Category Archives: Op-Eds

Op-Eds

Syria: Change the (Dissent) Channel

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The Harry S Truman Building in Washington DC. ...
The Harry S Truman Building in Washington DC. Headquarters of the US Department of State. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The US State Department’s “Dissent Channel” is a mechanism through which department personnel may disagree with administration policy without fear of job retribution. On June 17, Mark Landler of the New York Times revealed the existence of a recent  “Dissent Channel”  memo bearing the signatures of 51 diplomats and other department officials and calling for “a more militarily assertive US role in Syria [versus the Assad regime], based on the judicious use of stand-off and air weapons.”

Let me open my dissent to the dissent by invoking the late Pete Seeger: “Oh when will they ever learn?”

The “judicious use” of US military force in the Middle East and Central Asia  has made things worse, not better, for 25 years now.

The first Gulf War weakened admittedly draconian, but at least secular, rule in the region, unleashing al Qaeda on the world.

The US invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq turned those countries into festering wounds, breeding grounds for raging infections of militant Islamism. US interventions in Libya, Syria and elsewhere have accelerated, not suppressed, the growth and virulence of those infections.

How many civilians have died in the Middle East and Central Asia due to these “judicious uses” of US military force over the last quarter century? There’s no way to know. Estimates of the death toll in Syria so far range from about 150,000 to nearly half a million. Thousands in Libya. Tens of thousands in Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands, possibly more than a million, in Iraq.

That’s not counting thousands of American deaths — more than 6,000 US troops, more than 3,000 American civilians — directly related to successive administrations’ hubristic ambition to run the lives of people, and dictate the policies of governments, in these countries.

US military force, “judicious” or otherwise, has failed to produce peace, democracy or stability in the region. In fact, it has had precisely the opposite effect. It hasn’t worked. It isn’t going to start working now.

The proper course is neither continuing the administration’s half-hearted policy of funding and supporting “good” Islamists versus “bad” Islamists in Syria, nor the aggressive military policy advocated for by these State Department dissenters. The proper course is complete US military withdrawal from the region.

Their problems are theirs, not America’s, to solve. The quicker we learn that, the better their lives, and ours, will become. The US is in a deep foreign policy hole of its own creation. Time to stop digging.

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/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

No Fly, No Buy? No Dice.

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Photo by Zela from RGBStock

The “no fly, no buy” idea — a proposal to ban people whose names appear on the Terrorist Screening Center’s “no fly list” from purchasing firearms — has been around since at least 2009 when an act of that name failed in Congress. It was an evil idea then and it’s an evil idea now. But it’s once again an evil idea on the march, backed by demagogues of both parties in Congress and by Republican and Democratic presidential nominees-apparent Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

What’s so evil about it? Let’s break it down into its constituent parts to find out.

First, “no fly.” The no fly list is a list of people forbidden to board commercial aircraft in the United States on the claim that they are suspected of terrorist inclinations. Who suspects them? Nameless bureaucrats. On the basis of what evidence? Only those bureaucrats know. Who’s on the list? Once again, only those bureaucrats — and people who are actually stopped from boarding aircraft — know.

There’s a name for a system under which your ability to travel can be abridged by force of law absent evidence, without charge, sans trial and conviction, without due process of any kind. That name is “police state.”

Secondly, “no buy.” I shouldn’t have to explain this one. If the original police state measure (the no fly list) is an evil idea (and it is), extending that evil measure into additional areas of American life is equally evil if not more so.

Make no mistake about it, the backers of “no fly, no buy” are a far greater threat to our lives and our liberty than any number of Omar Mateens. That they’re dancing on the graves of Mateen’s victims in pursuit of their goals is nauseating but not surprising.

The uses of the no fly list should not be expanded. Instead, the list itself should be deleted — consigned to oblivion  — as soon as it exhausts its purpose as evidence in charging and convicting those who created and implemented it for conspiracy against rights under 18 US Code, Section 241:

“If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same …. They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section … they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.”

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/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

The Media and the AR-15: Style Over Substance, Fear versus Fact

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English: 1973 Colt AR-15 SP1 Sporter rifle
English: 1973 Colt AR-15 SP1 Sporter rifle (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oh, the poor, maligned AR-15. The American media seem to keep  thick files full of disinformation on this “assault rifle” available for instant use. Anti-AR-15 filler went up on the web and out on the airwaves before law enforcement had even named Omar Mateen as the perpetrator of the June 12 attack on The Pulse, a nightclub serving Orlando, Florida’s LGBTQ community. Here are a few problems with that filler.

Problem #1: Contra early speculation, the weapon Mateen used in his killing spree wasn’t an AR-15. Police initially described it as an “AR-15-type assault rifle.” Now we’re told it was a different weapon, the Sig Sauer MCX.

Problem #2: Some media outlets continue to propagate the myth that the “AR” in AR-15 stands for “assault rifle.” It actually stands for “Armalite,” the company that first produced the gun.

Problem #3: Speaking of which, the term “assault rifle” isn’t exactly meaningless, but it doesn’t mean what you probably think it means. All it means is that a weapon looks ugly and scary and therefore makes a nice juicy target for demagogues. The expired 1994-2004 US “assault weapons ban” was about cosmetic features — bayonet lugs, flash suppressors, pistol grips and so forth — not about the performance characteristics of the weapons it applied to.

Problem #4: In point of fact, as scary as it might look, the AR-15 is actually a fairly under-powered weapon for killing people. Most rifles for hunting large American game animals shoot bullets in the .270 to .308 caliber range. The AR-15 fires a .223 bullet, just a little bigger than the .22 that most rural American 12-year-olds used to hunt rabbits and squirrels with. That’s one reason the US military likes the M-16, its version of the AR-15 — kill an enemy soldier, his buddies keep fighting; wound an enemy soldier, two of his buddies stop fighting to help him out.

Problem #5: There’s nothing new, high-tech or unusual about the AR-15. “Semi-automatic” rifles — rifles which fire one bullet each time the trigger is pulled and automatically reload themselves — have been around for more than a century, and the AR-15 itself for nearly 60 years. If someone tries to tell you that the AR-15 is an “automatic weapon” or a “machine gun,” they’re just flat wrong.

No amount of blaming the AR-15 (or the Sig Sauer MCX) for the Orlando attack will make the gun responsible for the attack. The shooter is to blame for the attack.

No amount of fear-mongering about the AR-15 or any other weapon will make victim disarmament — what its supporters call “gun control” — legislation either moral or practical. More than 100 million Americans own more than 300 million guns and are going to keep them.

Too bad a few of them weren’t at The Pulse on Sunday.

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/CITATION HISTORY