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Posts filed under Smash the State

No Borders, No Question.

Here’s a great recent article by Jacob Hornberger:

Shared Article from fff.org

Open Borders Is the Only Libertarian Immigration Position

There is a common misconception in the libertarian movement that there are two positions on immigration within libertarianism: the position favoring o…

Jacob G. Hornberger @ fff.org


Of course it is. There’s no reasonable question about this. The fact that Right-wing cultural politics and American nationalism continue to bamboozle professed libertarians into believing that there is even the slightest compatibility between border controls and libertarian politics — and the fact that so many people within political libertarianism continue to prevaricate about the issue or shove it to one side, as if it were unimportant — the fact that anyone could take libertarianism to mean anything other than an uncompromising enemy of deportation, criminalization and exclusionist border control of any kind, is the shame of the so-called Liberty Movement.

Oops, Our Bad

Shared Article from The Independent

The CIA destroyed a copy of a torture report 'by accident'

The CIA inspector general's office has said it "mistakenly" destroyed its only copy of a comprehensive Senate torture report, despi…

independent.co.uk


CIA ‘mistakenly’ destroys copy of 6,700-page US torture report

The CIA inspector general's office has said it "mistakenly" destroyed its only copy of a comprehensive Senate torture report, despite lawyers for the Justice Department assuring a federal judge that copies of the documents were being preserved.

The erasure of the document by the spy agency's internal watchdog was deemed an "inadvertent" foul-up by the inspector general, according to Yahoo News.

One intelligence community source told Yahoo News, which first reported the development, that last summer CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document.

–Sadie Levy Gale, CIA ‘mistakenly’ destroys copy of 6,700-page US torture report
The Independent (17 May 2016)

Sometimes bad things happen, and it’s just nobody’s fault, really. Sometimes accidents happen or mistakes are made, and everything just happens to come up CIA. Whoops, there it goes. Oh, there goes the disk too.

Here’s a bit more on the oopsie.

The 6,700-page report contains thousands of secret files about the CIA's use of "enhanced" interrogation methods, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other aggressive interrogation techniques at "black site" prisons overseas.

. . . Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr opposed the publication of the report in 2014. Since taking power he has attempted to recover copies of the report that were distributed throughout the Obama administration.

–Sadie Levy Gale, CIA ‘mistakenly’ destroys copy of 6,700-page US torture report
The Independent (17 May 2016)

Siege Mentality (Cont’d)

Despite constant siege-mentality rhetoric, constantly invoked as a reason for police to be ever more aggressively controlling, ever more trigger-happy, ever more insulated from criticism in the name of officer safety, as a matter of fact, there has never been a safer time to be a police officer in the United States.

Shared Article from the Guardian

FBI data showing drop in police deaths undermines 'war on cops' …

Preliminary data show a 20% decrease in number of officers intentionally killed in the line of duty and the second-lowest total in the past 12 years

Jamiles Lartey @ theguardian.com


See also.

Alter, or Abolish?

A. Abolish. From a recent post by Ra?@c3;ba;l Al-qaraz Ochoa on Facebook:

Ra?@c3;ba;l Al-qaraz Ochoa

Houston, we have a few problems:
It’s ICE, not the raids.
It’s the police, not police brutality.
It’s border patrol, not apprehensions.
It’s violence, capitalism, borders, citizenship, nation-states, empire, not refugees, not migrants.

These Evils are not accidental. Whoever will take the pains to consider the Nature of Society, will find they result directly from its Constitution. For . . . Subordination, or in other Words, the Reciprocation of Tyranny, and Slavery, is requisite to support these Societies . . . . In vain you tell me that Artificial Government is good, but that I fall out only with the Abuse. The Thing! the Thing itself is the Abuse! –Anonymous, A Vindication of Natural Society (1757).

State of Emergency

Following up on my post from Friday, I find this reported earlier today from Agence France Press:

Shared Article from Agence France Presse

Maduro in crackdown under Venezuela emergency decree

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced a sweeping crackdown Saturday under a new emergency decree, ordering the seizure of paralyzed factories,…

Valentina OROPEZA @ msn.com


Notice, in particular:

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced a sweeping crackdown Saturday under a new emergency decree, ordering the seizure of paralyzed factories, the arrest of their owners and military exercises to counter alleged foreign threats. . . . Addressing his supporters at a rally in central Caracas on Saturday, Maduro announced some of the actions to be taken under the decree, which has not yet been published.

. . . Maduro’s decree expanded an “economic emergency” declared in January to a full-blown state of emergency.

The extent of the decree was unclear, but political analysts said it could be used to limit the right to protest, authorize preventive arrests and allow police raids without a warrant.

Maduro said the measures, which initially apply for three months, will likely be extended through 2017.

–Valentina Oropeza, Maduro in crackdown under Venezuela emergency decree
Agence France Presse (15 May 2016)

This seems unlikely to end well.

See also.

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