From Liberty to Force

Thought Criminals: Mark and Deborah Kuhn display the "desecrated" flag that provided the pretext for their arrest.


"[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.... [America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty."

John Quincy Adams, July 4, 1821 (emphasis added)



To exercise force abroad, the State must resort to coercion at home. Our present circumstances are somewhat unusual, given that Washington's imperial designs are being sustained with rented troops and borrowed money; this has obviated, at least for a while, the demand for War taxes, exacted from both our treasure and our blood. The day rapidly approaches when such impositions will be made. For now it's useful to contemplate how the war in Iraq is helping cultivate tyrannical habits of mind among the State's armed enforcement agents. U.S. soldiers carrying out the occupation of Iraq routinely break down doors in the middle of the night in search of insurgents and other troublesome individuals.

Here's how the routine is described by Sergeant John Bruhns, who served in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib (the town, not the gulag):

"You run in. And if there's lights, you turn them on--if the lights are working. If not, you've got flashlights.... You leave one rifle team outside while one rifle team goes inside. Each rifle team leader has a headset on with an earpiece and a microphone where he can communicate with the other rifle team leader that's outside.

You go up the stairs. You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall. You have junior-level troops, PFCs [privates first class], specialists will run into the other rooms and grab the family, and you'll group them all together. Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds and you make sure there's no weapons or anything that they can use to attack us.

You get the interpreter and you get the man of the home, and you have him at gunpoint, and you'll ask the interpreter to ask him: 'Do you have any weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda, anything at all--anything--anything in here that would lead us to believe that you are somehow involved in insurgent activity or anti-coalition forces activity?'

Normally they'll say no, because that's normally the truth," Sergeant Bruhns said. "So what you'll do is you'll take his sofa cushions and you'll dump them. If he has a couch, you'll turn the couch upside down. You'll go into the fridge, if he has a fridge, and you'll throw everything on the floor, and you'll take his drawers and you'll dump them.... You'll open up his closet and you'll throw all the clothes on the floor and basically leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it.

And if you find something, then you'll detain him. If not, you'll say, 'Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.' So you've just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you've destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes." (Emphasis added)

Apart from relatively minor details, what Sgt. Bruhns describes here is not that different from a no-knock raid carried out by a paramilitary drug enforcement squad. The element worthy of our particular attention in the Iraq example is the focus on "anti-U.S. propaganda," a description that could apply to any criticism of the occupation. It is fairly common for Iraqis to be detained for possessing "anti-U.S." materials.

I believe that Mark and Deborah Kuhn of Asheville, North Carolina are the first U.S. citizens to experience arrest and detention by military personnel for the supposed offense of publicizing "anti-U.S." sentiments -- in this case, a U.S. flag displayed upside-down and decorated with an anti-Bush display.

As previously recounted in this space, the Kuhns' display was noticed by Staff Sergeant Mark Radford of the North Carolina National Guard, who took offense and, more importantly, took it upon himself to visit the Kuhns and upbraid them for it.

After failing to over-awe the Kuhns, Radford contacted a "fellow National Guardsman" and Iraq veteran -- 25-year-old Brian Scarborough, a newly minted Buncome County Sheriff's Deputy.
Apparently these two heroes decided to show the Kuhns how they take care of business in Baghdad, Hooo-ah.

The foregoing was not intended to mock people who have worn the uniform honorably; such individuals are entitled to respect and, where appropriate, our gratitude. It is my intention to mock Radford and Scarborough, however, since their behavior was that of bullies whose instincts are similar to those who belong to street gangs and other criminal cliques.

This point has been made before, but it bears repeating: Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of law enforcement officers either have or will serve in Iraq. When they return to domestic duty, they will retain certain habits of mind they acquired or refined in combat. Coupled with the ever-increasing militarization of the police, this is a dangerous thing. When this is combined with resentments of the "stab-in-the-back" variety, the results could be catastrophic.

Buncome County Sheriff Van Duncan, who seems to be pretty typical of the new breed (he places a lot of emphasis on "community policing" and expanding the manpower pool), generously conceded that the Kuhns "are allowed to do" what they did with their own flag. However -- and there is always a "however" with people like Duncan -- "if it weren't for young men like Deputy Scarborough, we wouldn't have those rights."

The unpalatable truth is that "young men like Deputy Scarborough" are an acute danger to our rights, and the indispensable tools of those who seek to exterminate our rights.

This isn't because the Brian Scarboroughs are depraved, for the most part; it's because they've been suckled on the Regime's ideology, in which "freedom" is not valued as highly as force, and establishing the state's dominion, rather than protecting individual liberty, is the objective of government.




Please be sure to check out The Right Source and the Liberty Minute archive.

In Defense of Lawless Order: Mansfield's Paean to Fascism

“Law consists of two lines above my signature.” -- Saddam Hussein

"I'm the commander in chief, see, I don't need to explain, I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting part about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation." -- George W. Bush

Harvard Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield's May 2 Wall Street Journal essay “The Case for the Strong Executive” is a remarkable brief on behalf of unreconstructed fascist rule through an Executive emancipated from the rule of law.

Mansfield, who unblushingly admits that the alternative to the rule of law is "tyranny," insists that the "defects" of our system of liberty under law suggest "the need for one-man rule."

Seriously. He really wrote those words. And he apparently meant them.

He likewise maintains that the rule of law "is inferior to the living intelligence of a wise man on the spot."

This presumably would be true of our incumbent tyrant, an individual who displays no symptoms of either intelligence or wisdom.

To the best of my admittedly limited knowledge, Mansfield -- who is making his bid to become the neo-conservative Giovanni Gentile -- is the first American public intellectual of consequence to offer the unflinching declaration, by way of an op-ed in a prominent mainstream periodical, that the rule of law is disposable – and that the “executive power” supposedly embodied in the president exists apart from the law.

Mansfield refers to the struggle between “the strong executive and its adversary, the rule of law” -- a formulation that cannot co-exist with the constitutional mandate (which is also cited by the professor) that the president “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” If the executive is an adversary of the law, how can he carry out the function of enforcing it?

Like John C. Yoo and other exponents of unlimited executive power in the Bush Regime, Mansfield believes that the president draws his power not from the Constitution but from “Necessity” -- or, as Machiavelli (whose dubious authority the professor repeatedly invokes) puts it, la necessita che non da tempo (“the necessity that allows no time”).

In times of crisis, therefore, the president, as head of the “energetic” branch of government, can exercise plenary power, at least according to Mansfield's model. In this he would certainly be in agreement with the energetic chief executive who seized extraordinary powers to February 28, 1933 to deal with a crisis precipitated by the burning of Germany's Reichstag Building.

But this comparison is somewhat unfair .... to Hitler and his followers, that is.

The Nazi definition of Fuhrerprinzip posited that the chief executive was the embodiment of the General Will.

This was explained in the Organization Book of the German National Socialist Party:

The Führer-Reich of the [German] people is founded on the recognition that the true will of the people cannot be disclosed through parliamentary votes and plebiscites but that the will of the people in its pure and uncorrupted form can only be expressed through the Führer.... He shapes the collective will of the people within himself and enjoys the political unity and entirety of the people in opposition to individual interests.... [His] power is not limited by checks and controls, by special autonomous bodies or individual rights, but it is free and independent, all-inclusive and unlimited.... He is responsible only to his conscience and the people....

In practice, of course, Hitler and his clique didn't defer to the will of the “people” in any meaningful sense. Be that as it may, Mansfield's version of the “Leader Principle” is actually more radical than the official Nazi version of that doctrine, since he begins with the assumption that the president – by virtue of some divine afflatus, perhaps? -- is endowed with insight superior to that of the common people, and thus has the power, nay, the moral responsibility to defy the public will:

“A strong executive is requisite to oppose majority faction produced by temporary delusions in the people. For the Federalist, a strong executive must exercise his strength especially against the people, not showing them `servile pliancy.... `Responsibility' is not mere responsiveness to the people; it means doing what the people would want done if they were apprised of the circumstances.”

I wouldn't presume to know Mr. Mansfield's unspoken desires and motivations. It is significant, though, that the lines above saw print just a day after the Grand and Glorious Decider, in defiance of public opinion, vetoed a military appropriations measure that oh-so-tentatively prefigured an end to his precious war.

I can't help but suspect that this was – I'll be delicate here – an act of rectal osculation by a servile court academic. It is also a complete inversion of the description offered in the Federalist of the executive's role.

Here are a couple of "energetic executives" who shared Mansfield's hostility to the rule of law and civil liberties.

What the Founders understood, and the Idiot King's war in Iraq demonstrates beyond dispute, is that a lawless executive is the public official most likely to induce and capitalize on “temporary delusions of the people.”

The strength and energy the executive is supposed to exercise consists of holding fast against transient democratic pressures to aggrandize the central government; it is not his role to use whatever powers he can arrogate to himself to overcome public opposition to expensive and freedom-devouring central government undertakings.

As it happens, Mansfield has as little use for individual liberty as he has for the rule of law. This isn't surprising, since these two concepts are intimately intertwined – just as foreign war is joined to executive lawlessness in unholy wedlock.

“In our time,” the professor pontificates, “an opinion has sprung up in liberal circles particularly that civil liberties must always be kept intact regardless of circumstances. This opinion assumes that civil liberties have the status of natural liberties, and are inalienable.”

As Thomas Jefferson might interject at this point, “Well, duh.”

Mansfield, however, disdains the notion that liberties of any sort inhere in the individual, urging instead that we accept a crude utilitarian premise. The needs of the many – as perceived by the lawless executive -- nullify the rights of the few:

“Civil liberties are for majorities as well as minorities, and no one should be considered to have rights against society whose exercise would bring society to ruin. The usual danger in a republic is tyranny of the majority.... But in time of war the greater danger may be to the majority from a minority, and the government will be a greater friend than enemy to liberty. Vigilant citizens must be able to adjust their view of the source of danger, and change front if necessary. `Civil liberties' belong to all, not only to the less powerful or less esteemed, and the true balance of liberty and security cannot be taken as given without regard to the threat.”

It's important to recognize – as Mansfield certainly must – that the present argument over “the true balance of liberty and security” does not involve only “civil liberties,” but also the most basic individual rights and immunities long recognized in our Anglo-Saxon culture. We've long since ceased to argue over how to fine-tune the constitutional assignment of powers, or even over whether the Constitution should be followed at all.

At this point, freedom-focused people are trying to restore the Magna Carta by undoing the Bush Regime's repeal of the Writ of habeas corpus.

Regarding that fundamental, definitional due process guarantee – the literal foundation of our system of liberty under law -- official position of the Bush Regime today is exactly the same as that of Hitler's regime when it suspended habeas corpus on February 28, 1933: Any individual, citizen or non-citizen, can be deprived of the law's protection at the whim of the Executive, and imprisoned indefinitely without legal recourse.

Totalitarianism could be described as the creation of order without law through a regime claiming limitless power (“power without limit, resting directly on force, restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestricted by rules,” as Lenin put it).

Professor Mansfield's protracted exercise in undergraduate-level sophistry is intended as a defense of the Bush Regime's version of this lawless order. What better evidence can we find to support the once-controversial proposition that “Harvard Hates America”?

Please be sure to stop by The Right Source.

The Treason Called "Executive Privilege"

The execution of King Charles I:
How Parliament disposed of that tyrant's claims of "executive privilege"

“Treason is a matter of dates,” insisted Talleyrand, who despite being a physical cripple was ideologically double-jointed and thus (unlike many of his revolutionary comrades) was able to keep his head attached to its neck.

White House spokesliar Tony Snow displays more than a touch of Talleyrand in his ardent defense of what he once reviled – the concept of executive privilege.

In a syndicated column published in March 1998 (exhumed by the redoubtable Glenn Greenwald, and given wider circulation by Editor & Publisher), Snow waxed indignant about the Clinton junta's invocation of executive privilege in an effort to deflect the Ken Starr inquiry:

"Evidently, Mr. Clinton wants to shield virtually any communications that take place within the White House compound on the theory that all such talk contributes in some way, shape or form to the continuing success and harmony of an administration. Taken to its logical extreme, that position would make it impossible for citizens to hold a chief executive accountable for anything. He would have a constitutional right to cover up.”

Nearly a decade later, as the spokesman for a regime whose criminal behavior eclipses that of the Clintonites, Snow has discovered that the concept of executive privilege is the highest and most sacred governing principle.

In fact, as he informed CBS's Harry Smith during their recent dust-up, from the perspective of the Bush regime, “Congress ... does not have constitutional oversight responsibility over the White House.”

Snow's comment was one of those instances in which the essential fascism of the Bush regime vents to the surface, in the fashion of a gust of superheated, toxic gases seeping to the surface as an overture to a volcanic eruption.

(Another memorable instance occurred last year when a loyal Bushevik in the "Justice" Department told Senator Patrick Leahy – in all apparent seriousness – that “the president is always right.”)

From the Bushevik perspective – which is the distillation of the power-obsessed cult that conservatism has become – the presidency is a self-existing entity superior to every institution under heaven (and, on a good day, superior in some respects to Providence Himself).

This doctrine is alien to our Constitution, and to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of liberty under law. It does have a precedent, however, in the royal privilege claims asserted by King James I, the sexually depraved early 17^th Century English monarch, in his essay Basilikon Doron, a document intended to tutor his son in the ways of royal absolutism. The doctrine contained in that tract was nothing less than a prototype for the modern totalitarian concept of Fuhrerprinzip.

British legal expert Geoffrey Robertson summarizes James I's chief claims in his immensely important book The Tyrannicide Brief:

“James preached the benefits of what would now be described as a benign political and spiritual dictatorship, in which the King governed through an elite, chosen and discarded at his own discretion, comprising his ministers, his bishops and judges, who must never question the royal prerogative, for `that is to take away the mystical reverence that belongs to those that sit in the throne of God.'”

“In this Stuart utopia,” comments Robinson, “Parliament was irritating and irrelevant,” and the king was to be regarded as “`absolute master of the lives and possessions of his subjects; his acts are not open to inquiry or dispute, and no misdeeds can ever justify resistance.'”

James' successor was his small, stammering and petulant son Charles, who (in Robertson's words) “grew up in a narcissistic cocoon, unconcerned about the feelings and aspirations of other classes and citizens....”

Charles I was, in every significant way, a precursor to George W. Bush.

Charles built upon his father's legacy of regal lawlessness; his escalating conflict with Parliament included usurpation of the Parliament's power to enact taxes, and corruption of the judiciary into a servile tool of the throne through the notorious “Star Chamber” courts (which were inspired by similarly discreditable tribunals created by previous monarchs). He suspended habeas corpus and claimed the right to imprison people indefinitely at whim “by His Majesty's special command.”

Angered by these usurpations, and anxious to preserve the liberties won at Runnymede, Parliament enacted a document called the Petition of Right, intended to provide statutory protection for ancient rights; it reaffirmed the habeas corpus guarantee, extended protection against the quartering of troops in civilian homes, and prohibited the king from imposing martial law in peacetime.

Charles suffered the Petition's enactment, and promptly dismissed it. Eventually he dissolved the Commons, and during the entire decade of the 1630s refused to convene Parliament, ruling as a royal dictator. In 1642, the conflict between the Parliament and Throne blossomed into full-fledged civil war, which culminated with the trial, conviction, and execution of King Charles for treason.

“It had been with the criminal object of securing unlimited and tyrannical power that Charles I had levied war against Parliament and had set out to destroy the very people whose life and liberty he was obliged to preserve,” writes Robertson.

There is no reason to believe that Bush is less than deadly serious about his intent to deflect congressional subpoenas to protect his courtiers. Previous presidents who have dealt with similar challenges – Nixon, during Watergate; Reagan, during Iran-Contra; and even Clinton during the Lewinsky disgrace – have eventually deferred to Congress, rather than defying it.

Bush will almost certainly defy Congress. And if the conflict escalates further, he may eventually have to exercise the usurped powers he claimed last October 17, when he signed into “law” two measures that would establish his own version of the Star Chamber courts and use the National Guard as his proprietary army.

Even if he should decline to employ such severe means, George W. Bush, like his predecessor Charles I, would have to make war on the legislative branch -- either literally or in everything but name -- in order to defend royal prerogatives alien to our Anglo-Saxon heritage of law.

That was treason in 1642, and it remains treason today – the sophisms of Talleyrand and Tony Snow notwithstanding.

Please visit The Right Source for freedom-centered news, commentary, talk radio -- and an action program to take back our liberty.