Ludwig von Mises once pointed out that one government intervention inevitably leads to another intervention in order to fix the problems associated with the previous intervention. While Mises was referring to domestic interventions, such as price controls, the principle applies to foreign policy as well. For example, the federal government’s foreign policy led to the 9/11 attacks, which led the federal government to invade Afghanistan and achieve “regime change,” which converted Afghanistan to an opium-narco state, which will lead to a renewed effort to “win” the “war on drugs,” which will lead to more drug money to fund the “terrorists,” which will lead to a renewed effort to “win” the “war on terrorism.” And of course, all this means increased budgets and taxes to fund both the drug war and the terrorism war.

Hilary Clinton’s former finance chief, David F. Rosen, got a taste of the true benefit of the regulated society. Clinton and undoubtedly Rosen as well are totally committed to the socialist and interventionist philosophy by which federal bureaucrats have the power to regulate the peaceful activities of the citizenry through a myriad of rules and regulations, which are then brutally and selectively enforced through prosecutions, fines, and imprisonment. Thus, it is the ultimate of perverse ironies that Clinton’s own aide got prosecuted (although he was acquitted) for violating some idiotic regulations dealing with FEC disclosure reports.

You see, the supposed idea behind FEC reports is so that the public will know the sources and amounts of money that a political candidate is receiving and spending. But the real benefit is that like all other federal reports (IRS reports being the primary example), they also provide federal officials with unlimited power to prosecute people on a selective basis for screwing up with respect to filling out the report.

That is to say, federal officials, including those in Congress, know that when an enormous body of rules and regulations are imposed on the citizenry, no one—and I repeat, no one—will ever be able to comply with all of them. Thus, if they want to get someone, all they have to do is search through the rules and they’ll have no problem finding some violation of them.

Since everyone is in violation of some rule, whether it be IRS reports, or SEC reports, or FEC reports, or hiring reports (i.e, hiring illegal aliens), the tendency is for people to keep their head down and not make waves.

Thus the great benefit of the regulated society (from the standpoint of those who love power and hate liberty) is that it makes people conform to the mandates of their rulers because they know, consciously or subconsciously, that if they get out of line, there is always some rule or regulation that they have violated for which they can be prosecuted and punished. The federal prosecution of a high Clinton aide, albeit unsuccessful, reinforces that message to everyone else.

The slimy bureaucrat at the State Science Institute, Dr. Floyd Ferris, put the benefit of the federally regulated society best in Atlas Shrugged:

“Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against — then you’ll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We’re after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you’d better get wise to it. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted — and you create a nation of law-breakers — and then you cash in on guilt. Now, that’s the system, Mr. Rearden, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.”

As you may know, state officials have indicted the runaway bride for lying about why she ran away from her pending wedding. But why is that Pentagon officials haven’t been indicted for knowingly and intentionally lying about Pat Tillman’s death? In other words, as I asked with respect to the federal government’s persecution-prosecution of Martha Stewart, why is it a crime for a citizen to lie to a government servant but not the other way around? Do you ever get the feeling that it’s us, the citizenry, who are now the servants and they, the federal politicians and bureaucrats, who are the masters?

The Pat Tillman lie once again confirms that federal officials are not worthy of belief, ever. Because if a person will lie to you about one important thing without remorse or repentance, then obviously you cannot believe anything he says about other important things. Whether we’re talking about the Gulf of Tonkin “attack,” or Watergate, or Waco, or Ruby Ridge, or Iraq and WMD, or the Koran at Gitmo, or the Tillman death, the discomforting truth is that federal officials will lie and do lie. Their attitude is: “So what? We’re part of the federal government. We’re the masters and you’re the servants. Deal with it.”

Many Americans continue to place their undying faith in their federal officials. For example, when the Bush administration tried to blame Newsweek for America’s bad image around the world, that group of Americans immediately echoed the official “It’s all Newsweek’s fault that people hate America” line.

But it seems that a growing number of Americans are now reacting with caution and skepticism about federal pronouncements, which is a very positive sign. That group immediately recognized that the “Blame Newsweek because the U.S. military would never dishonor the Koran” was just one more federal lie. After all, think about it: When U.S. soldiers perform those weird and perverted sex acts (where do these people learn such acts?) on Muslim prisoners at Gitmo, what are the chances that their superior officers are going to say, “Hey, be sure to protect that guy’s Koran while we’re performing our deviant sex acts on him”?

Undoubtedly there were federal and state prosecutors and other supporters of the war on drugs grinding their teeth last night over the possibility that American Idol finalist Bo Bice might have been selected as this season’s American Idol. According to news media reports, Bice has been arrested in the past for drug-law violations.

You could just see the drug warriors sitting on their couches in front of their television sets, growling, “He ought to be in jail where prison officials could rehabilitate him. He’ll never go anywhere as a drug-law violator.”

Of course, it makes you think about all those nonviolent drug offenders that the drug warriors have put in jail, destroying their lives, preventing them from achieving any success in their lives.

Interestingly, the article linked above details an example of the federal snitch program, which has long been a core feature of the drug war, where the feds promise people lighter prison sentences if they’ll just snitch on their friends.

“But Elwin says Bo took the fall for his aunt — who was already facing serious jail time for drugs. The officers made a deal if she turned in so many people they would lessen her sentence.”

And before any drug warriors send me an email claiming that snitch programs are as American as apple pie, consider this news story, which describes the Chinese communist government’s war on drugs which the communists are still a long way from winning:

“‘Communist Party leaders declared a People's War on Drugs in April,’ Feng said. He appealed to the public to inform on traffickers and to help addicts reform — a rare step by a government that usually says it can handle crime and social problems on its own.

Now, think about that: If the U.S. government were to adopt all the tactics of the Chinese communists, including intensive snitch programs, it would still not be enough to win the war on drugs.

Of course, ultimately the issue is a moral one. Americans must finally ask a basic question: Under what moral authority does one grown-up have the authority to punish another grown-up for ingesting harmful substances? When American grown-ups in the private sector finally ask that question, the drug war will be brought to an end and American grown-ups in the government sector will no longer have the legal power to go after Bo Bice or anyone else for drug-law violations.

Now that U.S. Senators have reached a compromise in that “major” problem facing America — the filibustering of a few nominees to the federal bench — would it be asking too much for them to confront what some people might consider to be the real major problems facing our nation before falling back into their normal semi-comatose state? Such as:

1. The out-of-control federal spending, including what have become periodic “emergency” expenditures totaling tens of billions of dollars “rebuilding” Iraq, after having spent billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars destroying the country.

2. The level of congressional pork that is inserted into spending bills every time such a bill comes up for a vote.

3. The decades-old drug war that is destroying people and cities.

4. The increasing federal scapegoating to avoid focus on the federal root of America’s problems, including casting blame on immigrants for America’s economic woes and on China for America’s monetary and fiscal woes.

5. The moral and economic bankruptcy of socialist programs, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

6. The U.S. government’s knowing and intentional support of brutal dictators, including Saddam, the Shah of Iran, Pinochet, and the current heads of Pakistan and Uzbekistan.

7. The escalating killing that besieges “liberated” and “democratized” Iraq.

8. The president’s claim to wage war against sovereign and independent nations that have not attacked the United States, and without the constitutionally mandated congressional declaration of war.

9. The administration’s attempts to renew the Patriot Act and its horrific assaults on civil liberties, which the members of Congress didn’t even read before enacting it the first time.

10. The Padilla doctrine, in which the Pentagon is claiming the authorization to arrest, jail, and punish any American and any foreigner without federal court interference and without the interference of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

11. The U.S. military’s and CIA’s torture, sex abuse, rape, and murder scandal in Cuba, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the Pentagon’s whitewash and cover-up of such scandal.

12. The CIA’s kidnapping of people and “rendering” them to brutal authoritarian countries for the purpose of outsourcing the torture of such prisoners.

Washington worshippers undoubtedly consider it glorious and wonderful that the august members of the U.S. Senate have spent so much time, effort, and energy on resolving whether a few federal judges nominees are going to get “up or down” votes. The question is: While these people are fiddling with such “enormous” problems as Senate filibusters, why do they persist in turning away from the real problems facing our nation?

Among the many government lies surrounding the invasion and occupation of Iraq is the one about the sovereignty of the new democratically elected Iraqi regime. Ever since the national election in Iraq (which failed to ask Iraqi voters whether the U.S. should exit the country), U.S. officials have been claiming that the new regime is sovereign.

But if that’s true, then how come the U.S. military continues to announce that it plans to stay in Iraq for years and is even building permanent military bases in the country? If the new democratically elected Iraqi regime were truly sovereign, wouldn’t that mean that the Pentagon would have to ask for express permission from the new Iraqi regime to stay in Iraq and build those U.S. military bases?

Indeed, if the Iraqi regime, rather than the U.S. military, is sovereign in Iraq then how come U.S. forces are engaging in military assaults against Iraqis without the express approval of the Iraqi parliament? Isn’t it fairly obvious that the Pentagon, not the Iraqi regime, is the ultimate decider of who is going to be attacked, killed, detained, etc?

In fact, if the new Iraqi regime were truly sovereign, then wouldn’t U.S. troops simply be serving as the domestic army of the new regime, subject to the laws enacted by the Parliament and the orders and commands of the Iraqi president or prime minister?

Maybe the new Shiite regime, which is now aligning itself with U.S. arch-enemy Iran, prefers to have the U.S. military serving as its domestic killing force, helping it to rid the nation of their historical Sunni enemies. Of course if Americans later pay the price for those killings through terrorist counter-strikes, U.S. officials will be claiming, “It’s because they hate us for our freedom and values” rather than recognize that the U.S. government should never have been in Iraq at all, killing or abusing anyone.

While there is increasing talk about a civil war developing in Iraq, so far there has been little discussion of what’s going to happen if there is a collision between the supposed sovereignty of the new Iraqi regime and the sovereignty of the U.S. military. Such a collision could occur sooner than later, especially given closer ties being established between the new Iraqi regime and Iran, which U.S. officials consider a paragon of evil. Another potential conflict could occur if the new Iraqi regime pardons the thousands of Iraqi detainees being held without charges by U.S. officials. If such a collision takes place, it will not be difficult to see that the U.S. claim that the new Iraqi regime is sovereign will be just another lie among many in this immoral and destructive U.S. military adventure.

Federal probation officers are investigating whether to seek a revocation of Martha Stewart’s parole because she attended a Time magazine’s dinner honoring the “100 Most Influential People.” You’ll recall that the feds prosecuted and jailed Stewart for the ludicrous “crime” of lying to a federal bureaucrat, a “crime” that didn't cost anyone his life or his money. (Keep in mind that Stewart wasn’t under oath and therefore she wasn’t charged with perjury. She was simply charged with lying to a federal bureaucrat.)

Meanwhile, the evidence mounts every day that President Bush knowingly and intentionally lied about his reasons for invading Iraq. You’ll recall that Bush claimed that the principle reason he had to invade Iraq was because of those infamous WMD. Well, we now have that British “smoking-gun” British intelligence memo indicating that Bush’s real reason for invading was “regime change,” a point that we here at FFF have steadfastly maintained since even before the invasion. And now the Washington Post provides even more proof of the lies in a detailed analysis of how Bush and his minions knowingly and intentionally misused the intelligence reports.

Meanwhile, the family of Pat Tillman, not surprisingly, is angry and upset over the lies that the Pentagon knowingly told about his death.

And of course, we have all the lies involved in the whitewash and cover-up of the torture, sex abuse, rape, and murder scandal in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Cuba.

But is any federal prosecutor going after any of these federal politicians and bureaucrats for lying, especially since those lies were so much more immoral and destructive than the lies that Martha Stewart supposedly told federal bureaucrats? Of course not. Lying is a crime that’s reserved for Americans in the private sector, not the elite Americans in the federal government sector.

Unfortunately, it seems that the U.S. federal government is, once again, serving as a model for other countries. In this case, it’s Zimbabwe. According to a front-page article in today’s New York Times entitled “Zimbawe, Long Destitute, Teeters Toward Ruin,”

“In the weeks before parliamentary elections in March, the leaders of this threadbare nation threw open the national larder, wooing voters with stocks of normally scarce gasoline and corn and a flood of freshly printed money.”

In other words, just like the president and the members of Congress do when they dole out the political candy (i.e., grants for your community, SBA loans, education subsidies, military bases, increases in Social Security and Medicare, protectionism, etc.) to the American people on the eve of political campaigns. What better way to purchase votes from people who are clamoring for their welfare, especially if they have no idea that the money that their politicians are using to purchase the welfare comes from them — the citizenry — through the taxes they’re forced to pay the IRS?

Meanwhile, the Times also reports today that the Pentagon’s torture and sex abuse camp at Guantanamo Bay is now serving as model for people all over the world of what the United States now represents. Unbelievable!

Meanwhile rumors have it that supporters of the federal government’s pro-empire foreign policy are complaining that George Lucas has modeled the emperor and Darth Vader on the Bush administration’s war on Iraq, which Lucas denies. This means though that at least some of the supporters of America’s pro-empire foreign policy are beginning to recognize attributes of the emperor, Darth Vader, and the dark side of the force within themselves and their policies, which could be a positive sign, especially given that Vader returned to the good side of the force before he died. As Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame would say: Fascinating!

The august members of the U.S. Congress, who cowardly and unconstitutionally delegated their power to declare war on Iraq to President Bush and who have remained comatose during the entire torture, sex abuse, rape, and murder scandal at Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere, along with the resulting Pentagon whitewash and cover-up, undoubtedly are regretting letting British lawmaker George Galloway testify before Congress about allegations that he took money under the table from the infamous UN and U.S. oil-for-food program in Iraq.

Galloway let them have it, reminding them that it was the U.S. government that furnished Saddam Hussein with WMD and then helped him to use them. He also reminded them of the lies on which President Bush based his invasion and war of aggression against Iraq, recently confirmed by the ”smoking-gun” British intelligence memo. He reminded them of the brutal sanctions that the U.S. and the UN imposed against the Iraqi people — the sanctions that produced the deaths of Iraqi children that U.S. officials said were “worth it.” And he reminded them of congressional indifference to the millions of Iraqi dollars that went missing after U.S. officials took over the country.

I’ll bet those congressmen, who didn’t even read the Patriot Act before they enacted it, woke up real fast during that testimony! But I’ll also bet that they’ll soon be back asleep or at least fiddling with such important matters as judicial filibusters while Rome burns.

What better example of the moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy than Uzbekistan, a nation in which there is a brutal corrupt dictator who tortures and kills his own people and who happens to be the beneficiary of millions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid, which of course comes from U.S. taxpayer money. U.S. officials have delivered American taxpayer money to the Uzbek dictator with full knowledge of his brutality and corruption. How do they morally justify this? On the grounds that the dictator is a “team player” in the U.S. government’s “war on terrorism.”

Never mind that the dictator, not the protestors he kills, is the true terrorist. That doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he does the bidding of U.S. officials, as they continue to place U.S. taxpayer cash into the brutal, dirty, tortuous little hands of the dictator and his minions.

It was no different when U.S. officials were supporting Saddam, the Shah of Iran, Pinochet, and so many others. All that matters to U.S. officials is: “Are you with us or against us? How you treat your people is of no concern to us. But if you buck us, then we will cut off your flow of U.S. taxpayer money, or we will assassinate you, or we will invade your country and oust you from power. Play ball with us and you’ll be fine. Refuse to, and you’re toast. Just ask Saddam”

How can support of brutal dictators know breed anger and resentment against the United States? And then when the terrorist blowback occurs, U.S. officials piously and innocently exclaim, “Oh my gosh, the terrorists hate us for our ‘freedom and values,’” as if “American freedom and values” include the support of brutal, corrupt dictators who kill their own people or just torture them by boiling them in water.

And speaking of torture and boiling, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the CIA’s sending of terrorist detainees to Uzbekistan under its infamous “rendition” program. Of course, the feds would say, “Oh, it’s just that we need prison space for these people and every American can rest assured that we secure the necessary assurances that the Uzbek torturers will not torture our detainees.”

Unfortunately, all too many Americans just continue turning the other way, preferring not to confront the moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy of their own government’s policies as well as the anger and hatred it has bred and continues to breed among the people of the world.

An article we link to in today’s FFF Email Update is worth looking at: “Blowing Up an Assumption” by Robert A. Pape. The article explains how the occupation of Iraq is itself the cause of the terrorism it purports to smash. In other words, the federal government is not the solution to Iraq but rather the problem.

Therefore, for the U.S. to stay in Iraq to clean up the mess it has created will only make matters worse. The conquest of Iraq did enough damage in terms of all the innocent Iraqi people U.S. forces killed and maimed—many more innocent people that were killed on 9/11. The occupation, in which U.S.forces are now operating at the behest of the new Shiite regime in Iraq, entails the killing and maiming of even more people.

And the feds are making the matter worse with their plans to erect permanent bases in Iraq, along with the world’s biggest embassy. Talk about a colonial empire!

One problem is that all too many U.S. officials simply cannot fathom why foreign people hate them so much. In the minds of federal officials, they’re just benevolent bureaucrats from the federal government and just there to help people. Sure, they have to invade, and kill, and maim but if only people would follow their orders, everything would be fine.

But what the feds don’t understand is that many foreigners don’t like taking orders from a conqueror and occupier, especially one that consists of arrogant, know-it-all, point-head bureaucrats who lord it over foreigners. So, even if the U.S. government wasn’t torturing, sexually abusing, raping, and murdering detainees, or abusing people in their homes with warrantless searches and seizures, or shooting gun-control violators, there would be resistance to the occupation simply because people don’t like conquerors and occupiers.

There are those who say that it’s too late—that the U.S. government has killed so many innocent people that it must continue killing until all the insurgents (“terrorists”) are killed. That’s not very logical. Because the more they kill and maim, the more others are going to seek vengeance. And keep in mind: it is the presence of U.S. troops thousands of miles away that is producing the adverse reaction.

The federal government produced the problem in Iraq, with it support of Saddam, with its Persian Gulf intervention, with its sanctions, with its no-fly zones, with its troops on Islamic holy lands, and with its invasion of Iraq. The federal government is incapable of fixing the problem it produced and can only make things worse by trying to fix it. I repeat: The U.S. government is the problem in Iraq, not the solution.

In the wake of Newsweek’s retraction of its story alleging that U.S. military officials at Gitmo desecrated a copy of the Koran, Reuters is reporting that “the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department all strongly criticized the report and said it had damaged Washington's image abroad.”

Damaged Washington’s image abroad? Are these people for real?

They invade a sovereign and independent country that has not attacked the United States, lying about the real reason they’re doing so, which was “regime change,” not WMD, liberation, or democracy-spreading, as we have been saying here at FFF since even before the invasion and as the smoking-gun British intelligence memo has now confirmed.

And this after 10 years of brutal sanctions against the Iraqi people and the cavalier and callous attitude that U.S. officials had in maintaining that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children were “worth it” — that is, worth the attempt at ousting Saddam Hussein from power and replacing him with a U.S.-approved regime.

And they kill countless innocent people as part of their enforcement of the illegal no-fly zones over Iraq, which were authorized neither by the U.S. Congress nor the UN.

And then they impose a tyrannical order on the Iraqi people, consisting of curfews, shooting of demonstrators, killing of insurgents resisting the illegal invasion and occupation of their country, indefinite detention of people without any hearing or due process whatsoever, warrantless searches of people’s persons, homes, and businesses, gun control enforced by U.S. military snipers. And they call all this “freedom.”

And there is, of course, the torture, sex abuse, rape, and murder scandals along with their Pentagon whitewashes and cover-ups.

And these people have the gall to say that the Newsweek story has damaged their reputation? Oh well, at least they have a new scapegoat for all the horrific damage to America’s reputation that these people have wrought all over the world.

The New York Times yesterday provided a fairly good example of how U.S. foreign policy keeps crises and tensions high, thereby coincidentally producing the need for ever-increasing budgets for the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex. The example deals with Korea.

According to the article, the United States wants to impose a “quarantine” on North Korea, which would entail searching trucks, planes, and trains for nuclear materials smuggled out of the country. (Don’t forget that as the world’s policeman, the U.S. would be doing the searching.) U.S. officials are upset that North Korea officials continue to boycott the U.S.-demanded talks on its nuclear program, a program obviously designed to dissuade the U.S. from attacking North Korea for the purpose of “regime change,” as it has done with Iraq. Now ask yourself: What would be the response of North Korean officials to a “quarantine” in which U.S. military officials are doing the searching?

South Korea’s strategy is different. According to the Times, it is “seeking to enhance security on the divided peninsula by reaching out to North Korea, promoting trade, investment and economic interdependence.” The South Korean strategy, of course, would tend to diminish tensions and crises between the two Koreas, which obviously wouldn’t be in the interests of the Pentagon and the U.S. military industrial complex because it’s difficult to demand ever-increasing budgets in the context of diminishing tensions and crises.

The best thing that the American people could ever do, especially given the fiasco in Iraq, is require their public officials to pull out all troops in Korea, bring them home, and discharge them. In fact, that’s what all to be done with all the other U.S. troops around the world, including those in Iraq. Not only would that diminish the anger and hatred among the victims of U.S. foreign policy all over the world, as it did after the U.S. exited Vietnam, it would also enable Americans to finally take the enormous U.S. empire tax-and-spend military burden off of their backs.

The Pentagon has announced which bases it’s closing and, yes, the people in those areas are indeed in a conniption fit. According to the lead articles in today’s New York Times, there is “shock and a vow to fight” and that “opposition is intense” from the people who are about to lose their military welfare.

What a perfect testament to the welfare-warfare state! All across the welfare spectrum—food stamps, unemployment, Social Security, Medicare, public schooling, military bases, and on and on—people are fighting to maintain their dependency on the government—and fighting to ensure that everyone else pays for it.

Think about it: The military is announcing that a base is no longer necessary because the Cold War ended more than ten years ago. What these people (the military-welfare recipients) are saying is: “We don’t give a hoot about that. What does that matter to us? We have a right to have the IRS plunder and loot our fellow Americans to keep ourselves in high cotton with our military welfare. Don’t even think about stopping it!” Ironically, I’ll bet that a lot of these people look down their noses when they see a food-stamp mother in the grocery store line.

For those who think that the base closings constitute a reduction in Pentagon spending, sorry, it just ain’t true. Yes, you’re right — the Cold War ended more than 10 years ago. But did you really think that these people (the military-welfare distributors) wouldn’t come up with a new justification for their warfare state’s taxing and spending? Come on! Give these people some credit!

Don’t you remember when the Berlin Wall came crashing down after decades of massive taxing and spending to maintain the garrison state to “fight communism”? The justification for big miltary government became “the drug war” and “protecting U.S. businesses abroad” and, best of all, “an unsafe world.”

Thanks to the brutal things these people (the Pentagon) did to people in the Middle East during the 10 years after the Berlin Wall came down, we got 9/11 and the new perpetual justification for continuing and expanding the military-industrial complex—the “war on terror”! (Just the term itself is scary, right?)

And now they’ve come up with a new one. Referring to the base closures and realignment of the military welfare monies, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that the newest rationales for the massive “defense” expenditures include the “war on extremism” and, even better, “other evolving 21st century challenges”! Wow! Why, “extremism” and “new evolving challenges”! Why those are even scarier than communism, drugs, terrorism, unfair competition, and an unsafe world, right?

With so many anti-immigration folks complaining about Mexican illegal aliens, maybe the solution would be to have the U.S. government invade Mexico and take over its other half.

I mean, think about it: When U.S. officials wanted Mexico’s northern half, which consisted of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and parts of Colorado, which Mexico refused to sell, the U.S. simply started a war against Mexico, enabling it to win the entire northern half of the country, knowing that it was filled with (Spanish-speaking) Mexicans whose culture was Spanish and Mexican. Those people immediately became American citizens.

So, by starting another war, the United States could finish the job by taking over the rest of the country. That would mean: No more Mexican illegal aliens for the anti-immigrant crowd to fret about because all those people would now be Americans. And just think: We could then travel to Cancun and Acapulco without passports!

And it really wouldn’t be a problem to invade, given the U.S. government’s current policy of invading sovereign and independent countries for whatever reason. Heck, to make it look good, all they’d have to do is claim that Mexican officials are engaged in the drug trade, jeopardizing our oil supplies, invading America with immigrants, and even hiding WMD. Anyway, who would care once we win?

As longtime supporters of FFF know, long before 9/11 we were arguing that one of the predictable consequences of the U.S. government’s imperial and interventionist foreign policy was terrorism, including a terrorist attack on American soil. Then, ever since 9/11 we’ve seen the perverse but predictable consequences of the federal government’s so-called war on terrorism: out-of-control federal spending spearheaded by ever-increasing budgets for the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex; a perpetual state of crisis; the invasion and war of aggression against the Iraqi people; the torture, sex abuse, rape, and murder scandals on the part of the U.S. military in Cuba, Iraq, and Afghanistan; the CIA’s “rendition” scandal, in which detainees are kidnapped and forcibly and secretly sent to friendly brutal foreign regimes for the purpose of torture; and of course ever-increasing assaults on the civil liberties of the American people.

And yesterday, we witnessed another perverse consequence of U.S. foreign policy and the “war on terrorism” that it has spawned: the spectacle of a fearful, panicky people in our nation’s capital, desperately running for their lives as a small Cessna airplane inadvertently strayed into the “no-fly” zone around Washington, D.C. Can you imagine how these people would react if they lived in Baghdad, where bombs are a now a part of daily, ordinary life?

Is this any way to live? It’s certainly not the way Americans once lived. There was once a time not so long ago when federal officials didn’t live in constant fear and paranoia that “the terrorists” were coming to get them — a time when there wasn’t a run on duct tape.

Before 9/11, U.S. officials lived in blissful ignorance that they could do bad things to people around the world as part and parcel of their imperial and interventionist foreign policy. 9/11 provided the wake-up call that people to whom bad things are done will inevitably retaliate.

So, the questions facing both federal officials and the American people are:

Should the U.S. government be permitted to continue its pro-empire, interventionist, militarist course around the world, despite all the perverse and destructive consequences, including federal officials who now live under a cloud of continuous fear and paranoia and including a continuing erosion of liberty and prosperity for Americans?

Or should the U.S. government instead be required to abandon its policy of empire, interventionism, and militarism, thereby helping to restore peace, prosperity, stability, and harmony to our nation?

Yesterday, I talked about the perverse manner in which federal officials measure “progress” in the wars on terrorism and drugs. Now, take a look at this Houston Chronicle article about how the enormous narco-war between drug lords and the government is destroying Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, the sister city of my hometown of Laredo, Texas.

When I was a teenager in Laredo during the 1960s, we would take our dates across the river for dinner without worrying one bit about drug lords and drug battles. When I returned to Laredo in 1975 to practice law, the federal drug war was in full swing, and DEA agents were flooding Laredo with a commitment to “win the drug war.” Laredoans were treated to the same “We’re making progress with big drug seizures” bromides then that we hear today from drug-war officials. Nothing has changed in that respect.

What has also not changed is the aversion to the concept of “personal responsibility” that afflicts federal officials. Nowhere could you find a better example of that characteristic than the drug war. Consider the current deadly situation in Nuevo Laredo, which is a direct consequence of the drug war, just as alcohol Prohibition produced Al Capone. Do you think for a moment that federal officials, including those in Congress, who have the power to repeal the drug laws, take personal responsibility for what the drug war has done to Nuevo Laredo? Not on your life! Holding the concept of personal responsibility up to a federal official is like holding a cross up to a vampire, “Please, please, please judge us by our good intentions, not by the actual results of our programs,” is their common refrain, ignoring that that’s the way the road to hell is paved.

You’ll also notice in the Chronicle article about Nuevo Laredo that one of the primary means by which drugs are able to make their way north is through the bribery of law-enforcement officers. Hey, did you really think that drug lords are the only ones getting rich on this war? What about that Kentucky police chief accused of operating a meth lab? How about those police departments that are getting rich off of the drug-war asset-forfeiture seizures? What about those nice taxpayer-funded salaries of DEA officials — salaries that depend on the continuation of the drug war?

No wonder so many of these people — drug lords and drug-war officials alike — continue to oppose drug legalization so ardently—ending the drug war is certainly not in their self-interest, given that drug legalization would put both drug lords and drug agents out of business overnight. The shame of it all is that after 30 years of failure, immorality, and destructiveness the American people still fail to see how much of a federal scam the drug war really is.

The metaphorical war on terrorism is becoming more like the metaphorical war on drugs every day. U.S. officials proudly and excitedly announce arrests or killings of big suspected terrorists, just as they have proudly announced the arrests or killings of big suspected drug dealers for the last 30 years.

Each new arrest or killing in both wars immediately gives rise to much-ballyhooed announcements about the tremendous progress that is being made in the wars. Such announcements, in turn, give rise to ever-increasing calls for renewed dedication in winning the wars, followed by, of course, calls for more increases in government spending so that the wars can finally be won, once and for all.

Unfortunately, all too many Americans blind themselves to the fact that their very own government’s policies, especially the wars on drugs and terrorism, are the root of the problems. In fact, the consequences of both wars produce the very results that are then used as the rationale for waging the wars even more fiercely.

Consider the U.S. military’s killing of some 100 insurgents in Iraq yesterday — or “terrorists” as the U.S. government calls foreigners fighters who enter Iraq for the purpose of forcibly ousting the current regime and replacing it with another regime, except when the U.S. government does it, in which case the foreigners are called “freedom fighters.” Now that an “independent, democratically elected” regime exists in Iraq, U.S. forces are effectively acting as its police force. How can U.S. killings on behalf of the new Shiite regime in Iraq not engender anger and hatred against the United States regardless of the motivations that U.S. officials claim to have in providing “order and stability” for the new Iraqi regime? Surviving family members and friends of the dead don’t care about the motivations of U.S. officials — all they care about is that U.S. troops are thousands of miles from the United States killing people on behalf of a foreign regime. Ironically and perversely, U.S. officials proudly proclaim that the killings of such insurgents show that the feds are making progress in the war on terrorism, which, not surprisingly, means renewed dedication to winning the war on terrorism, which, not surprisingly, means increased budgets for the military-industrial complex.

The same holds true in the much-vaunted, 30-year-old war on drugs. DEA Chief Karen Tandy cites massive drug seizures as evidence that the DEA is “making progress” in the war on drugs. But after 30 years of drug warfare, only a died-in-the-wool government drug warrior, one who makes a nice government salary fighting the war on drugs, would consider massive drug seizures as evidence of progress. And of course, the massive drug seizures mean renewed dedication to winning the war on drugs, which, not surprisingly, means increased budgets for the drug-war complex, including those like Tandy whose salary depends on the continuation of the war.

Unfortunately, all too many Americans continue to put their blind faith in the feds and their beloved wars, believing that federal officials, like pagan gods, know what’s best for the American people and are only acting in their best interests. What we need in this country is a great awakening, in which the American people realize the fake, false, and destructive bill of goods they’ve been fed by the feds. That will be the day when Americans cause our nation to change course away from empire and perpetual war and move in the direction of liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony.

A front-page story in today’s New York Times should give thinking Americans a good idea of how the Pentagon is leading America in a horrible direction with respect to its Padilla doctrine. With the Padilla doctrine, the Pentagon is fighting for the authorization to pick up any American, label him a suspected terrorist, and detain him forever without having to go through the hassles of prosecuting him in federal court and according him such constitutional guarantees as due process of law and trial by jury.

The New York Times article points out that indefinite detentions of suspected criminals, “a relic of the Mao era,” are the way of life in communist China. The article states: “Locked inside more than 300 special prisons are an estimated 300,000 prostitutes, drug users, petty criminals and other political prisoners who have been stripped of any legal rights.”

Bringing to mind the U.S. military’s torture and sex abuse at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, a Chinese prisoner stated that “guards often jolted inmates with electric cattle prods…. Menstruating women were shackled standing against a board and then prevented from sleeping or going to the bathroom for several days.”

As we have long maintained here at FFF, a Pentagon win in the Padilla case will transform American society in ways that the American people cannot even begin to imagine. Ironically, just when the Pentagon is fighting hard to move America in more communist direction, the communist regime in China “this year is expected to begin privately considering whether, and how, to change” its system of indefinite detention.

According to Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, the word “gall” means brazen boldness coupled with impudent assurance and insolence. Synonyms include audacity, brashness, chutzpah, nerve, and temerity.

For a good example of “gall,” consider this excerpt from a recent Christian Science Monitor article:

“The Bush administration has also accused Venezuela President Hugo Chavez of having a ‘poor human rights record and of meddling in the internal affairs of neighboring countries,’ reports Bloomberg.”

Talk about gall!

Why, here is an imperial regime (the U.S. government) that has engaged in torture, sex abuse, rape, executions, invasions of both neighboring and faraway countries (i.e., Mexico, Panama, Grenada, and Iraq), wars of aggression, bribery (foreign aid), massacres of innocent people (Waco and Ruby Ridge), support of brutal dictatorships (i.e., Saddam, Musharraf, the shah of Iran, and Pinochet) and a corrupt and brutal drug war (especially in Latin America) and maintains military troops in more than 100 countries.

And now the U.S. government is complaining about Venezuela’s “poor human rights record and meddling in the internal affairs of neighboring countries”? Indeed, U.S. officials give renewed meaning to the word "gall"!

A high U.S. official — President Bush, no less — is finally admitting what so many Americans have not wanted to admit for the last half-century — that contrary to what every one of us is taught in our public (i.e., government) schools, the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II was no victory for the people who had to suffer under the occupation of the Soviet Union, a major ally of the United States in World War II.

You’ll recall that the purported reason that Great Britain and France declared war on Germany in the first place was to liberate the Polish people from tyranny. But as we have pointed out here at FFF since our inception, including in our book The Failure of America’s Foreign Wars, at the end of the war the people of Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe, and the people of East Germany, and the people in Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia were not liberated. Yes, they were free from the shackles of Nazi Germany, but they were then knowingly and intentionally delivered into the clutches of the Soviet Union, a brutal communist regime that was no different in principle from the Nazi regime.

The problem has always been that since the Soviet Union was an ally of the United States in World War II and since communist dictator Joseph Stalin was a personal buddy of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, U.S. officials have always been able to convince the American people simply that “the Allies” won World War II, discouraging people from thinking any deeper about what that really meant. It meant, as we have long pointed out, that Poland (which was invaded by the Soviet Union at about the same time that Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939), Eastern Europe, East Germany, and the Baltics were “liberated” from Nazi Germany only to be delivered into the hands of the communists.

Some victory, right? Some liberation, right? Some freedom, right?

President Bush, who is traveling to Moscow to celebrate the standard World War II “victory,” has been under pressure because Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, not surprisingly, are refusing to celebrate any such “victory.” Their refusal has pressured President Bush into writing them a letter implying that the Soviet communist occupation of their country at the end of World War II (and for several decades thereafter) wasn’t really a victory or freedom for them. Maybe Bush will go all the way and admit that World War II wasn’t a victory for the people of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and East Germany either.

Bush’s letter, in turn, has angered Russian president Putin, who has responded, quite accurately, that Great Britain and the United States committed a war crime when they fire-bombed the defenseless women, children, and refugees in the beautiful German city of Dresden near the end of the war.

According to a front-page article in the Los Angeles Times, “The U.S. government has opened a criminal inquiry into suspected embezzlement by officials who failed to account for almost $100 million they disbursed for Iraqi reconstruction projects, federal investigators said Wednesday.”

So, let me see if I have this clear: The U.S. government invaded Iraq to “liberate” the Iraqi people from a corrupt dictator who tortured, sexually abuse, and killed his own people, including filling mass graves with insurgents who were opposing his regime.

Excuse me for being indelicate but how is this different than the post-invasion Iraqi regime, which has engaged in financial corruption involving Iraqi oil revenues, torture, sex abuse, and killing of insurgents.

Or are we back to that strong moral argument—“Our regime has done it less than Saddam’s regime did.”

Of course, congressional supporters of the war of aggression against Iraq, which never attacked the United States or threatened to do so, might respond, “Yeah, but at least Iraq is now free and stable.”

Well, I’d be the last one in the world to support any more overseas “educational junkets” for congressmen, but given that they love to take them to places like Hawaii, why not require that every single congressman who supported the war spend his next vacation, I mean “educational junket”, in Iraq? And I don’t just mean the “Green Zone” or Saddam’s palace, which is now occupied by U.S. officials. I mean, requiring these congressmen to spend a real nice time walking around Baghdad and other cities in “liberated” Iraq, visiting the sights, the same way they would do in Hawaii, Ft. Lauderdale, etc. Why would those congressmen object, given repeated federal assurances (which have to be true since federal officials would never lie) that Iraq is now “free and stable”?

Yesterday I commented on how ideal it would be if the U.S. government abandoned all its bases overseas and brought the troops home, discharging all of them into the private sector. This would constitute a major step in dismantling America’s military empire and restoring a republic to our land. It would seriously diminish the threat of terrorism, given that the bad things that the U.S. military does overseas is a principle source of the anger and hatred that foreigners have against the United States. It would also slash federal spending (and taxes), which would be economically positive.

MSNBC reported yesterday that the Pentagon is getting ready to announce a round of base closings inside the United States. The reaction of cities that are dependent on military welfare is predictable — everyone is having a panicky, conniption fit over the possibility of losing their dole. It’s just another example of what the welfare aspects of the warfare state have done to Americans. Just as people are frightened to death of the “terrorists” and the immigrants and of losing their Social Security, welfare, Medicare, SBA loans, education grants, drug laws, etc., they’re also terrified of losing their military-welfare largess. But just like addiction to heroin and cocaine, the sooner that Americans terminate their addiction to this welfare-warfare federal junk, the better off they and the rest of the country will be.

There might be a perverse upside to the Pentagon’s continued military occupation of Iraq: The occupation might be inhibiting the Pentagon’s ability to attack and wage wars of aggression against other innocent nations. According to the New York Times, “The concentration of American troops and weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan limits the Pentagon's ability to deal with other potential armed conflicts, the military's highest ranking officer reported to Congress on Monday.”

After all, if U.S. troops were withdrawn from Iraq today, they would not be discharged into the private sector. Instead, they would undoubtedly immediately be made ready to attack, bomb, and invade another country that has not attacked the United States, such as Iran.

Of course, the ideal result would be for the U.S. occupation to end immediately, bringing all troops home and giving them a full and complete discharge from the military. For that matter, the real ideal result would be to simply close all U.S. bases overseas and bring all U.S. overseas troops home, giving them discharges as well.

But given that U.S. officials are steadfastly committed to maintaining and even expanding their military empire around the world, especially with military attacks and wars of aggression, the fact that some 150,000 imperial troops are bogged down in Iraq might well be saving tens of thousands of innocent lives in countries that the president and the Pentagon would otherwise be attacking and invading.

Sunday’s Washington Post reported that people “Vietnam celebrated the communist victory over a U.S.-backed government Saturday, parading its troops down the same boulevard along which tanks rolled to smash into the Presidential Palace of South Vietnam 30 years ago.”

However, the millions of Vietnamese people killed by the U.S. government were not there to participate in the celebration because they were dead.

Of course, there are those who claim that the war was worth it because if the U.S. government had won the war, the Vietnamese people would have been better off under a U.S.-approved regime than under a communist regime. That might well be true for those who survived but certainly not for those who were dead or maimed.

Consider, for example, the situation today. Things certainly have improved economically but no one can deny that the Vietnamese people are living a life of freedom under Vietnam’s socialist and communist systems. Should the U.S. government reinvade Vietnam to liberate and democratize the Vietnamese people? Absolutely not. Leave Vietnam to the Vietnamese. It would not be morally right for U.S. forces to again start bombing and napalming Vietnam and killing Vietnamese people in order to impose a U.S.-approved democratic regime in their country. Life isn’t free in Vietnam but the Vietnamese people have a right not to be bombed, killed, liberated, and democratized by the U.S. military.

On the anniversary of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, we shouldn’t forget that the deaths of almost 60,000 American men in the Vietnam War were the result of a knowing, intentional, and deliberate lie proudly put forth to the American people by U.S. officials, who falsely claimed that North Vietnamese military forces had fired on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin.

You’ll also recall that U.S. officials repeatedly claimed that if the U.S. government didn’t win in Vietnam, the dominoes would start falling and ultimately communists would take over America. Well, as everyone knows, the U.S. government lost the war but the dominoes didn’t stop falling and the communists didn’t conquer America. I wonder how many of those federal officials who were responsible for the deaths of so many people, both Vietnamese and American, would be surprised at reading the following excerpt from the Post’s article:

“Down the grand boulevard where Communist tanks once rolled in, capitalism has taken solid root. Many of the parade floats were sponsored by American companies including VISA and American Express. One float featured women pushing shopping carts loaded with supermarket goods. These days, Le Duan Street is home to Diamond Plaza, a glittering, upscale department store where French perfumes and Italian shoes are sold to an emerging urban, middle class. Along the same strip, a French-owned five-star hotel sits across the street from the U.S. consulate, rebuilt after the former U.S. Embassy was razed in the late 1990s.”

One of the interesting twists of fate in Iraq involves Bush versus Bush with respect to the regime that would rule Iraq.

After U.S. military forces under Bush I ousted Saddam’s forces from Kuwait in the Persian Gulf intervention, Bush I encouraged the Shiites and the Kurds to revolt. However, U.S. officials ultimately decided to stand aside while Saddam slaughtered the insurgents, filling mass graves with their bodies, because U.S. officials concluded that a Shiite regime would be worse than a Saddam regime given that it would likely align itself with Iran, another enemy of the U.S. government.

When Bush II invaded Iraq many years later, his hope was obviously to simply replace Saddam with a dictator that would align Iraq within the U.S. Empire, permitting the U.S. to move its military bases in Saudi Arabia to Iraq and permitting U.S. oil companies to have the best oil-producing contracts. That was the idea behind installing either Pentagon favorite Ahmad Chalabi or CIA favorite Iyad Allawi into power. It was also the idea behind the infamous “caucus democracy” that U.S. officials planned to use in Iraq to install their man into power. But things got out of control when Shiite leader Sistani demanded instead a national democratic election, a demand to which Bush II finally acceded.

Thus, ironically, Bush II’s national election in Iraq has now turned over power to the very same group that Bush I opposed for fear that it would align itself with Iran.

Like all the emperors in history who have gone on big government spending sprees and debasing their currency in the process, President Bush is now distracting people’s attention away from the cause of the problem and pointing them toward “external forces.” Meeting with Saudi Prince Abdullah at his Texas ranch, Bush is suggesting that the reason that oil prices are soaring is that those big bad OPEC oil nations just aren’t producing enough oil. (Of course, the reason that Iraq’s oil production has been less than normal is the brutal 10-year embargo imposed by U.S. officials and the fact that U.S. officials have been running Iraq for the past 2 years.)

I wonder what Bush says about the rising price of diapers, which are increasing by 5 percent. Is that the fault of the Saudis too?

The problem remains a simple one: federal spending is totally out of control, with spending exceeding tax receipts by some $300 billion a year—and there is no end in sight. How can this not have an effect on the value of the dollar? And how else can a depreciating dollar be reflected than by rising prices of everything else.

Everything the feds do is a mess, from Social Security, to Medicare, to the drug war, to the war on poverty, to Iraq, to the war on terrorism, to foreign policy, to the war on immigrants, to federal spending, to civil liberties, to the dollar. Unfortunately for the American people, who continue to put their deep and abiding and unquestioning faith in their federal officials, the socialist and imperial chickens might finally be coming home to roost. If so, be prepared for more federal distractions away from the root of the problem. And be prepared for the federal fox to call for more federal measures to protect the federal chickens.

Not surprisingly, the Army has cleared four of the top five army officers in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib scandal. That includes Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top army commander in Iraq during the period of time that the torture and sex abuse were taking place. According to the New York Times, “While General Sanchez and the other top officers may not have done everything right, the inquiry said, their failures came as they struggled to combat a fast-growing insurgency and a booming prison population, all with an understaffed headquarters.”

Such a finding, of course, directly conflicts with the U.S. military judgment ordering the execution of Japanese Gen. Tomuyuki Yamashita after the end of World War II. Yamashita was the commander of Japanese troops in the Pacific in the waning days of the war. A military officer of the highest caliber, he condemned war crimes and had expressly ordered his troops to refrain from engaging in war crimes. So, why was he executed? Because the U.S. government said that as a commander, he was responsible for war crimes committed by his men, whether or not he approved of them or ordered them—and despite the fact that he couldn’t stop them from being committed because U.S. military forces had destroyed his lines of control and communication.

In the wake of its Abu Ghraib exoneration of Gen. Sanchez and his subordinates, the least the Army could do is publicly acknowledge that the Yamashita execution was carried out by the U.S. military purely out of postwar vengeance and retribution, not out of a sense of justice.

The latest Abu Ghraib whitewash brings to mind the old saying, “Military justice is to justice as military music is to music.” The only way to ensure that justice is done and that any malefactors, including political higher-ups, are brought to justice in the Abu Ghraib case is through the appointment of an independent prosecutor, as Human Rights Watch is contending.

Not surprisingly, Amtrak is once again having problems, this time with its high-speed Acela trains, which according to the New York Times, were supposed to be Amtrak’s “savior.” The Times stated, “Today that train is called the Acela, and instead of being Amtrak's savior, it has become a frustrating burden. On Wednesday, the company announced plans to sideline all 20 Acelas until summer to replace cracked brakes. It was the third major disruption of the high-speed service since it came on line in 2001.”

Federal officials are a stubborn bunch of people. No matter the manifest failures of socialism all over the world, they continue to believe that U.S. socialism (i.e., government-owned enterprises) can be made to succeed as long as it is not called socialism and as long as Congress continues to appropriate taxpayer money to the boondoggle. That’s why they remain steadfastly committed to Amtrak and, for that matter, to the U.S. Postal Service.

One of the downsides to the federal “war on terrorism” and the invasion and occupation of Iraq is that they have distracted Americans from focusing on getting government totally out of such socialist enterprises as Amtrak and the Postal Service. But if more and more Americans start realizing that the federal government is at the root of America’s woes (both domestic and foreign), America stands to lead the world out of the socialist-interventionist morass and toward freedom, private property, and free markets. A good place to start (among many) would be train travel and mail delivery.

Conservatives love to rail against “outsourcing,” the process by which American companies are hiring foreigners to do jobs that can be handled overseas. Unable to recognize the benefits of free trade and believing that such activities as outsourcing harms Americans, many conservatives think that government force should be used to stop businesses from doing this.

Unfortunately, however, such a protectionist position cannot be reconciled with the purported devotion that conservatives have to their old mantra of “freedom, free enterprise, private property, and limited government.”

After all, doesn’t freedom entail the right to do whatever you want with your own money, wealth, and property? A person’s money, wealth, and property don’t belong to “society” or to the government. They belong to the individual or group of individuals who own it. Why should government have the power to restrict how a person disposes of something that rightfully belongs to him, even if it involves spending or investing it outside the United States?

Moreover, doesn’t “free enterprise” mean free from government interference? If government prohibits an American from engaging in enterprise overseas, how is that consistent with “free enterprise”? Or are the protectionists saying that “freedom and free enterprise” are morally right only when they take place within the confines of the United States?

Finally, if using government to stop outsourcing is such a good thing, how come the protectionists never try to apply its principles between the respective states? That is, why not stop California businesses from outsourcing to people in Virginia? Indeed, why not amend the Constitution to enable each state to erect a Berlin Wall around it, both to protect the citizens within the wall from “outsourcing” but also from all those immigrants from other states. Whoops, I suppose we shouldn’t give them any more ideas.

Zacarias Moussaoui’s guilty plea to terrorism charges in U.S. federal district court does not end the Pentagon’s threat that hangs over the head of every federal judge who has jurisdiction over an indicted terrorist defendant.

Moussaoui’s punishment must still be decided, either by a jury or by the judge if both Moussaoui and the government waive a jury. The problem is that the Pentagon and the Justice Department are still claiming the power to remove Moussaoui from the jurisdiction of the federal court and transfer him to the military for punishment, including execution. Don’t forget that that’s in fact what they’ve done to Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri and that they are fighting for the power to do this to every other American citizen and every foreigner whom they suspect of being a terrorist.

Thus, if it looks like the jury or the judge might be unwilling to impose the death penalty on Moussaoui, the military might simply take the law into its own hands and do the dirty deed itself, transferring Moussaoui to Gitmo and executing him there, independent of any federal judicial interference.

That’s why the Moussaoui case — or more accurately, the Pentagon’s claim of power to punish Americans and others without due process of law — still presents the most ominous threat to the freedom of the American people in our lifetime.

Detractors of Pope Benedict XVI are trying to make a big deal about his teenage service in the Hitler Youth and the Germany army during World War II. What’s interesting and somewhat amusing, however, is that very few of them are asking some important questions that would undoubtedly make them — the detractors — uncomfortable:

(1) Why should any government have the power to force parents to send their children into a government-approved institution for the purpose of receiving government-approved doctrine from government-approved schoolteachers using government-approved textbooks?

(2) Why should any government have the power to conscript (that is, force or draft) people to serve the state in any of its wars or, for that matter, for any other “national service”?

(3) Why shouldn’t every soldier, both voluntary and involuntary, whose government is waging an unjust war desert his military unit, as the Pope did, rather than follow orders to kill "the enemy"? Doesn’t the individual owe a higher duty, even in time of war, to his conscience and to God than he does to his government?

When they failed to find Saddam’s much-vaunted WMD, the Bush people switched their primary justification for invading Iraq to liberating the Iraqi people from tyranny. Notice how different the Bush method of liberating foreigners from tyranny is from the method that guided America’s Founding Fathers.

Our ancestors sent the following message to people suffering under tyranny: The U.S. government will not come to liberate you but if you are able to escape the dungeons and the famines in your country, there is a place that will accept you unconditionally — the United States of America. The result was the freest and most prosperous nation in history — one that attracted millions of immigrants from all over the world.

The Bush people, on the other hand, say the exact opposite: We don’t want you people in our country but our military will come and “liberate” you from your tyranny by replacing your regime with one that is U.S.-approved. The result in Iraq has been horrific: an estimated 100,000 people dead (the Pentagon refuses to keep count), untold numbers maimed, and the economy in shatters. And all they have to show for it is a brutal U.S.-installed military regime, followed by a national election that isn’t very likely to produce a free society. And of course there’s the collateral damage of government assaults on liberty at home in the name of protecting “national security” and fighting the “war on terrorism,” not to mention the adverse and potentially catastrophic effects that out-of-control federal spending could have on economic conditions.

Thus, the American people are faced with a conflict of visions: The vision of freedom, free markets, open borders, peace, and republic that guided our ancestors versus the vision of restriction, empire, foreign wars, and isolationism that guides the Bush people.

After years of legal wrangling, accused terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui plans to plead guilty to a federal indictment alleging that he conspired to participate in the 9/11 attacks. The presiding judge, Leonie Brinkema, intends to accept the plea and then likely set a date to empanel a jury to decide whether Moussaoui should be given the death penalty.

This is way the system is supposed to work. As we here at FFF have consistently maintained ever since 9/11, terrorism is a crime, not an act of war. If a person is accused of having committed a terrorist act, the proper procedure under the Constitution and our system of law is to arrest him, indict him, try him, and if convicted, punish him. Within that process, he must be accorded due process of law, right to counsel, and other procedural rights and guarantees. As our ancestors, who fought so hard for the enactment of the Bill of Rights, understood, if you permit government officials to deny such rights to the despicable and unpopular defendants, then ultimately no one is safe from the tyrants.

Thus, those who argued in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that those attacks were “acts of war” rather than criminal acts were wrong, just as any people who argued that the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and Timothy McVeigh’s attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City were “acts of war” were wrong. Federal officials did the right thing in indicting and prosecuting the 1993 WTC defendants, McVeigh, and Moussaoui in federal district court. And they did the right thing in refusing to follow the advice of those Americans who requested that federal officials simply transfer Moussaoui to the Pentagon’s clutches for quick execution. As imperfect as it is, America’s criminal justice system is something that Americans should take pride in.

In contrast, of course, is the Pentagon’s shameful attempt to circumvent and sabotage our criminal justice system, both with respect to its Guantanamo gulag and its bald-faced claim of power to arrest and punish any American and any foreigner suspected of terrorism without federal court interference and without due process of law. The Pentagon set up its Guantanamo gulag for the precise purpose of avoiding the U.S. Constitution and the jurisdiction of the U.S. Supreme Court. And its indefinite incarceration and denial of due process of accused terrorists Jose Padilla, Yaser Hamdi, and Ali al-Marri, along with countless foreigners, continues to be a Soviet-like stain on our heritage of liberty, law, and due process.

From Tuesday’s Washington Post:

“Army intelligence officials in Iraq developed and circulated ‘wish lists’ of harsh interrogation techniques they hoped to use on detainees in August 2003, including tactics such as low-voltage electrocution, blows with phone books and using dogs and snakes -- suggestions that some soldiers believed spawned abuse and illegal interrogations.”

One important thing to keep in mind is that these military people wished to employ these “techniques” against people who were entirely innocent. The Iraqi people were innocent in the sense that none of them had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks against the American people. They were also innocent in the sense that their government had not attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. The very worst thing that the Iraqi people could be accused of having done was resist an illegal invasion and war of aggression against their nation by the U.S. government and, moreover, many of the detainees swept up in the mass arrests were innocent of even that conduct.

Some questions arise here:

(1) What was it that so easily motivated U.S. military personnel to hate the Iraqi people to such a large extent that they wished to do these types of things to them?

(2) Why is there so little remorse or regret for the mistreatment, including killings, maiming, torture, and sex abuse of the Iraqi people, especially given the post-invasion discovery that their government had no WMD that was threatening the United States, as falsely alleged by U.S. officials prior to the invasion?

(3) Are U.S. military personnel capable of instantly hating and mistreating any people anywhere in the world upon orders to do so?

(4) How can the hatred and mistreatment of the Iraqi people be reconciled with a purported wish to “liberate” and “democratize” them?

Last week we received a taste of what is in store if an economic and monetary collapse occurs. When asked about the rising price of gasoline, President Bush blamed it on China’s growing appetite for crude oil. In other words, rising commodity prices have absolutely nothing to do with a plunging dollar which arises from out-of-control federal spending (and borrowing) to pay for massive welfare-warfare-state projects, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, drug war, war on terrorism, and the military adventure in Iraq to search for WMD and “spread democracy.” It’s all the fault of those big, bad Chinese communists, not the good, innocent federal bureaucrats in Washington who love to spend other people’s hard-earned money. Oh well, at least Bush didn’t blame rising commodity prices on “the failure of free enterprise.” No doubt he’s saving that one for a real monetary or economic crisis. By the way, have you noticed how Bush and other conservatives are no longer crowing about how they supposedly brought down the Soviet Empire — by causing it spend itself into national bankruptcy?

Until people took to the streets, U.S. officials were undoubtedly ecstatic over the situation in Ecuador.

A former military man who is now Ecuador’s president, Lucio Gutierrez, had declared a state of emergency, which would be a dream-come-true for U.S. officials here in the United States as part of their “war on terrorism.” Gutierrez used his state of emergency to suspend civil liberties — temporarily, of course — including banning public demonstrations protesting his state of emergency decree.

Best of all, from a U.S. government standpoint, has been the president’s attack on the independence of the judiciary. Gutierrez fired all 31 justices on the Supreme Court when they issued some rulings against him, and replaced them with his cronies. Of course, if he had been smart he would have done what the U.S. president and the Pentagon did — just establish torture centers offshore to avoid the law and the Supreme Court, like at Gitmo.

Echoing a favorite cry of U.S. officials, Gutierrez said it was now time for the nation to move on. Best of all was his statement, “Beloved people of Ecuador, let's now leave everything in God's hands,” which undoubtedly brought tears to the eyes of U.S. officials.

Pentagon officials undoubtedly burst with pride when Vice Adm. Victor Hugo Rosero, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, observed, "The state of emergency decree is not an attack on any citizen. It does not seek to pit brother against brother. Its only purpose is to recover the order and peace lost in these last days."

The good news is that refusing to behave like the sheep Gutierrez thought they were, thousands of Ecuadorians took to the streets in violation of the president’s decree in order to protest against the decree. Although U.S. officials would undoubtedly consider the protestors to be terrorists and traitors for daring to oppose their government in a time of crisis and emergency, the courage of the people motivated Gutierrez to lift his “state of emergency” decree that he had imposed the day before.

The Washington Post today has an article entitled “Congress’s Willingness to Tackle Deficit in Doubt.”

Well, duh! Talk about stating the obvious!

But as we have long maintained here at FFF, the deficit is not the problem. The problem is federal spending. It is out of control and it is soaring to the sky. And the reason is that so much money is being spent on both the welfare state and the warfare state.

Congressmen know that all too many Americans simply refuse to consider abolishing their beloved welfare opiates, which include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education grants, and corporate subsidies. That’s, in fact, why so many people unfortunately prefer to talk about “reforming” government programs rather than repealing them. It makes them feel good and makes them feel like they’re doing something about their problem. But even though it might make them feel good, the truth is that they’re not doing much good when they propose “reforms” of the welfare state. Reformed welfare-state programs will continue to entail out-of-control government spending.

It’s no different with the warfare state. Congressmen are scared to death to take on the Pentagon, especially because of the ever-present threat to close down military bases in their district. The bases themselves provide a welfare narcotic that makes people in that community think that they could not survive without it.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Empire continues to expand its bases around the world and continues to engage in its military adventures, most notably in Iraq, which is sucking billions upon billions of dollars down countless military-industrial complex rat holes. But the Congress just keeps appropriating ever-increasing amounts of money, without a care in the world. The way they figure it is that it’s not their money anyway and that as long as it makes people feel good about such things as a U.S.-approved regime now running the Iraq, that’s all that matters.

Meanwhile, U.S. debt continues to pile up higher and higher, with much of it being held in foreign hands. The dollar continues its slow decline in international markets. Few people save, not only because of taxes but also because of rising prices (which reflect the debasement of the dollar due to out of control federal spending) and also because U.S. officials have long taught the American people, especially in public schools, that spending, not saving, is the key to prosperity.

The question is not whether the welfare-warfare state’s chickens will come home to roost. The question is when they will do so. When that day comes, rest assured that the Washington Post and other mainstream publications will be carrying articles with the title, “Free Enterprise Fails Again.”

According to Knight Ridder, U.S. officials are refusing to permit certain Iraqis from coming to the United States. The Iraqis are those whose lives are now in danger as a result of having helped U.S. officials maintain their occupation of their country.

How can this be? I thought the (post-WMD) reason that the U.S. invaded Iraq was because of the love and concern that U.S. officials have for the Iraqi people rather than a desire to establish a U.S.-friendly regime in Iraq.

In other words, “We love you but don’t even think about coming to live in the United States because we don’t love you that much. You stay there and we’ll manifest our love for you by ‘liberating’ your country with our bombs and missiles and bringing you a national election.”

But actually, U.S. officials are saying that they’re actually doing it for the new Iraq — so that the country doesn’t lose the talent of all these fine people whose lives are now in danger. Aren’t U.S. officials so kind, benevolent, and selfless? They’re thinking only of the well-being of the new Iraq, even to the point of being willing to risk the lives of the Iraqis who have faithfully served the occupation.

Meanwhile, accused Cuban terrorist Jose Posada Carriles, who is an old CIA anti-Castro favorite, and who is alleged to have brought down a Cuban airliner, killing all passengers on board, and who is suspected of involvement in a string of hotel bombings in Cuba that killed and injured several others, and who is wanted in Venezuela for the airline downing, recently entered the United States and is seeking political asylum. It will be interesting to see how the “war on terrorism” crowd treats Posada, given that the alleged acts of terrorism were committed against people from countries whose regimes are not “team players” in the U.S. Empire’s “war on terrorism.”

The State of Connecticut is suing the federal government for requiring the state to spend millions of dollars in state taxpayer money in order to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind law. Connecticut’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, says that the federal action is “illegal and unconstitutional.”

I wonder what planet Blumenthal has been living on. How can he not know that he who pays the piper calls the tune? As the Supreme Court put it in the famous case of Wickard v. Filburn, decided in 1942, “It is hardly lack of due process for the government to regulate that which it subsidizes.”

For decades, public-school officials all over the nation have lived in ecstasy over “free money” from the federal government. But they learned a long time ago what all federal welfare recipients, including regimes receiving U.S. foreign aid, have learned — that federal money isn’t “free” after all. It comes with one a tiny string attached with a note stating: “You will do as we say.”

Responding to the lawsuit with that special tone of arrogance that is common to federal bureaucrats, D.J. Nordquist, a federal Department of Education spokesman, said, “It is very disappointing that officials in Connecticut are spending their time hiring lawyers while Connecticut's students are suffering from one of the largest achievement gaps in the nation."

Of course, it’s amusing to see state and federal bureaucrats battling each other. What’s even more amusing is that state and local bureaucrats, failing to realize that the reason education is in crisis is because state and local governments are in charge of it, continue to believe that federal bureaucrats, who make a mess out of every enterprise they run, are really going to help them solve their education woes.

In a surprise visit to Iraq, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made a point to lecture the new Iraqi officials on how to run a government. Warning the officials against “incompetence” and “corruption,” he said that he hoped that the government would include “highly competent people who are not going to politicize security forces.”

Reflecting the obeisant attitude that U.S. officials have come to expect from team players in the U.S. Empire or perhaps simply reflecting symptoms of the Stockholm Syndrome, Iraqi officials “greeted Rumsfeld’s comments warmly,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Too bad. Wouldn’t it have been nice if those Iraqi officials had instead replied to Rumsfeld’s lecture as follows:

“Rummy, we Iraqis don’t need lectures about ‘competence’ and ‘corruption’ from you or any other U.S. government official. You people in the U.S. government corruptly manipulated intelligence to justify invading our country for the sake of substituting a new regime here in Iraq — one that would be obeisant and obedient to you so that you could keep permanent bases here in our country and permit your favorite companies to extract our country’s oil. Your invasion has produced the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people, many more innocent people killed in the U.S. on September 11. Yet, you and other U.S. government officials have been rewarded, praised, and promoted for your corrupt achievements. By the way, are your members of Congress, whom President Bush controls more completely than Saddam controlled his, still having their family members’ pockets lined with moolah? And would you please ask your ‘competent’ and ‘honest’ public officials what they did with the billions of dollars in Iraqi money that they put into their dirty little hands on that is now mysteriously unaccounted for? Please come back and see us … in a few years.”

The biggest cost of President Bush’s war on Iraq has, of course, been paid by those people who are now dead. The federal response is: “Well, yeah, they’re dead but at least there’s been a national election in Iraq.”

Several years ago, I traveled to Cuba, a nation in which people have suffered under horrific tyranny, both political and economic (i.e., socialism). Suppose someone had brought me a 10-year-old child and handed me a gun and said, “If you will kill this child, Fidel Castro will have a fair and honest national election in Cuba, monitored and enforced by U.S. troops.”

I confess that I could not have killed that child even if I were 100 percent certain that it would have produced a fair and honest election in Cuba. Heck, I couldn’t even do it if it were a 90-year-old man with terminal cancer.

Yet, isn’t that what has happened in Iraq, given that the recent national election has now became the justification de jour for President Bush’s invasion? But instead of killing only one child in return for the national election, there have been numerous children killed along with tens of thousands of innocent adults, all for the sake of a national election. Do you ever wonder what all those dead people would have said if they had been asked in advance whether they’d be willing to trade their lives for a national election in Iraq?

Americans might soon be witnessing another price for President Bush’s war — the financial cost. Proudly proclaiming that he hasn’t raised taxes, what he and his Congress have done is remove all limits on federal spending. That means a debasement of the dollar, which we’re already seeing in terms of sky-high commodity prices, such as gasoline. By reducing the real purchasing power of people’s income through monetary debasement, the effect is exactly the same as a tax increase, only fraudulent. Moreover, if there is a run on the dollar by foreigners, especially those that the Bush administration is bashing, Americans are likely to witness a very interesting financial crisis. Of course, given that all-too-many Americans received their economics “education” from government-approved schoolteachers, all too many of them will immediately and blindly believe official explanations blaming the crisis on “external forces” (such as Big Oil), blocking out of their minds the adventure in Iraq, including its out of control federal spending, has played in the crisis.

Do you remember when conservatives used to say during the 1990s that the massive deaths of Iraqi children were due to the indifference of Saddam Hussein and not the Pentagon’s intentional destruction of water and sewage facilities followed by the brutal sanctions that prevented such facilities from being repaired? I wonder how they explain this excerpt from an article in yesterday’s L.A. Times about the dilapidated condition of Iraq’s water and sewage facilities under U.S. rule for the past two years:

“Schoolchildren have to step over rancid brown puddles on their way to classrooms. Families swim in, fish and get their drinking water from the polluted Tigris and Euphrates rivers, leading to high rates of child mortality and water-borne illnesses.”

That’s the way it was under more than a decade of those brutal sanctions, not surprisingly producing the infectious diseases that the Pentagon predicted would result when they intentionally bombed the water and sewage facilities during the Persian Gulf War, which ended up killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.

They sure can’t blame the current “high rates of child mortality and water-borne illnesses” on Saddam Hussein, unless of course they point to their U.S.-installed Saddam look-alike, Ayad Allawi, who has been ruling Iraq with the same iron fist that Saddam ruled it, even killing mass numbers of insurgents resisting his regime.

For more on the sanctions and the many deaths of Iraqi children they caused and the bureaucratic games that U.S. bureaucrats intentionally played to prevent the Iraqis from repairing their facilities during the years that the children were dying, see the articles posted in the February 9, 2004 issue of FFF Email Update.

And don’t forget that the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center were motivated in part by the sanctions and the deaths of the Iraqi children, not hatred for America’s “freedom and values” as U.S. officials maintain.

Yesterday, I wrote in my article “Regime Change Was an Immoral Excuse for War” that U.S. foreign policy has always been based on whether a foreign ruler, whether democratically elected or not, is a “team player” within the vast expanse of the U.S. Empire. If the ruler “plays ball” with the U.S., then he receives U.S. government support. If he doesn’t, then he needs to be ousted, in which case the excuse they come up with for ouster is WMD, drug dealing, liberation, democracy-spreading, etc. Examples of brutal dictators who have been “team players” are the shah of Iran, Musharraf of Pakistan, and Pinochet of Chile, all of whom are considered to have ruled over “free” societies because of their alliance with U.S. officials.

Another good example, of course, was Saddam Hussein. As long as he was a “team player” in the 1980s, he received financial and military support from the Empire and no U.S. official gave a hoot to how he treated the Iraqi people. Once he refused to play ball, his people needed to be “liberated” and have “democracy” imposed upon them.

Another good example is the U.S.-installed Allawi regime in Iraq. As the Washington Post points out today, it is engaging in the same brutal, deadly, tortuous treatment of the Iraqi people that Saddam engaged in. In other words, same treatment, but different dictator — this time another U.S.-approved one.

And the U.S. government’s response? It says it can’t get involved in the matter because the Iraqi regime that it installed is now sovereign and supreme. So, the poor helpless U.S. occupation forces can’t do anything to stop the Saddam-like treatment that the U.S.-installed dictatorship is engaged in but, at same time, steadfastly insists that it will stay in Iraq no matter what any Iraqi “sovereign and supreme” regime says to the contrary.

And when there is terrorist “blowback” for U.S. support of another in a long line of brutal dictators as part of U.S. foreign policy, we can hear the standard line from U.S. officials: “They hate us for our freedom and values.”

The most recent report about the CIA’s bungling of the WMD information about Iraq is all bunk anyway. The point is not whether President Bush was innocently misled by erroneous intelligence about WMD, leading him to wage against Iraq. The point was that the real reason for invading Iraq was to secure the ouster of Saddam Hussein from power and replace him with a ruler who was more palatable to U.S. officials.

Bush obviously knew that the regime-change justification would not garner the quick support that he needed. So, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, he used the WMD justification to garner quick support from Americans, knowing that people’s fear would cause them to put their total faith in everything the president said. Bush undoubtedly expected to find — and hoped to find — at least some stashes of WMD that the U.S. had previously furnished Saddam. At that point, U.S. officials would have loudly and proudly proclaimed how they had saved America and the world from an imminent WMD attack from Saddam, even as they quickly installed a new U.S.-approved regime to rule Iraq.

By destroying all his WMD, Saddam foiled Bush’s plan, resulting in a shift of justification to “democracy spreading,” which has now produced a regime that might prove to be less of a “team player” than Saddam was.

Everybody is agog and aghast over the disclosure that Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s wife and daughter received more than $500,000 of political donors’ money during the past few years.

What they fail to recognize is that this sort of thing is an inherent part of a political system that is based on the power to confiscate and redistribute wealth and regulate people’s activities. Despite all the “campaign-finance reform” or “ethics legislation” that is enacted, potential victims and beneficiaries of the socialistic welfare state and regulated society will always find it in their interest to figure out some way to benefit a member of Congress in the hope that it will pay off for them down the line.

It’s what Donald Rumsfeld, who says that U.S. troops are killing and dying to bring “democracy” to Iraq, would call the “messy” or “untidy” aspects of democracy. Unfortunately, it’s more like the messy and untidy aspects of the socialistic welfare state and regulated society way of life.

By the way, the person who crafted the memo citing how intervention in the Schiavo case could bring political advantage to Republicans has been outed and has now resigned his position. Perhaps that’s why Republicans have been silent and supine over the Pentagon’s and CIA’s torture, sex abuse, rape, and murder scandal—no political advantage there!

U.S. conservatives are remaining somewhat silent in the face of the widespread media analyses attributing the major role that John Paul II played in the demise of the Soviet Union. No, it’s not that conservatives don’t still feel that Ronald Reagan also played a major role in bringing down the Soviet Union, it’s just that talking about how Reagan supposedly did it now produces severe discomfort for conservatives.

Why? The answer turns on the fact that the Pope inspired the Polish people to oppose Soviet domination on moral and spiritual grounds while Reagan, according to conservatives, caused Soviet officials to spend their nation into bankruptcy.

So, why would that make conservatives uncomfortable? Because they know that they are now pursuing the exact same out-of-control government spending policies that they say brought down the Soviet Union. Thus, to boast about how Reagan supposedly brought down the Soviet Union places conservatives in the uncomfortable position of having to explain why their big-government spending policies won’t have the exact same result here in the United States.

Pentagon officials are undoubtedly smiling and cheering the attacks on the independence of the judicial branch of government, especially at the federal level. After all, don’t forget what the Pentagon is fighting for in the Padilla and al-Marri and Guantanamo cases — the power to arrest any American and any foreigner and punish him without federal court interference (even if such punishment consists of torture, sex abuse, rape, and murder).

Don’t forget also that the only thing — repeat: only thing — standing in their way is the federal judiciary, especially given the silent and supine acquiescence of Congress to the Pentagon’s wrongful actions. So far the federal judiciary has said “No” to the Pentagon, declaring such actions in violation of the U.S. Constitution. But given that the Supreme Court buckled under pressure in 1937, overturning decisions holding Franklin Roosevelt’s socialist and fascist New Deal programs unconstitutional, Pentagon officials know full well that it could happen again. Thus even though some people might disagree with the Schiavo decision, they might come to rue the day they permitted opportunistic and power-lusting politicians and bureaucrats, especially military ones, to use the Schiavo decision as an excuse to weaken the independence of the judicial branch of government.

P.S. Regarding my recent blog exchange on the Schiavo case with a blogger named Eshaya Youkhana, who posts his blogs at PhilosophyNotes.com: Youkhana has posted a new blog acknowledging that my blog of yesterday cleared up a misunderstanding that he had about the libertarian nonaggression principle — that is, that freedom entails the right to make any choices and engage in any activities, so long as the conduct is peaceful — that is, in the sense that it they don’t involve the initiation of force or fraud against other people and, of course, without their consent.

Although he now seems to understand the principle, Youkhana’s newest blog nevertheless reflects that he still is having trouble applying it. He suggests that instead of specifically discussing “unjustified homicide” and “mercy killing, suicide, and abortion,” I addressed other issues, such as “bungee jumping, mountain climbing, and smoking” as well as welfare-state programs.

By explaining the nonaggression principle and then using various examples, I figured that it would be fairly easily to apply the principle to other examples. But Youkhama still doesn’t understand how the libertarian nonaggression principle applies to “unjustified homicide, mercy killing, suicide, and abortion.”

Consider Youkhana’s general category of “unjustified homicide.” The libertarian nonaggression principle prohibits the initiation of force or fraud against another human being. “Unjustified homicide” involves the initiation of force against another human being. Therefore, freedom does not entail the right to commit an “unjustified homicide” under libertarian principles.

On the other hand, since attempted suicide is destructive action taken against one’s own self (as is smoking, drinking, drug abuse, etc.), people should be free to commit it without state punishment because it does not involve the initiation of force against another human being, just as the example I cited yesterday involving flogging one’s own back. Again, that’s not to say that at least some libertarians would not condemn the act as immoral.

What about mercy killing? If the intended victim hasn’t consented to being killed, then it is an “unjustified homicide” under libertarian principles because it involves the initiation of force against another human being. On the other hand, if the victim requests to be killed, it falls into the category of voluntary action taken against one’s self (i.e., attempted suicide) and, although considered immoral by at least some libertarians, falls into the category of freedom.

The issue of abortion has long split libertarians. Those libertarians who believe that life begins at conception (or before birth) believe that abortion is “unjustified homicide (i.e., murder) because it involves the initiation of force against another human being. Libertarians who believe that life begins after birth believe otherwise because they feel that force is not being initiated against another human being.

I have recently had a blog exchange on the Schiavo case with a blogger, Eshaya Youkhana, whose blogs appear on an interesting Catholic website named PhilosophyNotes.com. In his most recent blog, Youkhana criticizes the following statement I made:

“Ultimately, the true test of a free society is not whether people are free to make the ‘popular’ or ‘responsible’ choice with respect to peaceful choices. The test of a free society is whether people are free to make the ‘unpopular’ or ‘irresponsible’ choices, so long as their conduct is peaceful.”

Youkhana incorrectly interprets my term “peaceful” to mean acts that “disturb the public peace.” Actually what I mean by the term is the non-initiation of force or fraud against another human being. Thus, the state should criminalize all actions that involve the initiation of force or fraud against others but not criminalize peaceful choices, even ones that adverse social consequences, including attempted suicide.

Suppose someone’s religion calls for him to flog himself until his back bleeds. This action would obviously involve force but since it is voluntarily imposed by a person on his own body, the state should not criminalize it. Moreover, such peaceful actions as smoking, drinking, and drug usage can have adverse effects on others, especially family members, but should not be criminalized because these types of choices go to the very essence of what freedom and free will are. The same holds true for such high-risk activity as bunjee-jumping and mountain climbing. If people in a society are not free to engage in peaceful choices, no matter how self-destructive and dangerous and no matter how adverse to others, people in that society cannot truly be considered free.

Youkhana suggests that the criminalization of “bad” peaceful acts will lead to a higher level of morality. On the contrary, the exact opposite happens. When the state prohibits people from making such choices, the conscience tends to atrophy. The way to achieve a higher sense of conscience in society is to free people to struggle with the peaceful choices that confront them as they travel from birth to death.

As an aside, this principle of freedom applies also to those areas where the state, through it welfare system, forces people to make the “right” decision with respect to helping others (i.e., Social Security, Medicare, foreign aid, etc.). Just as freedom and free will entail the right to make “irresponsible” or “unpopular” choices with respect to choices that do not involve the initiation of force against others, freedom and free will also entail the right with respect to do what one wants with their own money. That’s undoubtedly why Jesus did not summon Caesar’s agents when the young rich man made the “wrong” choice by declining Jesus’s suggestion to sell everything and give the proceeds to the poor.

Army Captain Rogelio Maynulet, who was facing a 10-year sentence for “assault with intent to commit manslaughter,” walked out of court a free man — free even from any further military service. According to local Iraqis, the man he killed was a garbage collector, who had been wounded by U.S. troops who had fired upon his car. To “take him out of his misery,” Maynulet just shot and killed him.

One interesting aspect of the case is why U.S. officials decided to charge the man simply with assault and not murder or manslaughter. Charging a person with assault with intent to commit a crime involves a significantly lighter punishment than charging him with actual murder or manslaughter.

Another interesting aspect is that there has been no outcry (so far) among the cowardly clowns in Congress against the verdict and judgment of the military tribunal. I suppose, however, that that’s not too surprising, given the fact that Congress has lain silent and supine during the Pentagon’s torture, rape, sex abuse, and murder scandal. Anyway, how many American votes are likely to be garnered by coming to defense of an involuntarily terminated Iraqi man? And I suppose we also shouldn’t forget that unlike the civil judiciary, the military can always retaliate by closing a base in a congressman’s district.

Friday, April 1, 2005

President Bush’s commission on WMD in Iraq has concluded that there were no WMD in Iraq and makes the same standard conservative conclusion: “The system needs reform.”

As we pointed out prior to the war, Bush and Cheney had already decided to invade Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein and replace him with a regime that would be more palatable to U.S. officials. That’s what U.S. foreign policy is all about. What they needed was a justification, in order to avoid being condemned for waging a war of aggression, a type of war punished by the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal.

They finally settled on WMD, figuring that this would be the fastest and easiest way to frighten the American people into supporting the invasion, no questions asked. It worked. While it’s easy to forget it now, during all the “Saddam and his terrorists are coming to get us with a mushroom cloud” talk, there is no doubt that millions of Americans were quivering and quaking and not daring to question anything these people were saying. Even Catholics, who had been repeatedly warned by the Pope that this war would constitute an unjust war under Catholic doctrine, took the position that they could safely disregard what the Pope said, set aside their consciences, and blindly put their faith in the pronouncements