To date, President Trump and the US national-security branch of the federal government (i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA) have assassinated around 200 people in small boats on the high seas near South America. Such assassinations are quickly becoming a normalized part of American life, especially within the mainstream press.
There is no question but that the American people, as of now, can do little to stop these assassinations. Trump controls the congressional branch of government as well as the Justice Department. Ever since the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state, the Supreme Court has made it clear that it will not enforce the Constitution against anything the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA do in the name of “national security.”
But it is essential that we libertarians continue publicly pointing out what these people are doing and showing why their assassinations are evil, immoral, illegal, and unconstitutional. We must never let them — or our fellow Americans — think for a moment that everyone has come to accept their omnipotent assassination power over the American people and over everyone else in the world.
Make no mistake about it: The Pentagon’s assassinations of those boat people constitutes murder, pure and simple. In its enforcement of US drug laws, the Pentagon has simply been operating as a police force, one that legally and constitutionally lacks the power to exercise deadly force to enforce the drug war. None of those 200 dead people was ever been convicted of a drug crime. None of them has ever even been charged with a drug crime. There were no grand-jury indictments of any of them. There were no warrants issued calling for their arrest. Every one of the victims was an innocent person, given our system of criminal justice that presumes people innocent of crimes until they are proven guilty in a court of law based on competent and relevant evidence.
Were any of those assassinated boat people American citizens? We don’t know. Some of them might well have been. We just don’t know because their bodies were left in the ocean where they were killed. But US officials don’t care whether they were Americans or not because the power of the executive branch and the national-security branch to assassinate people extends not just to foreigners but also to American citizens.
That’s what the Anwar al-Awlaki case was all about. He was an American citizen who was accused of engaging in terrorism, which is a federal criminal offense. The federal judiciary had the opportunity to stop the national-security branch from assassinating him, but refused to do so. The Pentagon ended up assassinating him. Again, he was an American. They can do the same to any American.
How is it possible to live in a free country in which the government wields the omnipotent power to kill people? It’s not possible. Any people who live under a regime that wields the omnipotent power of assassination are not living in a genuinely free society, no matter how much they convince themselves that they are.
After all, what good is the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech under a regime that wields the omnipotent power to kill people? Everyone, whether consciously or subconsciously, must factor in the government’s omnipotent power to kill when deciding whether to speak out against the government and to what extent to do so.
Trump and the Pentagon maintain that they have secret information that informs that that those boat people are smuggling drugs. But that’s what trials are all about under the criminal-justice system that was established by our ancestors with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Let’s assume, for example, that instead of murdering those boat people, US officials are arrested them and brought them to the US for trial. The evidence, let us say, establishes that the defendants were, in fact, shipping drugs but not to the United States. Let’s say that they were shipping drugs from Columbia to France, intentionally avoiding violating any US drug law.
That would make them innocent in a US federal court. The jury would have to return with a not-guilty verdict. That’s why our ancestors demanded the enactment of the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments. They were trying to protect us from the tyranny of a government that wields the omnipotent, tyrannical power to kill people.
What about the fact that the president and the Congress are democratically elected? The freedom of people is not measured by how their officials reach political office. Their freedom is determined by the limits on the power of those who reach political office.
Consider another example: the US assassination of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani. That was six years ago, long before Trump and the Pentagon launched their illegal and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran. That assassination too was just legalized murder, under the simplistic rubric of Iran being labeled an official enemy, opponent, rival, or adversary of the US Empire. Of course, US officials got away with that one too.
Moreover, no American should fool himself. Assassination is not a new omnipotent power of US officials. Don’t forget, after all, the US kidnapping-murder of Chilean Gen. René Schneider, a totally innocent man who committed the cardinal sin of standing in the way of a US regime-change operation in Chile. For standing in support of the Chilean constitution, Schneider was made to pay for his principled stand with his life. Needless to say, US officials got away with that murder too.
There is no question about it: Ever since the federal government was converted from a limited-government republic to a national-security state, America has become an assassination nation. It is imperative that we libertarians continue to point this out and call them out on it. One never knows when a critical mass of Americans will suddenly experience a crisis of conscience and demand the restoration of our nation’s sound founding principles. One thing is for certain: If we libertarians roll over and accept the normalization of the US government’s omnipotent power to kill, we and our children will continue to be consigned to a life of serfdom, with the president, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA as our masters, in which case we can kiss goodbye any chance of living in a genuinely free society.
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.
