BOVARD

Friday 3rd October 2008

Freedom is Still the Preeminent Issue

2:21 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | dictatorship | Comments: 10

The Foundation for Economic Education posted online my piece from the current issue of their Freeman magazine responding to David Brooks’s call to devalue freedom in American poiltics.

Freedom Is Not the Issue? It Just Ain’t So! The Freeman September 2008

By James Bovard

The Friends of Leviathan are once again encouraging people to forget about freedom. In a May op-ed piece in the New York Times, columnist David Brooks announced, “The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary but insufficient to talk about individualfreedom. Political leaders have to also talk about . . . ‘the whole way we live our lives.’ ”

Brooks, the “liberal” media’s favorite “conservative,” has long sought to place a halo over Big Government. In 1996 he urged Americans to forget their fears of politicians and embrace “national greatness.” He proclaimed that “energetic government is good for its own sake. It raises the sights of the individual. It strengthens common bonds. It boosts national pride. It continues the great national project.” Brooks’s paean to government was almost indistinguishable from a 1932 tribute by Benito Mussolini, who declared, “It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity; harmonizing their various interests through justice, and transmitting to future generations the mental conquests of science, of art, of law, of human solidarity.”

But fascist ideas are not tolerated in the United States—if they are labeled fascistic.

In last May’s article Brooks gushed over how British conservatives are placing “more emphasis on environmental issues, civility, assimilation and the moral climate.” When Brooks talks about “moral climate,” he presumably means politicians lecturing citizens about the need to act responsibly. Brooks ignores the fact that the greatest irresponsibility comes from politicians. Consider his reaction to one of the worst abuses of the Bush presidency.

Brooks was a gung-ho advocate of invading Iraq. In the days after the Abu Ghraib torture photos appeared in May 2004, he bewailed; “We were so sure we were using our might for noble purposes. . . . Far from being blinded by greed, we were blinded by idealism.” Brooks and other pundits congratulated themselves for having swallowed politicians’ hokum and leading their readers and the nation over a cliff.

His response to the torture scandal epitomizes how he wants Americans to view government. People are supposed to believe wonderful things about it. Then, when government commits atrocities, people are supposed to “move along because there is nothing to see here.” Instead, it is on to the next opportunity to put government on a pedestal and urge everyone to bow down to it.

The great political issue of our times is not liberalism versus conservatism, or capitalism versus socialism, but statism—the belief that government is inherently superior to the citizenry, that progress consists of extending the realm of compulsion, that vesting arbitrary power in government officials will make the people happy eventually. What type of entity is the state? Is it a highly efficient, purring engine, like a hovercraft sailing deftly above the lives of ordinary citizens? Or is it a lumbering giant bulldozer that rips open the soil and ends up clear-cutting the lives of people it was created to help?

The issue of government coercion has been taken off the radar screen of politically correct thought. The more government power has grown, the more unfashionable it becomes to discuss or recognize the abuses, as though it were bad form to count the dead from government interventions. There seems to be a gentleman’s agreement among many pundits and political scientists to pretend that government is something loftier than it actually is and to wear white gloves when discussing the nature of the state.

Government Without Romance

Unfortunately, individuals often are unaware of government’s true record because the media are working hand in glove with the ruling class.

Statists rely on political arithmetic that begins by erasing all of government’s abuses from the ledger. Instead, people should begin by pretending that Leviathan doesn’t exist—and then ask what politicians can do to make the masses happy.

Modern political thinking largely consists of glorifying poorly functioning political machinery—the threats, bribes, and legislative cattle prods by which some people are made to submit to other people. It is a delusion to think of the state as something loftier than all the edicts, penalties, prison sentences, and taxes it imposes.

Like Tom Sawyer persuading his friends to pay him for the privilege of painting his aunt’s fence, modern politicians expect people to be grateful for the chance to pay for the fetters that government attaches to them. Even though the average family now pays more in taxes than it spends for housing, clothing, and food combined, tax burdens are not an issue for most American political commentators.

To call for government intervention is to demand that some people be given the power to compel others to submit. But coercion is a blunt instrument that produces many ill effects aside from the purported government goal. To rely on coercion to achieve progress is like relying on bulldozers and steamrollers for routine transit. The question is not whether a person can eventually reach a goal driving a steamroller, but how much damage is left in his wake and how much faster the destination could be reached without crushing everything along the way.
Americans and Washington

Many people in Washington believe that Americans are so helpless that they cannot be fulfilled unless their rulers give them a reason to live. Brooks proclaimed in 1996 that “ultimately, American purpose can find its voice only in Washington.” He did not explain where exactly in the memos, meetings, and machinations which engross the capital that “American purpose” arises. Brooks warned that Americans’ mental health depends on the feds proclaiming a purpose for the people: “Without vigorous national vision, we are plagued by anxiety and disquiet.”

Recent opinion polls show that much of the anxiety in this nation is the result of the follies and deceits of the federal government. It was government and politicians, not freedom, that failed Americans in the new century. It was not freedom that wrecked the U.S. dollar. It was not freedom that made federal spending explode. It was not freedom that spurred a foreign war that has already left tens of thousands of Americans dead and maimed, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead. It was not freedom which announced that the Constitution and the statute book no longer bind the president.

Brooks became a media darling in part because of his vehement warnings about the danger of cynicism. But it is not cynical to have more faith in freedom than in subjugation. It is not cynical to have more faith in individuals vested with rights than in bureaucrats armed with power. It is not cynical to suspect that governments which have cheated so often in the past may not be dealing straight today.

Trust no intellectual who tells you not to worry about Leviathan.

tagline: James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy, Terrorism and Tyranny, Lost Rights, and other books.

Tuesday 30th September 2008

Bush’s Forgotten Iraqi Sovereignty Sham

7:58 am | Uncategorized | Comments: 8

The Future of Freedom Foundation just posted online my article from the July issue of Freedom Daily on Bush’s sovereignty shenanigans on Iraq.

It continues to amaze me how easily Bush and team got away with the Empire-State-Building-sized farces regarding Iraq. Unfortunately, “Bush re-subjugated Americans by claiming to have liberated Iraqis.”
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The Forgotten Iraqi-Sovereignty Sham Freedom Daily July 2008
by James Bovard

The Bush administration and the Iraqi government are wrangling over the future role of the U.S. government in Iraq. The Bush team wants far more power over Iraqis than the current Iraqi government wants to concede.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said in April 2008 that the dispute is concentrated on “sensitive issues,” including the U.S. military’s right to imprison Iraqi citizens unilaterally and the legal immunity that American contractors enjoy. It is understandable that Iraqis would be sensitive on these points, since permitting foreigners to kill and imprison without legal consequence does make a mockery of Iraqi self-rule.

But the real surprise here is that there should be any such controversy. Didn’t the United States generously grant Iraq sovereignty over itself in 2004?

That was a key bragging point of the Bush reelection campaign that year. It was the ultimate proof that Bush is a great liberator and that the United States freed the Iraqi people. In an April 13, 2004, press conference, Bush declared, “On June 30th, when the flag of a free Iraq is raised, Iraqi officials will assume full responsibility for the ministries of government…. One central commitment of that mission is the transfer of the sovereignty back to the Iraqi people. We have set a deadline of June 30th. It is important that we meet that deadline. We will not step back from our pledge.”

Bush hyped the sovereignty turnover as the key to boosting Iraqis’ trust in America: “Were the coalition to step back from the June 30th pledge, many Iraqis would question our intentions and feel their hopes betrayed. And those in Iraq who trade in hatred and conspiracy theories would find a larger audience and gain a stronger hand.”

On June 28, 2004, Bush’s man in Baghdad, Coalition Provisional Authority Chief Paul Bremer, handed a leather-bound document to Iyad Allawi, the former CIA operative placed by the United States at the head of the interim Iraqi government. Because of fears of insurgent attacks during the sovereignty ceremony, the Bush administration secretly conveyed the document two days earlier than planned.

At the time, Bush was at a NATO summit in Turkey. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice handed him a slip of paper declaring, “Iraq is sovereign.” Bush jotted, “Let Freedom Reign” on a piece of paper and handed it back to Rice. Some Americans may have thought that this was the same phrase used on the first Independence Day in 1776. But “let freedom ring” is far different from “let freedom reign” — especially when “reign” meant the continued dominance of the U.S. military over a foreign country. Nevertheless, Bush proudly announced to the world, “The Iraqi people have their country back.”

He also announced that day, “This day also marks a proud moral achievement for members of our coalition. We pledged to end a dangerous regime, to free the oppressed, and to restore sovereignty. We have kept our word.”

And he bragged, “Not only is there full sovereignty in the hands of the Government, but all the ministries have been transferred, and they’re up and running.”

A Soviet-style sovereignty

However, prior to pseudo-abdicating, the Coalition Provisional Authority dictated that U.S. and British troops would have immunity from prosecution from the new Iraqi government, effectively creating a diplomatic corps of 160,000 people with guns and heavy weapons and no liability for wrongful killings. The sovereignty transfer did not impede the U.S. military from continuing to heavily bomb civilian areas and sweep up vast numbers of innocent Iraqi civilians for interrogation and detention.

Bremer’s electoral edict also dictated that “one of every three candidates on a party’s slate must be a woman.” In Bremer’s final weeks, he issued a flurry of edicts dictating long-term restrictions on Iraq’s new government and decreeing the hiring of more than 20 Iraqis for five-year terms in key positions. The Washington Post noted, “As of June 14, Bremer had issued 97 legal orders, which are defined by the U.S. occupation authority as “binding instructions or directives to the Iraqi people” that will remain in force even after the transfer of political authority.”

Bush bragged in a July 13 Wisconsin speech, “Because we acted, Iraq is a free and sovereign nation.” But the puppet government was no model republic. One of Allawi’s first acts was to issue an edict giving himself dictatorial power “to impose curfews anywhere in the country, ban groups he considers seditious, and order the detentions of people suspected of being security risks.” The New York Times explained that Allawi “wants to show he can rule with an iron fist.”

Bush hit the same theme in an August 5 campaign speech in Saginaw, Michigan: “You see, when we acted to protect our own security, we also promised to help deliver them from tyranny, to restore their sovereignty, to set them on the path of liberty. And when America gives its word, America keeps its word.”

But Iraqi sovereignty from the beginning was intended to be a sham. The Iraqis would have self-government — and the proof would be that the American military will constantly remind them that they have self-government. The U.S. government did not intend to permit Iraqis to govern themselves in any way that did not suit the interests and demands of the Bush administration. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was asked on April 2, 2004, what impact the June 30 sovereignty arrival would have on the U.S. military. Wolfowitz replied, “There’s not going to be any difference in our military posture on July 1st from what it is on June 30th, except that we will be there then at the invitation of a sovereign Iraqi government.”

That is akin to the sovereignty that the Soviets awarded Eastern European nations after World War II. U.S. government officials made it clear that they intend to maintain 14 permanent military bases in Iraq. “Do what we say and you won’t get hurt” will be the de facto meaning of sovereignty for Iraqis.

Bush apparently defined self-government for a foreign country as being under benevolent American domination. It is another case of Bush’s assuming that people are dumb enough to fall for a bogus label.

Many Iraqis have never recognized that the United States had sovereignty over them — as opposed to having enough force to suppress resistance. Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi derided Bush’s claims: “Sovereign power will be in the hands of the only military force in the country, which is the United States. It is ludicrous … to talk about a transfer of sovereignty.” University of Michigan professor Juan Cole commented that the sovereignty handover “was always nothing more than a publicity stunt for the benefit of Bush’s election campaign.”

As the Boston Globe’s Derrick Jackson noted, “It appears that the simple illusion of giving the Iraqi people ‘’their country back,’’ while still maintaining 138,000 troops there, was a master stroke. In May, a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll found that the percentage of Americans who thought it was worth going to war was at its lowest point, falling from a high of 76 percent during the war to 44 percent. A month later, just before the handover, the same poll found that the percentage of Americans who thought it was a mistake to go to send troops to Iraq was at its highest, 54 percent.”

False hopes over sovereignty

After Bush announced the sovereignty handover, the American media sharply curtailed its coverage of the Iraqi conflict. The media acted as if Bush’s de facto victory proclamation made the Iraq War old news and not worth as much coverage. They let the White House define reality — and thus people were supposed to move along. Americans paid more attention to Bush’s bragging about the “sovereignty hand-over” than to the rising number of dead U.S. soldiers. The average daily number of attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq rose sharply from June through September, as did the average number of U.S. military dead per month.

Sovereignty hoopla convinced millions of Americans that the Iraqi problem had been or would soon be solved. A survey done in the 10 days after the sovereignty handover showed that almost twice as many Americans believed that the new Iraq government had at least an equal share of power as believed that the U.S. military was still the supreme power in the country. The poll, by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center, also found that “fifty percent of the respondents said they thought the number of United States troops in Iraq should be reduced to no more than ‘a few thousand’ in six months or less.” That was a peculiar belief, since neither Bush nor Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry was hinting at any such withdrawal.

The “sovereignty transfer” also had a big impact because people expected similar results to what had happened after previous conflicts when the U.S. announced it was formally turning over the reins. CNN polling expert William Schneider concluded, “The handover of authority in Iraq at the end of June apparently had exactly the effect that the White House intended: It made Iraq seem like less of an American problem.”

Bush could not have won reelection without pervasive deceit over Iraq. A Washington Post analysis after the 2004 election noted that the Kerry campaign “gambled on building up the Massachusetts senator’s image in the belief that voters were familiar with Bush’s weaknesses and the turmoil in Iraq.” Professor Ira Chernus noted that one exit poll showed that “ninety percent of Bush voters said things are going well in Iraq.” In contrast, “Eighty-two percent of Kerry voters said things are going badly in Iraq.”

Bush re-subjugated Americans by claiming to have liberated Iraqis. Far more Americans recognize the futility of the U.S. attack on Iraq now than at the time of Bush’s reelection. But a cowardly media and a docile opposition party have permitted Bush to turn his folly into a long-term albatross around the necks of both Iraqis and Americans.

Saturday 27th September 2008

McCain’s Great Betrayal of Fellow POWs

7:42 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Lying | Comments: 17

In last night’s debate, McCain again strutted out the fact of his POW status during the Vietnam war.

A servile media has long allowed this to be the primary part of McCain’s halo.

But instead, it should raise questions that go to the heart of McCain’s willingness to betray his fellow soldiers and countrymen in pursuit of political profit.

Sydney Schanberg won a Pulitzer prize while risking his life covering Cambodia for the New York Times in the 1970s. The Nation just published a Schanberg expose that proves that McCain intentionally pulled strings to bury U.S. government information on American soldiers left behind in Vietnam. Upon returning from Vietnam, McCain “pulled himself up by his bootstraps” by burnishing Richard Nixon’s boots - and denying the existence of POWs left behind was Obligatory Lie #1.

Schanberg’s sources are 10-karat, if not better.

Here is the shorter version that appears in the October 6 version of Nation.

Here is the longer version that appears in a study at the Nation Institute webpage.

The media never cares enough about American soldiers to even ask McCain about his role in covering up info about American POWs left behind. But the press turns into his boot burnishers whenever he struts out his tale of suffering.

Friday 26th September 2008

Intro chapter from Feeling Your Pain (2000)

12:41 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 5

Here is the introduction chapter of Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years (St. Martin’s/Palgrave, 2000).

This was my parting bouquet to the Clinton White House. The book went to three printings within the first month of its release but slowed down afterwards. (It did not contain any fresh Clinton rape allegations, so it failed to hold the attention of the media). It was a number one bestseller for Amazon in the state of Florida before the election, thanks in large part to a syndicated column that the Orlando Sentinel’s Charley Reese wrote about the book. Reese had a huge following in Florida and his hammering of the Clinton regime probably swayed far more voters than Bush’s final “official” margin of victory [sic] over Gore in the Sunshine state. Charley later became one of the most eloquent conservative critics of Bush’s abuses and foreign policy inanity. But his honesty may have cost him his job.
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FEELING YOUR PAIN by James Bovard

Introduction
The victory of William Jefferson Clinton in the 1992 presidential election was supposed to launch a new era in American politics. The Clinton-Gore team promised a “New Covenant” between government and the people that would propel government beyond its past failings. Clinton sought to make government strong enough to hoist and harangue the citizenry to higher ground, once and for all. And there was little to fear from expanding government power because, as Clinton promised, his would be “the most ethical administration in history.”

Yet, after nearly eight years of his rule, America is bedeviled by independent counsels crowding Washington streets, cynicism as far as the eye can see, and more hostility to government agencies across the board, from the Census Bureau to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The attempt to forcibly lift people left government in the gutter-at least in the minds of tens of millions of Americans.

From concocting new prerogatives to confiscate private property, to cham-pioning FBI agents’ right to shoot innocent Americans, to bankrolling the militarization of local police forces, the Clinton administration stretched the power of government on all fronts. From the soaring number of wiretaps, to converting cell phones into homing devices for law enforcement, to turning bankers into spies against their customers, free speech and privacy were undermined again and again. From dictating how many pairs of Chinese silk panties Americans could buy, to President Clinton’s heroic efforts to require trigger locks for all handguns in crack houses, no aspect of Americans’ lives was too arcane for federal intervention.

The Clinton administration built its “bridge to the twenty-first century” by filling every sinkhole along the way with taxpayer dollars. From AmeriCorps projects that beat the bushes to recruit new food stamp recipients, to a flood insurance program that multiplied flood damage, to programs to give the keys to lavish new single-family homes to public housing residents, the Clinton administration’s record domestic spending produced record fiascoes. For Clin-ton, the only wasted tax dollar was one that did not buy a vote, garner a campaign contribution, or provide a chance to bite his lip on national television.

In the same way that the success of NATO’s attack on Serbia was measured largely by continual proclamations of “record numbers” of sorties flown and “record numbers” of bombs dropped, so the Clinton administra-tion gauged its domestic policy successes by the number of new laws passed, new programs enacted, and new activities prohibited-by record fines levied and record prison sentences imposed. Federal agencies issued more than 25,000 new regulations-criminalizing everything from reliable toilets to snuff advertisements on race cars.

While the media focused primarily on the new benefits that Clinton promised, little attention was paid to the swelling tax burden on working Americans. Federal income tax revenue doubled between 1992 and 2000. The total tax burden on the average family with two earners rose three times faster than inflation. Though the IRS wrongfully seized hundreds of thousands of Americans’ paychecks and bank accounts during Clinton’s reign, almost all of the agency’s power survived unscathed.

Faith in the coercive power of the best and brightest permeated Clinton administration policymaking. More commands, more penalties, and more handouts were the recipe for progress. The Clinton administration consistently acted as if nothing is as dangerous as insufficient government power.

The history of the Clinton administration cannot be understood apart from the president’s personal view of government. Clinton portrayed government as the Lone Ranger-or, more accurately, millions of Lone Rangers, each with a sacred mission to rescue people whether they want to be rescued or not. For Clinton, government was never merely a bunch of clerks in some drab office vegetating toward a pension. Instead, government was “a champion of national purpose,” “the instrument of our national community,” and “a progressive instrument of the common good.” Clinton urged Americans in 1998 to commit themselves “to a new kind of government . . . to give all our people the tools to make the most of their own lives.” Clinton’s invocation of “government as tool-meister” ignored the abysmal record of federal job training, literacy, and other programs purportedly created to help people help themselves.

Many of Clinton’s policies can be explained only by his belief in his own moral superiority. For Clinton, the officially proclaimed intent of a specific government policy or action far transcended whatever force government agents use against citizens. And any protests about excessive force were met by appeals to “the rule of law”-regardless of whether the law was on the side of federal agents. The more people government brings to its knees, the fairer society becomes-simply because government power is the personification of fairness.

And the loftier the goal Clinton proclaimed, the more irrelevant private collateral damage became. One visionary foreign policy speech was more important than a thousand cluster bombs dropped on foreign civilians. Vigorous denunciations of international terrorism were more important than the cruise missiles that destroyed Sudan’s only pharmaceutical factory. Continual invoca-tions of “the children” at every political whistle-stop mattered more than the deaths of dozens of children after an FBI gas attack at Waco.

The Clinton recipe for public safety was: if politicians frighten enough of the people enough of the time, then everyone will be safe. Because Clinton felt government must constantly intervene in people’s lives, people had to be convinced that they are doomed unless politicians save them on a daily basis. The result: constant efforts to alarm the citizenry on everything from health care to speed limits, to secondhand smoke, to global warming, to garbage dumps, to radon, to guns.

Clinton owes much of his popularity to his “stealth statism.” Clinton was the master of intellectual shell games. In his 1996 State of the Union address, he announced “the era of Big Government is over.” Yet, once he had won reelection by campaigning as a moderate (or, in the words of presidential adviser Dick Morris, “campaigning as Pope”), he opened the floodgates. In his 1997 State of the Union address, Clinton called for a “national crusade for education standards” and federal standards and national credentials for all new teachers; announced plans “to build a citizen army of one million volunteer tutors to make sure every child can read independently by the end of the third grade”; called for $5 billion in federal aid to build and repair local schools, a new scholarship program to subsidize anyone going to college, a $10,000 tax deduction for all tuition payments after high school, and federal subsidies for private health insurance; demanded a new law entitling women who have had mastectomies to stay in the hospital 48 hours afterwards; advocated a constitutional amend-ment for “victims’ rights”; urged Congress to enact a law criminalizing any parent who crossed a state line allegedly to avoid paying child support; and proposed enacting juvenile crime legislation that “declares war on gangs,” hiring new prosecutors, and increasing federal spending on the war on drugs. Clinton also announced plans to expand NATO and declare “10 American Heritage Rivers” (thereby effectively prohibiting thousands of landowners from using their property along those rivers). Clinton, deeply concerned about American ethics, also demanded that “character education must be taught in our schools.” (This demand was not repeated in later State of the Union addresses.)

In his 1999 State of the Union address, Clinton proposed more than 40 new laws and programs. Citizens applauded proposals for more government regardless of how poorly existing government programs functioned and despite the fact that most Americans personally distrusted Clinton at the time he sought more power over them. In his 2000 State of the Union address, Clinton talked for almost an hour and a half and, according to one estimate, proposed the equivalent of $4 billion of new federal spending per minute.

This book focuses primarily on the Clinton administration’s domestic policies and programs. A chapter on the war against Serbia is included because that adventure vividly illustrates the Clinton administration’s moralism and arrogance. The Clinton presidency must not be judged solely on whether the Senate convicted him on impeachment charges, or whether he and his wife were shown to have obstructed justice during the Whitewater investigation, or whether a federal judge fined him for perjury, or whether a clear link is discovered between Chinese military front companies and Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign. The danger of focusing narrowly on the best-known scandals is that people may forget or fail to realize how much misgovernment occurred during the 1990s.

Far more Americans have been affected by IRS depredations, HUD-ruined neighborhoods, and FDA-denied drugs than by Clinton’s personal misbehavior. Many of the worst abuses of the Clinton administration never appeared on the media’s radar screen. Instead, they were buried in Inspector General reports, General Accounting Office studies, or the proceedings of court cases followed by few.

The Clinton administration changed the political fabric of this nation and the political expectations of the American people and the American media. Clinton’s policies and rhetoric helped infantilize the American populace. The entire political system was subtely transformed year by year, crisis by crisis, hoax by hoax.

Clinton’s administration was far from unique in its contempt for constitu-tional or taxpayer rights. Most of the pernicious trends in federal policy started long before Clinton’s arrival in Washington. President Franklin Roosevelt was as voracious for power as was Clinton. Lyndon Johnson was more successful in passing sweeping laws to swell the federal government. The Bush administration was as feckless in its resolution to terminate failed government programs-and even President Ronald Reagan was far more tolerant of wasteful government spending than many of his fans recall.

The fact that the Clinton administration championed so many flawed programs and policies does not mean that good government would have resulted if the Republican Party held the White House. The Republicans controlled both houses of Congress for six of the eight years of Clinton’s administration. Most congressmen of both parties showed little understanding of, or curiosity about, how federal programs were functioning.

This is not an attempt to pass final judgment on the Clinton administration. Such an effort must await the unraveling of numerous cover-ups and the surfacing of further flaws in new programs and policies. Instead, it is an effort to present many details and key issues that must be part of a broad assessment of the impact of the Clinton administration on America.

Once a president leaves office, his record usually quickly blurs. All that is recalled are a few high points, a few catch phrases, and a few indictments. The rest is swept under the rug of failing memories and the spin-doctoring of supporters and detractors. Americans cannot understand the nation’s political course without recognizing the follies and fiascoes of the recent past, the constant expansion of government programs and power, and the resulting momentum for ever more coercion.

Thursday 25th September 2008

Intro chapter to ATTENTION DEFICIT DEMOCRACY (2006)

2:25 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 4

Here’s the introduction from Attention Deficit Democracy (2006).

This book may have struck more of a nerve with reviewers et al. if it had come out a year later. It was considered too cynical by many folks back in ‘06. Rather ironic, given subsequent American history….

For instance, Bush’s television address last night epitomized how the government now rules by exploiting fear. His bailout proposal would vest boundless power in the Secretary of the Treasury. And yet, the absolutism aspect is being treated as if it were an asterisk - instead of a profound threat to the Constitution.

ATTENTION DEFICIT DEMOCRACY by James Bovard
Introduction

Delusions about democracy are subverting peace and freedom. The American system of government is collapsing thanks to ignorant citizens, lying politicians, and a government leashed neither by law nor Constitution. While presidents and pundits harp on democracy’s inevitable spread around the world, it is perishing at home.

Victorious politicians routinely invoke the “will of the people” to sanctify their power. But voters cannot countenance what they do not understand. The “will of the people” is often simply a measure of how many people fell for which lies, how many people were frightened by which advertisements, and which red herrings worked on which target audiences. Rather than the “will of the people,” election results are often only a one-day snapshot of transient mass delusions.

Many Americans have little or no idea how government works or who is holding the reins on their lives. The majority of American voters do not know the name of their congressman, the length of terms of House or Senate members, what the Bill of Rights guarantees, or what the government is actually doing in the vast majority of its interventions. A survey after the 2002 congressional election revealed that less than a third of Americans knew “that the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives prior to the election.” Recent polls show that almost two-thirds of Americans could not name a single Supreme Court justice and that 58 percent of Americans could not name a single cabinet department in the federal government.

Americans are assured that they are free because rulers take power only with the people’s informed consent. What does “informed consent” mean these days? It means knowing the names of the president’s pets but not knowing his record on key issues. It means knowing the sexual orientation of family members of candidates for high office, but falling prey to their rewriting of history. It means recalling the phrases the government endlessly repeats, and screening out evidence of government atrocities.

The political ignorance of scores of millions of Americans prevents them from recognizing the consequences or dangers of government actions. The citizenry is increasingly on automatic pilot, paying less attention to each new war, each new power grab, each new dubious presidential assertion.

The rising gullibility of the American people may be the most important trend in U.S. democracy. With each passing decade, with each new presidency, it takes less and less to snooker Americans. And a candidate only has to fool enough people on one day to snare power over everyone for four years.

Attention Deficit Democracy begets a government that is nominally democratic – in which elections are boisterous events accompanied by torrents of deceptive ads and mass rallies. But after the election, the president returns to his pedestal. Attention Deficit Democracy lacks the most important check on the abuse of power: an informed citizenry resolutely defending their rights and liberties.

In 1693, William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, wrote what could be the motto for modern American government. “Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed.” Rulers endlessly assure people that they are in charge – while creating agency after agency, program after program that people can neither comprehend nor control. Americans’ political thinking is becoming akin to the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance – a series of bromides that sink into the mind and stifle independent, critical thought.

MONARCHICAL MYTHS OF DEMOCRACY

President George W. Bush calls democracy “the most honorable form of government ever devised by man.” Americans are taught that the sum of American democracy is vastly greater than its parts. Regardless of how often the candidate withholds information or how many false claims he emits, no matter how deluded the average voter, and no matter what manipulations occur before and during voting – election results are sacrosanct.

The same types of myths have grown up around democracy that long propped up monarchs. In the 1500s, peasants were encouraged to believe that the king was chosen by God to serve His purposes on Earth. Today, Americans are encouraged to believe that Bush’s reelection victory is a sign of God’s approval of Bush’s reign. In the 1600s, English yeomen were told that any limit on the King’s power was an affront to God. Today, Americans are told that any restraint on the president’s power thwarts the Will of the People. In the 1700s, the downtrodden of Europe were told that their king possessed the sum of all Earthly wisdom. Today, people are encouraged to believe that the president and his top cadre practically know all and see all – their insider information transcends the petty facts unearthed by the CIA, congressional committees, or the 9/11 Commission. In the early 1800s, people were encouraged to believe that their kings automatically cared about their subjects, simply because that was the nature of kings. Now, people are taught that the government automatically serves the people, simply because a plurality of voters assented to one of the politicians the major parties offered them.

As people became more literate and better informed, they lost their faith in monarchs. But new delusions have replaced old superstitions. Democracy multiplies the number of people with a vested interest in delusions about government. Americans are supposed to sit back, confident that voting cures all political evils – as if the process for selecting rulers vaccinated the political system from harm. People are told that as long as they can cast a ballot, they will be safe. In a democracy, people are led to believe that they can easily apply the brakes to government, no matter how unstoppable it becomes.

FABRICATING A RIGHT TO RULE

It is a common saying among political campaign consultants: “In victory, all sins are forgotten.” Unfortunately, the sooner citizens forget the lies of the campaign trail, the sooner they will be victimized by new government failures and sacrificed in more unnecessary wars.

Losing a certain percentage of the voters who understand issues or recall facts is now simply a “transaction cost” for a political campaign. The only lies that are unforgivable nowadays are those that repel more voters than they con. And regardless of how brazen a politician’s howlers, the media rushes to repaint him as worthy of respect and deference.

The biggest election frauds usually occur before the voting booths open. Bush is upholding a long tradition of presidential deceit. He was reelected in large part due to mass delusions about Iraq. An August 2004 poll found that “among those who wrongly believe that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction, 81% think going to war was the right decision. Among those who correctly know that Iraq had no WMD, just 8% think the war was right.” Bush and Cheney successfully inoculated tens of millions of voters against reality, linking Saddam to Al Qaeda and 9/11 and portraying the invasion of Iraq as a necessary part of the war on terrorism. A University of Maryland October 2004 poll analysis concluded, “It is clear that supporters of the president are more likely to have misperceptions than those who oppose him.”

For many voters in 2004, Bush’s presumed personal goodness was all that they needed to know. When Bush acted like he was incorrigible, many voters hailed his conduct as proof he was steadfast. When Bush refused to admit any mistakes, many voters assumed his record was impeccable. The more Bush boasted of his consistency, the less attention many Americans paid to reality. Bush “almost never entertains public doubt, which is part of the White House design to build a more powerful presidency,” the Washington Post reported. To breed blind faith in the ruler, people are encouraged to see the president as infallible. When Bush stumbled in the presidential debates, many supporters felt a bond with him as someone also not weighed down by excessive intellectual baggage. Floridian Lynn Farr, a 43-year-old former restaurant owner, explained his vote for Bush: “The guy wears a cowboy hat. He cuts brush. You always see [news] clips of him driving a big ol’ Ford truck and working on his ranch. He’s one of us.”

Bush has proven that a president can get away with far more hokum than previously thought. Unfortunately, this was also the lesson of the Clinton presidency. Even though Americans often recognized that Bill Clinton lied, many still believed him when he promised to “feel their pain.” Clinton’s case for bombing Serbia in 1999 was as dubious as Bush’s case for invading Iraq. But for both Clinton and Bush, their self-proclaimed good intentions made unjustified U.S. killings irrelevant.

“Presidents have lied so much to us about foreign policy that they’ve established almost a common-law right to do so,” history professor Leo Ribuffo observed in 1998. From John F. Kennedy lying about the Bay of Pigs debacle in Cuba; to Johnson lying about the Gulf of Tonkin resolution; to Richard Nixon lying about the secret bombing of Cambodia; to Jimmy Carter lying about the Shah of Iran being a progressive, enlightened ruler; to Ronald Reagan lying about terrorism and Iran-Contra; to George H. W. Bush lying about the justifications for the first Gulf War, entire generations have come of age since the ancient time when a president’s power was constrained by a duty of candor to the public.

Unfortunately, many citizens’ minds are sponges, soaking up whatever government emits. Lies almost always turn out to be duds, as far as detonating any backlash against political abuses. Self-government is vanishing because of black holes in citizens’ heads where connections are not made and sparks do not fly.

Ironically, despite the government’s long record of deceits, distrust of government is more dangerous than government power itself – at least according to the conventional wisdom of today’s Establishment. Private doubts are supposedly a greater threat to America than official lies. Trust in government becomes mass Prozac, keeping people docile and compliant.

BATTERED CITIZEN SYNDROME

The government is exploiting public dread to redefine the relation between rulers and the American people. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, in a talk to Republican National Convention delegates in September 2004, praised Bush’s role as the protector of the nation and assured them that “this president sees America as we think about a 10-year-old child. I know as a parent I would sacrifice all for my children.” Card’s comment generated almost no controversy. Yet viewing Americans as young children needing protection makes a mockery of democracy. Is servility now the price of survival?

The more ignorant the populace, the easier it becomes for rulers to frighten people into submission. Bush was reelected in part because his administration, policies, and statements, helped by many dubious alerts and warnings, boosted the number of Americans who feared a terrorist attack during 2004. Each time the feds issued a new warning of a terrorist threat after 9/11, the president’s approval rating rose by an average of almost 3 percent.

As long as enough people can be frightened, then all people can be ruled. Politicians cow people on election day to corral them afterward. The more that fear is the key issue, the more that voters will be seeking a savior, not a representative – and the more the winner can claim all the power he claims to need.

We now have the Battered Citizen Syndrome: the more debacles, the more voters cling to faith in their rulers. Like a train engineer bonding with the survivors of a train wreck that happened on his watch, Bush constantly reminded Americans of 9/11 and his wars. The greater the government’s failure to protect, the greater the subsequent mass fear – and the easier it becomes to subjugate the populace. The continuing follies and flounders of the war on terrorism were irrelevant compared to the paramount promise of protection. The craving for a protector drops an Iron Curtain around the mind, preventing a person from accepting evidence that would shred his political security blanket.

In recent years, Americans have devoted far more effort to spreading democracy than to understanding it. Bush, echoing Clinton and earlier presidents, says that America is “called” to spread democracy and freedom around the world. Forgetting the warnings by early presidents about the dangers of foreign entanglements, the U.S. government is charging forward to remake the world in its own image.

Americans have been taught to view U.S. intervention abroad as the equivalent of a holy man touching a sick person, instantly healing whatever ails them. Even if the person isn’t sick, getting a holy nudge can’t but help them. “Fixing” elections is doing a service to foreign peoples since the U.S. government knows what is best for them. And if foreigners object to U.S. interference, that just proves that they are deluded and must be protected from themselves.

In his second inaugural address, Bush issued a revolutionary challenge to every government in the world: “We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.” Bush is correct that freedom is “eternally right.” But that does not confer upon Bush or other U.S. presidents the right to act like the World Pope of Democracy, entitled to appoint rulers in each nation upon Earth. The notion of American uniqueness has gone from a point of pride to a pretext for aggression.

ELECTIVE DICTATORSHIP

President George Washington declared in 1790 that “the virtues and knowledge of the people would effectually oppose the introduction of tyranny.” But today’s Americans do little to justify the confidence of the nation’s first president. The federal government has been rapidly adding new coercive penalties to its statutory arsenal for decades. Americans have acquiesced to politicians and bureaucrats taking over one area of their lives after another.

President Washington may have also been confident that his fellow citizens and their offspring would not forget his warning that “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence – it is force.” Unfortunately, as long as recent American presidents continue to praise freedom, they are usually permitted to seize as much power as they please. On November 13, 2001, Bush announced that he had the right to nullify all rights. Bush decreed that he had the power to label as an “enemy combatant” anyone suspected of involvement with terrorism. The president need provide no evidence for such designations; there would be no access to courts to challenge such a label; and people could be detained forever on the president’s accusation. And “enemy combatants” need not be combatants. Bush administration lawyers have made clear that even hapless donors to foreign charities can be seized and held without charges if their contribution ends up in the wrong hands. In July 2005, Bush’s solicitor general announced in federal court that the entire United States is a “battlefield” upon which Bush has absolute power to have people – including American citizens – seized and detained indefinitely.

In 2002, Bush’s top legal advisors informed him that, as commander-in-chief during wartime, he was above all the laws Congress enacted. Bush’s legal whiz kids also redefined torture so that CIA agents and U.S. soldiers could brutalize detainees without fear of prosecution. Americans were assured that the Abu Ghraib photos that leaked out in 2004 were the result of “a few bad apples.” However, details later emerged that CIA operatives or U.S. soldiers had killed dozens of detainees during interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Reviving a hallowed tradition from the Middle Ages, the administration announced that it could use “evidence” gained from torture to prosecute detainees in its military tribunals. Americans’ scant response to the torture scandal signaled their growing tolerance for absolute power – as long as the president promised it would be used to make them secure.

This is the age of Leviathan Democracy. Leviathan was the Biblical term that English philosopher Thomas Hobbes used in 1651 to describe a government absolute and far superior to its subjects, whose task was to obey and, when ordered, die. The United States was an anti-Leviathan at its founding – the first government to be created with strict limitations on its power enshrined into the Constitution to protect citizens from their rulers in perpetuity.

But in recent decades, government power has become unbounded. The U.S. government still has the formal trappings of a democracy – candidates, elections, congressional proceedings, judges draped in long black robes. But we have fallen far from the Founding Fathers’ ideal of a Rule of Law. Today, when the president’s desires extend beyond legal boundaries, the Constitution and the statute book be damned.

Attention Deficit Democracy begets Leviathan because rulers exploit people’s ignorance to seize more power over them. The bigger government becomes, the fewer citizens understand it, the less representative it will tend to be. The contract between rulers and ruled is replaced by a blank check. As long as presidents and their appointees recite the proper phrases and strike the correct poses, they can do as they please.

Democracy unleashes the State in the name of the people. Yet citizens are assured that their government will protect liberty, no matter what. Democracy automatically reins itself in so that it does not gorge on power like a horse eating too many oats, stopping only when it explodes.

Government is an elective dictatorship when voters do little more than select who will violate the laws and Constitution. Bush, like other U.S. presidents, perpetually equates democracy with freedom. But if the purported consent of voters confers upon the winner the right to nullify citizens’ rights – they are voting for a master, not a representative. Elections become little more than reverse slave auctions, in which slaves choose their masters.

Voting is now a way of conferring power and honors on politicians, rather than a method of reining in rulers. In the early American Republic, candidates would stress their fidelity to the Constitution. But the Constitution has vanished from the campaign trail, replaced by competing promises of new handouts and new protections against the vicissitudes of daily life.

The Founding Fathers did not design a “Great Leader” democracy. The ultimate principle of the American system of government is strict limits on the power of all branches of the federal government. Yet Bush, like earlier presidents, has swayed many people to view checks and balances as a peril to their personal survival.

Attention Deficit Democracy lulls citizens into thinking that they have nothing to fear from the rising number of sticks and shackles that politicians and bureaucrats can use on them. The peril of rising U.S. government power is stark to foreigners, who see U.S. aggression around the globe. It is stark to many people who hear the president talk of military killings as “bringing justice” to the deceased. It is stark to those who fear the United States may invade their country next. But it is not stark to too many Americans.

THE COMING END OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY?
The more authoritarian the U.S. government becomes, the louder presidents praise democracy. Unfortunately, democracy is a magical word that permits speakers to automatically fog the minds of many listeners.

By what standard could American democracy be considered a success? Simply because referendums on rulers occur without widespread violence? Because most Americans acquiesce to whomever the political system ordains as the winner? Because the majority of people continue obeying, and paying taxes? Simply because there have not been Albanian-style mass violent attacks on government office buildings?

Bogus fears can produce real servitude. Politicians stampede people with one dubious terror attack warning after another; one constitutional right after another is decimated; one barrier against absolutism after another is breached.

Is our era coming to resemble medieval times, when people were so suffused with fear that they formally signed away their rights and pledged fealty to whoever promised to protect them? There is scant glory or dignity in panicky national referendums to choose a Shepherd-in-Chief.

Are Americans free simply because they are permitted a perfunctory choice on who will molest their rights and liberties? How much of a facade of democracy is necessary to placate the public? Is it the “will of the people” – or at least the majority – to be deluded? Does self-government now mean anything more than showing up once every few years to ratify one’s rulers? Is the sole question remaining in American politics – how to find a good master for the American people?

It is naive to trust to the ignorant preferences of frightened people to preserve freedom. In America today, all leaders have to do is brazenly deny obvious facts and they become entitled to commit new abuses. Bush has demonstrated how easily tens of millions of people can be conned into contented subjugation and marching lockstep behind a president whose falsehoods have already left thousands of Americans dead and maimed. The more lies that a government gets away with, the more it will assume that it can get away with anything and everything.

People need defenses against democracies as well as tyrannies. The road to political ruin is paved with positive thinking. The issue is not whether democracy is good or evil, but that seeing democracy as an absolute good opens the gates to great evil. Because of Clinton’s and Bush’s invocations of democracy to consecrate their power and sanctify foreign aggression, it is vital to analyze democracy now.

At this point, the de facto American theory of government consists of trusting to the good intentions of those who hold nearly boundless power over us, trusting that they will not violate any laws that don’t really need violating, that they won’t bomb any foreign countries that don’t really need bombing, and that they won’t torture anyone who doesn’t really need torturing. And if they do violate laws, bomb foreigners, and torture innocents – then it is all harmless errors and folks should just move along because there is nothing to see here.

This book examines the rising ignorance of the electorate, the fearmongering tactics of the 2004 and other presidential campaigns, the profusion of lying and how it fundamentally changes candidates’ relation to citizens, the ways in which contemporary elections are degenerating into a tawdry trading of votes for handouts and subservience, and the current Messianic Democracy push. The ongoing torture scandal will be considered in depth as the arch-example of what happens when the government is permitted to grant itself absolute power, when “due process” consists of nothing more than long-delayed coroners’ inquests. We will briefly consider popular delusions on the inevitability of democracy and the inevitability of democracies keeping the peace. Finally, we will look at some reforms that can curb politicians’ damage and recapture the blessings of representative government for ourselves and posterity.

It would be a mistake to view Bush as an aberration in modern political history. There are far more parallels between Bush and Clinton than either Democrats or Republicans would like to admit. And most of Clinton’s abuses followed precedents set by Bush Sr., Nixon, Johnson, and earlier presidents. Bush is more a symptom of the decay of American democracy than a first cause.

To detail current failings is not to idealize the past. There was no Golden Age in America in which all politicians were honest, most citizens were politically savvy, and government strictly obeyed the Constitution. And yet, the deterioration on all fronts in recent years is a fundamental change, not simply a brief pause in the annals of national greatness.

A democratic government that respects no limits on its own power is a ticking time bomb, waiting to destroy the rights it was created to protect. The more people who believe democracy is failsafe, the more likely it will fail. Attention Deficit Democracy produces the attitudes, ignorance, and arrogance that pave the way to political collapse.

This book will deal with democracy as the term is currently understood. Democracy is commonly used to describe a political system that involves regular elections, opportunities for citizen involvement, and purported limits on government power. There are other definitions that are more philosophically pure or intellectually stout. However, it would be a waste to spend hundreds of pages condemning the current system solely for failing to measure up to one abstract definition. Instead, we will examine what democracy in the real world is becoming, using the statements and standards of earlier centuries to vivify how times are changing.

Wednesday 24th September 2008

The Highway Robber State

10:41 am | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Bush | Congress | Elective Dictatorship | wool | Comments: 11

The Night Watchman State has been replaced by Highway Robber States - governments in which no asset, no contract, no domain is safe from marauding bands of politicians. (from Freedom in Chains, 1999)

If you voted in the congressional elections two years ago, were you ceding the right to the winners to give @ a trillion dollars to their Wall Street friends and donors?

Did any politician mention on the campaign trail in 2006 that a vote for them would be a vote for lavishing tax dollars on some of the richest wheeler-dealers in the nation?

Did any congressional candidate run on a platform of seizing tax dollars and using it to pay above-market prices for worthless assets for Wall Street’s benefit?

How in Hades can this bailout have any legitimacy within any notion of democracy that does not proclaim that citizens exist to be financially slaughtered for the good of whoever the rulers please?

Sunday 21st September 2008

Bush Teams Seeks Financial Dictatorial Powers

10:57 am | Uncategorized | Comments: 19

In order to save the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Bush administration seeks boundless power that cannot be reviewed by federal courts.

Didn’t we try this already at Gitmo, and it didn’t work out so well?

from Bloomberg:
Treasury Seeks Asset-Buying Power Unchecked by Courts (Update2)

By Alison Fitzgerald and John Brinsley

Sept. 21 (Bloomberg) — The Bush administration sought unchecked power from Congress to buy $700 billion in bad mortgage investments from financial companies in what would be an unprecedented government intrusion into the markets.

Through his plan, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson aims to avert a credit freeze that would bring the financial system and the world’s largest economy to a standstill. The bill would prevent courts from reviewing actions taken under its authority.

“He’s asking for a huge amount of power,” said Nouriel Roubini, an economist at New York University. “He’s saying, `Trust me, I’m going to do it right if you give me absolute control.’ This is not a monarchy.”

Introduction to Bush Betrayal (2004)

9:30 am | Uncategorized | Comments: 2

Continuing with the parade of Introductions, here’s the lead chapter from Bush Betrayal (2004).

This book generated a lot of vituperative fan mail.   Here is a collection of the highlights:  ”Bush Supporters Vindicate the President.”    I began to wonder if supporting George W. Bush automatically depraved people’s ability to spell.

It is unfortunate that more Americans did not catch on sooner to Bush’s deceits.   Perhaps even worse, few people seem to be drawing the right  lessons from the Bush debacles.   Instead, it is merely a question of finding and anointing some other would-be savior.

******************

INTRODUCTION     The Bush Betrayal   

by James Bovard    St. Martin’s/Palgrave MacMillan, September 2004

As we defend liberty and justice abroad, we must always honor those values here at home. George W. Bush, October 28, 2003

George W. Bush came to the presidency promising prosperity, peace, and humility. Instead, Bush has spawned record federal budget deficits, launched an unnecessary war, and made America the most hated nation in the world. Bush is expanding federal power and stretching prerogatives in almost every area that captures his fancy. Though Bush continually invokes freedom to sanctify himself and his policies, Bush freedom is based on boundless trust in the righteousness of the rulers and all their actions.
 
Truth is a lagging indicator in politics. A president’s promises and speeches receive far more publicity than subsequent reports and revelations about how his cherished programs crash and burn. This book does not aim to analyze all Bush policies. Instead, it examines an array of his domestic and foreign actions that vivify the damage Bush is inflicting and the danger he poses both to America and the world.

Bush governs like an elective monarch, entitled to reverence and deference on all issues. Secret Service agents ensure that Bush rarely views opponents of his reign, carefully quarantining protesters in “free speech zones” far from public view. The FBI has formally requested that local police monitor antiwar groups and send information on demonstrators to FBI-led terrorism task forces. Thanks to the campaign finance act Bush signed, Americans have also lost much of their freedom to criticize their rulers — at least in the 60 days before an election.

After 9/11, privacy is a luxury Americans supposedly can no longer afford. The administration has left no stone unturned, giving itself powers to sweep up people’s e-mail with the FBI’s Carnivore system, unleash FBI agents to conduct surveillance almost anywhere, allow G-men to secretly search people’s homes, bankroll Pentagon research on creating hundreds of millions of dossiers on Americans, expand the military’s role in domestic surveillance, and vacuum up personal data to create a federal “color code” for every air traveler. The administration is defining freedom down, pretending that protection from federal prying is no longer relevant to liberty. Americans are supposed to accept that freedom from terrorism is the ultimate freedom — and nothing else matters any more.

Bush is dropping an iron curtain around the federal government. The Bush administration is hollowing out the Freedom of Information Act, making it more difficult for citizens to discover government actions and abuses. Bush invoked executive privilege to block a congressional investigation into the FBI’s role in mass murder in Boston and in framing innocent men for those murders. The Supreme Court tacitly endorsed the Bush doctrine that the feds may carry out mass secret arrests and suppress all information about the roundup (including names of those detained, charges, and details on prison beatings).

Bush is wrapping himself in a flag drenched with the blood of Americans who died due to the failure of the federal government he commanded. The Bush reelection campaign is running television ads showing an American flag flying in front of the ruins of the World Trade Center towers and a flag-draped corpse being carried out of Ground Zero by firefighters. The Republicans will hold their national convention in New York days before the third anniversary of the terrorist attacks. Bush exploits the 9/11 dead while he stonewalls the 9/11 Commission. The Bush reelection team seems convinced that Bush’s actions on that day entitle Bush to rule Americans for four more years.

King of All Boondoggles

Americans will be forced to pay trillions of dollars in higher taxes in the coming decades to finance George Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign. Bush browbeat Congress into enacting the biggest expansion of the welfare state since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The White House blatantly deceived Congress about the cost of the new Medicare prescription drug entitlement, withholding key information that would have guaranteed the defeat of Bush’s giveaway. The administration launched a federally financed ad campaign showing a crowd cheering Bush as he signed the new law; federal auditors ruled that the ads were illegal propaganda. The new drug benefit will expedite Medicare’s bankruptcy and do nothing to improve medical care for most seniors.

Vote-buying is the prime motive of many Bush policies. Bush signed the most exorbitant farm bill in history in 2002, bilking taxpayers for $180 billion to rain benefits on millionaire landowners and other deserving mendicants. Bush repeatedly bragged that his farm bill was “generous” — as if Washington politicians have carte blanche to redistribute Americans’ paychecks to any group they choose. Bush imposed high tariffs on steel imports, wantonly destroying thousands of American manufacturing jobs simply because he wanted to try to snare the endorsement of the United Steel Workers and to boost his reelection chances.

After 9/11, almost every expansion of government became a coup for homeland security. When Bush announced plans to bloat the AmeriCorps “paid volunteer” program, he declared: “One way to defeat terrorism is to show the world the true values of America through the gathering momentum of a million acts of responsibility and decency and service.” While Bush portrays AmeriCorps recruits as heroes, AmeriCorps members busy themselves putting on puppet shows to persuade three-year-olds of the value of smoke alarms, hoeing corn at tourist farms, and sanctimoniously picking up litter in bad neighborhoods. Bush summoned every citizen to give four thousand hours of “service.” After dubious federal statistics showed a marginal rise in volunteering, Bush hyped the uptick as proof that his leadership is morally rejuvenating America.

The Transportation Security Administration and its 45,000-member airport occupation army is one of the Bush administration’s biggest shams. Despite more than $10 billion spent since 9/11, airport screeners are not any more competent than they were in 1987. Yet, as long as TSA brags about seizing millions of pointy objects each year from grandmothers and other scofflaws, Americans are supposed to believe that the endless delays are worthwhile. TSA is punishing critics, slapping fines of up to $1,500 on airline passengers guilty of showing the wrong “attitude” as they pass through TSA checkpoint gauntlets.

Some of Bush’s cherished reforms consist of little more than finding new names for old boondoggles. Bush sharply boosted foreign aid and created a new program, the Millennium Challenge Account. Bush denounces traditional foreign aid for bankrolling corruption, and insists that his program rewards governments for being honest. Even though the aid still goes to many of the same Third World politician-looters, the new program’s lofty rhetoric automatically converts the money into a force for goodness.

Political cosmetics pervade many Bush policies. The No Child Left Behind Act is perhaps Bush’s biggest domestic fraud. The act was falsely sold as giving freedom to local school officials. In reality, it empowers the feds to effectively judge and punish local schools for not fulfilling arbitrary guidelines. Many states are “dumbing down” academic standards, using bureaucratic racketeering to avoid harsh federal sanctions. Though the No Child Left Behind Act promised to permit children to escape “persistently dangerous” schools, most states defined that term to claim that all their schools were safe. As long as people believe Bush cares about children, it doesn’t matter that his education policy is a charade.

While Bush hypes himself as a “compassionate conservative,” his drug policy relies on wrath and harsh punishment (except for special cases like his niece Noelle Bush and talk show host Rush Limbaugh). John Walters, Bush’s drug czar, demonized drug users in federally funded TV ads, portraying people who buy drugs as terrorist financiers threatening America with complete destruction. Federal drug warriors have arrested cancer patients who smoke marijuana to control their chemo-induced nausea, busted doctors who give suffering patients more pain killers than the DEA approves, and carried out high-profile crackdowns on targets ranging from hemp food makers to comedian Tommy Chong (busted for bong trafficking).

Terrorizing in the Name of Antiterrorism

Bush appears determined to force Americans to pay almost any price so that he can be a world savior. He declared in December 2003: “I believe we have a responsibility to promote freedom [abroad] that is as solemn as the responsibility is to protecting the American people, because the two go hand in hand.” But the Constitution does not grant the president the prerogative to dispose of the lives of American soldiers any place in the world he longs to do a good deed. Though Bush is adept at destroying freedom in America, he has yet to demonstrate any ability to create it in foreign lands.

Bush greatly exaggerates the benefits of his conquests. After the Afghan war, Bush repeatedly told Americans that they had liberated Afghan women and that Afghan girls were now going to school. Yet, women are still heavily oppressed in most of Afghanistan and most Afghan girls still do not attend schools. While Bush portrays Afghanistan as a liberated new democracy, most Afghans are brutalized either by warlords or the resurgent Taliban. But the Bush White House rarely allows cold facts to impede a warm and touching story line.

For Bush, the right to rule apparently includes the right to lie. In his 2004 State of the Union address, Bush proclaimed that, as a result of actions such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq, “No one can now doubt the word of America.” A year earlier, in his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush rattled off a long list of biological and chemical weapons that he claimed he knew that Iraq possessed. No such weapons have been found. Bush has never shown a speck of contrition for his false prewar statements. Instead, he acts like a clumsy magician who assumes his audience is too feebleminded to recognize the elaborate trick that fell to pieces in front of their eyes.

The war in Iraq is the most visible debacle of the Bush war on terrorism. The president pirouetted in a flight suit on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, in front of a giant banner proclaiming, “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.” But Iraq subsequently became far more treacherous. On July 2, when asked about Iraqi attacks on American forces, Bush issued a taunt: “Bring ’em on!” In the subsequent months, more than 600 American soldiers were killed and thousands were wounded and maimed as Iraqis took up the Bush challenge. While Bush continually brags of how the United States “liberated” 25 million Iraqis, the U.S. military government vigorously suppresses television stations and shuts down newspapers that criticize American forces or U.S. policy. While Bush rhapsodizes about winning Iraqi hearts and minds, U.S. troops carry out crackdowns with names such as Operation Iron Hammer, conduct thousands of no-knock raids in people’s homes searching for weapons, routinely demolish the houses of suspected resistance fighters, imprison people solely for being relatives of insurgents, and kill hundreds of innocent civilians. Bush-style benevolence was best captured by U.S. Army Lt. Colonel Nathan Sassaman, commanding a battalion that enclosed an entire Iraqi town with barbed wire, when he observed: “With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.”

Bush proudly declared last year: “No President has ever done more for human rights than I have.” In reality, Bush has done more to formally subvert rights than any American president of the modern era. Bush claimed the right to label people as enemy combatants and thereby nullify all of their legal rights. Once detainees had no rights, torturing them apparently became permissible — at least in the eyes of some Justice Department and Pentagon officials. The Bush administration ignored warning after warning of the gross abuses that were being committed against detainees in Afghanistan, Cuba, and Iraq. After the torture photos from the Abu Ghraib prison became public in April 2004, Bush repeatedly falsely claimed that the abuses were the result of a few wayward soldiers. In speeches in his reelection campaign, Bush continued to brag about ending Saddam’s torture.

Foreign military “victories” have done nothing to increase the competence of homeland security. Even though federal agencies’ failure to combine terrorist watch lists helped allow two known Al Qaeda members to enter the United States before the 9/11 hijackings, the federal government still does not have a single, up-to-date terrorist watch list. The General Accounting Office concluded in late 2003 that the feds are still doing a lousy job of pursuing terrorist finances, despite a vast increase in the financial surveillance of average Americans. A federal commission on terrorist threats reported in December 2003 that federal, state, and local government agencies are still doing a very poor job of sharing key information about terrorist threats. And some of the information that the feds do send along — such as the FBI warning that people carrying world almanacs could be terrorist plotters — aids only late-night television comics.

Bush’s foreign policies are creating more terrorists than he is vanquishing. There are far more terrorist attacks in the Middle East now than before the United States invaded Iraq. Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, declared in early 2004 that “Al Qaeda remains as dangerous as it was before September 11.” British intelligence experts warn that Al Qaeda is a greater threat than before. Bush’s interventionist policies and meddling are spurring intense animosity throughout the Arab and Muslim world. And there is no evidence that the Bush administration is competent to protect Americans from all the new enemies its policies are breeding.

Repealing 1776

President George W. Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and other administration officials continually remind Americans that everything changed after 9/11. But does that include the Constitution? Are the myths of 9/11 undermining the truths of 1776?

The Founding Fathers taught Americans that power is dangerous regardless of who wields it. Bush would have people believe that, after 9/11, America will perish if the president lacks boundless power. The Founding Fathers saw individual rights as bulwarks against government abuses. Bush acts as if individual rights are barriers to public safety. The Founding Fathers sought to deter tyranny with checks and balances within the federal government. Bush acts as if the only legitimate check on his power is people’s chance to cast a ballot once every four years. Bush perennially talks as if tax cuts are the only protection people need against Big Government.

The Bush presidency is continuing and accelerating many of the noxious trends of the Clinton era, most of which started long before William Jefferson Clinton became president. Many of the abuses of the last few years would likely have occurred regardless of who was elected president in 2000. However, the glorification of Bush after 9/11 would not have reached such extremes without the slavish efforts of many Republican congressmen and much of the conservative news media. The president’s rarely challenged power grabs revealed the cravenness of many of Washington’s avowed champions of freedom.

Though this book focuses primarily on the blunders and deceits of Bush and his team, Democratic members of Congress are either complicit in or acquiescent to most of Bush’s abuses. Most of the budget disputes in Washington involve how to waste tax dollars, not whether tax dollars should be wasted. Some Democrats did yeoman work — such as Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) in opposing the war on Iraq, Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) in opposing the Patriot Act, and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) in opposing Ashcroft. Yet Democratic members of Congress as a group have been less vigilant and courageous in opposing misgovernment than were Republicans during the first Clinton administration.

Regardless of who wins in November 2004, Americans must recognize the damage the federal government is inflicting on their rights, liberty, and safety. Even if Bush wins reelection, the more Americans who recognize the failures and frauds of his first term, the more difficult it will be for Bush to perpetrate new abuses in his second term. Americans must understand the Bush Betrayal if they are ever to rein in the government.

Saturday 20th September 2008

Ron Paul Supporters Vindicated?

8:40 am | Attention Deficit Democracy | Bovard | Congress | Elective Dictatorship | Rule of Law | wool | Comments: 10

[full size photo at my Flickr site here ]

And to think that many people thought that the Ron Paul supporters were too cynical about the Fed….

This monster bank/stock market bailout shaping up in Washington will probably be one of the greatest cons of the new century.    This is simply letting politicians give themselves a blank check -  or a withdraw line up to a trillion dollars - to reward their friends and donors.

And of course, it has to be done in secret - or else the magic won’t work.

And the crowning bonus - after all the perverse incentives politicians have created in recent decades - they will manage to foist the blame for the stock market dive on “the free market.” 

Thus, they will entitle themselves to seize more power at the same time they squander hundreds of billions of dollars of other people’s money to bury the evidence of their previous follies. 

Many of the brokerage and investment firms richly deserve bankruptcy for their shenanigans and irresponsibility. If taxpayers are forced to bail out the “Masters of the Universe,” that will be one of the biggest financial crimes in modern history.   But the fact that many companies made foolish decisions does not entitle politicians to seize  more control over the economy.

As Lily Tomlin said, “No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.”

Thursday 18th September 2008

My FFF Speech on “Bush’s War on Civil Liberties” is Now Online

12:14 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 3

The Future of Freedom Foundation put online today the speeches from their  June conference.   You can watch them here.    

My topic was “Bush’s War on Civil Liberties.”  I had wanted to do an even-handed treatment of the issue but there were time limitations, so…

The same webpage has links to the videos of the other 20+ speakers.  I will wager a barrel of beer that the Ron Paul speech will be the most frequently viewed speech.    

The topics of the conference are even more relevant now than they were earlier this summer - the Federal Reserve, FISA,  Iraq/Iran, and sniveling politicians wrecking the Republic.

Tuesday 16th September 2008

269 And Trying Harder

10:10 am | Uncategorized | Comments: 0

I want to heartily thank all the folks who have perused here or linked here in the past few months.

Wikio compiles a ranking of English language political blogs.  The latest Wikio ranking is now posted on the upper left hand corner of this blog.  Thanks to y’all, this blog came in at 269 in the latest tally, in the top few hundred of English language political blogs.

I can’t vouch for their algorithms, but it was a choice of putting up a button for Wikio or a “Libertarians for Palin” logo.

Here is Wikio’s explanation on the rankings:

The position of a blog in the Wikio ranking depends on the number and weight of the incoming links from other blogs. These links are dynamic, which means that they are backlinks or links found within articles.

Blogrolls are not taken into account and Wikio only counts links from the last 120 days. We thus hope to provide a classification more representative of trends in the blogosphere.

Moreover, the weight of a link depends on the linking blog’s position in the Wikio ranking. With our algorithm, the weight of a link from a top blog is greater than that of a link from a blog that is less well ranked.

Our rankings also include Top Blogs for several categories: Technology, Politics, etc. New categories will be added on a regular basis.

Sunday 14th September 2008

Introduction from TERRORISM & TYRANNY (2003)

10:51 am | Uncategorized | Comments: 8

Since September is “Book Introduction” month, I figure I should send this chapter for another lap around the track.

The final paragraph of the chapter asks: “What are the prospects for the survival of American liberty from an endless war against an elusive, often ill-defined enemy?”

Funny to think back how some people reacted in 2003 to that question - as if it was sacrilegious, or at least scurrilous, to even raise the issue.

 

INTRODUCTION   TERRORISM & TYRANNY: TRAMPLING FREEDOM, JUSTICE, AND PEACE TO RID THE WORLD OF EVIL (ST. MARTIN’S/PALGRAVE, SEPTEMBER 2003)   James Bovard

The war on terrorism is the first political growth industry of the new millennium. After the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,President George W. Bush promised to lead a “crusade” to “rid the worldof evil-doers.”1 Unfortunately, the political fallout from the 9/11 attacks could fatally blight both individual liberty and public safety.

After the terrorists killed thousands of Americans, the United States had the right and the duty to retaliate against the perpetrators—the Al Qaeda network —and destroy their ability to ever strike the United States again. Bush’s initial response to the attacks received almost universal support among the American public and pervasive support from foreign governments.

But as time passed, the Bush administration continually broadened the war. The response to attacks by a handful of killers is morphing into a campaign to vanquish all potential enemies of U.S. hegemony and to impose American political values on much of the world.

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Americans’ trust in government soared after the terrorist attacks. In the days after the attack, flag waving and patriotic appeals swept the land: polls showed a doubling in the number of people who trusted government to “do the right thing.”2 The national media rallied to the cause with headlines such as “The Government, Once Scorned, Becomes Savior” (Los Angeles Times), “Government to the Rescue” (Wall Street Journal), and “Government’s Comeback” (Washington Post).3 The government failed—so the government became infallible.

The surge in trust was spurred by a profusion of false government statements in the aftermath of the attacks. The Bush administration did everything possible to portray the United States as a blindsided innocent victim. Yet, from the 1995 warnings from the Philippines that Muslim terrorists were plotting to use hijacked airplanes as guided missiles to attack America, to the warnings to the Federal Bureau of Investigation that Arab students at flight schools were acting suspiciously, to the warning that Al Qaeda operatives had infiltrated the United States, to the failure by the National Security Agency to translate key emails on the pending attack, the feds were asleep at the switch.

After 9/11, the Bush administration rushed to increase the power of federal agencies across the board. Within hours after the attacks, Attorney General John Ashcroft began strong-arming Congress to enact sweeping antiterrorism legislation. Ashcroft’s constant shrill warnings of new terrorist attacks resulted in maximum intimidation and minimum deliberation by Congress.

Because of the actions of a handful of terrorists on September 11, federal agents could have more power over all Americans in perpetuity. The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required To Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA-PATRIOT) Act treats every citizen like a suspected terrorist and every federal agent like a proven angel. The Bush administration carried off the biggest bait-and-switch in U.S. constitutional history. Rather than targeting terrorists, Bush and Congress awarded new powers to federal agents to use against anyone suspected of committing any one of the three thousand federal crimes on the books.

The Bush administration converted the terrorist assault into a trump card against American privacy. The Patriot Act entitled the FBI to cannibalize the nation’s email with its Carnivore wiretapping system. The FBI is crafting a computer virus that can be inserted via email into targeted computers, allowing government access to everything a person types. FBI agents can now easily get warrants to compel public libraries and bookstores to surrender records of what books people borrow or buy. Federal agents have issued over 18,000 counterterrorism subpoenas and search warrants since 9/11; in many other cases, FBI agents have snared personal or proprietary information via arm-twisting and intimidation, no warrant required. The number of “emergency” searches conducted solely on the Attorney General’s command (and approved ex po facto by federal judges) is skyrocketing. Operation TIPS, the Terrorist Information and Prevention System, raised the specter of millions of informants—from truck drivers to letter carriers to cable television installers—reporting any “out of the ordinary” behavior to the feds. The Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness surveillance system aims to create a vast database dragnet, potentially creating hundreds of millions of dossiers on Americans containing all their phone bills, all their medical records, and everything they purchase (from books to magazines to plane tickets to guns)—all in the name of preemptively detecting terrorists. The Pentagon is also financing research to track people by their gait and by their odors.

The Patriot Act gave the feds the right to financially strip-search every American. It created new financial “crimes without criminal intent”—empowering the Customs Service to confiscate the bulk cash of American travelers who fail to fill out a government form. The president and federal regulators can now ban any foreign bank or institution from the U.S. market unless it bares its books to U.S. investigators. The Justice Department is exploiting Patriot Act powers to confiscate bank accounts for alleged crimes with no relation to terrorism. Federal officials continually bragged of the total amount of alleged terrorists assets frozen. But there were no press releases confessing that
much of the money was later returned after no evidence of wrongdoing could be found.

The Patriot Act created the new crime of “domestic terrorism,” defined as violent or threatening private actions intended “to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.” This definition reaches far beyond the box-cutter crowd. It could take only a few scuffles at a rally to transform a protest group into a terrorist entity. This could allow the government to drop the hammer on environmental extremists (even those not spiking trees), anti-trade fanatics (even those not trashing Starbucks), and anti-abortion protesters (even those not attacking doctors). If the violence at a rally is done by a government agent provocateur—as happened at some 1960s antiwar
protests—the government could still treat all the group’s members as terrorists. Likewise, anyone who donates to an organization that becomes classified as a terrorist entity—be it Greenpeace, the Gun Owners of America, or Operation Rescue—could face long prison terms.

Six days after the terrorist attack, Ashcroft effectively canceled the “Great Writ” of habeas corpus with a decree announcing that the government would henceforth lock up suspected aliens for a “reasonable period.” Over one thousand “special interest” detainees were jailed in the months after 9/11; however, no evidence surfaced linking any of those people to the terrorist attacks. Many suspects were locked up and not charged for weeks or months afterwards and effectively held incommunicado. More than six hundred people were deported after secret trials. When a New Jersey judge denounced the government’s refusal to release the names of detainees as “odious to a democracy,”6 Ashcroft responded by issuing an emergency regulation trumping the state court decision. Georgetown University law professor David Cole observed: “Never in our history  has the government engaged in such a blanket practice of secret incarceration.”7 Even after the Justice Department released or deported most of the “special interest” detainees, President Bush continued to describe all of them as “terrorists” and “murderers.”

Airports have far more potholes after 9/11. Despite the success of all the hijacking attempts on 9/11, Bush raced to lavishly praise Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and Federal Aviation Administration Chief Jane Garvey. The feds promised to greatly improve airport safety. The result is institutionalized panic-mongering and an unending comedy of errors: hundreds of evacuations and scores of thousands of travelers delayed because of unplugged metal detectors, sleeping security guards, pairs of scissors discovered in trash cans, or other dire breaches of regulations. New search policies have become a Molesters Full Employment Act, with airport screeners obsessing on the underwiring of bras or poking and prodding beyond the bounds of decorum. Federal airport security
agents have confiscated more than five million nail clippers, cigar cutters, screwdrivers, and other prohibited items since early 2002. But covert government tests showed that firearms, knives, and dummy explosives have continued to gush through the new improved checkpoints. Congress mandated that more than $5 billion be spent purchasing and installing bomb detection machines that are notoriously unreliable and generate endless false alarms every day. Travelers can now be arrested if they commit the new crime of raising their voice at the federal agent pawing the socks and underwear in their carry-on luggage.

At the same time that Bush is making government more powerful, he is making it much less accountable. The Bush administration seized on the national security emergency atmosphere to erect stonewalls around all federal agencies. On October 12, 2001 Ashcroft announced that the Justice Department was reinterpreting the Freedom of Information Act to make it far more difficult for Americans to discover what the federal government actually does. Bush issued an executive order gutting the Presidential Records Act, which required the routine release of most of a president’s papers 12 years after their term ended.10 (Bush’s action will keep secret the actions of his father and many of his own top advisors during the Reagan administration.) White House spokesman Ari Fleischer pressured the news media not to broadcast or even print a transcript
of videotapes from Osama Bin Laden, warning that “if you report [the information] in its entirety that could raise concerns.”11 At the same time that the Bush administration rations the truth, it is generous with fabrications. Bush’s solicitor general, Theodore Olson, informed the Supreme Court: “It’s easy to imagine an infinite number of situations where the government might legitimately give out false information.”12

While Bush perennially invokes freedom to sanctify his antiterrorism policies, freedom to dissent may be on the endangered list. Ashcroft informed a congressional committee in December 2001: “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty . . . your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and . . . give ammunition to America’s enemies.” 13 The federal Homeland Security Department is urging local police departments to view critics of the war on terrorism as potential terrorists. In a May 2003 terrorist advisory, the Homeland Security Department warned local law enforcement agencies to keep an eye on anyone who “expressed dislike of attitudes and decisions of the U.S. government.”14 Such an expansive definition of terrorist suspects is especially pernicious because the Justice Department is advocating the nullification of almost all federal, state, and local court consent decrees restricting the power of local and state police to spy on Americans. Homeland Security officials also urged local lawmen to be on alert for potential suicide bombers who could be detected by such traits as a “pale face from recent shaving of beard.” They “may appear to be in a ‘trance,’” or their “eyes appear to be focused and vigilant”; either their “clothing is out of sync with the weather” or their “clothing is loose.” Perhaps to ensure that there will never be a shortage of suspects, federal experts advised local agencies of another tell-tale terrorist warning sign: someone for whom “waiting in a grocery store line becomes intolerable.”15

Perpetual Wars, Endless Enemies
Shortly after 9/11, President Bush announced: “So long as anybody’s terrorizing established governments, there needs to be a war.”16 The Bush administration quickly organized what Bush labeled a “freedom-loving coalition”—which included many of the most oppressive governments in the world. But as long as a foreign leader recited Bush’s catechism on terrorism, his government was automatically certified as a partner in Bush’s crusade against evil.

A week after the 9/11 attacks, Bush proclaimed he wanted Osama bin Laden “dead or alive” and made bin Laden the poster boy for the war on terrorism. Six months later, when asked about Osama at a press conference, Bush groused that bin Laden is “just a person who’s now been marginalized” and insisted: “I just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you.”17 From the initial targeting of al Qaeda, the enemies list expanded to include Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Somalia, and Libya, as well as an array of private groups.

The more foreign nations the United States bombs, the more domestic tranquility Americans will presumably enjoy. Bush declared on February 27, 2002: “We owe it to our children and our children’s children to rid the world of terror now, so they can grow up in a free society, a society without fear.”18 Bush assumes that there is a fixed sum of terror in the world and all that is necessary is to use enough force to “bring justice” to the culprits. Bush’s policies may spawn new terrorists faster than the U.S. military can kill existing terrorists.

Bush proclaimed that “either you’re with us, or you’re against us in the fight for freedom; either you stand beside this great Nation as part of a coalition that will defend freedom and defend civilization itself, or you’re against us.”19 Bush often speaks as if all he need do is pronounce the word “freedom” and all humanity is obliged to obey his commands—as if he were the World Pope of Freedom and his infallible proclamations are sufficient to justify scourging all slackers.

Bush rarely misses a chance to proclaim that the war on terrorism is being fought to save freedom—either U.S. freedom, or world freedom, or the freedom of future generations. On January 31, 2002, Bush proclaimed: “We are resolved to rout out terror wherever it exists to save the world for freedom.”20 Bush contrasts freedom and terror as if they are two ends of a seesaw. Because terror is the enemy of government, government necessarily becomes the champion of freedom. This simple dichotomy makes sense only if terrorists are the sole threat to freedom.

The Evolution of Terrorism
Terror was first explicitly used as a political tactic during the French Revolution. Terror had been used for thousands of years by despots to crush resistance but the French revolutionaries were likely the first to claim to be idealists for maximizing oppression. Maximilien Robespierre gushed that terror is “justice prompt, severe and inflexible,” “an emanation of virtue,” and “a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy.” For Robespierre, terror tactics exemplified “the despotism of liberty against tyranny.” The revolution featured not only the guillotining of thousands of aristocrats, but also the ritualized mass drownings of people in Nantes and the extermination of the populace of entire towns who failed to enthusiastically support the “despotism of liberty.” Britain’s Edmund Burke, the most eloquent enemy of the French Revolution, denounced “thousands of those hellhounds called terrorists.”

By the mid-twentieth century, the term “terrorism” was routinely used to condemn those who attacked politicians, government forces, or established regimes. The Nazis denounced French Resistance saboteurs as terrorists. Terrorism has permeated Middle East conflicts since the 1940s, when Menachem Begin and his Irgun gang helped drive the British out of Palestine by blowing up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people. In the 1950s, Algerians terrorized Paris and other French cities, eventually driving the French out of northern Africa and ending colonial rule. The United States revved up its military intervention in Vietnam to deal with what the Kennedy administration perceived as a “small war of terrorism and political subversion” by a few thousand Viet Cong.23 In the late 1960s, Palestinians became the premier terrorists in the Western world; the kidnapping of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich heralded the era of televised political murders.

After President George W. Bush announced a war on terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, one British wit declared that this was the first time in history that war had been declared on an abstract noun. Actually, many politicians had declared war on terrorism in the preceding decades—from Germany’s Helmut Schmidt, to various Israeli leaders, to Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s war on terrorism eventually crippled his administration, as revelations about the Iran-Contra scandal (trading weapons to gain release of hostages held by terrorists) raised the specter of both his impeachment and his senility. The first U.S. war on terrorism ended when a bomb exploded on Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, demonstrating the abysmal failure of the U.S. government to protect American citizens.

While Bush portrays his war on terrorism as a simple question of “good versus evil,” the concept of terrorism is murkier than many government officials would like to admit. Brian Jenkins, one of the most respected U.S. experts on the subject, observed in 1981: “Terrorism is what the bad guys do.”24

The U.S. State Department defined terrorism in 1981 as “the use or threat of the use of force for political purposes in violation of domestic or international law.”25 Since government use of force is almost automatically lawful (based on government edicts and sovereign immunity), governments by definition cannot commit terrorist acts. For decades, U.S. representatives to the United Nations have been adamant that “state terrorism” is a near impossibility. Private cars packed with dynamite are evil, while guided missiles launched from government jet fighters that blow up cars driven by terrorist suspects are good, regardless of how many children are in the back seat at the time of the “surgical strike.”

A core fallacy at the heart of the war on terrorism is that terrorism is worse than almost anything else imaginable. Unfortunately, governments around the world have committed far worse abuses than Al Qaeda or any other terrorist cabal. By treating terrorism as the supreme evil, and insisting that governments can never be guilty of terrorism, the Bush administration makes the crimes of government morally negligible. From 1980 to 2000, international terrorists killed 7,745 people, according to the U.S. State Department.26 Yet, in the same d