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The Assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, Part 2

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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Immediately after the bombing that killed Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, Michael Moffitt began screaming, “DINA!” “Assassins!” The Washington, D.C., police who had arrived on the scene were mystified. Who the heck is Dina? they wondered. Moffitt was referring to the National Intelligence Directorate, an internal military-intelligence force within the Chilean government that was established soon after Gen. Augusto Pinochet took power in the 1973 coup that ousted Salvador Allende, an avowed socialist-communist who had been democratically elected by the people of Chile in 1970. Known as DINA, and headed by an army colonel named Manuel Contreras, the organization had all the powers of the military, the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA, all wrapped into one. DINA agents wielded and exercised the omnipotent authority to kidnap people off the streets and cart them off to secret facilities, where they would torture, rape, or kill them. Tens of thousands of ...

Ditch the CIA, the Pentagon, and the NSA

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The fight between Donald Trump and the CIA over the supposed Russian hacking scandal has at least two positive benefits: One, it helps to remind us what the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state has done to us here at home. Two, it enables us to ask an important fundamental question: Given that the Cold War ended decades ago, why don’t we just ditch the entire national security establishment and restore a constitutional republic to our land? The conversion of the federal government from a constitutionally limited government to a national-security state occurred after World War II. U.S. officials said that the Soviet Union, Red China, and the communist world posed a grave threat to the United Staes. In order to combat this threat, they said, it would be necessary for the United States to become like them — a national-security state. If America failed to do that, the argument went, the country ...

The U.S. Government’s Power to Assassinate

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Throughout the presidential campaign, including the presidential debates, among the issues that have not been raised or discussed is the federal government’s power to assassinate. The power to assassinate is now consider an accepted power of the federal government. In fact, most people, especially mainstream reporters and pundits, treat federal assassinations with blasé and nonchalance. Most people undoubtedly believe that ...

Should America Pardon the U.S. National Security State?

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Several weeks ago, contemporaneously with the release of Oliver Stone’s excellent movie Snowden, friends and admirers of Edward Snowden launched a campaign to have President Obama pardon him for disclosing the NSA’s super-secret illegal surveillance scheme to the American people and the world. The reasons for the pardon request were excellently summarized in an op-ed that appeared in the ...

The Assassinations of John Kennedy and Orlando Letelier

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This week the Washington Post carried a fascinating front-page article entitled “This Is Not an Accident. This Was a Bomb” about the assassination of Orlando Letelier, the former official in the Allende administration who, along with his 25-year-old assistant Ronni Moffitt, was murdered on the streets of Washington, D.C., in 1976. The article includes several interesting photographs, including of ...

U.S. Hypocrisy on Due Process with Duterte

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The U.S. government is upset over Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s efforts to win the war on drugs. U.S. officials are criticizing Duterte for killing suspected drug-law violators without providing them due process of law. Ever since he was elected president of the country, Duterte has unleashed a state-sponsored reign of terror that includes extra-judicial executions of people suspected of ...

No Limited Government Under a National Security State

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Conservatives have long professed to be advocates of “limited government.” They often employ the phrase in their favorite mantra, “free enterprise, private property, and limited government.” As I pointed out in my blog post yesterday, “Conservatives and the Free Market,” conservatives also profess to be advocates of free enterprise but then endorse practically every statist program that comes down ...