Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

November 20, 2007

The ruling party of Iraq under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is called the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, or SIIC. It was organized in 1982 by Iraqi exiles living in Iran.

Despite the fact that the SIIC remains intimately connected to Iran, the Bush administration has given that party its full and unconditional support.

At the same time the administration has been arming and equipping Sunni Muslim factions that are funded and supported by Saudi Arabia. Many of the Sunni insurgents now receiving Washington's support are allies of al-Qaeda.

Yet another division is opening up between al-Maliki's ruling party and a political bloc led by the radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

While the recent decline in Iraqi violence is welcome, it's merely a lull in what promises to be an exceptionally bloody civil war, with tens of thousands of US troops caught in the middle. We should stop trying to micro-manage Iraq's sectarian feuds and bring our troops home immediately.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

November 19, 2007

The roots of our long and deepening involvement in Iraq go back more than three decades.

In 1975, a highly placed Pentagon policy-maker published an anonymous essay in Harper's magazine entitled ?Seizing Arab Oil.? That essay called for direct military control over Middle Eastern oil supplies. This concept was endorsed openly by then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and then-Defense Secretary James Schlesinger.

In 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced creation of a ?Rapid Deployment Force? designed to intervene in the Middle East. In 1983, that force, now focused entirely on the Persian Gulf, was re-named U.S. Central Command, or CentCom.

David Henderson of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, California, estimates that maintaining CentCom costs roughly one percent of our annual gross domestic product. That percentage will grow as our involvement in the Persian Gulf deepens ? not in defense of our nation, but in pursuit of political control over oil by Washington.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

November 16, 2007

In his justly famous Farewell Address, George Washington urged Americans to embrace a foreign policy based on American independence and non-intervention in the affairs of others:

?The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is... to have with them as little political connection as possible.?

America enjoys what Washington called a ?detached and distant situation? that permits us to remain aloof from foreign conflicts.

The same principles apply to conflicts arising with radical Islam. Steven LaTulippe, a retired Air Force officer, notes that ?The United States of America is the only major world power that is not forced by geography into a conflict with ... Islam.? Although well-suited as as ideology of conflict, radical Islam is not a viable governing ideology, LaTulippe continues, and ?is destined, like communism before it, to collapse from within.?

Accordingly, he concludes, we should defer to Washington's wisdom by withdrawing from the Middle East and establishing a posture of non-belligerency in Islam's civilizational wars.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

November 15, 2007

Supermodel Gisele Bundchen has no particular expertise where monetary policy is concerned, but she has enough common sense to recognize that the dollar is in trouble. That's why Gisele, the world's highest-paid model, has asked to be paid in euros rather than dollars.

A recent music video by rapper Jay-Z features a drug dealer flashing a wad of euros. When even the denizens of the Hip-Hop culture recognize the dollar's decline, something very unsettling is happening to our economy.

In early November, the Chinese central bank ? which has been propping up the dollar by purchasing Treasury notes ? predicted that the dollar will soon lose its status as the world's reserve currency. The German publication Der Spiegel points out that if China should abandon the dollar the result would be ?tantamount to Pearl Harbor without the war.?

Should this occur, however, the fault would lay entirely with our own government, which has spent the dollar into oblivion.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

November 14, 2007

The post-World War II trial of Nazi leaders at Nuremberg led most nations to accept a set of guidelines called the Nuremberg Principles. Under the Nuremberg Principles it is a war crime to plan, prepare, initiate, or wage a war of aggression.

In June 2006, 1st Lt. Ehren Watada, acting on his conviction that the war in Iraq is an illegal act of aggression, refused an order to ship out with his Army unit. His Court-Martial last February ended in a mistrial. Last week, a federal judge ruled that the military cannot put Watada on trial a second time unless it can prove that doing so does not constitute double jeopardy.

The predicament confronted by Lt. Watada and other soldiers of conscience was created when Congress allowed President Bush to initiate the war with Iraq ? a country that neither attacked nor threatened us. Congress and the White House share the moral responsibility for this undeclared, aggressive war.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

November 13, 2007

From Harvard University Law Professor Alan Dershowitz comes a novel defense of the torture techniques used by the Bush administration in the so-called war on terror: We must abandon our practical objections to torture because it worked for Nazi interrogators in occupied France.

?There are some who claim that torture ... never works ? it only produces false information,? wrote Dershowitz in the November 7 Wall Street Journal. ?This is simply not true, as evidenced by the many decent members of the French Resistance who, under Nazi torture, disclosed the locations of their closest friends and relatives.?

Ironically, Dershowitz juxtaposed the successful use of torture by the Nazis with a more recent counter-terrorist success in Israel in which investigators foiled a Yom Kippur suicide bombing plot without resorting to torture.

The Nazis used torture to defend a murderous military occupation. Israeli courts, by way of contrast, have banned the use of torture in terrorist interrogations. Only Professor Dershowitz can explain why he prefers the Nazi approach.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

November 12, 2007

During the four decades of its existence, East Germany developed what was probably history's most comprehensive police state.

Thick and detailed files were compiled by the Stasi secret police on all of the country's residents. An estimated one-third of East German citizens were forcibly recruited to be secret police informants. The objective was to abolish privacy so as to make everyone utterly vulnerable to the whims of the ruling elite.

Some unsettling echoes of that regime were heard in recent remarks by Donald Kerr, deputy director of National Intelligence.

Speaking to Congress, Kerr insisted that Americans will have to ?take stock of what we are already willing to give up, in terms of anonymity.? Because Americans already offer private information in business transactions, Kerr maintained, we shouldn't object to government surveillance of our telephone and on-line communications.

The architects of East Germany's surveillance state would agree with Kerr, and covet the technology at his disposal.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

November 9, 2007

On this day in 1938, Germany succumbed to a government-organized outbreak of anti-Jewish violence known to history as Kristallnacht ? the ?Night of Broken Glass.?

The triggering incident was the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jewish man whose parents were being mistreated by the Nazis. But that was merely a pretext. The National Socialist government had been carefully preparing to expropriate, incarcerate, and eliminate the nation's Jewish population.

During the rampage, the police worked in tandem with street thugs to destroy homes, stores, and businesses owned by Jews. Synagogues were desecrated and set on fire. Scores of innocent people were murdered. Tens of thousands were summarily arrested and sent to detention camps. The government fined the German Jewish community 1 billion reichmarks for the mob violence the same government had abetted and organized.

Wherever government exercises unaccountable power, and categorizes people by religion or ethnicity, the potential for a Kristallnacht exists.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

November 8, 2007

For nearly 20 years, Laura Soelberg has conducted a fall garage sale in the church lot next to her mother's old house. This year, police arrived to shut down the event and to issue a citation to the 72-year-old resident of Minnetonka, Minnesota.

The city has accused Soelberg of a zoning violation, for which she could face 90 days in jail, a $1,000 fine, and a year of probation. Her supposed crime was using her own property in a fashion disapproved of by municipal bureaucrats.

One city official told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that Soelberg's events aren't authentic garage sales, since she uses each of them as ?an income-generating venture? rather than to ?get rid of items around the house.? That distinction makes sense only to the sort of person who inhabits a bureaucracy, rather than making an honest living.

If you want to see socialism in action, traveling to China is unnecessary. Go attend a meeting of your local planning and zoning board.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg's Liberty Minute

November 6, 2007

During his Senate confirmation hearings, Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey was asked about the legal status of ?waterboarding? -- an interrogation technique best described as controlled, non-lethal drowning. Although he described the practice as ?repugnant,? Mukasey pointedly refused to say that it is illegal, owing to the fact that the Bush administration has made use of it in interrogating terrorist suspects.

The Bush administration employs a circular argument to defend its use of the practice: Since torture is illegal, and the administration approves of waterboarding, that method can't be considered torture ? or so the administration would have us believe.

Men who have been entrusted to uphold the honor of our military see the matter differently. In a November 2 letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the former Judge Advocate Generals of all four branches of the service wrote: ?Waterboarding detainees amounts to illegal torture in all circumstances.
To suggest otherwise ... represents both an affront to the law and to the core values of our nation.?

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.