All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

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Five Years is Five Years Too Long: Free Julian Assange!

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English: Julian Assange, photo ("sunny co...
Julian Assange (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Associated Press reports that “British police have removed the officers standing watch over Julian Assange outside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, but say they will still do their best to arrest the WikiLeaks founder who has been holed up there since June 2012.”

Arrest? Really? Assange has already spent the last three years and four months under de facto house arrest, trapped in the embassy and  prevented from traveling to Ecuador proper, where he’s been granted political asylum.

And let’s make no bones about this: Assange is a political prisoner.

In November of 2010, Sweden’s Stockholm District Court issued a falsified European Arrest Warrant for Assange. Such warrants may only be issued pursuant to actual prosecutions, not preliminary investigations.

To date, Assange has been charged with a grand total of zero crimes in Sweden. Director of Public Prosecution Marian Ny wanted to interview Assange, not arrest him, about spurious (and almost certainly politically motivated) rape and molestation allegations.

On the basis of the bogus warrant, the UK held Assange (on “conditional bail,” which also amounted to house arrest at the home of a supporter) for extradition proceedings. After exhausting his appeals, he sought political asylum in Ecuador and took up lodgings at the embassy.

Assange has offered, more than once, to submit to the “interview” Ny has requested — in the UK or at the embassy. He has even offered to return to Sweden voluntarily, given a guarantee that he wouldn’t be handed over to the United States for political prosecution over his work with WikiLeaks. The negative response from Swedish authorities to all these reasonable offers demonstrates exactly the ulterior motive Assange has suspected from the start.

The US Department of “Justice” wants to get its hands on Assange and take vengeance on him for exposing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as for publishing US State Department cables that revealed various instances of US diplomatic malfeasance (up to and including then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s attempts to have the offices of UN diplomats illegally bugged by State Department operatives).

Former US Army private Chelsea Manning is already serving a 35-year sentence — imposed after an entirely illegal military show trial — for making the material in question available to Wikileaks. Assange knows that he can expect no less if the US gets its hands on him.

The United Kingdom’s government should appreciate the shame it has brought upon itself by conspiring with the Swedish and US regimes to illegally detain Assange for lo on five years now. It’s time to free him, publicly apologize to him, and indemnify him for imposing such an entirely unjustifiable loss of freedom on him for so long.

Thomas L. Knapp 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.

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Score One for Fiorina: A Clarion Call to Budgeting Sanity

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English: A graph of the US GDP compared with F...
A graph of the US GDP compared with Federal budget outlay. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In every presidential election cycle, candidates find themselves called upon to present plans for balancing the federal budget. And, for the most part, their plans call for doing so — in the sweet bye and bye. Never next year, seldom even next decade. The plan is for the current crop of politicians to kick the can down the road some  more, leaving it to future Congresses and administrations to exercise the fiscal restraint that these politicians  won’t.

Not Carly Fiorina. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe (October 7), Fiorina claimed she would submit a balanced budget to Congress in her first term.

Will she? Probably not, if for no other reason than that she wants to increase, not decrease, spending on the single largest sector of the budget, “defense,” so that she can continue the two previous administrations’ program of idiotic military adventurism around the globe.

But, be that as it may, when she explained how she proposed to attack the budget, she put her finger on one of the biggest bad habits of government spenders and promised to fix it. The problem is something called “baseline budgeting.” She proposes to replace it with “zero-based budgeting.” A quick primer:

Under baseline budgeting, the federal government assumes that each department will spend as much as it spent last year, with an automatic upward adjustment reflecting the inflation rate and US population growth. That’s on rails. The only things that have to be justified in the departments’ budget requests are changes upward or downward from that automatic amount — and how often do you think a bureaucrat requests LESS money?

Under zero-based budgeting, it’s assumed that every last dime requested has to be justified from the ground up. Just because the department spent $100 million on chips, dip and  party favors last year, it doesn’t automatically get $102 million for that this year, with the department only having to justify an extra $10 million to buy ponies for all the deputy secretaries (with THAT $10 million forming part of NEXT year’s “baseline”).

The political class, predictably, went ballistic. By the time Fiorina left the set, budget “experts” were loudly reminding us that zero-based budgeting can never work. Why? Well, because the government is just so big and complex that we can’t can’t expect its swarms of bureaucrats to spend time explaining their demands.

The only way to balance the budget, the “experts” say, is to keep automatically forking over more money every year and trust that spending will eventually magically go down on its own. Someday.

Ultimately, balancing a budget is simple: Spend less than you bring in. “Experts” who pretend that zero-based budgeting is out of bounds are the problem, not the solution.

Thomas L. Knapp 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.

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War Party’s New Line: Vladimir Putin is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

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English: Richard Nixon meets Leonid Brezhnev J...
Nixon meets Leonid Brezhnev June 19, 1973 during the Soviet Leader’s visit to the U.S.  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Remember the good old days? The US and the Soviet Union constantly staring each other down? Mutual Assured Destruction? Perpetual brushfire and proxy wars punctuated by deadly and disastrous conflicts like Korea and Vietnam?

They’re baaaaaaack …

America’s War Party (a faction that sprawls across Democratic and Republican affiliation lines) has been looking for something to replace the Cold War ever since it ended.

As the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact collapsed, the rationale for spending one of every four US government budget dollars on a military jobs program and corporate welfare for “defense” contractors evaporated. With peace breaking out, American politicians faced the daunting task of remaining relevant without an external boogeyman to scare the bejabbers out of us commoners.

Bush the Elder and Bill Clinton tried hard to keep the scare up with Iraq, but after Desert Storm nobody really bought Saddam Hussein as a major threat to world peace. It took 9/11 to really put the War Party back in charge. They took full advantage, joyfully dancing on 3,000 graves while they dragged the US into interminable and expensive fiascoes in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, all the while grooming a reluctant China as the next monster under the foreign policy bed.

All that was wearing thin, too, even after US president Barack Obama drew his “red line” in Syria and went to war without so much as a do-you-mind to Congress, seemingly unable to decide from day to day whether the enemy was the Islamic State or the Assad regime.

Enter Vladimir Putin. He’s perfectly suited to serve as the War Party’s new hobgoblin: Former KGB agent, head of an authoritarian regime, already on the US enemies list after frustrating US ambitions in Georgia and Ukraine … what’s not to like?

As I write this, Putin is escalating Russian involvement in the Syrian conflict, going from airstrikes against Islamic State targets to having the Russian navy fire cruise missiles in support of a regime ground offensive.

Frankly, Putin seems to be going gangbusters at  one of the two jobs Obama can’t seem to decide between (liquidating the Islamic State as a military force) while making it clear that the other job (“regime change” in Syria) is no longer on the table unless we want to go back to the days of two superpowers brandishing nukes at each other.

No more solitaire for the American empire. It’s back to high-stakes poker. Which, of course, is exactly what War Party politicians on both sides of the aisle want. Gambling with our money and lives is their bread and butter.

Can we build a real American peace movement to call the War Party’s bluff? Our lives may depend on it.

Thomas L. Knapp 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.

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