The Institutionalization of Tyranny — Paul Craig Roberts
Republicans and conservative Americans are still fighting Big
Government in its welfare state form. Apparently, they have never heard
of the militarized police state form of Big Government, or, if they
have, they are comfortable with it and have no objection.
Republicans, including those in the House and Senate, are content for
big government to initiate wars without a declaration of war or even
Congress’ assent, and to murder with drones citizens of countries with
which Washington is not at war. Republicans do not mind that federal
“security” agencies spy on American citizens without warrants and record
every email, Internet site visited, Facebook posting, cell phone call,
and credit card purchase. Republicans in Congress even voted to fund the
massive structure in Utah in which this information is stored.
But heaven forbid that big government should do anything for a poor person.
Republicans have been fighting Social Security ever since President
Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it into law in the 1930s, and they have
been fighting Medicare ever since President Lyndon Johnson signed it
into law in 1965 as part of the Great Society initiatives.
Conservatives accuse liberals of the “institutionalization of
compassion.” Writing in the February, 2013, issue of Chronicles, John C.
Seiler, Jr., damns Johnson’s Great Society as “a major force in turning
a country that still enjoyed a modicum of republican liberty into the
centralized, bureaucratized, degenerate, and bankrupt state we endure
today.”
It doesn’t occur to conservatives that in Europe democracy, liberty,
welfare, rich people, and national health services all coexist, but that
somehow American liberty is so fragile that it is overturned by a
limited health program only available to the elderly.
Neither does it occur to conservative Republicans that it is far
better to institutionalize compassion than to institutionalize tyranny.
The institutionalization of tyranny is the achievement of the
Bush/Obama regimes of the 21st century. This, and not the Great Society,
is the decisive break from the American tradition. The Bush Republicans
demolished almost all of the constitutional protections of liberty
erected by the Founding Fathers. The Obama Democrats codified Bush’s
dismantling of the Constitution and removed the protection afforded to
citizens from being murdered by the government without due process. One
decade was time enough for two presidents to make Americans the least
free people of any developed country, indeed, perhaps of any country. In
what other country or countries does the chief executive officer have
the right to murder citizens without due process?
It turns one’s stomach to listen to conservatives bemoan the
destruction of liberty by compassion while they institutionalize
torture, indefinite detention in violation of habeas corpus, murder of
citizens on suspicion and unproven accusation alone, complete and total
violation of privacy, interference with the right to travel by
unaccountable “no-fly” lists and highway check points, the brutalization
of citizens and those exercising their right to protest by police,
frame-ups of critics, and narrow the bounds of free speech.
In Amerika today only the executive branch of the federal government
has any privacy. The privacy is institutional, not personal–witness the
fate of CIA director Petraeus. While the executive branch destroys the
privacy of every one else, it insists on its own privilege of privacy.
National security is invoked to shield the executive branch from its
criminal actions. Federal prosecutors actually conduct trials in which
the evidence against defendants is classified and withheld from
defendants’ attorneys. Attorneys such as Lynne Stewart have been
imprisoned for not following orders from federal prosecutors to violate
the attorney-client privilege.
Conservatives accept the monstrous police state that has been
erected, because they think it makes them safe from “Muslim terrorism.”
They haven’t the wits to see that they are now open to terrorism by the
government.
Consider, for example, the case of Bradley Manning. He is accused of
leaking confidential information that reveals US government war crimes
despite the fact that it is the responsibility of every soldier to
reveal war crimes. Virtually every one of Manning’s constitutional
rights has been violated by the US government. He has been tortured. In
an effort to coerce Manning into admitting trumped-up charges and
implicating WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, Manning had his right to a speedy
trial violated by nearly three years of pre-trial custody and repeated
trial delays by government prosecutors. And now the judge, Col. Denise
Lind, who comes across as a member of the prosecution rather than an
impartial judge, has ruled that Manning cannot use as evidence the
government’s own reports that the leaked information did not harm
national security. Lind has also thrown out the legal principle of mens rea by ruling that Manning’s motive for leaking information about US war crimes cannot be presented as evidence in his trial. http://www.armytimes.com/news/2013/01/ap-judge-limits-motive-evidence-wikileaks-case-bradely-manning-011613/
Mens rea says that a crime requires criminal intent. By
discarding this legal principle, Lind has prevented Manning from showing
that his motive was to do his duty under the military code and reveal
evidence of war crimes. This allows prosecutors to turn a dutiful act
into the crime of aiding the enemy by revealing classified information.
Of course, nothing that Manning allegedly revealed helped the enemy
in any way as the enemy, having suffered the war crimes, was already
aware of them.
Obama Democrats are no more disturbed than conservative Republicans
that a dutiful American soldier is being prosecuted because he has a
moral conscience. In Manning’s trial, the government’s definition of
victory has nothing whatsoever to do with justice prevailing. For
Washington, victory means stamping out moral conscience and protecting a
corrupt government from public exposure of its war crimes.
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