On the blogs and talk shows there have been an increasing number of futile calls for government “reform” of the NSA and other national security bureaucracies run amok, and of police using military style tactics, and so on.
And each election cycle new people get into office to “fix” the problems that were caused by the previous office holders. Or the reelected ones “really will get it right this time.”
But currently in Congress, the short-sighted Republicans are afraid to impeach Obama, charge James Clapper with perjury, and do other responsible and morally necessary things, out of fear of losing their Party’s control in the House in 2014.
You see, reforming government with government is a fool’s errand, and a waste of time. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe has discussed, bureaucrats resist reform.
Has there ever been a time in which the Rulers were willing to let go of power already accumulated?
Thanks to the nature of democracy and the State, America is becoming a police state.
And now with a secrecy-obsessed federal Leviathan run amok, we have un-American secret warrants, secret courts, and secret court opinions.
This police state is only getting worse by the day, with an increasing number of judges who naïvely sign these secret warrants and carry out secret proceedings.
Do you really think these judges and court flunkies can be convinced by people outside the national security state to go against the already-powerful NSA, CIA, FBI and so forth?
And while Lavabit and Silent Circle have closed down rather than willfully act with complicity to the government’s crimes against the provider’s customers, do you really believe that the email providers such as Verizon will decide to protect their customers’ privacy and security by going against the monster Leviathan?
The truth is, there is plenty of information now to show that the U.S. government’s spying on Americans is for mainly criminal purposes.
And with bureaucrats’ secrecy obsession, their Soviet-like crackdown on the Press shows that those who are above the law obviously don’t want their illicit and unlawful acts to be revealed.
In the Michael Hastings case, for example, local police and firefighters were told not to talk to the news media regarding his car crash, just as there was a gag order in the case of Christopher Dorner, the rogue L.A. cop who allegedly killed several other cops. That gag order was in the name of “officer safety.”
However, the Press’s duty is to the people and to the truth. They do not exist to serve the police. If officers are so frightened and concerned for their safety in those situations, then perhaps that line of work is not for them.
But it was that Dorner had allegedly killed cops which was why the police went on to shoot up innocent people’s cars and then go on to burn Dorner to a crisp.
Would the cops have been so hysterical had Dorner only killed a mere civilian?
That seems to be how narcissistic government police are now. “Officer safety” and all that.
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But that is just what a government’s monopolizing of security services breeds. It becomes a self-serving enterprise.
The same police hysteria occurred after the Boston Marathon bombings. The police had their unconstitutional door-to-door searches in Watertown, looking for one suspect who, besides being a Marathon bombing suspect, was alleged to kill a cop.
Many times throughout American history there had been prison escapes of hard-core killers. But the police did not do door-to-door searches at those times, because those previous generations understood the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.
But times are different now, with the decaying of American society and culture in general.
If you believe that the Watertown siege would still have occurred had Dzhokhar Tsarnaev been alleged to kill only mere civilians, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Meanwhile, it was never clear as to whether the Tsarnaev brothers were the real killers of the MIT police officer. And subsequent to that incident, several witnesses had stated that the other officer, of the transit police, who was shot and wounded but not killed was probably shot by fellow officers, “friendly fire.” And following the police shootout at the boat where a private civilian found the younger Tsarnaev brother, apparently no weapon was found with that suspect. The shootout had involved just police. That is how hysterical they were. And there have been further inconsistencies with that case.
And then there was the case of Troy Davis, who had been on death row in Georgia after having been falsely convicted of killing a cop. Even though witnesses had recanted their testimony after claiming it was coerced by police, even though there had been no actual evidence to prove Davis’s guilt in the killing, he was murdered by the state of Georgia anyway.
In my view, had Davis been falsely convicted of killing a mere civilian (and not a cop), the governor, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, the Georgia Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court would not have knowingly let an innocent and wrongfully convicted man be put to death.
That is how slavish to uniformed authority many people are now.
But with government monopolization of security, the monopolists are not accountable and they do not obey the law as imposed on the rest of us.
It is doomed to become – and has become – a cult of self-serving State authority vs. the rest of the population.
Likewise, the U.S. government’s monopoly of security for the entire territory has done nothing but empower the Rulers to provoke foreigners and to convince the naïve public to accept a bigger and more criminally intrusive Leviathan.
In more recent years, there have been the NSA and IRS scandals, constant FBI and other federal S.W.A.T. raids on the wrong house, the FBI thwarting terrorist plots that the FBI themselves cook up, FBI entrapments, and so on.
My, how the Fulbright Hearings, the Watergate Hearings, the Church Committee, the Tower Commission and other similar efforts at reform certainly have succeeded!
Let’s have more reform!
And now Army PFC Bradley Manning, a.k.a. Chelsea Manning – who was given a kangaroo trial administered by an extremely biased judge – has been railroaded into a 35-year sentence on top of time already served in a tortured solitary confinement.
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But Manning didn’t “betray his country” or commit actual espionage on behalf of any foreign enemy. Military and security experts had testified that none of the information Manning gave to WikiLeaks had posed any danger to any American or U.S. soldier overseas.
Another military whistleblower, retired USAF Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski has pointed out that there have been actual spies, Robert Hanssen, Aldrich Ames, James Hall, and George Trofimoff, who actually did sell secrets to foreign regimes such as Russia but who had been treated much more humanely by the U.S. government than Manning was treated.
You see, Manning felt it was important to inform the American people of the war crimes and diplomatic buffoonery committed by our own government.
Manning’s “crime” was of having a moral conscience, and of embarrassing and angering our corrupt and criminal Rulers who didn’t like their criminality and incompetence exposed for all the world to see.
That is part of the cult of self-serving State authority that we have now.
It is amazing how the campaign to mislead and propagandize – led by U.S. government officials and repeated by their Press stenographers – has turned actual government whistleblowers into “bad guys” in the eyes of many misinformed and gullible people, from the very beginning of the WikiLeaks documents releases and the Manning witch hunt.
At the very beginning of the Manning witch hunt, in June 2010, Glenn Greenwald wrote about the FBI informant who had turned Manning in to the government, Adrian Lamo, and on Lamo’s relationship with Wired senior editor Kevin Poulsen. At that time, Wired had published only a partial version of the chat logs between Manning and Lamo.
Greenwald wrote a subsequent update to that, in which it turned out there had been quite some relationship between Wired’s Poulsen and informant Lamo, that Lamo had been the government’s one and only source against Manning, and Greenwald noted the “journalistic disgrace” in Wired’s withholding of key information from other news reporters on the Manning case.
And Greenwald wrote a further update after Wired had published the full Manning-Lamo chat logs.
We must ask: Were Poulsen and Wired withholding information from other journalists to help the government project a false narrative of why Bradley Manning released documents to WikiLeaks? You can read those articles and make your own conclusions.
Similar to Wired’s intentionally withholding of the rest of the Manning-Lamo chat logs was the New York Times’s withholding the truth that a murderous CIA officer (and former Blackwater employee) Obama had referred to as “our diplomat in Pakistan” was really a CIA officer, because the U.S. government apparently told the Times to conceal the truth.
And it was disappointing to read in a periodical as prestigious as the New York Times its Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent resorting to tabloid-like, gossip page material on Julian Assange’s personal life and character.
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Greenwald also documented how other news journalists such as Wolf Blitzer reacted more angrily toward WikiLeaks’ revelations than toward the U.S. government’s crimes which were revealed.
In fact, Glenn Greenwald has written many times now of our modern day State-Press enmeshment.
Sadly, as the Press have tended to lose their “watchdog” status (and their objectivity) in the name of retaining favored status with preferred government insiders for sources, many members of the media have allowed themselves to serve merely as government spokesmen.
In further examples, Greenwald has pointed out CBS News fossil Bob Schieffer’s excruciating lack of objectivity in Schieffer’s recent softball interview of former Bush NSA director Michael Hayden on Edward Snowden, as well as Schieffer’s dishonest interview of Ron Paul, and the media’s attacks on the late investigative journalist Michael Hastings. (And see even more similar criticisms of the news media by Greenwald here.)
So given that the hypocrites of the Press now act as government press releases, the people depend more on alternative media to learn the truth about what’s going on.
For instance, the obedient State stenographers have not informed Americans of the possibility that the chemical weapons used in Syria may have been a part of a false flag attack as directed by the U.S. government, but Yahoo! News and reporter Anthony Gucciardi have reported on that.
And Dale Gavlak and Yahya Ababneh have reported that rebels and others interviewed have stated that rebels were responsible for the chemical attacks, provided to them by the Saudi government. But have MSM outlets reported these assertions?
(Actually, the central planners seemed to want to attack Syria for years. But that’s for a different discussion.)
So, the more the State grows, the more an oppressive Leviathan needs a sycophantic Press to keep the corroding State propped up. And the Establishment Press needs the State as well.
Actually, the subservient and slavish Press mainly reflect America’s modern day general population.
And the truth is, just as with local police departments as noted above, with the U.S. government it’s not about “national security,” safety or justice – it’s all about the bureaucrats keeping their illicit schemes and criminality swept under the rug, it’s about their power trips and their egos. And the State.
So in my opinion, each election cycle is a mere rearranging of deck chairs on a sinking ship.
Sorry to sound like such a gloomy Gus, but it really is important to get people to wake up and learn the truth about the State and the evils of central planning.
Toward that goal, the new Ron Paul Channel should be instructive, in addition to the Voluntaryist, Tom Woods’s Liberty Classroom, LRC and other similar sources of information.
Perhaps some day the people will be better able to open their minds to the truly radical, alternative approach of uncompromising libertarianism, as discussed recently at the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Now, I don’t mean to be harsh, but it really is the statists and reformers who are “utopian” in their unrealistic hope that government employees will leave their human flaws out the door and won’t exploit the privilege of being above the law granted to them by the powers of the State.
In fact, given history as well as the direction in which America is currently heading, one could argue that the right of the people to bear arms and voluntaryist resistance would be far more effective toward securing one’s community and repelling invasion by foreigners or crimes by one’s own Rulers.
