1. Secularized the Oath of Office, effectively replacing "so help me, God," with "so help me, Government."
   • This is a serious issue, even though most people regard the oath of office as a "mere formality." 
     • Even the U.S. Supreme Court has said the oath is little more than an "amenity."
     • But America's Founding Fathers believed that the oath was "an act of religious worship."
     • The oath is the subject of the Third Commandment, about taking the Lord's Name in vain.
     • More about the Oath of Office
     • Courts have recently ruled that a Christian, whose ultimate allegiance is to God as King, Judge, Lawgiver, and Savior, cannot take the oath to "support the Constitution."
       •  This means that a Christian, who was born outside the U.S., cannot legally become a naturalized U.S. Citizen in this "secular" nation. 
       • Even a Christian who was born in the U.S. and therefore automatically a citizen cannot become an attorney, nor a public school teacher, certified elevator inspector, or draftsman for the County of San Diego, or any other employment which requires an oath to "support the Constitution" (cases)
       • America's Founders would be outraged at all this. This one issue would be enough in their minds to commence a revolution.
     • My Petition Before the California Supreme Court - Appendix A
   • Biblically speaking, a secular oath is an act of idolatry -- especially a secular oath of allegiance to a "secular" (atheistic) state.
   • "The LORD will not hold them guiltless who take His Name in vain" (Exodus 20:7). North Korea does not take the Lord's Name in vain. "In God We Trust?"
      
2. Banned the Bible from "public" schools
   • Schools were created 400 years ago to make sure everyone in town could read the Bible. "Common schools" were the product of the Protestant Reformation, with its banner of "Sola Scriptura."
   • Even the Ten Commandments have been banned. A private organization cannot spend money to print the Ten Commandments on a poster which will hang passively and quietly on a classroom wall, at no expense to the taxpayers, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled.
     • The Ten Commandments
     • Idolatry and the Ten Commandments
     • Ten Principles for a Free Society
   • The U.S. Government says children cannot be taught the Bible as the authors of the Bible would teach the Bible. Students can only be taught the Bible as atheists would teach the Bible: that the Bible is an irrelevant artifact of the past, no different from any other "holy book."
   • The U.S. Government says that state and local public school teachers cannot teach students that the Declaration of Independence (1776) is actually true.
      
3. Legalized the murder of 50 million children simply because they are inconvenient and cannot defend themselves. (Roe v. Wade, 1973)
    
4. Killed, maimed, or made homeless TENS OF MILLIONS of innocent non-combatant non-white civilians around the world.
   • A million killed in Vietnam
   • 800,000 in Laos, and another 800,000 in Cambodia.
   • A million in Iraq
   • Before I was born, the U.S. played a significant role in unnecessarily killing tens of millions of people in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. None of those wars were "just wars."
      
5. The National Debt is One Thousand Times (1000x) greater than it was 100 years ago. All the goodies -- the TV, the microwave, the car -- were created using "false weights and measures," not gold and silver, as explicitly required by the Constitution, and the purchasing power for all these luxuries was stolen from the poor.
    
6. Apostasy: What is even more astonishing and reprehensible is that the U.S. Supreme Court once acknowledged that the United States was a Christian nation. North Korea was never a Christian nation like this.

   • Jesus warned:
     ⁴⁵ But if that servant ... begins to beat the male and female servants, and to eat and drink and be drunk, ⁴⁶ the master of that servant will come on a day when he is not looking for him, and at an hour when he is not aware, and will cut him in two and appoint him his portion with the unbelievers.⁴⁷ And that servant who knew his master’s will, and did not prepare himself or do according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes.⁴⁸ But he who did not know, yet committed things deserving of stripes, shall be beaten with few. For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required; and to whom much has been committed, of him they will ask the more.
     ⁴⁹ “I came to send fire on the land, and how I wish it were already kindled!”
     Luke 12:45-49

At this point your favorite Founding Father is not just horrified, he's angry. Outraged. Fuming.

And not just at "the government."

But at ordinary Americans who are lost in info-tainment, porn, and a video wasteland.

From We Must Not TRUST the Government

The following reasons not to trust the U.S. Government are from an article entitled "World's Most Evil and Lawless Institution? The Executive Branch of the U.S. Government" in AlterNet / By Fred Branfman. I don't know why Branfman limits his discussion to the Executive Branch. The Congress could have stopped all this evil. It didn't. The Supreme Court could have issued an opinion as to its Constitutionality, as well as its morality. It didn't. It's not just the Executive Branch that we can't trust, nor is it just the U.S. Federal Government that we can't trust; it's the entire concept of a monopoly of violence entrusted to depraved men. By definition, every "government" is a criminal enterprise.

Here is a lengthy excerpt from that article:

It is a matter of indisputable fact that the U.S. Executive Branch has over the past 50 years been responsible for bombing, shooting, burning alive with napalm, blowing up with cluster bombs, burying alive with 500-pound bombs, leveling homes and villages, torturing, assassinating and incarcerating without evidence more innocent civilians in more nations over a longer period of time than any other government on earth today.

Americans keep this secret because facing it openly would upend our most basic understandings about our nation and its leaders. A serious public discussion of it would reveal, for example, that we cannot trust Executive Branch leaders’ human decency, words, or judgment. And more troubling, acknowledging it would mean admitting to ourselves that we have been misleading our own children, that our silence has robbed them of the truth of their history and made it more likely that future leaders will continue to commit acts that stain the very soul of America.

Can Americans Trust the U.S. Executive Branch?

Columnist George Will recently summarized the fundamental issue underlying not only Edward Snowden's recent whistleblowing, but all controversies about U.S. Executive Branch behavior: "The problem is we're using technologies of information-gathering that didn't exist 20 years ago... and they require reposing extraordinary trust in the Executive Branch of government."

Former Bush aide Matthew Dowd chimed in on the same talk show, saying "what they're saying is trust us, trust us." Trust is indeed the only basis for supporting a U.S. Executive which hides its activities from its own citizens.

But can we trust the Executive’s Branch’s commitment to truth, law and democracy, or even basic human decency? Judging its actions, not words, over the past 50 years is the key to deciding this issue. And we might begin with some basic questions:

How would you regard the leaders of a foreign power who sent machines of war that suddenly appeared over your home, dropped bombs which killed dozens of your neighbors and your infant daughter, wounded your teenage son, destroyed your home, and then forced you into a refugee camp where your older daughter had to prostitute herself to foreigners in order to support you, your wife and legless son? (U.S. Executive Branch officials created over 10 million refugees in South Vietnam.)

What would you think of foreign leaders who occupied your country, disbanded the military and police, and you found yourself at the mercy of marauding gangs who one day kidnapped your uncle and cousin, tortured them with drills, and then left their mangled bodies in a garbage dump? (U.S. Executive Branch officials occupied Iraq, disbanded the police, and failed to provide law and order as legally required of Occupying Powers.)

How would you view a foreign power which bombed you for five and a half years, forced you and your family to live in caves and holes like animals, burned and buried alive countless of your neighbors, and then one day blinded you in a bombing raid that leveled your ancestral village, where you had honored your ancestors and had hoped after your death to be remembered by your offspring? (U.S. Executive Branch leaders massively bombed civilian targets in Laos for nine years, Cambodia for four years.)

What would you think of foreign assassins whom as Jeremy Scahill reports in Dirty Wars, broke into your house at 3:30am as a dance was coming to an end, shot your brother and his 15-year old son, then shot another of your brothers and three women relatives (the mothers of 16 children) denied medical help to your brother and 18-year-old daughter so that they slowly bled to death before your eyes, then dug the bullets out of the women's bodies to cover up their crimes, hauled you off to prison, and for months thereafter claimed they were acting in self-defense? And how would you feel toward the leaders of the nation that had fielded not only these JSOC assassins but thousands more, who were conducting similar secret and lawless assassinations of unarmed suspects while covering up their crimes in many other countries around the world? (3)

How would you view the foreign leaders responsible right now for drone attacks against you if you lived in northwest Pakistan where, a Stanford/NYU study reported after a visit there,

"hovering drones have traumatized millions living in these areas. Drones hover twenty-four hours a day over communities in northwest Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles and public spaces without warning. Their presence terrorizes men, women and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities. Those living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment, and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves."

These are not rhetorical questions. Every one of these acts, and countless more, have been committed by the U.S. Executive Branch over the past 50 years, and will continue indefinitely until it is transformed. If we judge them by their actions, not words, we must face the following facts:

• The U.S. Executive Branch killed in Vietnam from a U.S. Senate Refugee Subcommittee estimated 415,000 civilians to the 1.2 million civilians later estimated by Robert McNamara, to the two million civilians estimated by Nick Turse. And it wounded at least 1,050,000 civilians and refugeed at least 11,368,000, according to the Refugee subcommittee (3); assassinated through its Phoenix Program an officially estimated 26,000 civilians, and imprisoned and tortured 34,000 more, on unproven grounds that they were "Vietcong cadre"; created an estimated 800,000-1.3 million war orphans and 1 million war widows; and after the war ended left behind Agent Orange poisons, unexploded cluster bombs, and landmines, creating an estimated 150,000 deformed Vietnamese children; and killing and maiming 42,000 peacetime victims.
• The U.S. Executive has, in Laos, conducted nine years of bombing which has been estimated by Laos' National Regulatory Authority to have killed and wounded a minimum of 30,000 civilians by bombing from 1964-'73, and another 20,000 since then from the unexploded cluster bombs it left behind. It also created over 50,000 refugees after it had leveled the 700-year-old civilization on the Plain of Jars.
• The U.S. Executive has, in Cambodia, killed and wounded tens of thousands of civilians by carpet-bombing villages from 1969-'75. All told, after Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger secretly bombed and invaded Cambodia, waging a war that made the U.S. Executive responsible for casualties on all sides, the U.S. Senate Refugee Subcommittee estimated that 450,000 persons had been killed and wounded, and 3,990,000 made refugees. (4) Historian Michael Clodfelter has estimated that 600,000 Cambodians died from all causes during the U.S. Executive's aggressive war.(5)*
• The U.S. Executive under Bill Clinton in Iraq, John Tirman reports in The Deaths of Others, imposed an embargo so severe that "UNICEF estimated that 500,000 children under five years of age had died as a result of the war and sanctions from malnutrition, diseases for which cures were available but medicine in Iraq was not, and poor health at birth due to prenatal effects on mothers." (6) Dennis Halliday, Assistant UN Secretary General, declared that "I had been instructed to implement a (sanctions) policy that has effectively killed over a million individuals."
• And after invading Iraq in 2003, the Executive under George W. Bush, as the Occupying Power, was legally responsible for maintaining law and order. Its war was also an aggressive war as outlawed at Nuremberg. It thus bears both the moral and legal responsibility for the deaths of more than 130,000 Iraqis(Iraq Body Count) to 654,965 (Lancet Scientific Journal) to 1,220,580 (Opinion Research Business), hundreds of thousands more wounded, and more than officially estimated 5 million refugees.
• The Executive has, in Afghanistan, conducted thousands of night raids familiar to viewers of World War II Gestapo movies – killing over 1500 civilians in 6282 raids in 10 months from 2010 to early 2011 alone, as revealed by investigative reporter Gareth Porter. They have also conducted numerous bombing strikes and supported a corrupt regime which has stolen billions of dollars while their fellow citizens died for lack of healthcare and food.
• The Executive has, in Pakistan and Yemen, killed an estimated 2,800-4,000 persons from drone strikes, only 73 of whom it has named. Most were killed in “signature strikes” in which the victims’ names were unknown, and who in no way threatened the United States.
• Also, over the past 50 years, the U.S. Executive Branch bears a major responsibility for massive death and torture throughout Central and Latin America and in Africa. Church, human rights and others estimate that U.S.-installed, trained, equipped and advised death squads in El Salvador and Contras in Nicaragua killed well over 35,000 and 30,000 persons respectively. The U.S.-supported Rios Montt regime in Guatemala killed an estimated 200,000. The U.S.-supported coup in Chile brought to power a regime that killed an estimated 3,200-15,000 political opponents and tortured another 30,000. U.S. support for Indonesian government genocide in East Timor helped kill over 200,000 persons. U.S. support for terrorists led by Jonas Savimbi in Angola helped kill an estimated 1.2 million persons and displaced another 1.5 million. (7)

And how much can you trust the decency of a US. Executive that treats these millions of human beings as mere nameless, faceless "collateral damage" at best, direct targets at worst, as human garbage barely worthy of mention, as "non-people" as Noam Chomsky has observed?

We almost never ask such questions in this country, never try to put ourselves in the shoes of the tens of millions of victims of our leaders' war-making, because doing so confronts us with a grave dilemma. On the one hand, if we would say these acts are evil if done to ourselves they are obviously also evil when done to others. But admitting that would require most of us to challenge our most basic beliefs about this nation and its leadership. And if we are members of our political, intellectual, media, government and private sector elites, it would threaten our jobs and livelihoods.

We are divided. The honest part of ourselves knows there is only one word that can adequately describe the U.S. Executive Branch’s indifference to non-American life. It is not a word to be used lightly, for overuse robs it of its power. But when appropriate, failing to use it is an act of moral cowardice that assures its continuation. That word is evil.

If we would regard such acts as evil if done to us, they are equally evil if done to others. This is what we teach our children when we teach them the Golden Rule or that America is a nation of laws, not men. It means, simply, that if needlessly ruining the lives of the innocent is evil, the U.S. Executive Branch is the most evil and lawless institution on the face of the Earth today, cannot be trusted, and poses a clear and present danger to countless innocents abroad and democracy at home.

We speak of “institutional evil” here because the greatest evils of our time are conducted by often personally decent, even idealistic, men and women. It is not necessary to be hate-filled or personally violent for an American to commit evil today. One need only be part of, or support the police, intelligence and military activities of the U.S. Executive Branch.

But the practical part of ourselves, the part that needs to make a living and maintain emotional equilibrium, leads us to ignore the mass evil our leaders engage in. It is so much easier. For accepting this truth means accepting that our leaders are not good and decent people; that JSOC commandos are not "heroes" but rather lawless assassins whose very existence shames us all; that we are not being protected, but endangered by leaders who are turning hundreds of millions of Muslims against us; that we must assume that Executive officials are right now secretly engaging in a wide variety of illegal and immoral activities that would shock and disgust us if they were revealed; and that we cannot believe a word they say when these abuses are revealed as they so regularly engage in secrecy and stonewalling, lying when discovered, covering up when the lie is revealed, and claiming it was an aberration and/or blaming it on a subordinate when the cover-up fails. (8)

The issue of trust is key since it is the only basis upon which U.S. citizens can support secret Executive actions about which they are not informed. And the issue of trust is ultimately a moral, not legal judgment. We acknowledge that the citizen actually has a moral obligation to resist an unjust law promulgated by an immoral government, whether in the Soviet Union, South Africa, or, as we acknowledge when we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, in America.

Even when the law is used by the likes of David Ignatius, David Brooks, Tom Brokaw, and Nancy Pelosi and to attack Edward Snowden, their key unstated assumption is that they trust the U.S. Executive since they know little more about its secret activities than anyone else. The moral dividing line is clear. Those indifferent to innocent human life and democracy are less angry at Executive mass murder and threats to democracy than at those who reveal this wrongdoing.

Although the principal responsibility for the millions of lives U.S. leaders have ruined lies with the Executive, most of America's other organs of power have also participated in keeping the screams of America's victims from reaching the public. Republicans and conservatives have not only shown no concern for America's innocent victims, but heartlessly cheered on its leaders' torment of the innocent.

Bush U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, when asked by a New York Times writer about U.S. responsibility to aid the millions of refugees its invasion of Iraq had created, responded that the refugees had “nothing to do with our overthrow of Saddam. Our obligation was to give them new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war. Helping the refugees flies in the face of received logic. You don’t want to encourage the refugees to stay.”

But particularly striking has been the behavior of centrists and liberals who know full well the horrors U.S. Executive Branch leaders have inflicted upon the innocent, espouse humanitarian values, but simply look the other way. The Times, for example, quite appropriately ran photos and small bios humanizing each of the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on 9/11. But its editors have made a conscious decision not to humanize virtually any of the millions of non-Americans U.S. leaders have killed abroad, as has the rest of the U.S. mass media.

David Petraeus became Afghanistan commander on July 4, 2010, and proceeded to loosen General McChrystal’s rules of engagement, triple bombing and night raids and invade southern Afghanistan, leading to a huge increase in U.S. and Taliban violence against civilians. Within months, the Red Cross said conditions for civilians were the worst they’d been for 30 years.

A Pakistan newspaper reported that things were so bad at the Kandahar Mirwais hospital that civilian casualties “overwhelm the limited bed space. On some days, the floor is red with blood” and that “the overflow at Kandahar’s Mirwais hospital has forced hundreds of sick and injured Afghans to cross the border into Pakistan every day to seek medical treatment.” It also noted that “many Afghans are unable to get to basic healthcare” because despite hundreds of billions in U.S. spending on war, thirty years of conflict have left the country’s health care system struggling to cope.”

The Special Representative to Afghanistan of close ally Great Britain said “David Petraeus should be ashamed of himself ... He has increased the violence, trebled the number of special forces raids and there has been a lot more rather regrettable boasting from the military about the body count," and that “Petraeus has ignored his own principles of counter-insurgency which speaks of politics being the predominant factor in dealing with an insurgency."

But none of this reached the American public. No stories of visits to Kandahar Hospital, no interviews with Britain’s Special Representative appeared in the U.S. mass media. Instead, dozens of U.S. journalists visiting Afghanistan praised General Petraeus, and presented his sanitized version of a war in which only “militants” are killed. Petraeus’ greatest accomplishment, Time magazine columnist Joe Klein informed his readers after a Petraeus-managed trip to Afghanistan, was to turn the U. S. army into a “learning institution.”

And Democratic Party politicians, while at least voicing concern for those in need in this nation and acting honorably for a few brief moments at the end of the Indochina war, have funded the Executive's killing abroad and limited their own concerns to the wellbeing of America's soldiers. (9)

In 1967, Chomsky wrote a landmark essay titled "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," arguing that public intellectuals — who had the time, opportunity and freedom to study the pain its leaders inflicted upon the innocent, and to convey it to the larger public—had a special responsibility to do so.

But his argument, by and large, has fallen upon deaf ears, particularly since Vietnam. Thousands of intellectuals, members of Congress, pundits, academics and journalists have turned a blind eye to U.S. mass murder. And many even turned into "liberal hawks", supporting war against Iraq. The likes of the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, the N.Y. Times’ Thomas Friedman, Slate’s Christopher Hitchens, The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, and many others not only urged a war that brought a living hell to Iraq, but being liberals, justified it on the grounds that it would help the Iraqi people. (See “Bush’s Useful Idiots,” by Tony Judt.)

They even denigrated the millions of decent and honorable Americans who marched to try and head off the Iraq war. It is so easy when making a good living and having access to “official sources” to see oneself as smarter and better-informed than “naïve” students and grandmothers in tennis shoes. Hitchens, for example, called war opponents "moral imbeciles," "noisy morons," "overbred and gutless," "naive" and "foolish."

And after the war began most of these “liberal war hawks” then turned a blind eye to the civilian carnage resulting from the war they had supported in the name of the Iraqi people, as the body count steadily rose by tens of thousands until over 5 million Iraqis were killed, wounded or made homeless. Nor did they apologize to the millions of their fellow Americans opposing the war whom they had so arrogantly maligned, and who had turned out to be so much wiser and more moral than they were.

Executive Evil in Microcosm: A Personal Report

I first encountered U.S. Executive evil and lawlessness in September 1969, when I interviewed the first Lao rice farmers to come out of communist zones in northern Laos into American zones around the capital city of Vientiane. I was horrified as these gentle Lao, who did not even know where America was, described living under U.S. bombing for five and a half years. I interviewed people who had been blinded and lost limbs and yet were the lucky ones because they had survived. As I learned of grandmothers burned alive, pregnant mothers buried alive, children blown to bits by antipersonnel bombs, and realized that millions of Lao and Vietnamese farmers were still being bombed, I felt as if I had discovered Auschwitz while the killing was still continuing.

As I began to research the bombing, visiting U.S. airbases in Thailand and South Vietnam, talking with U.S. Embassy officials, interviewing a former U.S. Air Force captain over a period of months, I learned it was but a handful of top U.S. Executive Branch leaders, Republicans and Democrats alike, who were solely responsible for the bombing. Neither Congress nor the American people had even been informed, let alone offered their consent. The U.S. Executive, I learned, was a power unto its own that could not legitimately claim to represent the American people.

From May 1964 until March 1970, U.S. Executive officials constantly denied they were even bombing in Laos. When the evidence became so great that even Richard Nixon had to admit the bombing, Executive Branch officials continued to lie by denying they had bombed any civilian targets at all—even as I was interviewing over 1,000 refugees on dozens of occasions and hearing from each that their villages had been destroyed and that they had witnessed countless civilian casualties.

One day I was shocked to feel pellets still in the body of an old grandmother and see a 3-year old girl with napalm wounds on her breast, stomach and vagina. That night I read that U.S. Air Attaché Colonel William Tyrrell had testified to the U.S. Senate that "I recall talking to refugees from (the Plain of Jars) and they told me they knew of no civilian casualties during the operation. Villages, even in a freedrop zone, would be restricted from bombing." (10)

I couldn't believe it! How could a U.S. official look a U.S. senator directly in the eye and tell so big a lie?

I also read how the Senate had not been told of this mass bombing, how Executive officials had lied to senators even in a closed 1968 hearing. Senator William Fulbright stated at the fall of 1969 hearing that "I think the surprise that is evidenced by the chairman of the subcom­mittee and others, that they did not know the extent of this involve­ment until these hearings, is pretty clear evidence that we were not aware of these activities, although we had had some hearings on it." (11)

Realizing that a handful of U.S. Executive Branch leaders had the power, all by themselves, to level the Plain of Jars shook me to my core. Every belief I had about America was upended. If a handful of Executive leaders could unilaterally and secretly destroy the 700-year-old civilization on the Plain of Jars, it meant that America was not a democracy, that the U.S. was a government of men, not laws. And it meant that these men were not good and decent human beings, but rather cold-blooded killers who showed neither pity nor mercy to those whose lives they so carelessly destroyed.

On a deeper level, it meant that even core beliefs I took for granted were untrue. Might did make right. Crime did pay. Suffering is not redemptive. Life looks very different in a Lao refugee camp looking up than in Washington, D.C. looking down. In those camps I realized that U.S. Executive Branch leaders lacked even a shred of simple human decency toward the people of the Plain.

I remember once laying in my bed late at night after returning from an interview with Thao Vong, a 38-year old Lao farmer who had been blinded in a U.S. bombing raid. Vong was a gentle soul, displayed no anger to those who had turned him from a provider of four into a helpless dependent. I contrasted him and the other Lao farmers who had been burned and buried alive by bombers dispatched by LBJ, McNamara, Nixon and Kissinger. The latter were ruthless, often angry and violent men, indifferent to non-American life—precisely the qualities threatening all life on earth. Thao Vong was gentle, kind and loving, and he and his fellow Lao wanted nothing more than to be left alone to raise their families, enjoy nature and practice Buddhism — precisely the qualities needed for humanity to survive.

I also thought of sweet-faced Sao Doumma, whose wedding photo had so struck me, and who was killed in a bombing raid executed by Henry Kissinger seven years later. (12)

And I found myself wondering: by what right does a Henry Kissinger live and a Sao Doumma die? Who gave Kissinger and Richard Nixon the right to murder her? Who gave Lyndon Johnson the right to blind Thao Vong? I found myself asking, what just law or morality can justify these "killers in high places" who burned and buried alive countless Lao rice farmers who posed no threat whatsoever to their nation, solely because they could?

I was also troubled by another thought: if even a Thao Vong and his fellow subsistence-level farmers were not safe from this kind of brutal savagery, who was? If I believed that a society is judged by how it treats the weakest among us, what did this say about my nation?

And I found myself particularly reflecting on the question I found most troubling of all: beyond the issue of lawless and heartless American leaders, what does it say about my species as a whole that the most powerful could so torment the weakest for so long with virtually no one else knowing or caring? I was anguished not only about this extreme form of mass murder, but what it implied about humanity.

I shuddered in 1969 as I reflected on what I was seeing with my own eyes. I shudder today as I write these words.

One particular fact puzzled me during my investigations of the air war. All the refugees said the worst bombing occurred from the end of 1968 until the summer of 1969. They were bombed daily, every village was leveled, thousands were murdered and maimed. But I knew from U.S. Embassy friends that there were no more than a few thousand North Vietnamese troops in Laos at the time, and that there was no military reason for the sudden and brutal increase in U.S. bombing. Why, then, had this aerial holocaust occurred?

And then, to my horror, I found out. At Senator Fulbright's hearing, he asked Deputy Chief of Mission Monteagle Stearns why the bombing of northern Laos had so intensified after Lyndon Johnson's bombing halt over North Vietnam. Stearns answered simply:

"Well, we had all those planes sitting around and couldn't just let them stay there with nothing to do." (13)

U.S. officials had exterminated thousands of people of the Plain of Jars, destroying their entire civilization, because the U.S. Executive just couldn't let its planes sit around with nothing to do. The fact that innocent human beings were living there was irrelevant. No one hated the Lao. For Executive policy-makers in Washington, they just didn't exist, had no more importance than cockroaches or mosquitoes.

And that wasn’t all. Once the planes became available, they did in fact discover a purpose for them, as the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Refugees reported in September 1970: "The United States has undertaken a large-scale air war over Laos to destroy the physical and social infrastructure in Pathet Lao held areas. Throughout all this there has been a policy of secrecy. The bombing has taken and is taking a heavy toll among civilians."

Once the planes became available, the people of the Plain of Jars were not "collateral damage" to military targets. They were the target.

Chomsky, who interviewed the refugees in 1970 and is the world's expert on U.S. war crimes abroad, has called the bombing of northern Laos "one of the most malevolent acts of modern history," and N.Y. Times columnist Anthony Lewis termed it "the most appalling episode of lawless cruelty in American history." Chomsky has also stated that though U.S. leaders did not achieve their primary goal of winning militarily in Indochina, they did destroy a possible independent economic alternative to the U.S. model for developing countries.

"Malevolence." "Lawless." "Cruel." These are not words we normally apply to the Executive Branch as an institution, or the individuals who head its powerful agencies. But if we are to decide whether we can trust the Executive Branch with our own lives we must face the truth of its evil lawlessness.

Footnotes

(1) Robert McNamara, “The Post-Cold War World; Implications for Military Expenditures In Developing Countries,” in Proceedings of the World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics, 1991 (Washington D.C.: International Bank of Reconstruction and Development, 1991)

(2) See “Dollars and Deaths,” Congressional Record, May 14, 1975, p. 14262

(3) Kindle loc., 7078ff.

(4) “The Study Mission Report for the Subcommittee to Investigate Problems Connected With Refugees and Escapees,” January 27, 1975, p. 31

(5) Vietnam in Military Statistics, p. 278

(6) The Deaths of Others, Kindle loc. 3653

(7) The Deaths of Others, Kindle loc. 3311

(8) The Deaths of Others, kindle loc. 5988

(9) The two times Congress has limited Executive war-making were its vote to halt bombing over Cambodia in August 1973, and when it cut military aid to Thieu from $1.2 billion to $700 million in the fall of 1974.

(10) "United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad, Kingdom of Laos, "Hearings Before the Subcommittee on United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Ninety-First Congress, First Session, Part 2, October 20, 21, 22, and 28, 1969, p. 514

(11) “United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad, Kingdom of Laos," ibid.p. 547

(12) Sao Doumma’s wedding photo appears on the cover of Voices From the Plain of Jars, recently republished, which is the only book of the Indochina war written by the peasants who suffered most and were heard from least.

(13) ”United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad, Kingdom of Laos," ibid., p. 484

(14) The Untold History of the United States, p. 387, 395

(15) In The Death Of Others, John Tirman makes a convincing case that the 110,000 Iraqi dead estimated by the Iraq Body Count organization is far too law since they were limited to the relatively few deaths reported in English language newspapers, and located in Baghdad is far too low. He notes it depends upon English language newspapers, that most murders occur outside Baghdad in areas where few journalists visit, media coverage of Iraq plummeted post-invasion, and people often do not report deaths, particularly to the Iraqi authorities they mistrust. He also makes a strong case for believing the Johns Hopkins University estimates published in the Lancet scientific journal of more than 600,000 Iraqi dead. (Kindle loc. 5797 ff.)

• Deaths In Other Nations Since WW II Due To U.S. Interventions
• Study: U.S. regime has killed 20-30 million people since World War Two

Some might disagree with Branfman's conclusion (U.S. = most evil), citing Communist governments like the "former" Soviet Union and Red China.

The Soviet Union was propped up by technological, economic, and military aid by the U.S. See any of the works of Charles Levinson, or of Antony Sutton, Research Fellow at the prestigious Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Start with The Best Enemy Money Can Buy (1986) or National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union (1973). See also Joseph Finder, Red Carpet (1983).

Senator Joe McCarthy -- for all the invective against him - was right: The U.S. Federal Government was infested with commies:

The New American - The Real McCarthy Record - September 2, 1996

McCarthy's "Witches" - The New American - June 16, 2003

McCarthy and His Colleagues - The New American - June 16, 2003

The prestigious (and conservative) think-tank at Stanford University, the Hoover Institute, published a multi-volume study of de-classified State Department documents and other government records which proved beyond question that the Soviet Union would not have lasted more than a few years without technological and financial aid from the so-called "capitalist" West. Socialism does not work. It must be propped up by capitalism.

WALL STREET AND THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION

Antony Sutton

Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1930-1945

The purpose of World War II -- which was determined not by the brave men and women who fought in it, but by the communists in the Roosevelt White House, the State Department and throughout the federal government -- was to extend communism, which was at least 10 times more lethal than Hitler. America only entered the war against German National Socialism in order to further International Socialism under Stalin.

The same is true for America's entry into the Pacific Theater against Japan: the goal was to eliminate a threat to international socialism in the Far East.
FDR and his communist advisors were planning to enter WWII even as they promised to keep our boys out of war, and in Asia they opened the door to Mao Tse Tung, keeping Douglas McArthur from closing it.

• Pearl Harbor - Motives Behind the Betrayal - The New American - June 4, 2001
• The New American - Dropping the Bomb - August 21, 1995
• Why We Fought - The New American - July 2, 2001
• The Causes and Consequences of World War II, Part 1
• The Causes and Consequences of World War II, Part 2
• The Causes and Consequences of World War II, Part 3

As many as 90 million human beings died in World War II,
to protect Soviet Stalinism, which was guilty of murdering a nearly equal amount of human beings, and
to promote Communism in Asia, which again resulted in the murder of a nearly equal amount (best estimate: 40 million murdered under Mao) of human beings. In many ways this massive global destruction of property, liberty, and human beings was led by the United States. It most certainly was aided and abetted.

More on World War II.

Many tyrants like Saddam Hussein and the Shah of Iran are puppets of the U.S. Mao may not have been a "puppet," whose strings were directly pulled by U.S. Puppetmasters (though we don't know everything there is to know), but he was certainly unleashed on the world by the U.S.

Branfman is right to conclude that the U.S. Government is the most evil and lawless government on earth.

“American Exceptionalism”

No matter how much evil the government commits, too many Americans continue to believe it is good. Indispensable.

This basic belief in America’s good intentions is often linked to “American exceptionalism”. Let’s look at how exceptional US foreign policy has been. Since the end of World War 2, the United States has: Attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically-elected. Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries. Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders. Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries. Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries. Led the world in torture; not only the torture performed directly by Americans upon foreigners, but providing torture equipment, torture manuals, lists of people to be tortured, and in-person guidance by American teachers, especially in Latin America. This is indeed exceptional. No other country in all of history comes anywhere close to such a record.

Talk given by William Blum at a Teach-In on US Foreign Policy, American University, Washington, DC, September 6, 2014

• Why a Bill of Rights? | Walter Williams
• Why Bad Men Rule | Hans-Hermann Hoppe

"Good intentions will always be pleaded for any assumption of power. The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters ... but they mean to be masters."
~ Daniel Webster

A well-governed person, who yearns for a well-governed society, wants to place firm limits on "the government."

The United States as EMPIRE

Government Tentacles of Atheism and Immorality

• re-study the original purposes of civil government
• abolish all unconstitutional agencies and
• cut off funding of all Non-Governmental Organizations

• The purpose of civil government is to promote Christianity. See the evidence from America's Founders here.
• The Constitution allows the federal government to act only in areas which have been strictly enumerated in the Constitution.
• Understanding those two concepts is critical in empowering and inspiring activists to abolish unChristian and unConstitutional government programs and agencies.
• The purpose of this page is to show how vast that assignment really is.

3-4-5

Use the mnemonic "3-4-5" to think about the scope of your government.

The following is a catalog of government tentacles, to gain an overview of all that "the government" is doing.

We must always keep in mind that at present the government is committed to being a "secular" government, which is to say, an atheistic government, that its religion is the religion of Secular Humanism and "pluralism," which is an outright denial of the truth of Christianity. Around the world, agencies of the U.S. Government are promoting atheism and immorality.

Our goal should not be to change government funding from atheistic agencies to "Christian" agencies; to use the coercive power of the U.S. Federal Government to impose Christianity and threaten vengeance and punishment to those who engage in immorality, but to eliminate the tentacles that now encompass not just America, but the entire Globe.

Efforts at Christian Reconstruction and social healing should be undertaken by voluntary associations in the Free Market. This requires a complete transfiguration of our view of "society." A Christian view of "society" distinguishes society and state. Social order for the Christian begins with a regenerated heart, which

leads one's family,
influences one's neighbors,
shapes local schools,
determines the ethical practices of businesses and corporations, and
demands Christian values in media and entertainment.

Working from the individual, from the "bottom up," Christianity creates a Godly and humane society, without much help from "the State." Imposing a Godly society on unconverted people using the coercive power of the sword is repudiated by the Bible.

This catalog of Government tentacles is vastly abbreviated. Its purpose cannot be exhaustive identification of all the tentacles. The important point is to see how broad the scope is. Every area of life and thought is being reconstructed by these atheistic agencies. This is the outworking of a secular, non-Christian worldview, which views Caesar as Savior. There may be well-intentioned Christians working in the organizations listed below, and not everything done by these agencies would go undone if these agencies were abolished; some genuinely humanitarian activities are performed by some of these agencies, and Christians would undoubtedly take up the slack and solve the problems which these agencies purport to solve. But this catalog represents hundreds of billions of dollars spent on largely wasted (at best) efforts, or worse, successful promotion of atheism and immorality in the quest for a Humanistic world.

"Reforming" a tentacle here or there, or even amputating one tentacle here or another there, will not stop this beast. Individuals must develop a Christian worldview, and the entire Octopus must be destroyed.

First we'll survey domestic tentacles of atheism and immorality, then we'll look at the global reach of Washington-funded tentacles.

Executive Branch

• Executive Office of the President
• Executive Agencies -- Cabinet
• Independent Establishments and Government Corporations
• Boards, Commissions and Committees
• Quasi-Official Agencies

NGO's -- TENS of THOUSANDS More!

Finally, we have to examine the effect of Federally-Funded NGO's ("Non-Governmental Agencies") as well as International NGO's. At one point we had begun a catalog of NGO's, like the abbreviated catalog of government agencies above. But Helmut Anheier et al, in their work Global Civil Society place the number of internationally operating NGOs at 40,000. And that was back in 2001. [Global Civil Society 2007/8]

The World Bank, defines NGOs as "private organizations that pursue activities to relieve suffering, promote the interests of the poor, protect the environment, provide basic social services, or undertake community development". A World Bank Key Document, Working With NGOs, adds, "In wider usage, the term NGO can be applied to any non-profit organization which is independent from government. NGOs are typically value-based organizations which depend, in whole or in part, on charitable donations and voluntary service.

By the way, which leader of the World Bank did you vote for? To say an NGO depends "in part" on charitable donations is to say it depends "in part" on government funding, which is to say, your paycheck. But as "the smoking man" on X-Files used to say, "Access. It's all about access." Even if privately financed, an atheistic NGO will be granted access where a Christian NGO would not.

Over the last few decades, federal funding has been given only to NGO's that promote secularism and non-Christian morality. There have recently been efforts to get "faith-based" NGO's funded which promote, e.g., abstinence rather than condoms. "Secularist" and "pluralist" forces have fought these appropriations tooth and nail. In the long run, the best approach is to eliminate federal funding for everyone's NGO.

Here is a short list of NGO's affiliated with the United Nations, which receives funding taken from your paycheck.

You might even want to make a donation to some of these organizations. Others offend you. It is wrong for the government to threaten you with prison if you don't "contribute" to a federal budget which funds -- directly and indirectly -- these agencies and a hundred thousand others like them which are destructive of your conscientiously-held values.

Other NGO's

• INGO stands for international NGO;
• BINGO is short for business-oriented international NGO, or big international NGO;
• ENGO, short for environmental NGO, such as Global 2000;
• GONGOs are government-operated NGOs, which may have been set up by governments to look like NGOs in order to qualify for outside aid or promote the interests of the government in question;
• QUANGOs are quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations, such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). (The ISO is actually not purely an NGO, since its membership is by nation, and each nation is represented by what the ISO Council determines to be the 'most broadly representative' standardization body of a nation. That body might itself be a nongovernmental organization; for example, the United States is represented in ISO by the American National Standards Institute, which is independent of the federal government. However, other countries can be represented by national governmental agencies; this is the trend in Europe.)
• TANGO, short for technical assistance NGO;
• CSO, short for citizen sector organization or citizen society organization;

The Uncivil Civil Society: The Pernicious Influence of NGO's

Exactly How Has the US Meddled in the Ukrainian Elections? by Congressman Ron Paul

Statement before the US House International Relations Committee, December 7, 2004
     Mr. Chairman: President Bush said last week that, "Any election (in Ukraine), if there is one, ought to be free from any foreign influence." I agree with the president wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, it seems that several US government agencies saw things differently and sent US taxpayer dollars into Ukraine in attempt to influence the outcome.
     We do not know exactly how many millions – or tens of millions – of dollars the United States government spent on the presidential election in Ukraine. We do know that much of that money was targeted to assist one particular candidate, and that through a series of cut-out non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – both American and Ukrainian – millions of dollars ended up in support of the presidential candidate, Viktor Yushchenko.

Bush’s Foreign-Aid Fraud by James Bovard

     Foreign aid fails in part because of pervasive corruption. A 2003 report from a leading Bangladesh university estimated that 75 percent of all foreign aid received in that country is lost to corruption. Northwestern University political economist Jeffrey Winters estimated that more than 50 percent of World Bank aid is lost to corruption in some African countries. President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria announced in 2002 that African leaders “have stolen at least $140 billion from their people in the decades since independence.”
     An African Union study pegged the takings at a much higher rate, estimating Africa’s toll from corruption at $150 billion every year. Lavish automobiles are so popular among African government officials that a word has come into use in Swahili – wabenzi – for “men of the Mercedes-Benz.” Investment guru Jim Rogers, who recently drove around the globe, declared,

Most foreign aid winds up with outside consultants, the local military, corrupt bureaucrats, the new NGO [nongovernmental organizations] administrators, and Mercedes dealers. There are Mercedes dealers in places where there are not even roads.

The NGO Revolutionaries and the Leninists Who Support Them

When Poverty Becomes Profitable - The Acton Institute

Globalization Without Tears An economist debates the NGOs.

"in India these days, it's easier to attract a bride by offering her an NGO than by offering her a green card"

Watch out, quangocrats – our patience is running out | Minette Marrin - Times Online

"He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance."
Declaration of Independence, 1776

Governments around the world swallow up half of the world's wealth. Can you imagine how the world could be improved if people were allowed to keep their money out of the government coffers and donate that money to churches, non-profit agencies, and other organizations that are held accountable by the Free Market and achieve many times the good results at a fraction of the cost of government agencies? When families spend their money in "the pursuit of happiness," the money is spent more wisely and more humanely than when the government re-distributes family money to various bureaucracies and NGO's.

"The Government" -- as a way of achieving social objectives and a vehicle for social change -- is not a friend of any disciple of the Executed Christ.

July, 2015: The United Nations supports pro-family policy; The United States Opposes it.

“[T]he United States lobbied [against it] with great energy,” says Slater, noting that pushing the LGBT agenda abroad has become a “primary objective of our nation's foreign policy.” She even reports that our delegation threatened to withhold foreign aid to developing nations if they affirmed the natural family.
The West, the Family, and the Big Picture - Breakpoint.org

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