Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 30, 2012

Fifty-nine years ago, a CIA bioweapons expert named Frank Olson attended a secret meeting inDeep Creek Lake,Maryland, where he was given a drink laced with an experimental hallucinogenic compound now known as LSD. Dr. Olson did not give his consent to be a test subject; the same was true of many others used as human guinea pigs in the agency?s MK-Ultra program.

On November 24, 1953, Dr. Olson announced that he wanted to resign from the Agency. During the Thanksgiving weekend, he traveled to New Yorkfor a psychiatric evaluation. In the early hours of November 28, Olson fell to his death from the window of a 13^th-floor hotel room. The Agency described the incident as a suicide. The fact that Dr. Olson had been an involuntary test subject was concealed by the CIA until 1975.

On the anniversary of Dr. Olson?s death, his sons Eric and Nils filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit claiming that the scientist was murdered to conceal illegal interrogations that had been conducted by the agency using biological agents he had developed. The lawsuit claims that the CIA?s interrogations resulted in the deaths of detainees inNorway andGermany.

It is impossible to overestimate the institutionalized depravity of the people who rule us.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 29, 2012

Socialized medicine leads inevitably to rationed care, which inevitably leads to euthanasia. Over the past few years, Great Britain has been scandalized by revelations about the Liverpool Care Pathway. That protocol involves not only the denial of medical treatment to elderly and terminal patients, but also the withdrawal of food and fluids, which leads to an agonizing death by starvation and dehydration.

The London Daily Mail reports that the victims of this regime have included young patients ? including newborn infants.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, an anonymous physician testifies that he supervised ten cases in which fluid and nutrition were denied to babies born with severe disabilities. Typically, it would take ten agonizing days for the child to die from severe dehydration.

Bernadette Lloyd, a pediatric nurse, has confirmed that infants have been euthanized, and that parents of severely handicapped newborns often feel coerced by hospital staff into consenting to the killings.

Several months ago, two Australian bioethicists published an academic paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics arguing that what they call ?post-birth abortion? ? that is, infanticide of newborns ? should be permissible for any reason.  Given present trends, child-killing will soon not only be permissible, but in some cases mandatory.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 28, 2012

Warrantless ?drug sweeps? in government-run schools have become routine in recent years. So have ?lock-down? drills in which SWAT teams conduct training exercises involving hostage or terrorism scenarios. In some lock-down drills, students have been kept in the dark about the fact that the incident is a training exercise, rather than a genuine crisis.

Vista Grande High School in Casa Grande, Arizona, held a lock-down drug sweep on October 31. Students were confined to their classrooms, then led in small groups to another room where they were forced to line up against a wall and be searched with the help of drug-sniffing dogs. This exercise introduced a new element: Among the four law enforcement agencies involved in the search was a group of prison guards employed by the Corrections Corporation of America, the nation?s largest for-profit prison contractor.

Notes Caroline Isaacs of the Tucson office of the American Friends Service Committee: ?To invite for-profit prison guards to conduct law enforcement actions in a high school is perhaps the most direct expression of the `schools-to-prison pipeline? I?ve ever seen.? Clearly, the similarities between government-run schools and prisons are not limited to architecture ? and the differences separating them are increasingly difficult to identify.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 27, 2012

Shortly after the Soviets lunched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the U.S. government seriously considered a nuclear strike against the Moon in order to intimidate Russia.  A missile carrying an atom bomb would have been launched from an undisclosed location and then detonated on impact. The project involved some of the top scientists in the field ? including the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who at the time was a young graduate student. Preparations were made for a missile launch in 1959, but the program was quietly scrapped.

What is truly strange is that the plan to nuke the moon was supposedly inspired by the need to catch up with the Soviets in the space race. Yet there?s evidence that Washington actually spotted Moscow a lead by allowing the Russians to launch the first satellite. According to General James Garvin of the Army?s Research and Development arm, the U.S. had the ability to launch and orbit a satellite no later than 1956 ? but were forbidden to do so until after the Soviets had sent Sputnik aloft.

It often seems as if global politics is nothing more than a bad melodrama ? and the people in charge of the Military-Industrial Complex are determined to validate every comic book supervillain cliche.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 26, 2012

While thousands of his constituents left homeless by Hurricane Sandy were still suffering in the cold, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie found time to make a self-aggrandizing appearance on the Saturday Night Live program. He then informed New Jersey residents that taxes would have to be increased in order to pay for reconstruction efforts that have yet to begin.

As if this weren?t sufficiently aggravating, some residents of New Jersey?s Seaside Heights who saw their homes ravaged by the storm were slapped with a bureaucratic after-shock: They found demolition notices warning that their homes would be demolished by November 30, unless they could repair the structural damage by that date. Residents would be granted a hearing, but faced fines of $2,000 a week if they couldn?t comply with the clean-up order.

In storm-wrecked areas of both New York and New Jersey, looting is commonplace, and police have provided no discernible protection. However, police continue to issue parking and traffic tickets, continuing to harvest revenue on behalf of a government that has been manifestly useless in carrying out its supposedly indispensable functions in protection of liberty and property.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 23, 2012

Raymond Yans is the head of the UN?s International Narcotics Control Board, which was created through the world body?s 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. He is not an elected official, nor is he accountable to any electorate. He has no business dictating policy to anybody, let alone the citizens ofColoradoandWashington.

Voters in those states recently enacted ballot measures decriminalizing the recreational use of marijuana. This isn?t because they concluded that using that substance was a good idea, but rather because they?ve come to understand that government efforts to prohibit drug use are an even worse idea. From his perch at the UN, Yans looked down with disapproval on this development. He sent a message to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder demanding that the Obama administration ignore both the law and the Constitution and continue the federal crackdown on use and possession of marijuana.

According to Yans, decriminalizing marijuana use, Yans insists, sends the ?wrong message to the rest of the nation and it sends a wrong message abroad.? According to him, Americans are bound by international treaty obligations to continue the madness of drug prohibition. It?s difficult to find a better illustration of our need to end prohibition and free ourselves from the United Nations.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 21, 2012

While waiting for a taxi ride shortly after midnight last May 6, Magdalena Mol, a young wife and mother fromBurbank,Illinois, was accosted by a police officer Carmen Scardine, who ordered the young woman to get into his car.

Without explaining why he had takenMagdalenainto custody, Scardine demanded identification and then called the dispatcher to run her name. He then drove the terrified young woman to a secluded area and sexually assaulted her.

Magdalenafiled an official complaint, which was upheld by the Police Department. She has filed a lawsuit against the department and the city government ? but there is no record that Scardine has been prosecuted, or even subjected to official discipline. This is most likely because the Officer would claim that the victim had consented to the act ? because she didn?t resist.

Of course, ifMagdalenahad resisted, she most likely would have been prosecuted for resisting arrest or even aggravated assault on a police officer. This assumes, of course, that Scardine didn?t kill her while taking her into custody.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 20, 2012

Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermontintroduced a bill advertised as a measure intended to protect the online privacy of Americans. By the time lobbyists for law enforcement agencies were finished re-writing the legislation, Leahy?s bill was nothing less than a proposal to repeal the Fourth Amendment, at least as it applies to cyberspace.

The revised bill would permit police departments nation-wide and at least 22 federal agencies to have unfettered access to e-mail, social media accounts, and other online communications without a warrant. The original draft required police to obtain the constitutionally mandated search warrant before having access to those communications. The new, law enforcement-dictated version would allow police to set aside that non-negotiable due process guarantee merely by claiming that an emergency exists. Such actions would not even be subject to court review after the fact.

Although the bill relieves police agencies of all constitutional impediments to surveillance, it would impose new duties on internet service providers. The measure would require providers to notify law enforcement agencies before they inform customers that they have been targeted for a search.

This is a bill the East German Stasi secret police would have loved ? and it was written with the input of American police agencies.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 19, 2012

For two and a half years, a married father of two children in Florida was paid to lure people into buying drugs from the police so that they could be prosecuted on felony narcotics charges.

The informant, who received a bounty of $325 per arrest, took male prospective suspects to strip clubs, where he induced strippers into cooperating in the so-called sting operations. He had sex with several of the female suspects, and took one of them on a tax-funded vacation.

Once this misconduct was revealed, prosecutors were compelled to drop more than a dozen cases in which the informant played a central role. For at least three of his victims, this came too late: Facing long prison terms for offenses that had been engineered by the police, they had taken plea bargains.

In Michigan, a detective with the Eastpointe Police Department has been accused of selling tires, slot machines, watches, and other merchandise that had been seized in the name of ?asset forfeiture.? The items were fenced with the help of a former police informant, who gave the detective cash and drugs.

Prosecuting vices as if they were crimes doesn?t rid the world of vice; it merely turns the police into criminals.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 16, 2012

The U.S. government is scheduled to arrive at the so-called ?fiscal cliff? on January 1, when the Bush tax cuts expire and mandatory budget sequestration kicks in. At the same time, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation will stop offering 100 percent insurance on all bank deposits, and reinstitute the $250,000 deposit insurance limit.

Some analysts believe that this will precipitate a bank run similar to ? but larger than ? the panics that have occurred in economically distressed European countries.

An international bank run of a different kind is slowly gathering momentum. Following the example of Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Ecuador have demanded a full visual audit of their national gold holdings in the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Ecuador has also called for repatriation of its gold.

Like the Federal Reserve?s fiat currency, the fractional reserve banking system is an officially sanctioned fraud. Banks are required to hold only a small portion of their advertised assets, and can issue loans amounting to many times the value of their actual holdings.

What would happen if our fractional reserve banking system underwent a systemic panic at the same time foreign governments demanded that the Federal Reserve return their gold deposits? We?re likely to find out, and it won?t be pretty.

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