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THE SOVEREIGN SOCIETY OFFSHORE A-LETTER
Your Link to Freedom, Privacy & Prosperity in the Offshore World
Tuesday, September 27, 2005 - Vol. 7 No. 195
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In This Issue:
* COMMENT: Another Major Catastrophe.
* OFFSHORE: Hong Kong Visits Beijing. Panama in the Spotlight.
* WEALTH: Not Really Offshore Law. Asia Views EU Tax Directive.
* PRIVACY & RIGHTS: China's Great Firewall. Shut Up Librarians!
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COMMENT: Another Major Catastrophe.
Dear A-Letter Reader:
George Santayana, the Spanish philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist, is best known for his oft-quoted statement, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Still good advice -- and worth remembering as President Bush comes up with yet another one of his ideas of the day -- that perhaps the US military should be put in charge of domestic police matters when a major catastrophe occurs. (Critics might say the President himself constitutes such an emergency, but we don't think, so far, that warrants a military coup).
The operative factor here would depend squarely on how one defines "major catastrophe" -- an elastic phrase that could be expanded at the stroke of a presidential pen. (Read some of those Presidential Emergency Declarations now in effect and you may have trouble sleeping nights).
The President's press secretary would not say precisely what the president wants that trigger to be, other than an "extraordinary catastrophe" (which is sort of what has happened to the President since Katrina blew through the Gulf and the Bush administration). But putting the military in charge should not require a request from a governor, as it now does, he said. Good-bye states rights.
Of course, the President is still in a "do something" mode, having gotten much of the blame (some of it undeserved) for the dismal, disorganized response to Hurricane Katrina. That's always a dangerous place for a politician to be after a televised major mess, as witness the PATRIOT Act as the wrong headed "solution" to future 9-11s. The Bush administration, in the PATRIOT Act, and with unconstitutional detention and torture of terrorism suspects, already has sacrificed the principles we were supposed to be defending. Are we now to believe a military trained to be kill the enemy is going to play the role of Officer Clancy? And with wars all over the globe, where do we get these millions of new policemen? A compulsory draft for police?
There are a great many very good reasons why the long-standing statutory prohibition against the military acting as domestic policemen should not be suspended, now or in the event of a major emergency.
The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act now limits the role of the US military in our lives and keeps America from becoming a banana republic. The law was adopted after a 15-year military occupation by the US Army as post-Civil War law enforcement in the southern states. (There's a major history lesson to be learned right there).
Currently, America's military is largely prohibited from acting as a domestic police force. They cannot participate in arrests, searches, seizure of evidence and other police activity on US soil. The Coast Guard and National Guard troops under the control of state governors are excluded from the Act. And the law doesn't stop the military from providing emergency supplies and keeping order in a disaster.
For the last 20 years America has experienced the horror of the militarization of its own local and state police. There were military "advisors" during the slaughter at Waco, Texas, and who can forget a flack jacketed federal agent waving a machine gun at a terrifie Elian Gonzalez. But similar events, where people are assaulted in their homes by SWAT teams waving machine guns, threatening to shoot, and trashing the house as a tactical distraction, happen every day in the US, without media attention. It's all part of the failed war on drugs that has burdened us with a gigantic police establishment spending billions every year to no good purpose.
The most dangerous aspect of police militarization isn't the machine guns. It's the change in police attitudes. In a constitutional republic policemen are supposed to be "peace officers." Police militarization promotes maximal use of force as a solution, even when no force at all is required. Police think of themselves as an occupying army, and the public comes to think of them as the same. That a real disaster!
Isn't it bad enough that domestic US policing is approaching a sad state of militarization. Must we step off the precipice and turn the country over to an occupying army under control of the Pentagon?
We think not. The US can meet any major catastrophe if we have proper leadership at all levels, and an end to government by cronyism.
That's the way it looks from here.
BOB BAUMAN, Editor
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