People v. State

Norway

[with apologies to Benjamin Tucker]

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COMPARE Glenn Greenwald’s July 4th post on the motives of Bradley Manning with Bryan J. Brown’s “July 4th Primer — to the Indiana Supreme Court,” consisting of his final filing with that court in his unsuccessful bid to be admitted by them to the practice of law in Indiana. (Background on Bryan’s case is here, here, and here.)

CONTRAST Jeff Gamso’s July 4th post contrasting the relative “necessity” of dissolving political bands in 1776 and now with Norm Pattis’ July 4th post contrasting the trial in 1770 of the British soldiers charged with murder for their role in the Boston Massacre with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 2011 in the case of Harry Connick, District Attorney v. John Thompson (throwing out a $14 million jury award for an innocent man who was imprisoned for 18 years, including 14 on death row, because prosecutors hid evidence that exonerated him).

“That, after all, was the argument on which the American Founding was based; it is pure political speech; and criminalizing the expression of that idea poses a grave danger to free speech generally and the specific ability to organize against abusive governments.  To allow the government to punish citizens — let alone to kill them — because their political advocacy is threatening to the government is infinitely more dangerous than whatever ideas are being targeted for punishment, even if that idea is violent jihad.”

Glenn Greenwald is of course absolutely right.

And his absolutely valid point kind of makes my little effort on this blog to undermine and diminish the government’s power over the American people, by reminding whoever stops by that faith in the government is irrational and un-American, appear positively tame in comparison, doesn’t it?

Glenn Greenwald

IOZ

Justin Raimondo

Glenn Greenwald’s The Egyptian mirror:

Not even American propaganda could whitewash the fact that the U.S. has imposed Hosni Mubarak’s regime on The Egyptian People for decades.  His government is not merely our ally but one of our closest client regimes.  We prop him up, pay for his tools of repression, and have kept him safe for 30 years from exactly this type of popular uprising — all in exchange for his (a) abducting, detaining and torturing whom we want, (b) acting favorably toward Israel, and (c) bringing stability to the Suez Canal.

And yet it’s remarkable how self-righteously our political and media class can proclaim sympathy with the heroic populace, and such scorn for their dictator, without really reconciling our national responsibility for Mubarak’s reign of terror.  Thanks to this Look Over There genre of reporting, we’re so accustomed to seeing ourselves as The Good Guys — even when the facts are right in front our noses that disprove that — that no effort is really required to reconcile this cognitive dissonance.  Even when it’s this flagrant, we can just leave it unexamined because our Core Goodness is the immovable, permanent fixture of our discourse; that’s the overarching premise that can never be challenged.

Read the whole thing.

Greenwald is one of those bloggers who often makes me wonder why I even bother.

Norm Pattis on Secrecy, Terror and a Cowardly Government:

The Patriot Act and its sickly progeny have been used for all sorts of decidedly unpatriotic things in the past few weeks. The Government is, for example, seeking account information about Twitter users. It flashed a subpoena at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco ten days before Christmas: Turn over records but don’t tell anyone we asked, the Government demanded. Only cowards and tyrants hide their tracks with threats. Twitter stood its ground, and the truth can be told: Uncle Sam is wetting himself because WikiLeaks has toid the truth about what he does when he thinks no one is looking.

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