An edited version of "The 80's are Back" has appeared in the Hoya. You can check it out here if you like.

The Eighties are Back

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, or so the saying goes. Unfortunately it seems that even those who did learn from history are hell-bent on doing the same thing, most likely because they learned something different. Straight out of the Central American 1980s, Shiite death squads are offing Sunni leaders in Iraq, apparently with training and aide of the United States. Obviously most good, patriotic Americans have dismissed any mentions of this they may happen to have heard of this in the liberal media as mere fabrications, but to dismiss it so quickly requires ignoring a fair amount of evidence to the contrary.
To begin with, back in January there were news reports that the Pentagon was debating a top-secret strategy dating to the Reagan administration, named by most news reports as the “Salvadoran Option.” Paramilitary and military squads were responsible for the extralegal kidnapping and murder of alleged leftist rebels, sympathizers, and even their family members. Despite nearly universally recognized massive civilian death tolls of these policies in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and other countries, many in the American government (and the citizenry for that matter) recognize these strategies as successful.
Following this, one cannot ignore the many people in the Bush administration who, either directly or through very few degrees of separation, have connections to the administrations which supported these policies. Most obviously, you have the President himself who is the son of Ronald Reagan’s Vice President. Next down the ladder is Dick Cheney. He served as the elder George Bush’s Secretary of Defense and was responsible for directing the universally condemned (even by staunch allies such as Augusto Pinochet) invasion of Panama. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also served directly under the Reagan administration as a Special Envoy to the Middle East. John Negroponte, well known for his involvement with the funding of the Contras in Nicaragua, served as the Ambassador in Iraq starting in 2004, but left the position in February of this year to assume the position of Director of National Intelligence. This is just a short list, and I’m sure you can find many more involved in the administration with very close ties to those responsible for the 1980s foreign policy in South and Central America.
However the circumstantial evidence does not stop here. Not only are those responsible for setting policy in the lower Americas involved, those who actually committed atrocities in the Americas are too. Back in the summer of 2004 there was (not so widely covered by the “liberal” media again) news that American mercenary companies such as Blackwater USA, were retired soldiers from countries like Chile, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, and Guatemala. The reason? The military in these countries are quite skilled (thanks to their training at the School of the Americas) in brutally repressive counter-insurgency tactics. Chilean newspapers estimate at least 37 Pinochet-era vets have gone to Iraq and one Argentinean journalist knows of at least 7 veterans of his country’s last military dictatorship who have left the country for the Middle East as well. Those directly responsible for disappearance, torture, and execution of the enemies of brutal dictators in countries like Argentina are finding new employment with “civilian security contractors” in Iraq.
Despite all this, I’m sure there are still some especially red-blooded Americans out there willing to dismiss all of this as mere coincidence. Not to worry, however, there is more. Recent news reports have surfaced that Shiite groups operating within the Iraqi police force are responsible for the arrest and detention of many Sunnis. Neither the American nor the Iraqi government denies that this is happening; however public statements and news reports obviously report it as an unintended consequence of the rush to build up Iraq’s police. One who is more trusting of governments than I might be tempted to believe these statements, but in light of what we have seen already, can we really ignore the possibility that this is not accident but policy?

Bye Bye Bill of Rights

(This is a bit old, but still worth checkin out)

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today that the government has the right to keep José Padilla detained as an enemy combatant, held without charges and with no prospect of a trial. José Padilla is an American citizen and he was arrested on American soil.
One would think that the protections of the Bill of Rights would apply in this case. Amendment V states that “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia” and Amendment VI states “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial”. José Padilla has been denied both of these, because he must be held indefinitely to protect Americans.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Padilla and his case, he was arrested in 2002 in Chicago after returning from Pakistan, allegedly having been trained in explosives by Al-Qaeda. The government also alleged that he had plans to blow up apartment buildings, and to detonate “dirty” bombs (bombs which scatter radioactive material). He was quickly designated an enemy combatant, and has spent the last three years in a Naval brig. While he was finally granted access to a lawyer, he has not been charged with any crime, and the government seems to have no plans to do so.
The justification for all this is that José Padilla has ties with Al-Qaeda. However, such a tie should be a non-issue. The Constitutional protection of all citizens in the case of government arrest given by the 5th and 6th Amendments trumps the only American legal precedent for the use of “illegal enemy combatant” status. This status was introduced into America in 1942 during the Supreme Court case ex parte Quirin in which German saboteurs were tried in the US. The Court ruled that they were unlawful combatants, and that they were subject to capture and trial by the military. Obviously, Supreme Court decisions, and in fact, all American law, must fall within the legal rules set up by the Constitution.
Another argument made by Judge J. Michael Luttig, who wrote the court’s argument (and, interestingly enough, may be under consideration for a Supreme Court seat), was that the power to detain individuals linked with Al-Qaeda was included in the USA PATRIOT Act, the massive group of anti-terrorism laws passed shortly after 9/11/01 which broadly expanded the powers of the government. It seems Luttig has perhaps forgotten that the Constitution and its amendments are the highest law in the land, and that if Congress passes a law which violates the Constitution, the Constitution trumps Congress.
So what’s the point of all this? Why bother defending some alleged terrorist? If José Padilla’s detention is allowed to stand, it sets a dangerous precedent. Any US citizen who is arrested could, in theory, be detained indefinitely merely with the claim that they have ties to a terrorist group. The government has provided no evidence of this link. No impartial jury has decided anything about this case. The government said “he’s a terrorist” and we have to take their word for it. Isn’t this how “justice” systems work in military dictatorships? Enemies of the state are seized based solely on the suspicion or declaration of the government, and held, tortured, or killed without any independent party deciding whether or not they have committed a crime.
If José Padilla did in fact have plans to kill Americans at the behest of Al-Qaeda, and the government could provide evidence to prove this, no judge or jury in the country would think twice about locking him up for life. Denying him his rights as an American citizen to a fair trial by an impartial jury is of huge consequence if it is not overturned by the Supreme Court. What scares me, perhaps even more than the fact that the government would do such a thing, is that there are people in this country who support such an action. They claim to have no cares about the rights of terrorists, and as such have no qualms with holding them without trial, torturing them, etc. Strangely enough, it is most often those who claim to fear big government, the Conservatives, who are perfectly comfortable with allowing the government to designate terrorists without independent review and do with them what it pleases. Such actions are the first steps towards a rollback of our constitutionally guaranteed rights. Those who love liberty should not tolerate them, as the loss of any individual’s rights is a threat to the rights of all.

This site may become defunct, since I've applied for a columnist position with the Hoya. If I do get the position, I will link to my columns from here though. So I guess it won't really be defunct. Nevermind. I did have to write two sample columns, so I may try to toss those up here later.

Mind Control

“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

We take a short break from politics and examine culture this week. A recent study done by the University of California may reveal the new wave in dieting. Forget buying Atkins and South Beach books; for those who truly cannot resist indulging there may soon be a new solution: brainwashing. Psychologists at the University of California were able to make volunteers give up foods like strawberry ice cream, pickles, and hard-boiled eggs, and start eating asparagus, by implanting memories that the bad foods had made them sick as a child and that they had always liked the vegetable when they were younger. The woman who led the study Elizabeth Loftus is, according to The Guardian calls “a distinguished professor of psychology, social behaviour and criminology”, a title which raises interesting questions about just what the REAL planned uses of this technique are. Seriously, what is a criminologist doing running a study on dieting? Stephen Behnke, the ethics director at the American Psychological Association, rather than come out and say anything direct, simply raised questions about the ethics involved in changing childhood memories, suggesting that changing someone’s beliefs about their entire childhood might have some ethical problems.

As Behnke points out, the possibilities for abuse here are endless. If they truly can convince you to create new memories about what foods you liked, where’s this to stop (besides chocolate chip cookies and potato chips, which they have been unable to convince test subjects to dislike)? Not to pull out the classic fascist-future of 1984, but something like this could very easily be used to convince us that they raised our chocolate rations, right after they lowered them. Military applications would be quite fruitful as well: citizen recruits could be brainwashed to make them more ruthless killers, POWs could be given bad childhood memories of their home country in order to make them divulge information. As you can tell, this sort of procedure certainly isn’t something that I’d want the government to adopt. The last thing we are man-made pasts, created by those bent on controlling us.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/Story/0,2763,1541448,00.html

USA PATRIOT Act v. 2.0

“To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded; all by creatures that have neither the right, nor wisdom, nor virtue” Pierre Joseph Proudhon

Today the US House of Representatives began discussion on a bill which will, if passed, remove the sunset clause in the USA PATRIOT Act, making some parts of the act permanent, and simply extending the deadline for sunset for other parts. For those of you who have been living under a rock, the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, a moniker coined with the only purpose of creating the acronym it is known by, gave new and increased powers to the Federal government to collect normally confidential information—medical, business, and library records, for example—and to tap phones and conduct other searches with greater ease when investigating an alleged terrorist or foreign agent. While the Act does provide that these investigations may not be based solely on actions which are protected by the First Amendment, Congress is once again looking to ban flag burning, so that protection, given a few more years, may not mean much.

So what’s the problem, you ask? Well aside from the fact that the original bill was hastily passed, with most Senators not even bothering to read it (makes you wonder how many STILL haven’t picked the thing up), the Act is based on the fundamental assumption that it is possible to curtail the liberties of some, without curtailing the liberties of all. One of its proponents, I assume a Republican, said (and I paraphrase, since I heard this quote on the news as opposed reading it in print) that while she cared very much about the civil liberties of law-abiding citizens, she did not care one bit about the liberties of terrorists. The problem here, like I said, is that to take the civil liberties away from criminals (before they have been tried) you have to take away the rights of all, because ANYBODY, innocent or not, can be an alleged criminal. The government, which has been known to make mistakes from time to time, could very easily take away the civil liberties of a law-abiding citizen by designating them (either accidentally or maliciously) as a suspected terrorist.

Of course, our President, though much of the left refuses to give them any credit, is smart enough to know that those who truly love civil liberty aren’t going to buy any of that nonsense. So how does he placate his followers? Easy: use the pain and suffering of others to scare them. Bush alluded to the recent attacks in London and said at a speech that “This is no time to let our guard down, and no time to roll back good laws”.

As usual, when push comes to shove, the Democrats can’t bear to be an opposition party. Sure they can filibuster a few judges here and there, but look soft on Homeland Security by supporting civil liberties? Oppose a bill with PATRIOT as its acronym? Heavens no! Rather than oppose the bill altogether, The Democrats merely proposed some amendments to it which would soften the effect. Obviously, the strongest ones did not get passed.

Those who love liberty must know that when you restrict the rights of some, you place the rights of all in jeopardy. Since I’m sure those who actually need to be convinced that this is a problem won’t really appreciate the anarchist quote above, perhaps this one from a more respected figure will get some attention, although I’m sure you’ve heard it before. Ben Franklin said “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” In fact, he might better have said that they will get neither.

Tyranny at Home

The United States recently celebrated its birthday, the day on which a group of disgruntled colonists declared Independence from the tyrannies of the British monarchy. Among the grievances listed were that the government (in the form of King George III) had: ‘sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance’, ‘[protected troops], by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States’, ‘[imposed] Taxes on us without our Consent’ ‘[deprived] us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury’, and ‘constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms’. Any of these sound familiar? Conscription: check. Suspension of Habeas Corpus: check. Taxation without representation: check. Protection of murderers among those supposedly there to keep the peace by mock trial: check. Giant bureaucracy: check (if they only knew).

Throughout its history, the United States, it seems, has become the evil it was once fighting. While we have done away with conscription, all of these other grievances can be found right here. Anybody who has ever dealt with any level of government, even the local Department of Motor Vehicles (or Department of Transportation, or whatever it may be called in your state/area) can see to what extent we have grown our bureaucracy. Police, while not quite the “armed troops” referred to by our founding fathers, are in a similar role as the government’s alleged peacekeepers, yet they who supposedly enforce the law, are seemingly immune from it. Washington D.C. remains effectively a colony, governed and taxed by Congress’s whim, but with no representation therein. The US, while generally good about maintaining the right to trial by jury, has had several notable suspensions: Lincoln suspended habeas corpus for those who protested the Civil War, FDR suspended habeas corpus for those suspected of being Japanese traitors (known more commonly as the entire Japanese-American population) and, most recently, George W. Bush has begun to suspend the right to a speedy trial by one’s peers for terror suspects such as José Padilla, an American, arrested on American soil, who remains in the custody of the military.

As the US grows its government bigger and bigger, it seems to become more and more like the monster it once struggled to escape from. The restriction of liberties seems to get worse by the day. More bothersome still, it grows even closer to its former ruler with the gradual move towards more religious government. Jefferson said (something like) “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Perhaps his advice should be heeded.