BOVARD

Thursday 2nd September 2010

Government Online Surveillance and Your Bad Attitude

This great Dilbert cartoon perfectly captures how surveillance breeds distrust.

The feds are spying on us left and right, and yet politicians whine that we don’t trust the government.

At least not everyone’s a damn fool on that regard. (No - this isn’t the cue to recite the Pledge of Allegiance….)

Tuesday 31st August 2010

Obama’s Bogus Exit Perfectly Captured

8:51 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 8

When the Washington Post’s Tom Toles is good, he’s great.

Will Obama Out-BS Bush on Iraq?

Popcorn sales are soaring across the nation because Obama will give a live Oval Office speech tonight on the U.S. victory in Iraq.

I’m disappointed that Obama will not be giving the speech after climbing out of a jet wearing a flight suit, like George W. did with his “Mission Accomplished” speech in 2003.

I expect that Obama will have at least half a dozen Montana-sized howlers in his speech tonight.

But will he out-BS Bush on Iraq?

Has anyone seen betting odds on this proposition? It will not be easy, considering that Bush spent 6 years shoveling hokum on Iraq.

On the other hand, Obama has embraced most of Bush’s follies. Perhaps he can rise to this challenge as well.

Thursday 26th August 2010

9/11 as Government Blowback Day

2:11 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 10

Some church in Florida is planning on celebrating 9/11 by burning hundreds of Korans. Perhaps this will be the launchpad for bonfires across the nation of any book suspected of Muslim tendencies.

There’s a different 9/11 celebration going on in San Diego. Lawrence Ludlow emailed me about “Government Blowback Day.” I don’t know if Lawrence and his friends are planning to burn copies of the 9/11 Commission Report.

From the press release:

San Diego Complete Liberty Declares Sept. 11th “Government Blowback Day”

– Wear a black arm-band on September 11; tell the world you didn’t swallow the Big Lie —

SAN DIEGO, CA – September 6, 2010 – The San Diego “Complete Liberty Meetup” group joins other voluntaryists, private-property anarchists, and libertarians by declaring September 11th a day of remembrance: Government Blowback Day. This September 11, nine years will have passed since the price of the U.S. government’s meddling foreign policy was paid by innocent people. Despite the passing of time, gullible people still believe the Big Lie that was cooked up in the Washington, D.C. “lie factory” – namely, that the terrorists “hate us for our freedom.” What freedom? The spy cameras? Phone and email surveillance? The high taxes? The Patriot Act? The paranoia? The promise of endless wars and new terrorists to come? We are tired of the nonsense. On September 11, the first Government Blowback Day will remind the lunatics in Washington, D.C. that some of us know the real reasons for the attacks. The terrorists made no secret about why they attacked: (1) U.S. government support for the apartheid state of Israel, (2) the presence of U.S. armed forces in Islamic holy places, and (3) the U.S. sanctions that killed over 500,000 children in Iraq as of 1995 (and continued until Dubya started his “war on terror” that will never end with Obama).

September 11 is a day to remember the real cause of terrorism: the president, the congress, and their foreign policy

…..

Wednesday 18th August 2010

The Crime of Lying to the FBI???

Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich is a four-star sleazeball. But the feds had their chance to put him away and they failed to convince a jury on all charges except lying to the FBI.

This is one of the “crimes” that best illustrates the mirage of the Rule of Law in the U.S. FBI agents and chieftains can lie up and down, in court and out, and never sweat for a New York minute. But federal prosecutors and the federal statute book treat alleged false statements to FBI agents like some type of heresy that threatens the Republic.

Here’s a piece I did for Playboy back in May 1999 on this double standard.

Playboy May 1999
BEYOND PERJURY by James Bovard

Perhaps the greatest irony of the national debate over who should go to prison for lying has gone largely unreported: Even while President Bill Clinton fought for his reputation and job, his administration aggressively argued that Americans who make even the most offhand false comments to practically any government worker deserve harsh punishment.

Under Clinton’s watch, Congress amended the false statements statute in 1996 to ensure that people who make false statements during congressional testimony could be prosecuted.

The FBI academy in 1997 added a full training course on ethics for new recruits. According to the academy’s official syllabus, subjects of the bureau’s investigations have “forfeited their right to the truth.”

Federal agents have the right to lie to you-and to put you in prison if you lie to them. Any citizen who makes even a single-word false utterance (”no,” “yes”) to a federal agent faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The false statements law conveys so much power that, according to Solicitor General Seth Waxman, it could allow federal agents to “escalate completely innocent conduct into a felony.” One federal judge condemned the law for encouraging “inquisition as a method of criminal investigation.”

In 1998 the Supreme Court reinforced the power of federal agents when it upheld the conviction of New York union official James Brogan. He was surprised at home one evening by two investigators who asked him if he had received any cash or gifts from a real estate company whose employees were represented by his union. He answered no-which, the investigators knew, was false-and received a prison sentence for his one-word answer. (The jury also convicted Brogan of unlawfully receiving $150 in gratuities from the company-a misdemeanor.)

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in reviewing Brogan’s conviction, called attention to “the extraordinary authority Congress, perhaps unwittingly, has conferred on prosecutors to manufacture crimes.” Justice Ginsburg warned that the Supreme

Court’s decision will apply the federal law to encounters between federal agents and their targets “under extremely informal circumstances which do not sufficiently alert the person interviewed to the danger that false statements may lead to a felony conviction.” Ginsburg concluded that the broad interpretation of the law may result in “government generation of a crime when the underlying suspected wrongdoing is or has become nonpunishable.” In other words, you can be not guilty of a crime but guilty of lying about the same noncrime.

Unfortunately, federal agents use the powers granted by the false statements act far more often than most Americans realize. And they almost never warn you that a wrong single-word answer can earn you hard time.

For instance, if you smuggle in one Cuban cigar-and lie to a Customs inspector who asks what you purchased abroad-you could face two years in prison or a fine. Or, if you merely fail to complete a Customs declaration form, you could face felony charges for making a false statement.

If you question the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s position on air bags and apply for a switch to deactivate the device, you have to check off one or more state-approved reasons. You then have to certify that the statement you just made is “truthful, correct and complete to the best of your knowledge and belief” and acknowledge that if you make a false, fictitious or fraudulent statement you are subject to criminal prosecution.

If a taxpayer misreports his income by only a few hundred dollars, he can be fined or sent to prison for tax fraud. But if an IRS employee misrepresents federal tax law to jack up a citizen’s tax bill by thousands of dollars, he is not penalized.

Roughly 2 million Americans are audited each year; these audits generate almost $30 billion for the federal government.

How consistent are auditors in their misrepresentations? In 1996 the IRS Appeals Office found that almost 70 cents of each dollar of additional taxes that auditors demanded that year were unjustified. Is this a lie, or is it what poker players call a bluff?

Perjury is serious business. But failing to bare your soul to some federal employee who knocks on your door should be a different case. The core problem is that there are too many laws and too many government agents asking too many questions.

Monday 16th August 2010

James J. Kilpatrick, RIP- the Conservative Literary Path Not Taken….

9:19 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 8

[updated at the bottom]James J. Kilpatrick passed away yesterday at the age of 89.

In his prime, and in his top notch writing, he was one of the best conservative stylists of the late 20th century. He gracefully combined earthiness and erudition to connect with Americans far and wide. When William F. Buckley passed away two years ago, pundits and obituary writers gushed over Buckley’s exquisite style. Kilpatrick’s style was far more potent and probably far more effective.

Kilpatrick’s The Writer’s Art was a fount of excellent ideas on style, and his The Foxes Union is one of the most vivid portrayals of the good life in rural Virginia.

There were plenty of issues on which I vigorously disagreed with him on, and I will make no excuse or defense for his championing of “Massive Resistance” in Virginia in the late 1950s. (The Washington Post obituary notes that he began his journalism career at the Richmond News Leader, where he championed the cause of a black shoeshine boy wrongfully convicted of shooting a policeman. Kilpatrick’s efforts led to a pardon).

But there were some issues on which he stunned me. When I was doing the research for Lost Rights in the early 1990s, Kilpatrick was one of the few conservatives who understood and treasured the Fourth Amendment. He vigorously opposed permitting government to conduct unreasonable, warrantless searches and he recognized how this profoundly changed the relation of State & Citizen. (I think that is a fair characterization of his position - my memory is dusty here). There were other issues on which Kilpatrick avoided the cravenness that too often characterized Washington pundits, both left and right, in recent decades.

UPDATE: LawHobbit* kindly sent me the following link on Kilpatrick’s horrible position on the Second Amendment. Geez, I never expected that he would be so wrongheaded on such a fundamental issue.

* A.K.A. Infamous Oregon Lawhobbit

Friday 13th August 2010

A Web-Only Solution for Federal Agencies?

12:52 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 2

Today’s Dilbert should cheer up American newspaper executives.

Is there any way to also get most federal agencies to go “web-only”?

Thursday 12th August 2010

How We Brought Freedom & Prosperity to Afghanistan

posted online today by the Future of Freedom Foundation, from the May issue of Freedom Daily -

BRINGING FREEDOM & PROSPERITY TO AFGHANISTAN
by James Bovard

The Obama administration is seeking to rechristen the Afghan debacle it inherited from the Bush administration. Obama’s efforts to legitimize the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan simply ignore the previous record of American actions in that nation. But the past debacles ensure the failure of Obama’s ramped-up interventions.

Afghanistan was recently judged to be the second most corrupt nation on Earth. According to Transparency International, the only place in the world that is more corrupt is Somalia — a nation best known for its pirates. The Washington Post reported last November that one of Afghanistan’s top ministers took a $30 million bribe to give a special deal to a Chinese mining company. The New York Times reported, “Everything seems to be for sale: public offices, access to government services, even a person’s freedom.”

And yet, Americans are supposed to believe that sending in more troops will morally redeem the Karzai regime. Unfortunately, that is the message that the American media often trumpet — following the White House script, the way they have done since 2001.

U.S. government handouts have enabled the Afghan government to increase repression of the Afghan people. The U.S. government has poured billions of dollars into building up the Afghan army. But Afghan soldiers are often a pox on their countrymen. Human Rights Watch reported that government

troops and police in many parts of the [southeast] region, and parts of Kabul itself, are invading private homes, usually at night, and robbing and assaulting civilians. By force or by ruse, soldiers and police gain entry into homes and hold people hostage for hours, terrorizing them with weapons, stealing their valuables, and sometimes raping women and girls. On the roads and at proliferating official and unofficial checkpoints, local soldiers and police extort money from civilians under the threat of beating or arrest.

U.S. aid is supposedly going to generate the prosperity that leads to Afghan freedom. And yet, even within a couple years after the U.S. invasion, foreign aid was floundering in Afghanistan, just as it almost always does elsewhere.

On December 16, 2003, dignitaries from the U.S. government, the Afghan provisional government, the United Nations, and other organizations gathered for a ribbon-cutting ceremony. President Bush issued a statement from Washington bragging that

the first phase of paving the Kabul-Kandahar leg of the highway is completed under budget and ahead of schedule. This new road reduces travel time between Kabul to Kandahar to five hours. It will promote political unity between Afghanistan’s provinces, facilitate commerce by making it easier to bring products to market, and provide the Afghan people with greater access to health care and educational opportunities.

Though the announcement and the ceremony were widely portrayed in the U.S. media as a triumph for the Bush administration, the reality was less cheery. The Los Angeles Times reported that “it took hundreds of U.S. and Afghan troops, backed by attack helicopters, antitank weapons, snipers and bomb-sniffing dogs, to make it safe for President Hamid Karzai to cut the ribbon on the Kabul-to-Kandahar highway.” Prior to the signing ceremony, “troops set up roadblocks to stop traffic in both directions for more than three hours. That was just long enough for dignitaries to arrive in heavily guarded convoys and on Chinook helicopters, celebrate a job well done and rush back to safer ground in Kabul, the capital, 25 miles northeast.”

The trip from Kabul to Kanda-har is faster now — unless a person gets killed or kidnapped along the way. Andrew Natsios, the director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, bragged, “We built this road right through a war zone.” But the road is doing nothing to end the war. Though the road itself is a vast improvement over the horribly potholed road first built by the United States in the 1960s, the Chicago Tribune noted that “all but about 40 miles of it are off-limits to the United Nations agencies and international aid workers” because of the high risk of attacks. The soaring crime rate can make the road too perilous even for Afghan taxi drivers.

Despite the dismal failure of U.S. foreign aid to Afghanistan during the Bush administration, the Obama administration’s promises of redemptive aid are usually taken at face value by most of the American media. Neither the media nor the White House has shown a learning curve.

The blessings of liberty?

Another defense of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan is that it will bring the blessings of freedom to the long-suffering Afghan people. But that is the same charade that the Bush administration used — very successfully for his 2004 reelection campaign.

In a February 5, 2004, speech in Charleston, South Carolina, Bush declared, “Thanks to the United States and our friends, thanks to the bravery of many of our fellow citizens … Afghanistan is a free country.” Bush also asserted that the United States “liberated the … Afghan people from oppression and fear.” But it takes more than the abolition of weekly public executions in the Kabul soccer stadium to make Afghans free. If freeing people were as simple as toppling a bad government, almost all of the people in the world would have long since been free.

Bush’s proclamation that Afghans were free provides more insight into his concept of freedom than it does into the daily sufferings of Afghans at the hands of their government. The U.S. State Department noted in 2004,

Arbitrary arrest and detention are serious problems…. Procedures for taking persons into custody and bringing them to justice followed no established code…. Limits on lengths of pretrial detention were not respected….

… There were credible reports that some detainees were tortured to elicit confessions while awaiting trial.

On the bright side, the State Department noted that “defendants … were permitted attorneys in some instances.”

Unfortunately, the Afghans were receiving the same type of freedom that Bush was creating for Americans. The Afghan government created a National Security Court to try terrorist cases and other cases but did not disclose any details on how the court would actually function. The new court provided the appearance of a judiciary while permitting maximum political manipulation of charges and verdicts. The Karzai government also expanded the number of judges on the Afghan Supreme Court from 9 to 137. Even Franklin Roosevelt’s 1937 scheme to pack the U.S. Supreme Court was timid in comparison.

Freedom has been flattening for some Afghans unlucky enough to live near high-ranking government officials. The State Department reported, “Government forces demolished homes and forcibly removed populations from and around the homes of high government officials and other government facilities, without any judicial review. Police officers, led by Kabul Chief of Police Salangi, destroyed the homes of more than 30 families in Kabul.” The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission has “investigated and registered” hundreds of cases of “police arbitrarily destroying homes.”

Freedom of speech and freedom of press are sparse in many parts of Afghanistan. The government and political forces have a stranglehold on broadcast media and also dominate much of the print media. The State Department noted, “The State owned at least 35 publications and almost all of the electronic news media. All other newspapers were published only sporadically and for the most part were affiliated with different provincial authorities. Some government officials through political party ties maintained their own communications facilities.” Considering the high rate of illiteracy in Afghanistan, the government broadcast media monopoly ensures that few Afghans will hear a discouraging word — at least regarding their rulers.

The Bush administration followed the usual pattern of touting to the heavens meaningless reforms by its foreign lackeys. In 2004, Bush gushed about the provisional constitution recently approved by a meeting of Afghanistan’s Loya Jirga. Bush bragged that “the people of Afghanistan have written a constitution which guarantees free elections, freedom, full participation in government by women. Things are changing. Freedom is powerful.”

But the new Afghan constitution has thus far had about as much effect on the average Afghan as Stalin’s 1936 constitution, which generously proclaimed a panoply of freedoms, had on the typical Soviet citizen. The Afghan constitution is largely a list of positive-sounding aspirations — the type of public relations slogans that Washington lobbies emit all the time for their foreign clients. The new constitution did little more than provide an applause line for Bush’s speeches.

The Obama administration is following in Bush’s footsteps in its portrayal of the Karzai regime as a legitimate elected government. The election last summer in Afghanistan was one of the most corrupt in the world since the fall of the Soviet bloc. But after it became clear that Karzai was not going to budge from power, the Obama administration decided to treat him as if had won fair and square. That was the same folly that the Johnson administration fell into regarding its South Vietnamese lackeys in 1967. But in the same way that the Vietnamese people were not fooled, the Afghan people are increasingly bitter about both Karzai’s abuses and the fact that the United States is sanctioning their oppressor.

There will be no happy ending to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. By vesting himself in one of Bush’s greatest follies, Obama is destroying his credibility both with Americans and with the world. Who will be the last American soldier to die so that the U.S. president can continue denying his Afghan follies?

James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [2006] as well as The Bush Betrayal [2004], Lost Rights [1994] and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003.

Wednesday 11th August 2010

Government Lies Make Leaks Explosive

The Pentagon is caterwauling that the next round of WikiLeaks’ disclosures of US government documents will be even more damaging than the last round.

It is always touching to see the world’s most powerful military machine portray itself as a “pitiful, helpless giant” (the phrase Nixon used in his speech announcing his illegal invasion of Cambodia).

WikiLeaks is wreaking havoc primarily because the U.S. government has shoveled so much bilge on Afghanistan for the last 9 years.

The easiest way for the US government to reduce WikiLeaks’ impact is to disclose the truth at the time events occur.

But that is practically like asking a king to surrender his sovereign immunity….

Wednesday 4th August 2010

My 2 Cents on WikiLeaks, the FBI, and Assorted Hokum - Antiwar.com Transcript

The good folks at Antiwar.com Radio added a transcript to the MP3 of last week’s interview. My comments on the Obama administration’s ploy to increase FBI surveillance power are excerpted here at the top. (The full text is below. My Kelly Girl past is now no longer secret).

Bovard:
National Security letters have already been a complete disaster. The FBI has used those to put the Fourth Amendment through a shredder. We have no idea how many innocent people’s privacy has been violated by that, because there have been some very good inspector general reports, but the actual damage to privacy is far greater, and the government leaves out all the details, so we don’t know what the government did with the information it got. And so the folks in the Obama White House think the answer is to give the FBI a much bigger vacuum cleaner and basically change the law to make it much clearer that the FBI is entitled to far more sweeping information on people’s Internet use, the times and dates they sent email, the subject lines, and also possibly a person’s browser history. So if someone out there clicks on Antiwar.com, that could go on their permanent federal FBI record.

The FBI or perhaps other federal agents or federal agencies, because we don’t really know how much else, how many other laws are being broken right now. It’s been a long time since federal law enforcement was on a leash, and we really don’t know who they’re ravaging. But it’s appalling to see the Obama Administration, “Mr. Constitutional Lawyer,” coming in there and just pushing these things, which are just one more wish list for law enforcement and the intelligence types and one more trampling of privacy. I mean, it is an outrage that these folks want to give more power to the government on this when they have not yet disclosed how the government abused the power it already had.
***

Edit note on the interview transcript: It reads as if I thought I would receive a bonus payment (any payment would have been a bonus) each time I said “I mean” or “you know.”
Geez….

Transcript – Scott Horton interviews James Bovard July 30, 2010

Scott Horton: All right y’all, welcome back to the show. It’s Antiwar Radio. I’m Scott Horton. I’m joined on the phone by my friend Jim Bovard. He’s the author of The Farm Fiasco [9] and The Fair Trade Fraud [10] and Feeling Your Pain [11] and Freedom in Chains [12], Terrorism and Tyranny [13], The Bush Betrayal [14], and Attention Deficit Democracy [3] is so good – it’s a couple of years old now, but still – man what an awesome book, Attention Deficit Democracy [3]. I’m sure I’ve left half of them off the list there, but that’s Jim Bovard’s work. He is the most accomplished libertarian journalist in history and of course he’s a fellow over at the Future of Freedom Foundation [15] as well. Hey Jim, how’s it going man?

James Bovard: Hey, Scott, thanks for having me on the air.

Horton: Well I appreciate you joining us again on the show today.

Bovard: Hey, it was a really great interview that you did yesterday with Julian Assange [16]. It’s great that you guys are putting the transcripts online. You know, I’ve been hearing a lot of stuff in the Washington press corps and the Washington Post about kind of telling you that the release a couple of days ago wasn’t as big as the Pentagon Papers. It’s nice to see from your interview there’s a whole lot more coming, and you know this game is only starting and it’s getting better all the time.

Horton: Well, thanks very much. Two things there: First of all, Angela Keaton gets the credit for producing this show and getting all the guests lined up, like you right now, but like Julian yesterday as well – she gets all the credit for that. And then, secondly, the transcripts are thanks to a small group of volunteers I’ve been able to put together. I think at least some of them have told me not to say their names or whatever, so I guess I won’t say their names, but anyway there are about five people who are working together to put together the transcriptions and then go over them and get them in final draft form for me, and then, as you mentioned, they got that Julian Assange interview transcript together, ready to post in real time with the archive of the audio last night. So I’m very thankful to all of them for that. It’s really something having the transcripts up.

Bovard: Yeah, and it’s so helpful for folks who might not want to listen or folks who are more print oriented, kind of like geezers like myself.

Horton: Well and it’s a matter of time too, you know.

Bovard: That’s true. That’s true.

Horton: You listen to a half-hour interview, you can read it in four minutes, you know?

Bovard: That’s true, and something which is nice about being able to read it is that you can annotate it.

Horton: Right, yeah, copy, paste.

Bovard: And there are certain quotes – like the thing a half an hour ago, I did a blog on your interview, and it was nice to be able to pull out a couple of sentences from his comments and just pop them right in there, so…

Horton: Right, well and you think about some of the things I get, former CIA agents and former National Security Council staffers and other people who will say on the show – a lot of those things could be news stories themselves, and I think now that we’re getting them in print, and especially fast like this, maybe we can get to building some news releases around them. You know, because Flynt Leverett on this show, the things that he says – that’s a news story itself, that this guy Flynt Leverett told this guy Scott Horton X and such.

Bovard: Well, yeah, but the downside to all this is it means you’re going to have more trouble with groupies.

Horton: Yeah! Well that’s always been a real problem around here, believe me.

Bovard: Well, I saw it happen at that Future of Freedom conference. My goodness, you know, it was dangerous standing close to you. You know? I felt like I had to do my middle-linebacker, you know, always be on defense.

Horton: Well, it’s nice to know you have my back, Jim.

Bovard: All right.

Horton: Hey, by the way, when are they doing another one of those Future of Freedom Foundation conferences? That thing was awesome, man.

Bovard: Good question. Don’t know. That’s a good question for Bumper [Future of Freedom Foundation president Jacob Hornberger] next time you talk to him. They’ve been cooking some other stuff up, so I don’t know.

Horton: You know, people go on the YouTube [17] and look – that was in 2007, right?

Bovard: There was one in 2007. There was one in 2008.

Horton: Okay. Well maybe that was the 2008 one. Or maybe – I don’t know. Yeah, I guess that was 2008. So, anyway, go and look at the YouTube y’all, and there are excellent speeches by Ron Paul, and Stephen Kinzer, and Andrew Bacevich, and you’re one of them too, aren’t you?

Bovard: I was one of them. There was Glenn Greenwald…

Horton: Karen Kwiatkowski. Yeah, Greenwald. Anthony Gregory gave a great speech about why it’s immoral to drop high explosives on peoples’ heads from your airplane. Yeah, it was awesome – always is. And of course Jacob’s speech was great too.

Bovard: Yeah, he’s a first-class hell raiser.

Horton: All right. Well, so, we got to cover some news or something important or something, so let’s talk about this WikiLeaks thing. That’s kind of where we started here with the Julian Assange. I’m trying to be hopeful that – and this was going to be one of my questions for him before I ran out of time yesterday, and I don’t know, he doesn’t have any inside information on this, I guess. But what I’m hopeful about, Jim – and I wonder whether you think that this will be the case, is that WikiLeaks will inspire competition, and more people, more computer geniuses with encryption skills and whatever are going to figure out ways to do their own little separate WikiLeaks.

Bovard: That would be great. I mean, as long as there’s some type of quality control. Because I would assume at some point that people inside of the government are going to be trying to feed false information through the different people that are sending information to the various –

Horton: Well, the more the merrier, right?

Bovard: Absolutely.

Horton: I mean that’s where we get our checks and balances in the market. And, well look, as we’ve been discussing, as I think you brought up – yeah, because you’re talking about the Washington Post there and the way that they treat this thing – we have to come up with our own journalism. Ray McGovern [18] yesterday called it the “Fifth Estate” – “the Ether” – and the establishment can’t do nothing about it. It’s the Internet. It’s CampaignForLiberty.com (I’m looking at your article, “The Fraud of ‘Big-Picture’ Thinking [19]” right now). It’s Antiwar.com. It’s WikiLeaks.org and Salon.com/Opinion/Greenwald. And this is the future of journalism in the world.

Bovard: I hope you’re right. I’m not entirely confident the government cannot find some way to sabotage it. I would also – I will be curious to see what they try to do as far as lawsuits; I wouldn’t be surprised if someone in Congress tries to pass a law that would somehow attach liability to people who pass on government confidential documents. I mean, there’s all kinds of peril laying out there, and it was surprising to see some of these liberal mainstream journalists prior to this most recent leak kind of taking shots at WikiLeaks. I mean, it’s almost as if some of the liberals thought that they should be a team player, and I’m thinking, you know, it doesn’t make sense to trust the government to tell us the truth because the government’s had plenty of opportunities and it hasn’t done it.

Horton: Yeah, well, we’re doomed.

Bovard: Well, I don’t know that we’re doomed, but I expect that there’ll be a lot of surprises and tussles coming up here. But it’s very encouraging to hear that those folks have got a lot more surprises in the pipeline, and you know, the thing that’s shocking to a degree is how much the established media – you know, there have been individual journalists who have done a great job in Afghanistan – people like Carlotta Gall for the New York Times and some other folks, but so much of the mainstream press coverage – well, it’s been government-fed, which is why that Rolling Stone story [20] was such a shock. It’s like the evidence was out there, but it was almost as if some of the journalists were bending over backwards not to connect the dots.

Horton: Yeah, well and you’re right. I mean, you do have Carlotta Gall and a lot of other good reporters at the Times and even at the Post and other places, but it’s the narrative that sticks, you know? No matter how many times Carlotta Gall reports about, I don’t know, Pakistani help for the Taliban, or whatever, and it’s the kind of thing that people who are paying attention already know – the narrative really never changes from, whatever, “It’s hard work but we’re making progress – all we got to do is surge some more troops in there and everything will end up going our way.”

Bovard: Well, yeah. I mean there is a fair amount of that. The interesting thing about Gall is she had the first bombshell story [21] on the U.S. use of torture after 9/11, using it there in Afghanistan, but if memory serves [22], the New York Times editors basically sat on the article for a long time and then kind of buried it in the middle of the A section or the front section, and did not give it anywhere near the play. And if the New York Times had not flinched on that, it might have been more difficult for the Bush administration to make an institution of torture in so many different places around the world. And it’s surprising to me that Carlotta Gall has not gotten a lot more credit for what she’s done, because – well, anyhow, that’s another story.

Horton: Well you know when you talk about the Democrats turning on WikiLeaks. I was just looking at Greg Sargent’s blog [23], actually at the Washington Post – Glenn Greenwald [24] had a link over to it – and it’s this Jason Chaffetz, a Republican congressman who voted against the Afghan war funding, is being attacked for betraying the troops by his Democratic opponent. And on down the chain of BS we go, just switching roles back and forth between these two stupid parties.

All right, y’all, it’s Jim Bovard the genius on the show, on the line. We’ll be right back after this.

* * * * *

Horton: All right, y’all. Welcome back to the show, it’s Antiwar Radio, I’m on the phone with former Kelly Girl typist Jim Bovard.

Bovard: [laughs]

Horton: He’s the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [25], it’s really a great book, you guys really ought to read it. I know I sit here and I tell you about all these books you got to read all the time. I can’t even read all the books I got to read, and that’s my job. But this is one that you actually go and get and read, not just hear about: Attention Deficit Democracy [25]. And, yeah, he knows it’s not supposed to be a democracy, it’s just a stupid title.

Bovard: [laughs] Oh thanks, that’s a great plug.

Horton: Yeah, yeah, quote that one on the back of the next one, you know?

Bovard: Sounds good to me.

Horton: All right, so let’s talk about –

Bovard: – Bob Barr has a blurb, but go ahead.

Horton: Oh, yeah, yeah, no doubt. Hey, by the way, did that guy ever give you the money he owed you? Ok, nevermind.

Bovard: Oh, now there’s a question. Things are proceeding on the litigation front.

Horton: Well the guy is a former federal prosecutor, so I don’t expect him to have any honor or anything, but I guess we’ll see how that goes. Well, yeah, and speaking of that, I want to pick on the FBI.

Bovard: Go for it.

Horton: I know they’re one of your favorite government agencies to pick on. These guys – well, two things. First of all, it says that they want to just be able to seize whatever information they want from any ISP in the country without any warrant. But I thought they could already do that, because of the Patriot Act, because of the National Security Letters and administrative subpoenas and so forth, so I was hoping you’d set me straight as to exactly how that works. And then the second thing is, all the cops were cheating on the test about when you’re allowed to seize what – to see whether they’re allowed to be cops in the first place.

Bovard: Well this is – yeah, the second story, the FBI agents probably apparently cheated en masse as far as being able to answer the question about when they’re allowed to do these – seize people’s private information without a warrant, but that’s a harmless error because it works out well for the government. And the second one – front page [26] of the Washington Post today – the Obama administration is pushing to allow the FBI to seize far more personal information about people’s computer use without using a warrant. This is basically a change in the standard which the National Security Letters would be used for.

National Security letters have already been a complete disaster. The FBI has used those to put the Fourth Amendment through a shredder. We have no idea how many innocent people’s privacy has been violated by that, because there have been some very good inspector general reports, but the actual damage to privacy is far greater, and the government leaves out all the details, so we don’t know what the government did with the information it got. And so the folks in the Obama White House think the answer is to give the FBI a much bigger vacuum cleaner and basically change the law to make it much clearer that the FBI is entitled to far more sweeping information on people’s Internet use, the times and dates they sent email, the subject lines, and also possibly a person’s browser history. So if someone out there clicks on Antiwar.com, that could go on their permanent federal FBI record.

Horton: Well look, I think everybody ought to understand already that it does go on their permanent National Security Agency file forever, if not the FBI, at this point.

Bovard: Well, it’s really hard to know – well, you know, sometimes bureaucrats share, and we have no idea how much information is being passed back and forth.

Horton: Right, I mean, that’s the real concern, right? I mean, hell, Jim, if we left it up to the FBI to build the Cray supercomputer to enslave us all, we’ll be free forever, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that you change an “and” to a “to” in some legislation somewhere, and now the National Security Agency’s powers over all of us are available to the cops who actually can use these things in court against us, and the National Security Agency – I guess they could contract out a secret hit with the CIA to kill you or whatever, but they don’t have any police power over us here other than through the FBI.

Bovard: Well, the FBI or perhaps other federal agents or federal agencies, because we don’t really know how much else, how many other laws are being broken right now. It’s been a long time since federal law enforcement was on a leash, and we really don’t know who they’re ravaging. But it’s appalling to see the Obama Administration, “Mr. Constitutional Lawyer,” coming in there and just pushing these things, which are just one more wish list for law enforcement and the intelligence types and one more trampling of privacy. I mean, it is an outrage that these folks want to give more power to the government on this when they have not yet disclosed how the government abused the power it already had.

Horton: And even if you check out the Priest-Arkin version [27] of the national security state in the Post, they’re saying, “It’s out of control.” I think that was the title of the first piece of that last week was “Out of control, National Security State” – no one’s in charge, certainly not elected representatives of anybody.

Bovard: Well and Congress is supposed to have oversight. I would wager heavily that probably less than a third of the members of Congress even read that Washington Post series. Because members of Congress almost never read. I mean, you know, it’s like – well, anyhow.

Horton: Well, you know I’m actually going to interview Barbara Lee later today.

Bovard: Oh good!

Horton: It was supposed to be at the beginning of the show, and that was going to be one of my questions for her, is, “How dim is the average member of Congress?” I mean not even in the sense of, “Do they disagree with me about X, Y or Z?” Lord knows Barbara Lee and I disagree about all kinds of things, I’m sure. But it seems to me like most of these members of congress, Jim – and I know you’ve covered most of them live there at the Capitol – it seems like they don’t even care about stuff. They’re not even interested in what’s going on.

Bovard: Right. Yes. I mean, something that you might want to do with Barbara Lee is ask her what her assessment is of how much the average congressman knows about what the government is doing either in foreign policy or in the surveillance stuff. And ask her if her fellow members of Congress ever read anything about these things, because that might get a very interesting answer.

Horton: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s pretty obvious to listen to these people talk that they’re a tenth as informed as the average reader of Antiwar.com. You could even tell, in the Bush years, there were times where you could tell that George Bush actually knew less than the readers at Antiwar.com. Whatever it was they were telling him didn’t include a lot of the story.

Bovard: Scott, Scott, Scott, this is damning with faint praise as far as your readers –

Horton: Well, no, I don’t mean – I mean what he’d even been briefed on.

Bovard: “Knows more than George W.” I mean, this is something to pat yourself on the back about. It’s like being a Rhodes Scholar these days.

Horton: No, no, you know what I mean, where he’s just talking about – I wish I had a good example, but, you know, going on about Iran and Iraq, and you can tell he really doesn’t know that he’s been fighting for Iran in Iraq for years on end. I mean, most of these guys knew they were lying when they said something like that. Nobody ever even told him, you know? All he had to do was get a laptop and start googling, he’d have found out a lot more than Condoleezza Rice ever let him know.

Bovard: Well, and the thing that’s unfortunate – it was so rare in an interview with Bush that some journalist would ask him a question that would actually test his factual knowledge, because that would tell us a lot more as far as whether he had any clue in Hades as far as what was going on. But the journalists almost never did that. There was a short little Irish lady who interviewed him in the summer of 2004 and Bush just had a snit because she was pushing him on torture, and the White House just about fell apart on that.

Horton: Right, yeah, how dare she? And you know, this is the symptom of the whole larger thing – I hate to even bring this up. But I obviously don’t want to talk about the subject, but it’s an example/side-issue thing – is the upcoming marriage – apparently, I hadn’t read anything but a headline, can’t avoid them – the upcoming marriage of the daughter of two presidents ago. And this is like some kind of like the – when I was a kid and Lady Diana got married to Prince Charles or whatever. I mean, really, I’m supposed to care about Bill Clinton’s daughter? This is news? It’s like we do live in England with this kind of weird pseudoroyalty that they got from Arkansas.

Bovard: Well, yeah, and it’s similar to the British Royalty because it’s fairly inbred.

Horton: [laughs] Yeah, indeed. I always did think that – well, never mind, I’m not going to say it.

Bovard: [laughs] Okay.

Horton: I had something really funny I was going to say, but never mind.

Bovard: Okay, well, we’ll just try to keep up to you.

Horton: It would have been worth that laugh I got out of you.

Bovard: All right, well, you know I was waiting for a zinger.

Horton: Well, yeah, there was a zinger but I stifled it, man.

Bovard: A Bill Hicks cyber zinger – You know, I was looking for some Bill Hicks caliber right there.

Horton: Yeah, no. There’s nothing Bill Hicks caliber here, man. Anyway, we try. Well, so, hey, here’s this too, man, is the Iraq war – you think that’s ever going to end?

Bovard: Well, there’s still quite a few Iraqis alive, so um…

Horton: Yeah, I guess we still got a job to do.

Bovard: Well, and it’s fascinating how the mainstream American media has basically gone with this notion that the U.S. won – and it’s like a hell of a definition of victory.

Horton: And it really has worked – You know Biden here says the headline, “U.S. Troops Halted Chaos and Destruction in Iraq.” They really got away with that. We really live in a world upside down.

Bovard: Well, it almost makes you cynical.

Horton: Yeah, almost – well good thing you’re not yet. Everybody go look at JimBovard.com, would you? And thanks, Jim.

Bovard: Hey, thanks for having me on, Scott.

Horton: We’ll be back.

——————————————————————————–

Article printed from Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton and Charles Goyette: http://antiwar.com/radio

URL to article: http://antiwar.com/radio/2010/07/30/james-bovard-13/

URLs in this post:

[1] here: http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash&promoid=BIOW

[2] James Bovard: http://fff.org/aboutUs/bios/jxb.asp

[3] Attention Deficit Democracy: http://www.amazon.com/Attention-Deficit-Democracy-James-Bovard/dp/140397666X/antiwarbookstore

[4] flagrant abuse: http://www.aclu.org/national-security/internal-report-finds-flagrant-national-security-letter-abuse-fbi

[5] even more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/28/AR2010072806141.html

[6] paying its bills: http://www.jimbovard.com/Bob%20Barr%20Lawsuit.htm

[7] MP3 here: http://dissentradio.com/radio/10_07_29_bovard.mp3

[8] many other books: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=james+bovard&x=0&y=0

[9] The Farm Fiasco: http://www.amazon.com/Farm-Fiasco-James-Bovard/dp/1558151141/antiwarbookstore

[10] The Fair Trade Fraud: http://www.amazon.com/Fair-Trade-Fraud-James-Bovard/dp/0312083440/antiwarbookstore

[11] Feeling Your Pain: http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Your-Pain-Government-Clinton-Gore/dp/B000IOET32/antiwarbookstore

[12] Freedom in Chains: http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Chains-State-Demise-Citizen/dp/0312229674/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_3

[13] Terrorism and Tyranny: http://www.amazon.com/Terrorism-Tyranny-Trampling-Freedom-Justice/dp/1403966826/antiwarbookstore

[14] The Bush Betrayal: http://www.amazon.com/Bush-Betrayal-James-Bovard/dp/1403968519/antiwarbookstore

[15] Future of Freedom Foundation: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3GGLL_enUS371US371&q=Future+of+Freedom+Foundation+Bovard&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

[16] Julian Assange: http://antiwar.com/radio../2010/07/28/julian-assange-2/

[17] YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/FutureFreedomF

[18] Ray McGovern: http://antiwar.com/radio../2010/07/28/ray-mcgovern-24/

[19] The Fraud of ‘Big-Picture’ Thinking: http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=1037

[20] Rolling Stone story: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236

[21] the first bombshell story: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/04/international/asia/04AFGH.html

[22] serves: http://www.cjr.org/politics/how_well_has_the_press_covered.php

[23] Greg Sargent’s blog: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2010/07/dear_dems_no_reading_from_rove.html

[24] Glenn Greenwald: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/07/29/change/index.html

[25] Attention Deficit Democracy: http://www.amazon.com/Attention-Deficit-Democracy-James-Bovard/dp/140397666X/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1

[26] front page: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/28/AR2010072806141_pf.html

[27] Priest-Arkin version: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/

Click here to print.

Tuesday 3rd August 2010

New U.S. Government Motto: Controlling Us to Secure Us

“If you don’t have control of the population, you can’t secure the population,” according to Brig. Gen. Frederick Hodges, director of operations for the NATO regional command in southern Afghanistan.

The front-page Washington Post piece with the above quote deals with Kandahar.

But it is also the motto for the U.S. government’s approach to the American people in the post 9/11 era.

” + New Yorker, 2002

Saturday 31st July 2010

MP3 of My Interview with Scott Horton on the FBI, WikiLeaks, Etc.

Scott Horton of Antiwar.com Radio and I had fun tarring-and-feathering the usual federal outrages on Thursday. The MP3 is here.

Scott balked at the chance to reveal his deepest thoughts on Chelsea’s wedding. It could have been a great “Bill Hicks moment.”

Here’s Scott’s thumbnail of the interview:

James Bovard, author of Attention Deficit Democracy, discusses the FBI’s flagrant abuse of national security letters that apparently entitles them to even more eavesdropping power, the lawsuits and sabotage efforts likely heading WikiLeaks’ way, how media sycophancy enables the know-nothing Congress and why Bob Barr’s 2008 Presidential Committee needs help paying its bills.

Thursday 29th July 2010

Excellent Interview with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange by Antiwar’s Scott Horton

Antiwar’s Scott Horton did a superb radio interview with WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange yesterday. Transcript and the MP3 are here.

I have been amused to see the tut-tutting of some of the Washington press corps because the Afghan document disclosure was not as earth-shaking as the Pentagon Papers.

Folks, this game is only beginning. Assange confirmed a pending release on one of the worst massacres in Afghanistan: “We are still working on the Garani video. It is quite complex, and in this case we also have managed to acquire a number of tracking documents, underlying reports. So it’s fleshed out a bit – but a very complex attack occurring over a five- to six-hour period, many different bombers and aircraft involved.”

Thank goodness for WikiLeaks - -and for Antiwar.com.

Tuesday 27th July 2010

Modern Communication At Its Best - or - Guaranteed Spam Cure

10:23 am | Uncategorized | Comments: 2

from this week’s New Yorker

Monday 26th July 2010

Three More Cheers for WikiLeaks!

The latest deluge of truth from WikiLeaks is a welcome novelty in American politics.

The New York Times, UK Guardian, and Germany’s Der Spiegel are simultaneously releasing articles today on more than 90,000 Pentagon documents that WikiLeaks posted on the web regarding the Afghan war.

These documents reveal the lies that have permeated U.S. Afghan policy since 2004. Naturally, the Obama White House is indignant…

WikiLeaks’ biggest bombshells may be yet to come. There are 15,000 more documents that WikiLeaks is vetting and could release in the near future. According to WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, “thousands” of U.S. attacks in Afghan could be investigated as possible war crimes.

If Americans had seen the evidence in the Pentagon’s and other U.S. government files on Afghan debacles, Obama might not have been able to vastly expand the U.S. military role in that country. (I assume that the info from the Pentagon, CIA, and State Department that has not become public is far more volatile than the information WikiLeaks just released).

Friday 23rd July 2010

The Fraud of “Big Picture” Thinking

11:48 am | Attention Deficit Democracy | Comments: 3

From the April 2010 issue of Freedom Daily -

The Fraud of “Big Picture” Thinking
by James Bovard

Politicians, pundits, and others perennially invoke the “Big Picture.” Recognizing the role of the Big Picture is vital to understanding how contemporary democracies are going off the rail. The Big Picture provides preemptive exoneration for almost anyone who wants to kowtow and cheerlead for political power.

Fifteen years ago, there was a hullabaloo to denounce “politically correct” mandates and imperatives. But the biggest beneficiary of “politically correct” thinking may be political power itself. The politically correct attitude looks beyond the government’s past failings and current botches, and focuses instead on the idea of government.

The incarnation of this attitude is the Big Picture. The Big Picture is a type of abstraction or pseudo-abstraction. The Big Picture mindset ensures that hard facts rarely enter one’s conscious mental orbit — or, if they do, only as shooting stars. People are urged to “look beyond” or above banal political reality, and encouraged to keep their eyes on the clouds so they don’t see how many government-made potholes endanger their path.

The Big Picture immunizes policymakers from history. The Vietnam War was one of the clearest illustrations of the mental incorrigibility of “the best and the brightest.” Government policymakers became mesmerized by a few phrases and became impervious to real-world evidence that the phrases and theories did not apply. The CIA debunked the “domino theory” explanation for intervening in Vietnam by 1964 and assured Richard Nixon in 1969 that there was no threat of communist takeovers throughout the region as a result of a precipitous U.S. withdrawal. Yet, as the Pentagon Papers noted, “only the Joint Chiefs, Mr. [Walt] Rostow [Lyndon Johnson’s chief intellectual advisor] and General [Maxwell] Taylor appear to have accepted the domino theory in its literal sense.” These were men who had had vast influence in raising U.S. troop levels in Vietnam to half a million. Similarly, as historian Hannah Arendt noted, “The divergence between the facts established by the intelligence services — sometimes by the decision makers themselves (as notably in the case of [Robert] McNamara) and often available to the informed public — and the premises, theories, and hypotheses according to which decisions were finally made is total.”

In 1967, the Pentagon ordered top experts to analyze where the war had gone wrong. The resulting study contained 47 volumes of material exposing the intellectual and political follies that had, at that point, already left tens of thousands of Americans dead. After the study was finished, it was distributed to the key players and federal agencies. However, the massive study was completely ignored. When the New York Times began publishing excerpts in 1971, “the White House and the State Department were unable even to locate the forty-seven volumes.” New York Times editor Tom Wicker commented at the time that “the people who read these documents in the Times were the first to study them.”

One of the most important lessons of the Pentagon Papers was how the war strategists became misled by fixating on the battle “to win the people’s minds.” Arendt noted, “What is surprising is the eagerness of those scores of ‘intellectuals’ who offered their enthusiastic help in this imaginary enterprise, perhaps because it demanded nothing but mental exercises.” It was easy for the intellectuals “to remain unaware of the untold misery that their ‘solutions,’ pacification and relocation programs, defoliation, napalm, and anti-personnel bullets, held in store.”

Three decades after the publication of the Pentagon Papers, another president launched a “crusade” to win “the hearts and minds” of the world. Unfortunately, once again, the lessons of history were not permitted to stymie the salvation campaign. Arendt noted that the Pentagon Papers revealed how “sheer ignorance of all pertinent facts and deliberate neglect of postwar [i.e., post–World War II] developments became the hallmark of established doctrine within the Establishment.”

The Washington intellectual milieu

The Big Picture helps Washington intellectuals define issues in ways that buffer the federal government from any damage it inflicts. Much of the Washington establishment is devoted to maintaining the prestige of government as the single most important fount of their own personal prestige.

German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel captured the imperative of the political Big Picture: “In considering the idea of the State, one must not think of particular states, nor of particular institutions, but one must contemplate the idea, this actual God, by itself.” Big Picture statists rely on “transcendental math,” which always proves that no matter how much government appears to be bumbling it is actually a glorious success.

This is the same spiel courtiers used for centuries: the king is much greater than he appears to be, his bad judgments are not his fault, and veneration cures all. Throughout history, there has rarely been a shortage of intellectuals happy to hail the achievements of political power and disparage all who doubted its majesty.

Think tanks often help politicians pump hot air into the Big Picture. Clifford May, the president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, commented in 2005, “It is the job of think tanks to create political capital. It is the job of politicians to spend it.” The pretense of ideas sanctifies the pursuit of power. (May’s think tank lavishly praised the Bush administration and politicians who favored military aggression against Arab and Muslim nations.)

The Big Picture is often a substitute for hard facts, and think tanks promote the slogans that suffice for reality. For instance, think tanks tied to the Pentagon played a major role in the “defactualization” of policy that helped create the quagmire in Vietnam. As Arendt observed, “No ivory tower of the scholars has ever better prepared the mind for ignoring the facts of life than did the various think tanks for the scholars and the reputation of the White House for the President’s advisers. In this atmosphere, defeat was less feared than admitting defeat.”

Intellectuals in Washington thrive by invoking politically profitable Big Pictures. The intelligentsia is perhaps the ultimate partner in power — given all the government consulting contracts and all the tenured gigs at government-subsidized universities (including private universities that depend on federal research grants and subsidized loans to students). As professor of philosophy David Ciepley noted, “Starting in the First World War, and much more so during the New Deal and World War II, American social scientists became part of the autonomous state themselves, helping staff the mushrooming government agencies.” Much of the expert class — including academics, editorial writers, and public intellectuals — are swayed by their aspirations for government.

The Big Picture is the great labor saver for intellectuals. There is no need to exert themselves understanding what the government does, since they already know what it means. Their disdain for mere details proves their profundity. Regrettably, it is often the intellectuals who are in the forefront, encouraging intellectual negligence toward public policy.

The Big Picture also perennially triumphs in the work of Washington journalists. The Washington press corps has long been derided as “stenographers with amnesia.” Actually, this epithet is going out of fashion because fewer people know the meaning of “stenographer.”

In Washington, the Big Picture rules in part because there is a surprising lack of curiosity about government. There is passionate interest about the latest budget proposals for government agencies, passing new laws, or creating new programs. But the actual operation of government, the details of what specific government programs achieve or inflict, is considered mundane. The less a journalist understands an agency’s policies, the more gullible he is for its propaganda.

Washington journalists’ reality is largely defined by government press releases, which often are built around the Big Picture. The media rarely look beyond the government’s proclaimed purpose for a program or policy. “Pack journalism” predominates — and the pack rarely strays from the government reservation. When journalists do stray, it is often in a group — after something has occurred or some pronouncement has been made signaling that it is okay to temporarily deviate from the official line. There is almost never any liability for Washington journalists who peddle false information received from the government, but they risk their careers if their criticisms of government turn out to be unsubstantiated. Sam Donaldson, the legendary ABC White House correspondent, observed of the Washington media, “As a rule, we are, if not hand-maidens of the establishment, at least blood brothers to the establishment. We end up the day usually having some version of what the White House … has suggested as a story.”

Those who invoke the Big Picture often have a vested interest in discouraging people from looking at grisly details. The Big Picture becomes the enabler of the Big Lie. The studied avoidance of the details of government policy makes it far easier for politicians to manipulate and deceive the public. The Big Picture allows governments to do as they please, confident that few people will pay attention to the details. And even when hundreds of thousands of people are killed, the government only needs to redefine the issue.

The Big Picture ensures that people learn little or nothing from the past and ignore the problems of the present. The Big Picture is the higher truth — and everything else is mere ephemera. Big Picture myopia empowers those whose schemes and ambitions would be thwarted if people understood their plans.

Thursday 22nd July 2010

The Pentagon No Longer Awards This Medal

10:17 pm | Afghanistan | Attention Deficit Democracy | Comments: 2

Amazing how much has been forgotten since this 1988 New Yorker cartoon…

Wednesday 21st July 2010

The Media’s Attitude Towards Government Surveillance

This 1990 New Yorker cartoon perfectly captures the usual media attitude towards government surveillance in the post-9/11 world.

Happily, today’s Washington Post blockbuster does not show the same complacency.

Monday 19th July 2010

Best Comical Response to Wash. Post “Top Secret America” Series?

The Washington Post series on “Top Secret America” by Dana Priest and Bill Arkin is off to a great start.

I am shocked to learn that the federal government has little or no idea what the hell it is doing.

I expect some conservatives will want to indict the Post reporters and editors for treason….

What are the most comical responses thus far to the series?

Thursday 15th July 2010

What the FBI Does Best

It is unfortunate that few of the nation’s editorial writers have ever understood the FBI as well as Handelsman did within weeks after 9/11…..

Wednesday 14th July 2010

The New American Credo

Weren’t things supposed to be different after Obama was elected?

[cartoon from the New Yorker, 2002]

Monday 12th July 2010

Davi Barker: A Libertarian Rebuttal - 24 Types of Authoritarian

2:18 pm | cartoon | Comments: 8

Davi Barker has put together a very amusing retort and parody to the 24 Types of Libertarian cartoon by Barry Deutsch.

Davi Barker’s blog is here.

Friday 9th July 2010

“Freedom & the War on Terrorism” - my Pennslyvania speech…

Now online here: the video of my “Freedom and the War on Terrorism” speech last month in Bernville, Pennsylvania. I want to thank Bob Bowers, who organized this libertarian supper club, for inviting Jacob Hornberger and I to talk there. The audience was excellent - lots of hardliners full of fire-and-brimstone.

The question-and-answer exchanges after the speech were zesty, especially regarding torture.

This is the first speech I have given where I had the option of accompaniment by a full percussion drum set.

Friday 2nd July 2010

POLITICAL SHOCKER! A Whiff of Truth on Afghanistan!

4:01 pm | Afghanistan | Comments: 3

Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele blasted Obama’s Afghan troop surge last night at a Connecticut fundraiser.

Steele asked: “If [Obama's] such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that’s the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? Because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed.”

Steele’s comments shirked Republican responsiblity for starting the war - but even a brief moment of candor on this subject is a shock.

Steele’s comment produced indignant responses from Democrats and from neo-conservative laptop bombardiers.

I expect this controversy will be good for another couple laps over the holiday weekend.

Thursday 1st July 2010

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan and Torture

3:14 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Torture | Comments: 1

Phil Giraldi makes an excellent observation on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan in his Antiwar.com column today:

New Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan has described retired Israeli Judge Aharon Barak as her “judicial hero.” Barak is sometimes described as a liberal, but a review of his decisions reveals that he has always sided with the Israeli government in cases where arbitrary behavior by the state was being challenged. He also established the legal guidelines that enabled torture by the Israeli authorities. Kagan herself is of a like mind, favoring government prerogatives, executive privilege and secrecy even when there is no clear legal reason to deny access to information. In one recent case Kagan successfully argued that the Supreme Court should overturn a New York appeals court ruling to permit the release of photographs of foreign prisoners being abused by their American captors. The American Civil Liberties Union argued for the release of the photos while Obama and the Pentagon against. Kagan, in her role as solicitor general, argued that US military personnel would be endangered if the photos were to become public.

If there has been a groundswell of criticism of Kagan’s tacit embrace of torture, I have missed it.

Cartoon: 24 Types of Libertarian

2:26 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 15

Biased but very funny….

from cartoonist Barry Deutsch:

[h/t Lew Rockwell blog]

Monday 28th June 2010

Ron Paul Celebrates Justice Department’s 140th Anniversary

It’s almost always a shock when truth surfaces in the Congressional Record.

Madam Speaker, the House of Representatives recently considered H. Res. 1422, honoring the 140th anniversary of the Department of Justice. I voted against this resolution because of the Justice Departmentâ€™s history of violating individual rights.

It is the Justice Department that leads the ongoing violations of the Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments in the name of the â€œwar on drugs.â€ It is Justice Department agents who perform warrantless wiretaps and â€œsneak-and-peakâ€ searches under the misnamed PATRIOT Act. It is the Justice Department that prosecutes American citizens for violating unconstitutional federal regulations even in cases where no reasonable person could have known their actions violated federal law.

Some like to pretend that the Justice Departmentâ€™s assault on liberties is a modern phenomenon, or that abuses of liberties are only carried out by one political party. However, history shows that the unconstitutional usurpations of power and abuse of rights goes back at least almost a hundred years to the â€œProgressiveâ€ era and that Justice Departments of both parties have disregard the Constitution and violated individual liberties.

Friday 25th June 2010

Washington Post Drops One of its Best Reporters: Dave Weigel out

2:54 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 3

Washington Post blogger David Weigel is out after someone exposed some emails he sent to a private group in DC criticizing Matt Drudge, the Washington Examiner, etc. Weigel reportedly offered to resign last night and the Post accepted today.

I don’t always agree with Weigel, but he is one of the hardest working journalists I have seen in DC. He has done a lot of good work and uncovered facts missed by other reporters of any and every ideology. He has provided far more insightful coverage of libertarian and conservative politics and groups than the Post previously had.

Perhaps the Post will go back to the paradigm the media has periodically used since the 1964 Goldwater campaign - assuming that non-liberals are mentally ill.

Salon has a good summary of the hubbub.

Thursday 24th June 2010

Towards a More Honest Afghan Policy

2:07 pm | Afghanistan | Obama | Comments: 6

Good riddance to McChrystal. His role in the coverup of the killing of Pat Tillman alone was enough to qualify him for the Pentagon Rogues Gallery of the new Millennium.

Petreaus is better than McChrystal because at least we get to sometimes watch him get overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the BS he shovels on Capitol Hill.

Monday 21st June 2010

Supreme Court’s Latest Constitutional Disaster of Biblical Proportions

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision upholding a federal law banning “material support” to terrorist organizations is a disaster for preserving free speech or limiting federal power.

Once again, the Obama administration proudly championed repression, and the court agreed with the Obama team.

Raw Story has a good collection of quotes bashing the decision here.

David Cole, the Georgetown law prof who has eloquently fought this case for many years, has thoughtful comments here.

Increasingly, the purpose of the Supreme Court seems to be simply to rubberstamp government crimes.

I’ll write more about this in the next few days, but figured I should start my swearing now.

Friday 18th June 2010

Medical Freedom Fighters: The Arnetts of West Virginia

12:09 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 0

At the Competitive Enterprise Institute dinner in DC last night, I caught up with Dr. Jerome Arnett and met his daughter, Dr. Brenda Arnett. Jerry is a prolific writer - he has done great work on the bogus threat of secondhand smoke and on other abuses of science. He is a pulmonary specialist, so I paid close attention when he urged me to continue smoking cigars to add 30 years to my life. Jerry is very active with the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.

Jerry and Brenda are both relying largely on cash payments for their medical practices. (Jerry is from West Virginia, and Brenda’s practice is just over the Virginia state line.) They recognize that insurance companices can destroy a doctor’s freedom (and patient’s opportunities) the same way that Medicare drags down doctor-patient relations.

National Public Radio did a great @ 40 minute interview with the two of them last year. You can listen to it here.

It is encouraging to see doctors who have the courage and the principles to stand up for freedom.

UPDATE: Contact info:
Dr. Brenda Arnett, Phone: (540) 542-1180
Fax: (540) 542-1181
3034 Valley Avenue
Winchester, VA 22601

Thursday 17th June 2010

Congratulations, Ron Paul - Audit the Fed Triumph

2:12 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Ron Paul | Comments: 0

The House-Senate conferees on the financial reform bill have significantly tightened the bill’s mandate to audit the Federal Reserve.

This is a huge triumph for Ron Paul - and another vindication of his 2008 presidential campaign.

The bill’s provisions do not go nearly far enough - but they are a seachange in official Washington. It was not that long ago that a Washington Post editorial fretted that pulling back the curtain (even a little bit) on the Fed would be a catastrophic evil….

I hope the auditors are smart and ruthless, and that politicians and political appointees are not able to hide all their scams.

How the Senate Makes Afghan Policy

9:04 am | Uncategorized | Comments: 8

<
Our Afghan policy would be more honest if senators always sat in a circle.

update:
[[I used a truncated photo to fit into the blog space, and I think that may have blunted the point. Oh bother.]]

Wednesday 16th June 2010

Obama Administration: Don’t Question Sincerity of Torturers

1:58 pm | Attention Deficit Democracy | Supreme Court | Torture | Comments: 9

The Supreme Court disgraced itself on Monday by torpedoing the appeal of Maher Arar, the Canadian who was kidnapped at John F. Kennedy International Airport and sent by the U.S. government to Syria for torturing.

The Canadian government has publicly apologized to Arar for providing false information to the U.S. government about Arar’s suspicious connections. The U.S. government has refused to admit it did anything wrong in shipping Arar to the Middle East to be tortured at U.S. behest.

The Obama administration vigorously opposed Arar’s motion to get justice and to discover the details of the U.S. government’s role in his horror trip. Obama’s Justice Department told the court that permitting discovery in Arar’s case could result in unfairly exposing or scrutinizing “the motives and sincerity of the United States officials who concluded that petitioner could be removed to Syria.”

Now we also have sovereign immunity for the reputation of torturers and torture enablers???

Tuesday 8th June 2010

43rd Anniversary of Israeli Attack on USS Liberty… and the Coverup Continues

5:53 pm | Lying | Uncategorized | Comments: 44

On June 8, 1967, Israeli forces knowingly attacked an American intelligence ship off the coast of Egypt. Thirty-four Americans were killed.

Here is a new YouTube video that captures the spirit of the attack.

The Johnson administration responded by rushing to coverup the facts.

James Bamford, author of Body of Secrets, has unearthed massive evidence proving that the Israelis had definitely identified the ship as American before they sought to destroy it.

The fact that many of the files and tapes relating to the attack on the USS Liberty are still kept under wraps illustrates how truth has scant chance in DC - if some major interest group is profiting from official lies.

Here’s a link I did to a longer blog on this subject last June 8.

It is naive to think that the Obama team would give a damn about getting the truth out about last week’s Israeli attack on the humanitarian relief ship, considering how the U.S. government has vigilantly covered up the IDF killing of 34 American sailors.

My Greatest Culinary Fear

1:36 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 2

[from the New Yorker]

Monday 7th June 2010

Obama’s Latest Assault on the Truth

2:23 pm | Iraq | Secrecy | War crimes | Comments: 10

From A Tiny Revolution:

The feds have arrested Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, for allegedly leaking the classified video footage of a US helicopter slaughtering Iraqi civilians in 2007. Manning allegedly leaked other information to WikiLeaks.

This follows the indictment of a National Security Agency official who allegedly leaked information on Bush’s illegal wiretap program to the media.

So how exactly was the Obama administration supposed to be superior to the Bush cabal?

Friday 4th June 2010

How Democracy Breeds Political Idioicy

9:29 am | Uncategorized | Comments: 9

from the March issue of the Future of Freedom Foundation’s Freedom Daily…

The Folly of Blindly Trusting Government

by James Bovard

Democracy breeds gullibility. Lord Bryce observed in 1921, â€œState action became less distrusted the more the State itself was seen to be passing under popular control.â€ The rise of democracy made it much easier for politicians to convince people that government posed no threat, because they automatically controlled its actions. The result is that the brakes on government power become weakest at the exact time that politicians are most dangerous.

Blind trust becomes a substitute for informed consent. But mass trust in government compounds the political damage brought about by pervasive ignorance.

The bias in favor of trusting government brings out democracyâ€™s worst tendencies. The normal defenses that people would have against alien authority are undermined by a chorus of politicians and government officials continually reminding people that government is themselves, and they cannot distrust the government without distrusting themselves.

How should people think about their rulers? This is a question that is rarely asked. Instead, it is preemptively squelched by myths pummeled into peopleâ€™s heads from a very early age.

Since it has not been possible to neuter political power, citizensâ€™ thinking on government has been neutered instead. Fear of government is portrayed as a relic of less civilized, unrefined times. There is a concerted effort to make distrusting the government intellectually unacceptable, a sign of bad taste or perhaps ill breeding, if not downright ignoble.

The central mystery of modern political life is: Why are people obliged to presume that politicians and government are more trustworthy than they seem? The question is not, Why do people distrust government? The question is, Why do people follow and applaud politicians who they recognize are lying to them? The mystery is not that politicians lie, but that citizens believe. It is not a question of giving rulers one benefit of the doubt â€” but of giving such benefits day after day, year after year, ruler after ruler.

America is perhaps the first nation founded on distrust of government. Checks and balances were included in the Constitution because of the danger of vesting too much power in any one man or one branch of government. The Bill of Rights was erected as a permanent leash on the political class. As Rexford Tugwell, one of Franklin Rooseveltâ€™s Brain Trusters and an open admirer of Stalinâ€™s Soviet system, groused, â€œThe Constitution was a negative document, meant mostly to protect citizens from their government.â€

The Founding Fathers issued warning after warning of the inherent danger of government power. John Adams wrote in 1772, â€œThere is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.â€ Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1799, â€œFree government is founded in jealousy, not confidence…. In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.â€ The term â€œpoliticianâ€ was in disrepute from 1776 onward (thanks to the antics of Congress during the Revolutionary War and the conniving of some of the state legislators after 1783).

Many of the initial curbs on federal power were maintained for most of the first century of this nationâ€™s history in part because Americans often had a derisive attitude toward government â€” especially the federal government.

Wariness toward government was one of the most important bulwarks of American freedom. Representative government worked fairly well at times partly because people were skeptical of congressmen, presidents, and government officials across the board. However, beginning in the early 1900s and accelerating in the New Deal, government was placed on a pedestal.

Trust in government is sometimes demanded most vociferously after some horrendous government blunder or abuse. Such was the case in the aftermath of a deadly no-knock raid by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and an FBI tank-and-toxic-gas assault on the home of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, in 1993, which ended with 80 dead men, women, and children. The Washington establishment almost instantly closed ranks around the federal government, canonizing Attorney General Janet Reno â€” the person who had approved an FBI plan to destroy the Davidiansâ€™ home to bring the siege to an end â€” as a hero.

The precedents established by one political party are routinely exploited for totally different ends by their opponents. During the 1990s, liberals were in the vanguard, preaching the need to trust government. After 9/11, it was George W. Bush who exploited boundless trust to expand government power in ways that mortified many liberals. The Bush administration could exploit 9/11 because Americans were predisposed to see credulity and obedience as paramount virtues.

The number of Americans who trusted the federal government to do the right thing more than doubled in the weeks after the attack. By the end of September 2001, almost two-thirds of Americans said they â€œtrust the government in Washington to do what is rightâ€ either â€œjust about alwaysâ€ or â€œmost of the time.â€

The foreign-policy response to 9/11 would have been far more targeted if scores of millions of Americans had not written George Bush a blank check in the form of automatic trust. The adulation and deference that he received in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 encouraged federal officials to believe that they could do practically whatever they pleased. Top administration officials were laying plans to attack Iraq within days after the Twin Towers collapsed, though there was no evidence linking Iraq to the attacks. Less than two weeks after 9/11, senior Bush administration officials were already claiming that the attacks gave the U.S. government carte blanche to attack anywhere in the world. Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo sent White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales a memo on September 25, 2001, suggesting that â€œan American attack in South America or Southeast Asia might be a surprise to the terrorists,â€ since they were expecting the United States to target Afghanistan.

Blind trust in government is often portrayed as a harmless error â€” as if it were of no more account than saying prayers to a pagan deity. However, the notion that rulers are entitled to trust is the most expensive entitlement program of them all. â€œFollow the leaderâ€ has often been a recipe for national suicide. Throughout history, people have tended to trust most governments more than rulers deserved.

Blind trust in government has resulted in far more carnage than distrust of government. The more trust, the less resistance. It was people who believed and who followed orders who carried out the Nazi Holocaust, the Ukrainian terror-famine, the Khmer Rouge blood bath, and the war crimes that characterize conflicts around the globe. It is not just a question of acquiescence but of breeding a docile attitude toward political events and government actions.

Docility is a far greater danger than blind fanaticism, at least in Western societies. It is mass docility that permits fanatics to seize power and wreak havoc. The more people there are who unconditionally trust the government, the more atrocities there are that the government can commit. All that the government needs to do afterward is to label and blame the victim.

Excessive trust in government breeds attention deficits. People assume they do not need to keep an eye on government and politicians because government is no threat to them â€” because their government tells them so. Ignorance combined with blind trust produces citizens pliable for practically any purpose the ruler decrees.

When people blindly assume that their leaders are trustworthy, the biggest liars win. To believe their lies almost guarantees submission. To accept a false statement from oneâ€™s rulers is to submit to a lie â€” to intellectually submit. And submission is habit-forming. Politicians do not need to promulgate a duty to submit because as long as people believe, most will submit to almost anything. After people lower their mental defenses, political perfidy is halfway home. If people are trained not to doubt â€” politicians need only to continue lying and denying until all barricades that guard individual rights have been smashed, one by one.

Any politician who violates his oath to uphold the Constitution has proven himself unworthy of trust. What is the case for trusting someone who has proven himself untrustworthy? Should people be proud to trust politicians in a way that they would consider foolish regarding any other profession?

Much of the American public appears to separate the issues of trust and power â€” as if a personâ€™s character is irrelevant to how much additional power he should be permitted to capture. For instance, regardless of the number of people who believed that Bill Clinton was a liar, his proposals to expand federal power to protect people or to give them specific new benefits generally had high levels of popular approval (excepting his 1993-94 health-care plan). Public support for vesting more power in an untrustworthy ruler is a sign of how few Americans still understand the nature of government.

In the same way that power corrupts, blind trust corrupts. To say that people should not blindly trust the government is not to call for anarchy or for violence in the streets or the torching of city halls across the land. It is not a choice between trusting the government and refusing to drive on the right side of the road. Instead, it is a call for people to cease deluding themselves about those who seek to control them.

Trust in a dishonest government is true escapism â€” an evasion of responsibility for oneâ€™s own life and liberties. Deference to lying rulers is self-betrayal.

Thursday 3rd June 2010

Max Blumenthal’s Excellent Analysis of Israeli Attack on the Flotilla

9:04 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 0

Gee, I can’t understand why the Washington Post missed all the key details that Max Blumenthal rounded up from Israeli published sources (in Hebrew and English).

The Flotilla Raid Was Not â€œBungled.â€ The IDF Detailed Its Violent Strategy In Advance.

The Israeli military broadcast its plan for violence, inciting the Israeli public and the soldiers of Unit 13 with fevered visions of a kill-or-be-killed encounter with a group of Arab â€œterrorists.â€ The stated conditions for using live fire were arbitrary and poorly defined, giving the commandos little direction and lots of leeway to kill â€” at the very least the plan demanded force in some form….

Were they that stupid, or just crazy? From the details of the plan it appears that Netanyahu and his cohorts had envisioned Entebbe Part Deux, a daring anti-terror raid that would lift the sinking morale of the Israeli public while intimidating Iran and the Arab world. Though Israel may be more isolated than ever as a result of the massacre, the Netanyahu administration is reaping considerable political benefits at home.

The day after the massacre, spontaneous celebrations broke out in Ashdod, Tel Aviv, and throughout the country, bringing together right-wing elements with everyday Israelis. Over a thousand Israelis gathered tonight outside the Turkish embassy in Tel Aviv to rally against the Turkish government and express their support for the raid. Multiple demonstrators including one man who has lived in Israel for 60 years told me, â€œWhat Turkey [the sponsor of the Mavi Marmara boat] has done is great. I have never seen this country more united in my entire life. We are all standing together now.â€ (Video coming soon).

Israeli newscasters are routinely using the term â€œmechabel,â€ or terrorist, to refer to the flotilla activists, while the violence that broke out on the deck of the Mavi Marmara is called â€œthe lynch.â€ (Nevermind that zero commandos were hung and nine activists were killed, including an American citizen who was shot in the head four times.) No evidence is required to support claims in the Israeli media. The public desperately wants to believe that its government is right, so much so that Israelâ€™s media is not even making a token effort to challenge the increasingly hysterical press releases disseminated by the IDF press office every few hours.

Hanin Zoabi, a Palestinian-Israeli member of the Knesset who was on the Mavi Marmara, was physically accosted in the Knesset by fellow legislators for attempting to relate her experience aboard the flotilla. MK Miri Regev of Likud called her a â€œtraitor,â€ while Yoel Hasson of Kadima, a supposedly centrist party, denounced Zoabi as a â€œterrorist.â€ An Israeli Facebook group devoted to inciting Zoabiâ€™s assassination has gathered 600 members in just a day and a half. In the meantime, Israelâ€™s Interior Minster Eli Yishai is â€œlooking intoâ€ means of stripping Zoabi of her citizenship.

Wednesday 2nd June 2010

Podcast: Brian Wilson Interview on Worldwide Downfall of Democracy

Talk Show mastermind Brian Wilson and I had fun today discussing the worldwide downfall of democracy.

This trend has gone so far that it might even affect Toledo.

Brian took the high road - preferring to discuss Berlusconi’s Italian corruption rather than Singapore culinary prohibitions.

You can download or listen to the @ 15 minute interview by clicking here radio-brian-wilson-6-02-2010-jbovard10

Ernest Hancock Concession Speech for LNC Chairman

4:05 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 1

Ernie Hancock gave a great speech this past weekend - capturing his vision for fighting for liberty.

Ernie’s motto: “Those of you who have not been in the trenches - on the corners… challenging the state -â€“ youâ€™re not having enough fun â€“ youâ€™re doing it wrong.â€

Watch his speech here.

A Great Israeli Saying….

10:56 am | Uncategorized | Comments: 0

From Counterpunch’s Patrick Cockburn: An old Israeli saying describing various less-than-esteemed military leaders says: “He was so stupid that even the other generals noticed.”

Too bad this is not also an American saying…. or maybe it will be after McChrystal does Kandahar….

Tuesday 1st June 2010

From the Libertarian Convention: An Interview & Speeches (hopefully)

10:28 pm | Uncategorized | Comments: 3

Under the terms of my parole, I’m not allowed to travel west of the Mississippi. Thus, I could not attend the national Libertarian Party convention in St. Louis this past weekend. But here are a couple highlights.

Corey Moore, the producer of the Voice of Radical Dissent, taped a lively sparring match between Wayne Allyn Root and Nicholas Burdohan, Kurtis Liston, and himself. The exchange with Root begins about 6 minutes into the podcast here. Root is very forthright about his political calculations and media strategy.

OK - as for the speeches - I was planning to link to Ernie Hancock’s concession speech. I have heard fine things about the speech. Ernie understood the Ron Paul Revolution much better than many people actually working for the Ron Paul campaign. But I haven’t found a link to it yet, so…

Similarly, I’m looking for a link to the audio or video of Bob Barr’s keynote speech to the convention. He had a line about how his 2008 Libertarian Party presidential campaign suffered from “meager resources.” (This line was not included in the text of his talk he posted on his own website).

Campaign for Liberty’s Review of Attention Deficit Democracy

Anthony Gregory has a generous review of Attention Deficit Democracy posted today at the Campaign for Liberty website:

There are few writers who pay more attention to the political follies of our time and who provide their readers with more meticulously documented reasons to be outraged than James Bovard, whose new book, Attention Deficit Democracy, presents his diagnosis of what is so terribly wrong with modern American democracy…

A partisan of neither major party, only of liberty, Bovard sums up the lies surrounding Clinton’s Kosovo war of the late 1990s. Clinton and his cabal called the terroristic Kosovo Liberation Army “freedom fighters”; distorted the history of the region and exaggerated the Balkans’ threat to the world; cried “genocide” when in fact the killings were far fewer in number than what was suggested; lied about the precision of the NATO bombing campaign; and disingenuously told the Serbian people that they would be protected by the United States when peace broke out. Bovard also takes issue with what Clinton’s “aides labeled the Clinton doctrine” — which the author says boils down to the principle “that the U.S. government is allowed to attack foreign nations on false charges.”

As a helpful reminder that today’s Republican administration is guilty of repeated deception, Bovard lays out the case plainly, citing the shameless lies of such officials as Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney. The book’s focus on Clinton and Bush alike reminds us that wartime deception cannot be addressed by simply switching the party that occupies the White House.

We have come to the point where Americans, confident that their democratic rulers will behave virtuously, have empowered Leviathan and granted their rulers a de facto “right to lie for 72 hours.” “As long as the lies are not exposed in the same news cycle,” Bovard explains, “the refutations may as well be done in a different century.” The political establishment tells as many lies as it wants because the people have come down with a bad case of attention deficit democracy; they forget what it was that got them riled up and so supportive of the president’s new power grab or military invasion only days after it happened and the lies have been refuted.

Attention Deficit Democracy is an indictment of the modern American democratic state. It is an indictment of the American people, who have lost interest in the sweeping and dangerous powers their rulers have grabbed and abused in recent history, especially since 9/11 but also going back many years before that. Following in the tradition of his other books, Bovard carefully documents hundreds of instances of government wrongdoing and deceit in domestic and foreign policy. But more than in his other recent works, he draws on history and on sociological insights to form his diagnosis of the general affliction in modern America. The book shows that the problem is nonpartisan and deeply seated in American culture and will not be likely to reverse simply when another man moves into the Oval Office. Things must considerably change for our democratic government to stop ravaging the freedoms it is supposed to guard. The American people must reclaim their libertarian heritage, and understand liberty and the limits and dangers of government power, even when brandished by a popularly elected power elite. They must start paying attention, and thus start being more outraged. Reading Attention Deficit Democracy is a perfect place to start.

Most Sycophantic Apology for Israeli Attack?

11:38 am | Uncategorized | Comments: 11

The Israeli military attacks an aid ship in international waters and kills at least 10 people.

Naturally, Israel is the victim.

As usual, Glenn Greenwald has some of the best reporting and analysis here. Gideon Levy of Haaretz also has an excellent piece.

Mossad chief Meir Dagan admitted to a committee of the Knesset today that Israel “is progressively becoming a burden on the United States.”

But I doubt you’ll be hearing about his observation in American papers and television reports.

I expect the IDF attack will bring out the best both in American politicians and the American media.

What is the most sycophantic defense you have seen of the attack on the aid ship?

Monday 31st May 2010

New Yorker’s Disgraceful Embrace of Government Coverups

2:59 pm | Lying | Secrecy | Comments: 3

from a New Yorker article on Wikileaks’ heroic Julian Paul Assange -

“But, unlike authoritarian regimes, democratic governments hold secrets largely because citizens agree that they should, in order to protect legitimate policy.”

This is one of the biggest crocks in modern history.

Wikileaks is doing more to promote self-government than the vast majority of liberal publications that kowtow to government coverups.

Memorial Day: Scourge the Lying Politicians…

9:05 am | Attention Deficit Democracy | Lying | Comments: 3

This Memorial Day, the media is doing its usual sacralizing of war. Instead, this should be a day for the ritualized scourging of politicians. During the last 60 years, their lies have resulted in the unnecessary deaths of almost a hundred thousand American soldiers and millions of foreigners.

And yet, people still get teary-eyed when politicians take the stage today to talk about their devotion to the troops.

Rather than parades, it would be better to celebrate this holiday like the British used to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day - by burning politicians in effigy, or a reasonable facsimile.

Boston antiwar activist John Walsh has an excellent piece here on the media’s complicity on turning Memorial Day into pro-government hokum.

Thursday 27th May 2010

Barr Campaign Manager’s Solomonic Solution to the Ghostwriting Debt

9:28 pm | Bob Barr | wool | Comments: 8

Regarding the lawsuit over the Barr 2008 Presidential Committee’s $47,000 debt to me for ghostwriting Bob Barr’s Lessons in Liberty –

Russ Verney, Bob Barr’s 2008 campaign manager, admitted to the Washington Post that “We owe him some money and we intend to pay it.”

And then Verney came up with the best fundraising idea of the year:Â “If Bovard’s sending out press releases about it, he could add a donation button. We could use it.”

So not only did I have to write the [@#$$#] book - but now I am supposed toÂ raise the [@#$#]Â money soÂ they can pay me for the work I did?

What next?Â

SuggestingÂ the Federal Election Commission impose a retroactive surcharge on anyone who voted for Barr in 2008? Or? Or?

It is things like this that make it difficult for me to retain my youthful idealism regarding politics.

Bob Barr will be giving the keynote speech at the Libertarian National Convention on Saturday.

If you see Bob in St. Louis… make sure you give him my greetings.

The Worldwide Downfall of Democracy

From the July issue of the American Conservative - my review of a fine new book -

Global Undemocratic Revolution

Freedom for Sale: Why the World Is Trading Democracy for Security, John Kampfner, Basic Books, 294 pages

By James Bovard

Freedom for Sale is the best synopsis of the recent collapse of restraints on government power around the globe. John Kampfner, the editor of Britainâ€™s New Statesman, traveled the world seeking to answer the question: why have freedoms been so easily traded in return for security or prosperity?

Kampfner begins his tour in Singapore, where he was born. Lee Kuan Yewâ€™s 30-year reign as prime minister begat an authoritarian regime that combined high economic growth with endless petty impingements on personal liberties. Leeâ€™s sense of entitlement to power knew no boundsâ€”he even chose spouses for senior government workers and dictated how many children they should have. With immaculate streets and the worldâ€™s highest rate of executions, Singapore earned the nickname â€œDisneyland with the death penalty.â€

While many Americans know that chewing gum is illegal in Singapore, they are unaware that until recently oral sex was punishable by two years in prison. The government has almost totally repressed political opposition. When journalists or others criticize, they are bankrupted by volleys of defamation suits. Kampfner notes, â€œPeople confide only in their good friends here; meaningful opinion polls do not exist.â€ But as long as the economy has boomed, there has been little or no resistance to authoritarianism.

Kampfner spent two stints as a journalist in Russia, one before and one after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He writes, â€œThe Westâ€™s overall approach during the 1990s was a mix of condescension, ingratiation, and insensitivity.â€ Perceived U.S. government meddling in Georgia in late 2003, which helped install Mikheil Saakashvili in power, was a turning point for the Russians, compounded by the U.S. intervention in the Ukrainian election the following year.

Freedom flourished in Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed, but has faded in the new century. Media criticism of the Russian regime is tempered by routine assassinations of bothersome reporters. According to the Russian Union of Journalists, â€œmore than two hundred journalists have been killed in 10 years. In not a single case has the mastermind been arrested.â€ Putin and his cohorts routinely refer to â€œzhurnalyugaâ€”journalist-scum.â€ Even organizations that merely document the crimes of the Stalin era have been targeted for police raids and repression, since they interfere with Putinâ€™s effort to revive patriotic fervor.

Putinâ€™s power has been practically unlimited since Boris Yeltsin crowned him as his successor. The Russian parliament has rubberstamped laws punishing â€œantistate behaviorâ€ that grant â€œthe security services the right to kill enemies of the state at home and abroad. Another gives law enforcement agencies the right to view acts of dissent as forms of extremism or treason, crimes punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Treason has been redefined to include damaging Russiaâ€™s constitutional order.â€

India is the worldâ€™s most populous democracy, but it is far more authoritarian than most Westerners recognize. â€œPolice encountersâ€ is the colloquial term for police killings, which are routinely open-air executions followed by the ritual planting of a weapon on the deceased. Kampfner writes, â€œFor nearly 30 years, these shoot-to-kill encounters have been a regular occurrence in the major cities, and, according to public opinion polls, they are highly popular with the public.â€ The Indian parliament passed sweeping anti-terrorism legislation in 2002 that gave the government power to detain terrorist suspects for up to a year without bail. Other anti-terrorism laws entitle authorities to arrest â€œrelatives as hostages when a person wanted by the police absconds.â€ Indiaâ€™s democratic pretensions have not stood in the way of horrific attacks by Hindu mobs on minority Muslims, sometimes aided and abetted by the police.

In some democracies, governing is indistinguishable from looting. In Italy after World War II, â€œa system of state larceny was enshrined.â€ Until the early 1990s, Italian politics was â€œdenuded of respectability and credibility, and rotted to the core by corruption,â€ Kampfner remarks. After a two-year crackdown on thieving weasels, Italy reverted to form. This worked out well for Silvio Berlusconi, the media baron who snared three terms as president. He showed contempt for any limits on his own power and repeatedly pushed through parliament laws giving himself total legal immunity, regardless of what crimes he might commit. He vigorously pressured the media to stifle criticism, including successfully pressuring one television channel to cancel a late night political satire that mocked him.

Kampfner wonders, â€œIn a democracy, how can a leader who has openly set about to destroy an independent media and independent judiciary, and whose personal finances are murky at best, command such popularity?â€

Yet as long as Berlusconi denounces Communists and socialists, many Italians accept him as the incarnation of freedom. Last year, he broadened his political base by incorporating another political party into his own and naming the combination The People of Freedom. â€œWe are the party of Italians who love freedom and who want to remain free,â€ he declared. And Berlusconi must have absolute legal immunity so that he will have unfettered power to fight the enemies of freedom.

The chapter on the United Kingdom is the strongest part of the book. During the decade of Blairâ€™s rule, Parliament created â€œmore than 3,000 new criminal offenses. That corresponded to two new offenses for each day Parliament sat during Blairâ€™s premiership.â€ British citizens are treated like a mass of unindicted criminal conspirators. The UK is now the most surveilled nation on earth, with over 5 million closed-circuit televison cameras sweeping the streets, waiting to detect anyone publicly urinating or committing any of a long list of other offenses. The cameras automatically recognize license places and faces, as well as â€œsuspicious behavior.â€ New software issues an alert when â€œpeople are walking suspiciously or strangely.â€ The CCTVs in some places are equipped with loudspeakers to permit government officials to shout at people who litter. In Liverpool, drones hover 100 yards above the ground lurking for scofflaws. Their loudspeakers startle Brits foolish enough to believe no one is watching their mischief.

The Blair regime also helped unleash a tidal wave of wiretaps. Government agencies are requesting approval for more than 300,000 wiretap operations a yearâ€”probably a hundred times more than the corresponding rate of administrations in the United States. (Illicit wiretaps are another story: the U.S. may far surpass Britain on that score.)

This issue flared up briefly in the election campaign that ended on May 6. Blairâ€™s successor as prime minister, Gordon Brown, was wearing a microphone for a TV network as he went out and talked to commoners. He ran into one elderly widow who complained about immigrants. After he returned to his chauffeured car, he groused that the woman was a â€œbigotâ€ and wanted to know which aide allowed her to talk to him. Typical stuff for lordly politiciansâ€”except that his microphone was still on. One Twitter user quipped, â€œGordon Brown has created a total surveillance society. Glad to see he got caught out, now he knows how we all feel.â€

Once a government has become committed to achieving omniscience over its subjects, any half-witted justification for expanding the dragnet suffices. After the British government created the largest DNA database in the world, ministers urged that â€œpolice be allowed to take the DNA of anyone stopped for not wearing seatbelts.â€ When people balked at a mandatory national identification card with extensive biometric data, Charles Clarke, the home secretary, declared that the proposal was a â€œprofoundly civil libertarian measure because it promotes the most fundamental civil liberty in our society, which is the right to live free from crime and fear.â€ After promising freedom from fear, a politician can always invoke polls showing widespread fears to justify seizing new power. The more people government frightens, the more benevolent its dictatorial policies appear.

But nowhere is the recent decline of democracy more evident than in the United States. After the 9/11 terror attacks, President George W. Bush effectively suspended habeas corpus and claimed a right to detain anyone in perpetuity on his own say so. The National Security Agency launched a massive illegal wiretapping program that eavesdropped on thousands of Americansâ€™ phone calls and e-mails without warrants. After the New York Times exposed the program, Bush bragged about it in his State of the Union address and received a standing ovation from Republican members of Congress.

The more oppressive U.S. policies became, the more servile the media acted. Even after the Abu Ghraib photos and John Yooâ€™s â€œpresidential torture entitlementâ€ memo surfaced, most newspapers and magazines ducked the issue. This pattern was locked in place by late 2001, when Attorney General John Ashcroft declared, â€œthose who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty â€¦ only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and â€¦ give ammunition to Americaâ€™s enemies.â€ Even if the critics were accurate, they were still traitors.

One of the nationâ€™s most prominent pundits, Michael Kinsley, admitted in 2002 that he had been listening to his â€œinner Ashcroftâ€: â€œAs a writer and editor, I have been censoring myself and others quite a bit since September 11.â€ Kinsley conceded that sometimes it was â€œsimple cowardiceâ€ that sparked the censorship. Kampfner notes the intense pressure on American commentators during the war on terror and observes, â€œthe most sensitive issue of them all was policy toward Israel.â€ Criticizing Israel after 9/11 was as prudent as praising Stalin during the Cold War.

Freedom for Sale places much of the blame for democracyâ€™s decline on the pursuit of wealth at any price. Politicians who praise free markets often receive carte blanche to abuse constitutions. But free markets by themselves are not inherently depraving. Democracy is floundering in part because politicians gorged on power for decades.

This is the age of Leviathan Democracy. The bigger government grows, the more clueless citizens become. The contract between rulers and ruled is replaced by a blank check. Government becomes an elective dictatorship, and elections merely signify whose turn it is to trample the Constitution. Because people have been taught to expect their rulers to save them from all perils, they cheer any action that either boosts their benefits or assuages their fears. Because the media relies on government â€œnewsâ€ handouts, it ignores most official abuses and instead whines about the perils of citizens distrusting their masters.

Kampfner complains about the collapse of â€œredistributive democracyâ€ in recent years. But politicians are buying more votes than ever before. At the state and local level in the U.S., government employees and pensioners often have a death grip on everyone elseâ€™s paychecks. Government entitlement spending is pushing nation after nation towards insolvency.

He also contends that politicians have â€œopted out of economic rule-making.â€ Maybe in Singapore, but not in the United States. It was politicians and political appointees who poured far too much credit into the housing sector, causing one of the biggest boom-and-busts in American history. It was politicians who created a new ad hoc â€œruleâ€ that entitled them to bail out Wall Street and a host of financial institutions that richly deserved bankruptcy. It is politicians who empower and shield the Federal Reserve, permitting it to manipulate everyoneâ€™s finances according to secret rules that provide the greatest benefit to insiders.

The ultimate threat to democracyâ€™s survival may be the fact that many people simply do not value their own freedom. When elections degenerate into a search for benevolent caretakers and cage-keepers, authoritarianism is almost guaranteed to win on Election Day. Freedom for Sale is a powerful wake-up call for anyone who still believes in the inevitable global triumph of democracy.

Monday 24th May 2010

Welfarization and the Capsizing of Democracy

Liberty Central just posted online my analysis of how government handouts subvert self-government…

WELFARIZATION AND THE CAPSIZING OF DEMOCRACY
by Jim Bovard

The Founding Fathers intended that America be composed of self-reliant individuals who would not hesitate to pull the reins in on their rulers. However, in the past 75 years, the soaring number of government dependents has made it far more difficult to curb politiciansâ€™ power. Federal policy is dividing society between â€œthose who work for a living and those who vote for a living,â€ as H.L. Mencken quipped during the New Deal.

In recent decades, politicians have launched one recruiting campaign after another to persuade Americans to accept federal handouts. The Heritage Foundation created an Index of Dependency to measure the rising number of Americans reliant on government. The index gauges â€œthe pace at which federal government services and programs have been growing in areas in which private or community-based services and programs exist or have existed to address the same or nearly the same needs.â€ The index is based on housing aid, healthcare and welfare assistance, retirement income, and subsidies for college and other post-secondary education.

The Heritage Index rated the level of dependency in the United States at 22 in 1964, the year that Lyndon Johnson launched his Great Society. By 1980, the year before the Reagan Revolution commenced, the index had risen to 100. By 2008, the index had soared to 240, signaling a ten-fold increase of dependency on the federal government over the prior 40+ years.

The food stamp program was greatly expanded beginning in the late 1960s, after politicians realized that promising to feed everybody made them look compassionate. The number of food stamp recipients has soared to almost 40 million. Recent studies have shown little or no nutritional benefit from food stamps. A 2009 Ohio State University study found that â€œpeopleâ€™s BMI [Body Mass Index] increased faster when they were on food stamps than when they were not, and increased more the longer they were in the program.â€ University of Maryland professor Douglas Besharov observed: â€œIn a time of mass obesity, encouraging the poor to consume more food makes no sense at all.â€ The Obama administration pushed through Congress changes last year that make it far easier for able-bodied young people to collect food stamps. A recent Slate article reported that â€œhipstersâ€ were now using food stamps for Perrier water, organic salmon, and expensive soy meat alternatives and gourmet ice cream from Whole Foods.

Other food aid programs also have perverse results. The Women Infants and Children program provides coupons that mothers who are pregnant or who have young children can use for free infant formula and other specific food items. But this has significantly discouraged women from breastfeeding â€“ one of the healthiest things they could do for their babies. Low-income women on WIC are far less likely to breastfeed than are women of the same income and similar background who are not on the WIC dole. Households with almost double the poverty level income can qualify for WIC handouts, and 10 million women and children are collecting WIC benefits.

Housing subsidies have exploded in recent years. More than ten million people live in either public housing or in apartments or homes designated for Section 8 rental subsidies. Public housing often brings out the worst in residents; the crime rate in public housing projects is up to ten times higher than elsewhere in America, according to HUD studies. Section 8, by dispersing former public housing residents and welfare recipients in suburbs, has created a new crime wave across America, according to a 2008 article in the Atlantic magazine.

On top of that, the federal government has underwritten the vast majority of subprime mortgages. The Clinton administration and the George W. Bush administration championed policies that permitted people to â€œbuyâ€ houses â€“ even though they were uncreditworthy and could afford little or no downpayment. This foolish policy is resulting in wave after wave of defaults and a plague of abandoned houses that create magnets for crime across the nation. Politicians placed incompetent hacks at the top of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and those agencies squandered a kingâ€™s ransom to create the appearance that almost everyone could buy a house. Fannie Mae alone had $72 billion in losses last year.

Farmers have been Americaâ€™s perpetual dependents since the 1930s. Even though farmers have far higher net worth than do other Americans, Congress has perpetually entitled plowmen to first dibs on other peopleâ€™s paychecks. Farm subsidies now cost taxpayers more than $25 billion a year. While Republicans like to talk about â€œfreedom to farmâ€ and Democrats like to condemn handouts for large corporate farmers, neither party has shown any willingness to abolish handouts, which have always been a travesty, both of fairness and common sense.

Businessmen have been the fastest growing welfare class in recent years. The profusion of bailouts began in 2008 has already cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. Wall Street is also the most arrogant welfare recipient in the nation â€“ with some firms offering endless excuses why they are blameless for the catastrophes they spawned. Some of the firms and banks that got bailed out are now paying multi-million dollar bonuses to the same executives who ran their ships aground a few years ago. It would have been both politically and economically better for Americaâ€™s future if many of the bailed-out firms instead reaped the bankruptcy they richly deserved.

More than 23 million households collect almost $50 billion in handouts from the misnamed â€œEarned Income Tax Credit.â€ This program was created in the 1970s to counteract the anti-work incentives of payroll taxes on low income Americans. But politicians have continually expanded it and turned it into an all-purpose handout. The Earned Income Tax Credit is among the most fraud-ridden handouts in modern American history.

At the same time that Congress has put far more people on the dole, it has also exempted vast numbers of people from any federal income tax obligation. In 2008, more than 51 million tax filers had zero tax obligation, according to the Tax Foundation. As of 2009, â€œroughly 47% of households, or 71 million, will not owe any federal income tax, â€œ according to the Tax Policy Center. The sharp increase in the numbers who owe no taxes are largely the result of President Obamaâ€™s stimulus and other expansionist programs.

Thomas Jefferson warned, â€œDependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.â€ Anything that increases dependency on government undermines liberty. How can a citizen help steer the ship of State at the same time that he has his hand out for another government benefit? Once a person becomes a government dependent, his moral standing to resist the expansion of government power is fatally compromised.

The sheer number of handout recipients transforms the purpose of government from maintaining order to confiscating as much as possible from vulnerable taxpayers. Elections nowadays, instead of a vote on what government should do, are largely referendums on how much it should take. The more government dependents, the more likely that democracy will become a conspiracy against self-reliance.

Americans need to demand an end to government handouts for those who could help themselves.

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