All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

Op-Eds

Seth Rich, the DNC, and WikiLeaks: The Plot Thickens

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WikiLeaks Retweet of Seth Rich Story
WikiLeaks Retweet of Fox News’s Seth Rich Story

According to the District of Columbia’s Metropolitan Police Department, the nation’s capital reported 135 homicides last year. One of those homicides, the killing of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich on July 10, 2016, continues to make news ten months later.

Who killed Seth Rich, and why? We may never know for sure. On the other hand, a significant piece of the puzzle may have just fallen into place.

Fox News, citing a federal investigator as source, reports that Rich may well — as long rumored — have been the source of DNC emails published by WikiLeaks, less than two weeks after he was shot twice in the back during a robbery in which, curiously, nothing was apparently taken from him.

That email release, which revealed an internal DNC conspiracy to ensure the nomination of Hillary Clinton for president at the expense of her opponent, Bernie Sanders, wounded Clinton’s campaign and cost US Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz her position as DNC chair.

The federal source, as well as an investigator hired by the Rich family (former DC homicide detective Rod Wheeler), claims that Rich communicated with (now deceased) WikiLeaks director Gavin MacFadyen.

WikiLeaks founder/director Julian Assange, in line with the organization’s policy against outing sources, has resolutely declined to confirm or deny Rich as the DNC leaker. On the other hand, WikiLeaks did put up reward money for information leading to the arrest and conviction of his killer or killers — and retweeted, without comment, the Fox News story referenced above.

For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. In the case of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the right-wing conspiracy theory project of putting every fatal heart attack and accidental traffic death in America on a constantly updated, Internet-circulated “Clinton Body Count” list tends to make the rest of us cautious about just assuming skulduggery on the part of the Clintons and their associates in any given instance.

Still, it can’t be denied that Hillary Clinton has, as what her husband called his “co-president,” as a US Senator, and as US Secretary of State, proven herself to have both a sense of political entitlement and a distinctly murderous bent. If you doubt this, watch the CBS News video of her giggling “we came, we saw, he died” response to the killing of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Clinton’s publicly flaunted attitudes lend credibility to claims, admittedly listed as “unproven” (not necessarily “false”) by pro-Clinton site Snopes.com, that as Secretary of State she once seriously proposed the assassination of none other than Julian Assange: “Can’t we just drone this guy?”

Is it really that far-fetched to hypothesize that Clinton, or officials in her campaign or party — many of whom are accustomed to exercising power of life and death in when actually in office — wouldn’t quail from likewise killing in pursuit of their political interests? The DNC leak (and therefore the DNC leaker) arguably cost Clinton more than the 80,000 votes or so by which she lost the 2016 presidential election.

As the straight news types like to say: Developing.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION  HISTORY

Op-Eds

The US Postal Service is Dying. Let it.

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Image taken by User:Minesweeper on December 14...
Image taken by User:Minesweeper on December 14, 2003 and released into the public domain. From left to right, the post boxes belong to FedEx Corporation, University of California, Berkeley, United Parcel Service, and two from the United States Postal Service (the one on the left is for Express Mail only) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Like most monopolies, the US Postal Service isn’t interested in changing its business model. An enterprise hemorrhaging cash  in a free market would cut prices, improve service, look for new revenue streams, or simply close its doors. The USPS solution, as usual, is to raise prices and hope for the best.

Alternative proposal: Let’s put it out of its misery.

The Service posted losses of $562 million in the first quarter of 2017, the Associated Press reports.  This year will likely bring the Service’s sixth straight annual operating loss. While its package delivery revenues have grown, the areas in which it enjoys a monopoly — “first class” (letter) mail and “marketing” (junk mail) — are in decline thanks to the ascendance of email and other Internet technologies.

That decline is terminal. The age of hand-delivered paper mail on the scale required to sustain the Postal Service model is coming to an end, and the market is already well-situated (via the likes of Federal Express and United Parcel Service) to handle ever diminishing future levels of emergency and vanity traffic of that kind.

In truth, we’ve known for nearly 175 years that the Service’s government-granted monopoly is all that keeps it afloat. Its prices don’t reflect the market value of its services. In 1844, anarchist Lysander Spooner  founded the American Letter Mail Company and turned a profit selling stamps for 6.25 cents each or 20 for a dollar versus the Post Office’s price of 12 cents, delivering mail up and down the eastern seaboard until the federal government shut it down.

In the past, one excuse for a government monopoly on mail was to protect “universal service.” Spooner could make money serving Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, but the government’s postal monopoly used those “easy” routes to subsidize letter delivery to, for example, rural Kentucky and distant San Francisco, where private competitors would have had to charge prohibitively high rates.

Today, however, nearly all US households have telephones (cell or land line). According to the Pew Research Center, 84% of American adults use the Internet, and most of the rest COULD use it. Even with no home connection, they could visit the library or any of numerous free wi-fi locations, just as citizens of rural communities once visited the Post Office to pick up mail in the absence of home delivery.

If the Postal Service shut its doors today, taxpayers would still be on the hook for generous retirement and retiree health care commitments to its current and former employees. That’s no  reason to keep throwing good money after bad forever.

Neither is our natural nostalgia for the big blue corner mailboxes and the friendly neighborhood mail carrier.

Let’s say goodbye to what’s clearly become a relic of a bygone age.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION  HISTORY

Op-Eds

Congress Should Just Say No to Trump’s Afghanistan Surge

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SANGIN, Afghanistan - American and British sol...
SANGIN, Afghanistan – American and British soldiers take a tactical pause during a combat patrol in the Sangin District area of Helmand Province April 10 2007. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With the US occupation of Afghanistan well into its sixteenth year and the country no closer to becoming a stable democracy than it was in late 2001, Antiwar.com reports that this isn’t an “all options are on the table” scenario.

President Donald Trump seems to have rejected the idea of withdrawing US troops and ending the war. Instead, he intends to become the third president in a row to roll the dice on a “surge” — that is, to send in more troops (the initial estimate is anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 more in addition to the current 8,400) and hope for the best.

That idea has never worked before and it’s not going to magically start working now. If Trump can’t bring himself to put an end to America’s Afghanistan misadventure, Congress should force him to do so by either repealing its “Authorization for the Use of Military Force” or using its power of the purse to cut off funding for military operations in Afghanistan.

The US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan has been nothing but epic fail from the very beginning.

First, it was quite likely unnecessary. After the 9/11 attacks — carried out by terrorists from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon — president George W. Bush demanded that Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers hand over Saudi national Osama bin Laden. The Taliban offered to remand him to a third, neutral country upon the presentation of evidence, even though they were under no obligation to do so in the absence of an extradition treaty. Rather than proffer the requested evidence, Bush chose war.

Secondly, instead of invading, finding, and capturing or killing bin Laden and coming home, the troops were set to play at the game of “nation-building.” While they toppled the Taliban regime and began setting up what they hoped would become a western-style democracy instead of immediately going after bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora, he and his compatriots made their escape over the border into Pakistan. It was nearly another decade before bin Laden was hunted down and assassinated.

Finally, even after it became clear that the forces which denied the Soviets victory in a decade-long war from 1979-89 could and would do the same versus US forces, first Bush and then Barack Obama just kept doubling down, pouring American blood and treasure by the gallon into soil from which peace and democracy refused to sprout. Trump apparently wants to go down in history as Afghanistan failmaster number three.

The US occupation will never achieve its purported goals. If Afghanistan is going to change, it will be the Afghans who change it. They’re not interested in being told how to live by Russians, by Americans, or by anyone else. Can’t say as I blame them.

This column is dedicated to the memory of R. Lee Wrights (1958-2017)

Note: The original version of this column claimed that the Taliban offered to hand Osama bin Laden over to the US on presentation of evidence implicating him in the 9/11 attacks. In fact, the Taliban’s offer was to hand bin Laden over to a “third party” country. Thanks to Jacob Hornberger for the correction.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION  HISTORY