From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
Date: Sun, 28 Jul 1996 03:15:32 +0800
To: Mike van der Merwe <cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Olympic bombing
Message-ID: <199607271652.JAA12072@mail.pacifier.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 05:41 PM 7/27/96 +0200, Mike van der Merwe wrote:
>
>Hi all
>
>I can just see the FBI screaming "we need weaker encryption to combat
>terrosism on US soil" with nasty effects -- it seems all to many people,
>lawmakers included, will be only to happy to sacrifice their privacy that
>the FBI can better combat these terrorist acts (which could *of course*
>could been prevented had only the FBI been able to read their encrypted
>mail...)
>
>Somehow I got the feeling watching CNN that the FBI was given a shitload
>of ammo. Call me cynical but the Reichstag fire comes to mind... 
>
>Later
>Mike

This was on another list.  It expresses my sentiments quite well.



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>Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 21:36:25 -0600
>From: "L. Neil Smith" <lneil@ez0.ezlink.com>
>Message-Id: <199607270336.AA20227@ez0.ezlink.com>
>To: mongoose@indirect.com
>Subject: TWA 800 and Atlanta
>Cc: tompkins@indirect.com
>
>TWA 800 AND THE POLICE STATE OF GEORGIA
>
>By L. Neil Smith <lneil@ezlink.com>
>
>Special to _The Libertarian Enterprise_
>
>    I've been sitting around all week, watching the Olympics whether I 
>like it or not, because my wife and daughter want to watch them, and I 
>can deny them nothing.  
>
>    In between undeniably dramatic moments -- astonishingly courageous 
>little girls "playing hurt", as if they were major-league football 
>players -- I've been treated to story after story of how, due to the 
>efforts of thousands of uniformed professional paranoids, Georgia, USA 
>is coming to resemble _Soviet_ Georgia.  The sight of _hundreds_ of 
>trailers moved in to house these security "troops" is demoralizing in 
>and of itself to anyone with a regard for a free society.  
>
>    At the same time, I've been a TV witness to the tragedy of TWA 
>Flight 800 and an ignoble struggle by network fear-vampires to wring 
>the story of its last delectable drop -- "It was a bomb!"  "It was a 
>missile!"  "It was a bomb!" "It was a missile!" -- the whole thing 
>beginning to sound like a macabre Certs commercial.  
>
>    Over it all hung the spectre of international terrorism, and the 
>swollen, corrupt, bulbous-nosed, droopy-jowled visage of a politician 
>(no "New Democrat" as it turns out, but just another damned fascist) 
>grimly determined -- exactly like Richard Milhous "Guns are an 
>Abomination" Nixon before him -- to be the last democratically elected 
>President of the United States:  William Jefferson Blythe Clinton.  
>
>    Clinton -- aided by his vile minions, the national "news" media -- 
>went into raptures of ecstasy, listing all the ways that the freedom 
>of Americans would have to be curtailed (Clinton has spoken of this 
>before; it's a favorite theme of his) due to the heinous act he 
>transparently hoped had been committed against TWA 800.  
>
>    Afterward, the round-heeled sprayheads obligingly searched out the 
>usual street-cretins to rubberstamp Our Glorious Leader's latest Five 
>Minute Plan, and add that they wouldn't mind at all paying extra for 
>the "service" of having their inalienable rights violated even worse 
>-- within the increasingly Bulgarian-style compounds American airports 
>have become -- than they're being violated now.  
>
>    But there's a simpler, more effective way to prevent the criminal 
>acts generally labelled "terrorism" that Clinton and his idiot-box 
>doxies don't want anyone to know about. Behind virtually every 
>terrorist attack we've ever seen or suffered, it's relatively easy to 
>discover vicious and repeated acts of aggression against innocent 
>individuals by the state. 
>
>    Preceeding the highly-publicized excesses of the Irish Republican 
>Army, for example, we find 850 years of violent occupation by an 
>exceptionally brutal foreign power that's managed to con the world 
>into believing that it's civilized.  
>
>    Half a hundred years of Middle Eastern terror arise directly from 
>the fact that, instead of coming to America -- the appropriate refuge 
>for "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" -- either before or 
>after World War II, European Jews decided to take somebody else's land 
>away, and treat their victims the same way they themselves were 
>treated by the Nazis.  (In fairness, at least before the war, would-be 
>refugees from Hitler's terroristic state weren't given much choice, at 
>least not by the American Medical Association, the American Bar 
>Association, and the Roosevelt Administration, all of whom worked 
>overtime, keeping out imported professional competition.)  
>
>    Similarly, there would never have been an Oklahoma City had there 
>never been a Ruby Ridge or Waco.  If Clinton had any real interest in 
>reducing the threat of "domestic terrorism" (he most assuredly does 
>not: terrorism, like war before it, has become "the health of the 
>state") instead of ratcheting government controls tighter around the 
>necks of 250 million Americans who've done nothing wrong, he'd 
>immediately arrest, try, convict, and punish all of those responsible 
>for Ruby Ridge and Waco, abolish the outlaw agencies in whose names 
>they were perpetrated, and repeal or nullify the unconstitutional laws 
>which provided them their justification.  
>
>    The trouble is, he'd have to arrest, try, convict, and punish 
>_himself_.  
>
>    Oh, yeah, the plan:  the best-kept "secret" of our overly- 
>governmentalized age is that terrorism almost invariably 
>_reactionary_; simply stop doing things -- things you shouldn't be 
>doing anyway -- that cause terrorists to attack you and the attacks 
>will stop. 
>
>    Terrorism is the price that governments -- and their hostage 
>subjects -- pay for exercising illegitimate power.  Despite pundits 
>whose ignorance is exceeded only by their presumption (_Wall Street 
>Journal_'s Paul Gigot leaps immediately to mind) 20th century history 
>demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that no further expansion of 
>that power will do anything but make make the problem worse.  
>
>    Benjamin Franklin warned us, more or less, that anyone who trades 
>liberty for safety is a fool, in part, because there ain't no such 
>_thing_ as safety.
>
>    We're reminded by Amnesty International that more individuals have 
>been murdered by governments in this century -- well over 100 million 
>-- than have died in its wars (war itself being a government 
>enterprise, as well), proving that government is a worse threat than 
>anything it claims to protect us from.  Tragedies like TWA 800 is 
>presumed to be, represent a failure of the _state_ -- of the very 
>_idea_ of the state -- and it is the state, not individuals, that must 
>be penalized, by reducing its income, and especially the power it 
>wields over individual lives.  
>
>    Americans are famous the world over for doing what was never done 
>before.  It's time we did something historically unprecedented again. 
>We flew the first airplane; we sent the first men to the Moon. Both of 
>those were possible _only_ because we were the first people ever to 
>tell a King to go to hell.  
>
>    Now it's time to tell a President to go to hell. It's time to be 
>the first people ever to _refuse_ to be steam-rollered out of our 
>liberties by jackbooted thugs claiming to protect us from people and 
>events that don't threaten any of us nearly as much as the thugs 
>themselves.  
>
>===================================
>
>L. Neil Smith's award-winning first novel, _The Probability Broach_, 
>which has long been out of print, will be republished by TOR Books 
>this October.  Permission to redistribute this article is herewith 
>granted by the author, provided that it is reproduced unedited, in its 
>entirety, and appropriate credit given.
>
>
>
Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com