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What If the Military or CIA Had Killed Mike Brown?

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While the facts surrounding the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, must still be determined, one thing is clear: If it turns out that the killing was not justified, the law dictates that he is subject to being criminally indicted and also to being sued in a civil action for wrongful death by Brown’s survivors. Not so, however, if the killing had come at the hands of the military or the CIA. In that case, the soldier or the CIA agent would be immune from criminal prosecution and civil suit, so long as they claimed that the killing took place as part of a “national-security” operation. Once their lawyers cited those two magical words, every judge in the land, both state and federal, would immediately slam down the gavel and declare “Case dismissed.” Among the best examples of this immunity phenomenon involves the murder of two American men, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, during the Chilean coup in 1973, ...

Embracing Communists

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For some 45 years, the U.S. national-security state justified its existence and its Cold War antics based on the “communist threat” that the United States was supposedly facing. If the United States failed to maintain an enormous standing army and a CIA, the nation would almost sure to fall into communist hands. Moreover, we were told, dark-side practices, such as torture, assassination, terrorism, invasions, occupations, coups, regime-change operations, and partnerships with criminal organizations and tyrannical foreign regimes were necessary to combat the evils of communism. Why, they even said that it was necessary to invade Vietnam and sacrifice tens of thousands of American men to prevent the dominoes from falling to the communists, with the biggest domino being the United States. The Cold War was nothing but a sordid, corrupt sham, one that, not so coincidentally, kept the Pentagon and the CIA in high cotton for decades, with ever-increasing budgets and power, especially with the climate of perpetual crises and war that ...

Why Reform the CIA?

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Just as I predicted in my article “Why Not Simply Abolish the CIA?” critics of the CIA’s illegally hacking into the computers of U.S. senators who were investigating CIA torture are calling for reform, rather than abolition, of the CIA. Stuck in the mindset of the national-security state, they simply cannot raise their vision to a higher level—to one that restores a constitutionally limited government republic to our land. Here’s one example: an op-ed today entitled “The CIA vs. the Senate: The Constitution Demands Action” by constitutional scholar Bruce Ackerman in the Los Angeles Times, in which the author states: “CIA spying on the Senate is the constitutional equivalent of the Watergate break-in. In both cases, the executive branch attacked the very foundations of checks and balances.” After criticizing some of the reform proposals being circulated, Ackerman does the predicable: He himself calls for reform. Or consider this one: “Obama and the CIA” by Melvin A. Goodman, which is ...

What Limited Government?

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One of the common misconceptions about the United States is that the federal government is a “limited government,” unlike tyrannical regimes, which are characterized as “omnipotent government” or “unlimited government.” Limited government means that the government’s powers are limited in nature and scope. Omnipotent or unlimited government means that the government can do whatever it wants. Limited government certainly was ...

Needed: A U.S. Truth Commission on Horman and Teruggi

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For the past several years, the Chilean and Argentine people have been confronting their dark pasts under military dictatorships during the 1970s. They have been conducting official investigations into the dirty wars the dictatorships waged under the guise of a “war on communism” and a “war on terrorism,” including disappearances, kidnappings, incarcerations, torture, rapes, executions, secret prisons, and assassinations. Among ...