Category Archives: Constitution
Ron Paul Criticizes Boston Lockdown: ‘We Had Martial Law Out There,’ ‘It’s Criminal’
Reason.com: When Cops Claimed the Right to Search Anyone Who “Causes Fear in a Community”
Radley Balko has published a series of stories at The Huffington Post that use the government’s response to the marathon bombings as a newshook to write about Boston’s recurring role in the history of militarized policing. The most interesting article in the sequence, I think, is the segment on the modern drug war. Here’s the setup:
In the early 1980s, Boston authorities introduced widespread stop-and-frisks, barricades, and other high-intensity policing tactics in high-crime neighborhoods like Roxbury and Matapan. Critics claimed police were implementing a “search on sight” policy of black men in some neighborhoods, doing away even with the low bar of needing reasonable suspicion before conducting stop-and-frisks. Police admitted a search-on-sight policy, but only for anyone known to be or suspected of being in a gang, along with anyone who associates with those people. They also claimed to be following a vague policy that allowed them to search anyone they felt “causes fear in a community.”
According to a subsequent lawsuit, black men were stopped, patted down, and in some cases strip searched for no more than wearing the sports logo of a particular professional sports team. A Boston Globe investigation found 15 people who had been stripped searched on the street, but were never arrested.
State Sen. William Owens said the tactics were alienating an entire generation of black men, and that had effectively imposed martial law on some communities. Tensions boiled over in 1989 when a plainclothes officer shot 30-year-old Rolando Car during a stop-and-frisk after mistaking Carr’s keys for a gun.
At another point, “Residents of Lawrence were issued passes that they had to show to get into and out of the neighborhood. Anyone entering Lawrence had their vehicle license plate documented by police manning a barricade. A letter was then sent to the registered owner of the vehicle to let him know the car had been spotted in Lawrence.” The police chief, Balko notes, “described the tactics as a form of community policing.”
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Click here for the full article.
http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/06/when-cops-claimed-the-right-to-search-an
Lew Rockwell: Another Nail in the Neocon Coffin
The recent opening of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity was a watershed moment in American history. There has never been anything quite like it. Ideologically diverse, the Ron Paul Institute reaches out to all Americans, and indeed to people all over the world, who find the spectrum of foreign-policy opinion in the United States to be unreasonably narrow. Until Ron Paul and his new institute, there was no resolutely anti-interventionist foreign-policy organization to be found.
Neoconservatives have not responded warmly to the announcement of Ron’s new institute. Whatever their particular gripes, we can be absolutely certain of the real reason for their unhappiness: they have never faced systematic, organized opposition before.
The Democrats would see the earth tumble into the sun before supporting nonintervention abroad, so they pose no fundamental problem for the neocons. Ron Paul, on the other hand, is real opposition, and he can mobilize an army. The neocons know it. What’s Tim Pawlenty up to these days? Where are his legions of well-read young fans who seek to carry on his philosophy? You see the point.
For the first time, strict nonintervention will have a permanent voice in American life. It is another nail in the neocon coffin. The neocons know they are losing the young. Bright kids who believe in freedom aren’t rallying to Mitt Romney or David Horowitz, and, like anyone with a critical mind and a moral compass, they are not going along with the regime’s war propaganda.
At this historic moment, I thought it might be appropriate to set down some thoughts on war – a manifesto for peace, as it were.
(1) Our rulers are not a law unto themselves.
Our warmakers believe they are exempt from normal moral rules. Because they are at war, they get to suspend all decency, all the norms that govern the conduct and interaction of human beings in all other circumstances. The anodyne term “collateral damage,” along with perfunctory and meaningless words of regret, are employed when innocent civilians, including children, are maimed and butchered. A private individual behaving this way would be called a sociopath. Give him a fancy title and a nice suit, and he becomes a statesman.
Let us pursue the subversive mission of applying the same moral rules against theft, kidnapping, and murder to our rulers that we apply to everyone else.
(2) Humanize the demonized.
We must encourage all efforts to humanize the populations of countries in the crosshairs of the warmakers. The general public is whipped into a war frenzy without knowing the first thing – or hearing only propaganda – about the people who will die in that war. The establishment’s media won’t tell their story, so it is up to us to use all the resources we as individuals have, especially online, to communicate the most subversive truth of all: that the people on the other side are human beings, too. This will make it marginally more difficult for the warmakers to carry out their Two Minutes’ Hate, and can have the effect of persuading Americans with normal human sympathies to distrust the propaganda that surrounds them.
(3) If we oppose aggression, let us oppose all aggression.
If we believe in the cause of peace, putting a halt to aggressive violence between nations is not enough. We should not want to bring about peace overseas in order that our rulers may turn their guns on peaceful individuals at home. Away with all forms of aggression against peaceful people.
(4) Never use “we” when speaking of the government.
The people and the warmakers are two distinct groups. We must never say “we” when discussing the US government’s foreign policy. For one thing, the warmakers do not care about the opinions of the majority of Americans. It is silly and embarrassing for Americans to speak of “we” when discussing their government’s foreign policy, as if their input were necessary to or desired by those who make war.
But it is also wrong, not to mention mischievous. When people identify themselves so closely with their government, they perceive attacks on their government’s foreign policy as attacks on themselves. It then becomes all the more difficult to reason with them – why, you’re insulting my foreign policy!
Likewise, the use of “we” feeds into war fever. “We” have to get “them.” People root for their governments as they would for a football team. And since we know ourselves to be decent and good, “they” can only be monstrous and evil, and deserving of whatever righteous justice “we” dispense to them.
The antiwar left falls into this error just as often. They appeal to Americans with a catalogue of horrific crimes “we” have committed. But we haven’t committed those crimes. The same sociopaths who victimize Americans themselves every day, and over whom we have no real control, committed those crimes.
(4) War is not “good for the economy.”
A commitment to peace is a wonderful thing and worthy of praise, but it needs to be coupled with an understanding of economics. A well-known US senator recently deplored cuts in military spending because “when you cut military spending you lose jobs.” There is no economic silver lining to war or to preparation for war.
Those who would tell us that war brings prosperity are grossly mistaken, even in the celebrated case of World War II. The particular stimulus that war gives to certain sectors of the economy comes at the expense of civilian needs, and directs resources away from the improvement of the common man’s standard of living.
Ludwig von Mises, the great free-market economist, wrote, that “war prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings. The earthquake means good business for construction workers, and cholera improves the business of physicians, pharmacists, and undertakers; but no one has for that reason yet sought to celebrate earthquakes and cholera as stimulators of the productive forces in the general interest.”
Elsewhere, Mises described the essence of so-called war prosperity: it “enriches some by what it takes from others. It is not rising wealth but a shifting of wealth and income.”
(5) Support the free market? Then oppose war.
Ron Paul has restored the proper association of capitalism with peace and nonintervention. Leninists and other leftists, burdened by a false understanding of economics and the market system, used to claim that capitalism needed war, that alleged “overproduction” of goods forced market societies to go abroad – and often to war – in search for external markets for their excess goods.
This was always economic nonsense. It was political nonsense, too: the free market needs no parasitical institution to grease the skids for international commerce, and the same philosophy that urges nonaggression among individual human beings compels nonaggression between geographical areas.
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Click below for the full article.
http://www.24hgold.com/english/news-gold-silver-another-nail-in-the-neocon-coffin.aspx?article=4355092296G10020&redirect=false&contributor=Lew+Rockwell
Reuters: U.S. appeals court strikes down mandate on union rights
The National Labor Relations Board violated the law when it required U.S. businesses to put notices in their workplaces and on their websites informing employees of their right to unionize, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down the rule, finding that federal law prohibits the labor board from punishing a business for speech, or lack of it, as long as the business does not issue threats.
Freedom of speech “necessarily protects … the right of employers (and unions) not to speak,” Judge Raymond Randolph wrote for the appeals court.
In mandating the notices in 2011, a majority of the labor board appointed by President Barack Obama said that employees cannot fully exercise their rights unless they know what their rights are.
Business trade associations sued within days, arguing that the “11-by-17” posters violated corporate speech rights.
The ruling for the trade associations, including the National Association of Manufacturers, is the second major defeat at the appeals court for the labor board this year.
In January, the court invalidated Obama’s appointments to the board during a period of congressional inactivity. The Obama administration has since asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the ruling.
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Click below for the article on Reuters.com
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/07/us-usa-courts-laborboard-idUSBRE9460LD20130507
NY Times: U.S. Engaged in Torture After 9/11, Review Concludes
A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.
The sweeping, 600-page report says that while brutality has occurred in every American war, there never before had been “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.” The study, by an 11-member panel convened by the Constitution Project, a legal research and advocacy group, is to be released on Tuesday morning.
Debate over the coercive interrogation methods used by the administration of President George W. Bush has often broken down on largely partisan lines. The Constitution Project’s task force on detainee treatment, led by two former members of Congress with experience in the executive branch — a Republican, Asa Hutchinson, and a Democrat, James R. Jones — seeks to produce a stronger national consensus on the torture question.
While the task force did not have access to classified records, it is the most ambitious independent attempt to date to assess the detention and interrogation programs. A separate 6,000-page report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s record by the Senate Intelligence Committee, based exclusively on agency records, rather than interviews, remains classified.
“As long as the debate continues, so too does the possibility that the United States could again engage in torture,” the report says.
The use of torture, the report concludes, has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.” The task force found “no firm or persuasive evidence” that these interrogation methods produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means. While “a person subjected to torture might well divulge useful information,” much of the information obtained by force was not reliable, the report says.
Interrogation and abuse at the C.I.A.’s so-called black sites, the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba and war-zone detention centers, have been described in considerable detail by the news media and in declassified documents, though the Constitution Project report adds many new details.
It confirms a report by Human Rights Watch that one or more Libyan militants were waterboarded by the C.I.A., challenging the agency’s longtime assertion that only three Al Qaeda prisoners were subjected to the near-drowning technique. It includes a detailed account by Albert J. Shimkus Jr., then a Navy captain who ran a hospital for detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison, of his own disillusionment when he discovered what he considered to be the unethical mistreatment of prisoners.
But the report’s main significance may be its attempt to assess what the United States government did in the years after 2001 and how it should be judged. The C.I.A. not only waterboarded prisoners, but slammed them into walls, chained them in uncomfortable positions for hours, stripped them of clothing and kept them awake for days on end.
The question of whether those methods amounted to torture is a historically and legally momentous issue that has been debated for more than a decade inside and outside the government. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote a series of legal opinions from 2002 to 2005 concluding that the methods were not torture if used under strict rules; all the memos were later withdrawn. News organizations have wrestled with whether to label the brutal methods unequivocally as torture in the face of some government officials’ claims that they were not.
In addition, the United States is a signatory to the international Convention Against Torture, which requires the prompt investigation of allegations of torture and the compensation of its victims.
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Click below for the full article.
What is the right fix to social security? Is there one?
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The above chart is taken from the article “Is Obama’s New Index the Right Fix for Social Security?” from the Wall Street Cheat Sheet’s website, which can be viewed below. It does start one to question just what has Social Security become and how should we fix it? (If it should be fixed).
Fox News Fail: George W. Bush has saved more lives than any American president
We aren’t going to post any of this gem of an article, but you can check it out at the link below. This one took the cake as the Fox News Fail of the week (and probably month), but there were plenty of other contenders as Fox News tries to help remake the image of George W. Bush, the President who pushed for the Unconstitutional Patriot Act, created the TSA and DHS, expanded the size of government, fought Unconstitutional wars while going back on 2000 campaign promises of his foreign policy, and whose reckless spending left America on a pathway to bankruptcy.
NOTE: Dana Perino’s take deserves honorable mention:
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/04/23/my-favorite-memories-president-george-w-bush/
Steve Chapman of the Washington Examiner: Stay out of Syria
With the Iraq war behind us and our departure from Afghanistan underway, the United States could be entering a well-earned respite from fighting. But even before peace can take hold, hawks are singing the old country song: “I’ve enjoyed as much of this as I can stand.”
They see a way to escape in Syria, where rebels have been fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad for more than two years. For most of that time, Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have been leading the call for U.S. military intervention — and President Barack Obama has been declining the invitation.
His critics, however, think they now have him where they want him. Obama earlier said that any use of chemical weapons by Assad would be a “game changer,” and last week, the White House said it thinks he’s used sarin gas, though it said further investigation would be needed.
Obama was careful in his Tuesday news conference to emphasize the uncertainties: “What we now have is evidence that chemical weapons have been used inside of Syria, but we don’t know how they were used, when they were used, who used them.”
So far he’s settled for a minimalist response: possibly sending weapons to the insurgents. He added that as a result of the gas attacks, “there are some options that we might not otherwise exercise that we would strongly consider.”
Strongly consider? My advice is to consider them till the cows come home — just don’t actually adopt them. The options at hand are generally dangerous, ineffectual or both.
Graham says the United States has to act because “the greatest risk is a failed state with chemical weapons falling in the hands of radical Islamists.” In reality, the greatest risk is putting our troops into a civil war where they could end up targeted by both sides, as we ingeniously arranged in Iraq. As we showed there, removing a dictator can unleash endless sectarian conflict. Fortunately, even McCain says he doesn’t favor American boots on the ground.
The preferred instrument of hawks is air power — to enforce a no-fly zone against the regime or destroy military assets. But it’s a lot easier said than done.
To begin with, Syria has one of the best air defense systems in the world, built with help from Russia. “Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, frequently singles out Mr. Assad’s air-defense prowess as the biggest single obstacle to U.S. intervention,” reports The Wall Street Journal. Casualty-free intervention, a la Libya, is not a realistic possibility in Syria.
Taking out Assad’s anti-aircraft batteries — or tanks, trucks and infantry — would inflict heavy casualties on the people we’d like to help. Much of the fighting takes place in cities, where civilians are dangerously exposed.
Even precision bombs launched from drones, notes University of Chicago scholar Robert Pape, author of “Bombing to Win,” have a blast radius of up to 50 feet, and their shock waves can easily bring down neighboring buildings. Our drone strikes in rural Pakistan do enough collateral damage to sow deep anger among the locals. In urban Syria, civilian fatalities would be far higher.
U.S. bombing might backfire by inducing the regime to make full use of its chemical weapons while it can. Air power also can’t head off the danger of those supplies falling into the hands of Islamic radicals. Bombing chemical weapons sites, even if we could identify them, would mean spewing deadly nerve agents over a wide area — which sort of resembles the outcome we’re trying to prevent.
But securing them from militants would require ground forces — as many as 75,000, according to the Pentagon. Transporting the stockpiles out of the country or destroying them would take a lot of troops and time. “There is no exit strategy with this option either,” says Michael Desch, a national security scholar at the University of Notre Dame.
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Click below for the full article.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/steve-chapman-stay-out-of-syria/article/2528663
Opposing Views: Rapper Xstrav Arrested for Drinking Iced Tea in Parking Lot
Two videos (below) of the arrest of rapper Xstrav (Christopher Beatty) on April 29 outside an ABC Liquor Store in Fayetteville, North Carolina, have gone viral on the web.
According to LatinRapper.com, Xstrav and fellow rapper Tino Brown were waiting in the parking lot for Money Mal to meet them when a man walked up and asked repeatedly what Xstrav was drinking.
Brown, who was holding a camera or a cell phone, recorded the entire incident.
Xstrav told the man several times he was drinking Arizona Half & Half Iced Tea. Xstrav then asked the man several times to identify himself, to which he finally said “police,” but did not immediately show a badge or other form of ID.
The plainclothes police officer told Xstrav that he was “trespassing” and had to leave the property. When the rapper refused, the officer wrestled Xstrav to the ground and handcuffed him.
The plainclothes police officer did flash what may have been a badge for a few seconds, but apparently did not read Xstrav his Miranda Rights.
In the second video, a police car drove up with a uniformed police officer and Xstrav was led into the police car.
While some viewers have suggested the videos were fake, the North Carolina Court System website shows Beatty was charged with trespassing and resisting a public officer.
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Click below for the link to the article on Opposing View’s website.