2.  THE KABINET OF GEORG BUSCH
    by L. Neil Smith 
    Exclusive to TLE

We've been hearing lately that George Bush wants his illegitimate
brainchild, the "Office of Homeland Security", to become a
Cabinet department. This is a very bad idea, and it should be fought at
every step.

(RJT:  A little late,  now...)

As you may recall, the Office of Homeland Security was created in the first
place by Presidential decree -- without debate, without due consideration,
without reference to the Constitution or the Bill of Rights -- following
the attacks on the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon of
September 11, 2001. The initial idea was to convey an impression that the
government -- meaning Bush and his petrocronies -- were "doing
something" to protect us from further acts of terrorism, an
undertaking at which they had failed miserably, before September 11.

Americans soon learned who it was they really needed protection from, as
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of mostly Moslem individuals -- some of whom
were American citizens, and many more of whom had lived peacefully and
productively in the United States for decades -- were illegally abducted
and detained in a secret gulag, incommunicado, out of reach of their
terrified families, and without the benefit of legal representation.

Meanwhile, as the US military was bombing and invading a backward,
poverty-stricken, helpless Third World country that had no more to do with
the events of September 11 than, say, Denmark or Tasmania (and considerably
less than countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia), and was treating its
captives as if they -- the military, not the captives -- were Nazi war
criminals, the government at home was busy seizing new illegal powers to
spy on and interfere with the lives of ordinary people, to threaten them if
they complained or expressed officially unauthorized opinions, and to
prevent them from travelling freely, which is a basic right of every
American and of every human being on Earth.

Through it all, Attorney General Ashcroft kept muttering about how
"the bureaucracy" was obstructing him, when what he clearly meant
was the Bill of Rights, which, indeed, was written specifically to blunt
the ambitions and machinations of power-hungry authoritarians like
Ashcroft.

Perhaps the worst moment (so far) came when Bush and Ashcroft took it on
themselves to abrogate the citizenship -- and therefore, in their minds,
the Constitutional rights -- of any American they don't like. Again, the
legal safeguards assured us by the Bill of Rights were intended to prevent
exactly this sort of abuse of power by the government. The chilling
implication was that if one individual, born and raised in America, can be
declared an "unlawful combatant" and confined indefinitely
without a hearing or legal counsel, so can any individual.

This means you.

To those who clearly despise individual liberty like Bush, Cheney, Ridge,
Ashcroft, and Rumsfeld (not to exclude Daschle, Schumer, and that whole
scurvy lot, or they'd be screaming their heads off by now), September 11
must have felt like a last-minute call from the governor. The Cold War was
over, the Soviet Empire defunct, leaving the US the world's only
superpower. Thanks to decades of evildoing, incompetence, and coverups on
the part of the government, people had grown skeptical -- if not downright
cynical -- about its genuine intentions toward them.

There was about to be an uncontrollable outbreak of freedom if new
justifications couldn't be found -- or fabricated -- for limiting the
people's legal and moral rights, while continuing to rob them of half their
earnings and devouring whole their hopes for their children's future.

Thus, when it was revealed (by a broad variety of sources) that the Bush
Administration had been warned, possibly months in advance, what was going
to happen September 11 -- and perhaps had let it happen anyway, to maintain
and tighten its deathgrip on the lives of those by whose consent it
supposedly governs -- some Cabinet-level officials, drunk with their
newfound power, responded by threatening anyone who discussed the issue of
prior warnings publicly with vague, unspecified "charges".

Happily, most of the New Media ignored them.

This administration has very good reason not to wish any aspect of
September 11 discussed without its supervision, for it was government that
created this mess in the first place. Although a small number of violent
criminals hijacked four airliners and flew three of them into buildings,
killing thousands, it could never have happened if the government had
pursued a rational foreign policy and refrained at home from routinely
disobeying the highest law of the land -- the first ten amendments to the
US Constitution -- commonly known as the Bill of Rights.

To put a finer point on it, if the United States government had not
insisted, for the past 150 years, on interfering, often violently, in the
affairs of other nations, no one in the world would have had a reason to
hijack those planes and use them the way they were used. And if the Second
Amendment right of every individual -- including airline passengers -- to
own and carry weapons had been observed and enforced, no one would have
been able to hijack those planes even if they had a reason.

That's all it would have taken: a non-interventionist foreign policy and
enforcement of the Bill of Rights, particularly the Second Amendment.

There are those within the government who will tell you -- when they're not
warning you of the dire peril represented by radical Islamic scuba divers
-- that September 11 occurred because people in the Third World hate
American private capitalism and the individual freedom supposedly
symbolized by the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

To them I say those towers, built with taxes and owned by the New York
Transit Authority, stood not for capitalism but for mercantilism.
Mercantilism is the system complained of by Adam Smith in his great work
The Wealth of Nations, under which businessmen struggle,
not to produce better goods at lower prices, which is the way of
capitalism, but to control enough of the government to give them advantages
over their competitors -- and customers -- in a market that is far from
free.

I also ask, just what freedom do Americans have left, especially after
September 11, for Third World people to hate? And if our presumptive
enemies hate it, why is the government destroying it for them?

Back to the point, this is not a time to create a new Cabinet department,
regarding "homeland security" or anything else. Most of the
Cabinet departments that exist now serve functions that are not mentioned
in the Constitution (consult the Tenth Amendment and Article I, Section 8)
and are therefore illegal. The only new department worth considering would
be dedicated to stringent enforcement of the Bill of Rights.

Should anybody claim (as we have all heard them do from time to time) that
the provisions of the Constitution proved inadequate to protect Americans
on September 11, remind them immediately that it was 
disregarding the Constitution that made that atrocity possible
and inevitable.

Government -- and government alone -- made this unholy mess. Only by
getting government out of it can we ever hope to clean it up. The only real
security for America's "homeland" lies in the ability of the
individuals within it to defend it, unimpeded by a government whose
interests more closely parallel those of terrorists than they do our own.
- - -
Three-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith is the author of 23 books,
including The American Zone, Forge of the
Elders, Pallas, The Probability
Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his
collection of articles and speeches, Lever Action, all
of which may be purchased through his website "The Webley Page"
at http://www.lneilsmith.com>. Autographed copies may be had from
the author at .

L. Neil Smith writes regular columns for The Libertarian
Enterprise , Sierra
Times RoadHouse , and for
Rational Review .

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