America: a Beacon, not   a Policeman

The Costs of World Empire

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THE COSTS OF EMPIRE ---$29 billion for the CIA (and $50 billion for a fleet in the Persian Gulf)--There goes our tax cut? 

&  DEFINING TERRORISM

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Reprinted from the Rothbard-Rockwell Report

Nearly ten years after the Cold War ends, what happens to the budget of the
CIA? Thanks to the Republicans, the agency just received the largest spending increase from Congress in 15 years. Its official budget is now at $29 billion, which is as high as it was at the height of the Cold War. (I say official, because “black” or hidden funds are also included for the CIA in the Pentagon budget and even such agencies as Fannie Mae.)

"About a year ago," an unidentified source told the New York Times, "the door into the agency was almost shut" because of budget cuts. Now it has new life.  No official conservatives appear upset by this. In fact, the Weekly Standard praised the atrocious budget agreement ($1.7 trillion) in which this spook subsidy was embedded. The Heritage Foundation's Dan Mitchell, who has traditionally been tough on the Republicans by Washington's standards, actually argued the budget was a step in the right direction.

Neither mentioned this CIA budget increase, which is arguably the least justifiable aspect of the new budget. But it appears that official conservatives will endorse anything that bolsters the warfare state. And two weeks after the appalling budget agreement passed, millions of conservatives marched to the polling stations to pull the levers for the usual crop of lying Republicans.

Conservatism likes to wrap itself in a vast intellectual tradition. Burke, Weaver, Voegelin, and on and on, and this is what it comes down to: loot more tax dollars to feed the largest military empire ever constructed, with troops in 100 countries and spooks in many more.

The latest excuse is the need to combat "terrorism." Would the word apply when, say, a head of state decides on his own authority to bomb a productive capitalist medicine factory halfway around the world without warning, killing civilians all around? Of course not.

The word doesn't apply when the victim is a single territory. For example, Russians were considered terrorists when they bombed Afghanistan. When the U.S. does the same, it is "retaliation" for supposed support of terrorism.

It doesn't apply solely to people of a certain nationality. For example, Iraq is considered a terror state for suppressing the just nationalist aspirations of the Kurds. But when the Kurds in Turkey seek an independent state and thus defy a U.S. favored government, they are considered terrorists.

No, the definition of terrorism is increasingly obvious. It means behavior that the U.S. military power elite does not like on political grounds. The CIA, as the portion of the military state that deals with espionage, is now charged with seeking out enemies wherever it can find them, and blowing them up during critical stages in American political life.

In an echo of Pearl Harbor, recent revelations suggest that the U.S. had prior knowledge that the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were being targeted by opponents of U.S. middle east policy, but did nothing about it. Recent revelations also suggest that the decision to "retaliate" through property and life destruction was undertaken by four or five people, without broader consultation, let alone a Congressional declaration of war as demanded by the Constitution..

Is this not an abuse of power that conservatives should denounce? Is rewarding the military state with ever bigger budgets a proper response to this outrageous violation of all standards of decency?

We have here a movement that is so wedded to the military state that it will drag down liberty, even when all excuses for empire have slipped away, just to keep it well funded. What a disgrace that conservatism has come to mean a tacit endorsement of permanent empire.

Courtesy of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, published by the Center for Libertarian Studies,

PO Box 4091, Burlingame, CA 94011, $49 for 12 issues yearly, (800) 325-7257