"America’s Police Brutality Pandemic" by Paul Craig Roberts 9/25/07
Bush's "war on terror" quickly became Bush's war on Iraqi civilians. So far over one million Iraqi civilians have lost their lives because of Bush's invasion, and four million have been displaced. Iraq's infrastructure is in ruins. Disease is rampant. Normal life has disappeared.
Self-righteous Americans justify these monstrous crimes as necessary to ensure their own safety from terrorist attack. Yet, Americans are in far greater danger from their own police forces than they are from foreign terrorists. Ironically, Bush's "war on terror" has made Americans less safe at home by diminishing US civil liberty and turning an epidemic of US police brutality into a pandemic.
The only terrorist most Americans will ever encounter is a policeman with a badge, nightstick, mace and Taser. A Google search for "police brutality videos" turns up 2,210,000 entries. Some entries are foreign and some are probably duplications, but the number is so large that a person could do nothing but watch police brutality videos for the rest of his life. A search on "You Tube" alone turned up 2,280 police brutality videos. PrisonPlanet has a selection of the most outrageous recent cases.
Police brutality has crossed the line from using excessive force against a resisting Rodney King to unprovoked gratuitous violence against persons offering no resistance, such as the elderly, women, students, and elected officials. Americans are not safe anywhere from police. Police attack Americans in university libraries, in public meetings, and in their own homes
Last week we had the case of the University of Florida student who was repeatedly Tasered without cause for asking Senator Kerry some good questions in the question and answer period following Kerry's speech. Two days after the Florida student was gratuitously brutalized, Senate Republicans defeated Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy's bill to restore habeas corpus protection.
A UCLA student was Tasered by police without cause for studying in the university library without having having his student ID on his person. Following police orders to leave, the student was walking toward the door when police grabbed him and repeatedly Tasered him.
On September 19, 2007 a young woman was repeatedly Tasered without cause by a large brutal cop in a parking lot outside a night club in Warren, Ohio.
On September 14, 2007, Roseland, Indiana, city council member David Snyder was ejected from a council meeting by dictatorial council chairman Charlie Shields. Snyder had protested being limited to one minute to speak. Police goon Jack Tiller escorted Snyder out, and as Snyder exited the building, Tiller, following behind, pushed Snyder to the ground and without cause began beating Snyder in the head with a nightstick. Snyder was hospitalized.
Local TV news stations throughout the US offer an endless stream of police brutality videos, which are then posted on the stations� web sites, often with an opportunity for citizens to express their opinion of the incidents.
There are many disturbing aspects to police brutality cases.
One disturbing aspect is that the police always arrest the people that they have gratuitously brutalized. There was no justification whatsoever to arrest Councilman Snyder, or the UCLA student, or the University of Florida student. The cops committed assault against innocent citizens. The cops should have been arrested for their criminal acts. Instead, the cops cover up their own crimes by arresting their victims on false charges that are invented to justify the unprovoked police violence against citizens.
Another disturbing aspect is that no one tells the police to stop the brutality. "Free" Americans are so intimidated by police that on February 19 of this year male customers in a Chicago bar stood aside while a drunk cop weighing 251 pounds beat a 115 pound barmaid, knocking her to the floor with his fists and repeatedly kicking her, for obeying the bar rules and not serving him more drinks.
Yet another disturbing aspect is that a minority of citizens will justify each act of police brutality no matter how brutal and how unprovoked. For example, WNDU.com's poll of its viewers found that 64.2% agreed that Snyder was a victim of police brutality, but 27.8% thought that Snyder got what was coming to him. "Law and order conservatives" and other authoritarian personalities invariably defend acts of police brutality. Perhaps the police brutality pandemic will bring the day when we will be able to say that a civil libertarian is a law and order conservative who has been brutalized by police.
The most disturbing aspect is that the police usually get away with it.
I remember decades ago when civil libertarians in New York City tried to stop police brutality by establishing civilian review boards to introduce some accountability into the police's interaction with civilians. Law and order conservatives at William F. Buckley�s National Review went berserk. Accountability was "second-guessing" the police. The result would be a crime wave. And so on.
Police forces have always attracted bullies with authoritative personalities who desire to beat senseless anyone who does not quake in their presence. In the past police could get away with brutalizing blacks but not whites. Today white citizens are as likely as racial minorities to be victims of police brutality.
The police are supreme. The militarization of the police, armed now with military weapons and trained to view the general public as the enemy, against whom "pain compliance" must be used, has placed every American at risk of personal injury and false arrest from our "public protectors."
In "free and democratic America," citizens are in such great danger from police that there are websites devoted to police brutality with online forms to report the brutality.
Nine years ago Human Rights Watch published a report entitled, "Shielded from Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States." The report stated:
"Police abuse remains one of the most serious and divisive human rights violations in the United States. The excessive use of force by police officers, including unjustified shootings, severe beatings, fatal chokings, and rough treatment, persists because overwhelming barriers to accountability make it possible for officers who commit human rights violations to escape due punishment and often to repeat their offenses. Police or public officials greet each new report of brutality with denials or explain that the act was an aberration, while the administrative and criminal systems that should deter these abuses by holding officers accountable instead virtually guarantee them impunity.
"This report examines common obstacles to accountability for police abuse in fourteen large cities representing most regions of the nation. The cities examined are: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, Providence, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Research for this report was conducted over two and a half years, from late 1995 through early 1998.
"The brutality cases examined, which are set out in detail in chapters on each city, are similar to cases that continue to emerge in headlines and in survivors' complaints. It is important to note, however, that because it is difficult to obtain case information except where there is public scandal and/or prosecution, this report relies heavily on cases that have reached public attention; disciplinary action and criminal prosecution are even less common than the cases set out below would suggest." []
There is no way to hold police accountable when the president and vice president of the United States, the attorney general, and the Republican Party maintain that the civil liberties and the separation of powers mandated by the US Constitution must be abandoned in order that the executive branch can keep Americans safe from terrorists.
Even before the "war on terror," federal police murdered 100 people in the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, and no one was held accountable.
Who is a terrorist? If the police and the US government have the mentality of airport security, they cannot tell a terrorist from an 86-year old Marine general on his way to give a speech at West Point. Retired Marine Corps General Joseph J. Foss was delayed and nearly had his Medal of Honor confiscated. Airport security regarded the pin on the metal as a weapon that the 86-year old Marine general and former governor of South Dakota could use to hijack an airliner and commit a terrorist deed.
In America today, every citizen is a potential terrorist in the eyes of the authorities. Airport security makes this clear every minute of every day, as do the FBI and NSA with warrantless spying on our emails, postal mail, telephone calls, and every possible invasion of our privacy. We are all recipients of abuse of our constitutional rights whether or not we suffer beatings, Taserings, and false arrests.
The law makes it impossible for Americans to defend themselves from police brutality. Law and order conservatives have made it a felony with a long prison sentence to "assault a police officer." Assaulting a police officer means that if a police thug intends to beat your brains out with his nightstick and you disarm your assailant, you have "assaulted a police officer." If you are not shot on the spot by his backup, you will be convicted by a "law and order" jury and sent to prison.
No matter how gratuitous and violent the police brutality, a "free" American citizen can defend himself only at the expense, if not of his life, of a long stay in prison. Osama bin Laden must wish that he had such power over Americans.
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Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow�s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.
"The Iraqi Genocide" by Paul Craig Roberts 10/15/07Why has not the Turkish parliament given tit for tat and passed a resolution condemning the Iraqi Genocide?
As a result of Bush's invasion of Iraq, more than one million Iraqis have died, and several millions are displaced persons. The Iraqi death toll and the millions of uprooted Iraqis match the Armenian deaths and deportations. If one is a genocide, so is the other.
It is true that most of the Iraqi deaths have resulted from Iraqis killing one another. But it was Bush's destruction of the secular Iraqi state that unleashed the sectarian strife.
Moreover, American troops in Iraq have killed more civilians than insurgents. The US military in Iraq has fallen for every bit of disinformation fed to it by Al Qaeda personnel posing as "informants" and by Sunnis setting up Shi'ites and Shi'ites setting up Sunnis. As a result, American bombs and missiles have blown up weddings, funerals, kids playing soccer, and people shopping in bazaars and sleeping in their homes.
Not to be outdone, Bush's private Waffen SS known as Blackwater has taken to gunning Iraqi civilians down in the streets. How do Blackwater and Custer Battles killers escape the "unlawful combatant" designation?
One can only marvel at the insouciance of the US Congress to the current Iraqi Genocide while condemning Turkey for one that happened 90 years ago.
People seldom see the beam in their own eye, only the mote in the eyes of others. Every member of the Bush Regime is busily at work denouncing Iran for causing instability in the Middle East. Meanwhile, the US has invaded two countries, throwing them into total chaos, while beating the drums for war with Iran and conspiring with Israel to invade Lebanon and to attack Syria.
The indisputable facts are that the US and Israel have attacked four Middle East countries and are determined to attack a fifth. Yet, it is peaceful Iran, at war with no one, that Bush and Israel blame for causing instability in the Middle East.
Not content with its many wars in the Middle East, the Bush Regime is sponsoring wars in Africa and is setting up an African Command. The US government has been bombing and attacking other countries ever since the cold war ended. Instead of peace, the gang in Washington DC chose war.
Other than the Israel Lobby, the greatest supporters of Bush's wars are Christian evangelicals, specifically the "rapture evangelicals" and the "Christian Zionists."
I remember when Christianity was about saving one�s soul. Today it is about bringing on Armageddon. While the various evangelical Christians preach war in the Middle East, they condemn Islam for being a "warlike religion."
Americans are so full of themselves that they are blind to their extraordinary hypocrisy.
The US government has broken every agreement with Russia by withdrawing from the anti-ballistic missile treaty, pushing NATO to Russia's borders, conniving to place missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic, and buying governments in former Soviet republics and installing US military bases therein.
When Russian President Putin finally has enough and protests, the US Secretary of State blames Putin for being difficult and restarting the cold war.
Few Americans realize it, but they take the cake.
International polls show that the rest of the world regard the US and Israel as the greatest dangers to world peace. Americans claim that they are fighting wars against terrorism, but it is US and Israeli terrorism that worries everyone else. The rest of the world knows that the wars are about US and Israeli hegemony and that the US and Israel are prepared to engage in whatever acts of terror are necessary to achieve hegemony.
That is the bare fact.
When the US dollar loses its reserve currency status, the US empire will come to an abrupt end. Sooner or later the rest of the world will realize this and, in an act of self-protection, dethrone the dollar.
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"Bush’s “Permission To Fly” Proposals: Preaching Liberty, Promoting Tyranny" by Paul Craig Roberts 10/23/07Americans had best rethink the "war on terror" while they still have the liberty to do so. For all of President Bush's blah-blah talk about bringing democracy to the world, the Bush administration has proved that it is no friend of liberty at home.
The Bush administration has violated constitutional principles, US law, and the Geneva Conventions as no previous administration has done. Here is a short list of the Bush administration's crimes:
 | Spying without court warrants on Americans in violation of both the US Constitution and the FISA statute. |
| The denial of habeas corpus, attorney-client privilege, due process, and Geneva Conventions protections to those, American or foreign, designated without evidence as terrorists or enemy combatants. |
| The justification and use of torture to coerce confessions and the kidnapping of foreign nationals who are sent to be tortured in foreign prisons. |
| The initiation of military aggression against states based on intentional deception by the Bush administration of the US public and the United Nations, and the intentional fabrication of "evidence" to justify unprovoked aggression against sovereign states, which is a war crime under the Nuremberg standard established by the US. |
| Violation of the oath of office to defend the US Constitution by practically every member of the Bush administration and Congress. |
| Bush has assaulted the separation of powers and the rule of law with "signing statements" and "executive orders" that President Nixon's White House Counsel John Dean says are commands that treat the co-equal branches of government and the electorate as subservient to executive authority. In April 2006, Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage listed 750 laws "challenged" by the Bush administration. Not even the demonized president of Iran claims to be above the law. |
| Genocide against the people of Iraq where one million Iraqis have died as a result of Bush's invasion and several million Iraqis are displaced persons. |
| Massive civilian casualties in Afghanistan, which is a form of genocide in which military force is routinely applied to unarmed noncombatants. |
| Massive corruption in which no-bid contracts are issued to Republican corporations in exchange for kickbacks to political campaigns. |
| The theft of two national elections as documented in books by Mark Crispin Miller and Greg Palast. |
The Bush administration has even conducted Stalinist show trials against innocent Muslim charities as part of its propaganda to make the American people fearful that they are surrounded by hostile terrorists. In December 2001 President Bush declared the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development to be a "terrorist organization" and seized the charity's assets. Bush put the charities' officials on trial as terrorists. Six years later on October 22, 2007, after years of investigations and two months of testimony by who but "Israeli intelligence agents" (according to the New York Times), the US government's case fell apart in the courtroom. [No Convictions in Trial Against Muslim Charity, By LESLIE EATON, October 22, 2007]
One of the jurors said that the case "was strung together with macaroni noodles. There was so little evidence."
Georgetown University professor of constitutional law David D. Cole said the case "suggests the government is really pushing beyond where the law justifies them going."
While committing these unprecedented crimes, President Bush has claimed the moral high ground despite having lied to the American people and despite devastating two countries in the name of "making the world safe from terrorists."
When people in Iraq and Afghanistan are asked who are the terrorists, they answer that it is the Americans.
The Bush administration has not been held accountable for any of its crimes. By failing to hold government accountable to law, the Constitution, and the American people, the opposition party and the corporate media have abandoned their responsibility to protect freedom and democracy in the United States.
There can be no democracy where there is no government accountability, and there is no government accountability in the United States--except, of course, to the Israel Lobby.
Now the Bush administration wants to take away the American people's freedom to travel within their own country by airplane. Not content with an 80,000 "no fly" list, a subset of a 500,000-750,000 "watch list," the Bush administration's Transport Security Administration has proposed new rules [PDF] that will require Americans to get government permission 72 hours in advance prior to being allowed to board a domestic flight.
The TSA justifies this extraordinary violation of our constitutional rights on the grounds that 90 to 93 percent of all travel reservations are final by then.
So what?!
And what of the 7 to 10 percent of flights that the TSA estimates are not on the books 72 hours in advance? These are family emergencies and critical business deals. What does the TSA care if a member of your family dies while you await the government�s permission to fly?
Any agency of the government that can propose such a tyrannical regulation should be abolished. The TSA's mentality shows it to be a far greater threat to Americans than are terrorists.
Even without the "permission to fly" rule, the TSA's practices are ridiculous and unjustified. The confiscation of tooth paste and unopened bottles of perfume, the harassment of US military officers in uniform, the harassment of old people struggling with their walkers, of mothers struggling with small children--none of this makes any sense except in terms of getting Americans accustomed to harassment as a citizen's duty to government and to train a cadre to conduct warrantless searches of fellow citizens.
The no-fly list itself is absurd. If a known terrorist were to show up at an airport, he would be arrested, not refused permission to fly. Anyone else who can clear security like other passengers has every right to fly.
Set aside the violation of the Constitution and the Soviet-style tyranny of the loss of the freedom to travel and consider merely the practical aspect of the proposal. What American wants his travel plans dependent on a government bureaucracy capable of putting US Senator Ted Kennedy on the "no fly" list and capable of issuing US visas to two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers six months after they allegedly died in the 9/11 events?
If we believe the official story, 9/11 itself reveals a government totally devoid of any competence whatsoever.
The "war on terror" is fraudulent. The cruel war and the deceptive vocabulary that protects it are a cover for expanding US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East and for constructing a functioning police state at home.
A country in which people cannot make airline reservations without the government's permission is not a free country.
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