Monthly Archives: June 2016

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Utah v. Strieff: SCOTUS Fuels a Dangerous Fire

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United States Supreme Court building.
United States Supreme Court building. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The US Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Utah v. Strieff, issued on June 20, is the latest in a long line of rulings expanding the powers of police at the expense of everyone else. Such expansions represent a clear and present danger to the public … and when resistance to the abuses they encourage explodes into open violence, as it surely will sooner or later, to police themselves.

Edward Strieff was detained in what the state of Utah’s attorneys openly admit was an illegal stop — a stop completely absent probable cause to believe that he had committed a crime — by Salt Lake City detective Douglas Fackrell. But the illegal stop and an illegal demand for identification enabled Fackrell to discover an outstanding traffic warrant. That discovery, the court holds, was an “attenuating” event which made Fackrell’s subsequent search of Strieff (and use of the drugs discovered on Strieff’s person in that search as evidence against him) perfectly legal.

In the opening to her dissent,  Justice Sonia Sotomayor explains the ruling’s essential evil. “This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic warrants — even if you are doing nothing wrong,” writes Sotomayor. “If the officer discovers a warrant for a fine you forgot to pay, courts will now excuse his illegal stop and will admit into evidence anything he happens to find by searching you after arresting you on the warrant.”

My late friend Aaron Russo (you may remember him as the award-winning producer of such motion pictures as “The Rose” and “Trading Places”) defined a police state in terms of fear. You know you’re living in a police state, Aaron said, if merely noticing a patrol car behind you in traffic makes you nervous.

I suspect the street sign marking that point is likewise in the rearview mirror for most of us. “No-knock” raids, “Terry stop” aka “stop and frisk” policies, and numerous violent police assaults and even murders caught on camera but often committed with impunity, make those fears eminently reasonable. This ruling can only add to the power of those fears and to the number of Americans living daily with them.

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible,” said president John F. Kennedy, “will make violent revolution inevitable.” With its ruling in Utah v. Strieff, the US Supreme Court continues a long and sorry record of answering to Kennedy’s description.

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.

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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.

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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.

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