tyrannical regime so long as it keeps them safe from the terrorists (or the communists, the drug dealers, the illegal aliens, or any other boogeymen that national-security state officials come up with to terrify people into continuing to embrace the national-security state way of life).

What matters to me, as a libertarian, is freedom. ?And the biggest impediment to my freedom and well-being lies not with the terrorists but instead with the entire U.S. national-security state apparatus, the anti-freedom apparatus that was brought into existence to fight anti-freedom apparatuses in communist countries.

The time is past to talk about "reforming" the national-security state. The Cold War ended a long time ago. This anti-freedom apparatus needs to be dismantled. I choose freedom. I'm willing to take my chances with the terrorists.
_
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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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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The State versus George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin

by Thomas L. Knapp

Any take on the shooting of Trayvon Martin should start with an obvious ? but often missing ? disclaimer: I don?t know exactly what happened in Sanford, Florida on the night of February 26, 2012.

It?s likely to the point of near certainty that you don?t either. Even the people closest to the events have only partial knowledge at their disposal, and the rest of us necessarily access that knowledge indirectly. We?re reduced to choosing from between competing narratives, each of us most likely to choose the one which best matches our own biases.

Was Zimmerman the heroic community watchman, acting in self-defense as he was menaced by Trayvon Martin, thug of the week? Or was Martin the innocent victim murdered by Zimmerman, an over-zealous wannabe cop at best and perhaps even a racist hooligan?

Either way, we should recognize one important fact in all of this: Government has thus far played no constructive role in the matter, and in fact has created an environment in which incidents of this type are more likely to happen and less likely to be justly resolved.

If we assume the worst of Zimmerman ? that he attacked and murdered an innocent young black man without cause or provocation ? we need look no further than America?s police culture for his excuse.

American police gun down hundreds, possibly thousands of innocent civilians each year, (for obvious reasons, they don?t keep such statistics, or at least don?t share those statistics with us ? we have to comb the newspapers ourselves and try to keep rough running totals) many if not most of them people of color, and almost always with total impunity (yes, I know racism isn?t always ?structural,? but let?s not ignore cases where it clearly is).

Were Zimmerman a sworn officer with a badge instead of just a neighborhood watch volunteer, there?s every likelihood that we wouldn?t even know his identity at this point. The local police department would refuse to release it (only mere civilians get their names publicized when they?re accused of crimes) and put him on paid ?administrative leave? while they conduct an ?internal investigation,? inevitably clearing him of all wrongdoing. And absent some high-dollar lawyering up by his victim?s family, that would be the end of it.

Additionally, as libertarian author J. Neil Schulman notes, Martin was disarmed in advance. At 17, he was legally forbidden to own or carry a firearm with which to defend himself. The state knowingly and intentionally left him at Zimmerman?s mercy. And had the situation been reversed, Martin would no doubt have learned that race and age become two-way streets when prosecutors see their shot at some limelight: As a black male, he?d have been charged before the gun cooled, and he?d almost certainly have been tried ?as an adult.?

Supposing, on the other hand, that Zimmerman is the innocent party, his case is a perfect example of what American ?justice? has become.

The local police found no grounds to charge him with a crime. They accepted his version of events and wrote off the shooting as a justifiable act of self-defense. They may or may not have been correct in that assessment, but nobody gets it right every time, right? As Benjamin Franklin said, ?That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved.?

But this isn?t Franklin?s America. These days, if there?s a sufficiently loud hue and cry from a powerful (and usually well-organized) political constituency, well, one level of government or another will find something to charge you with. And if they can?t get a conviction, then they?ll find something else to charge you with. And if that doesn?t work, stand by to be harassed to bankruptcy and quite likely to your grave. If you don?t believe me, ask OJ Simpson, Laurence Powell or Stacey Koon.

The shooting of Martin by Zimmerman is an ugly thing in itself, whatever the circumstances that led up to it. But it?s also a perfect example of the idiocy of vesting a monopoly on ?justice? in the state. We?re never going to get every case right, but the incentives of monopoly government inherently tend toward maximizing both the number of cases we get wrong and the severity of the consequeneces.

Government failed Trayvon Martin, arguably leading to his death. Now government is failing George Zimmerman, inexorably leading to his likely imprisonment and his certain hardship.

These failures are not anomalies. They are what the state is and what it does. We can have political government or we can have the possibility of justice, but we can?t have both.
_
Thomas L. Knapp is Senior News Analyst and Media Coordinator at the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org).

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