Have things really gotten that bad? →
U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people →
U.S. torture policy
So where are all those lawyers finding their Geneva Convention loophole? Apparently it’s in Article 5 of Convention IV:
Where in the territory of a Party to the conflict, the latter is satisfied that an individual protected person is definitely suspected of or engaged in activities hostile to the security of the State, such individual person shall not be entitled to claim such rights and privileges under the present Convention as would, if exercised in the favour of such individual person, be prejudicial to the security of such State.
Where in occupied territory an individual protected person is detained as a spy or saboteur, or as a person under definite suspicion of activity hostile to the security of the Occupying Power, such person shall, in those cases where absolute military security so requires, be regarded as having forfeited rights of communication under the present Convention.
In each case, such persons shall nevertheless be treated with humanity and, in case of trial, shall not be deprived of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed by the present Convention.
They shall also be granted the full rights and privileges of a protected person under the present Convention at the earliest date consistent with the security of the State or Occupying Power, as the case may be.
This section seems mostly designed to prevent captured members of an ongoing resistance from using their rights under the Geneva Conventions to continue to coordinate with and share intelligence with their comrades.
If you read it generously, though, it’s carte blanche.
If you can say with a straight face that it would be “prejudicial to the security” not to torture your “individual protected person… definitely suspected of or engaged in activities hostile to the security of the State” then, voila! — you’re free to haul out the thumbscrews.
Just be sure to treat them “with humanity” (and we all know what humanity is like).
What a nice little loophole.
It’s hard to imagine anyone you couldn’t throw to the wolves with this little clause if you just interpreted it this way.
After all, you wouldn’t want to torture them in the first place if you didn’t suspect them of activities hostile to the security of your State.
Can you imagine the glee of the lawyers who found this? “Hey!
It says here we have to treat our prisoners well unless we suspect them of being hostile to us!” There’s a place on our Supreme Court for brilliant legal minds like that.
Because that’s what the Geneva Conventions are all about — protection for those prisoners of war you don’t suspect of being on the other team.
On the one hand, it would be a mistake to go along with the “half a dozen bad apples” theory of what happened in Abu Ghraib (er, I mean Camp Redemption).
Clearly the problem was not just caused by a small handful of people going savage, and the solution to the problem won’t be simply to isolate and denounce those people.
On the other hand, if we pursue this line of thought too recklessly, we can find ourselves propping up the “I was only following orders” excuse.
Rusting museum of our attempted suicide survives in the desert — Jon Else revisits the nuclear weapons test site at Frenchman Flat:
“An enormous Mosler bank vault sits abandoned and forgotten on the dry lake bed of Frenchman Flat, Nev.
It is ugly and rusting, a big cookie jar from hell — yet it now exists as one of America’s greatest monuments to clear thinking.
¶
That giant safe is a relic of an Atomic Energy Commission experiment in (“Response of Protective Vaults to Blast Loading”).
Filled with stocks and bonds, cash and insurance policies, it confirmed that our official valuables, contracts and financial instruments could survive nuclear war.…
¶
Today, as we sweat over whether North Korea has four bombs or six, or whether Iran has any at all, remember that in , only 12 years after the Trinity test — the first nuclear explosion in history took place at Alamogordo, N.M., on — the United States was manufacturing 10 nuclear bombs per day, 3,000 fission and fusion bombs every year.
The largest deployable weapon in our arsenal was the 5-megaton Mark 21, powerful enough to flatten 400 Hiroshimas (or Fallujahs or Oaklands) at a pop.
¶
Filling that Mosler vault with stocks and bonds in now seems a surreal gesture of hope.
Imagine the bomb’s survivors — a hairless, sterilized post-nuclear Adam and Eve, dry heaving (like the radioactive feral dogs that roamed the deserted streets of Chernobyl) — crawling toward the bank vault in their bloody rags, trying to remember the combination, praying for their Chrysler stock, or Grandpa’s gold watch, or their Prudential personal liability policies.”
Perhaps you’ve heard that some libertarian-minded sorts are hoping to gather the faithful and make their Gulch in New Hampshire.
They may be joined by the town of Killington, which wants to secede from their current state and become a little island of New Hampshire deep inside Vermont.
What’s triggering the revolt? Taxes, of course.
Bankrate.com gives us a little more detail about the new federal income tax deduction for state and local sales taxes.
According to them, you do have to choose between the deduction for state sales taxes and state income tax, and you can take either the actual sales tax you paid (save those receipts) or a guesstimate from an IRS-supplied table.
I mentioned that Craig Murray, Britain’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, had written a report condemning the intelligence services of the United States and of Britain for winking at torture in Uzbekistan in exchange for intelligence extracted from the torture chambers.
Suspecting, I’m guessing, that Murray leaked this report to the press himself, the government pulled out the stops to smear Murray’s reputation and is making moves to withdraw his security clearance, which would also remove him as ambassador.
I marvelled at the time when I read how forthrightly Murray condemned torture, and I wondered why we don’t hear more such straight talk.
I guess now I know.
Seymour Hersh — he broke the My Lai story, and he had the straightest scoop on the manipulation of intelligence by the Dubya Squad before the war in Iraq (and he had it at the time, while it was happening, and the rest of the media is still just catching up).
If any other journalist were telling this story I’d be a lot more skeptical.
Jonathan Magbie meeting President Reagan in during the proclamation of National Respiratory Therapy Week
“Our prison system is both a devastating moral blight on our society and an overwhelming economic burden on our tax dollars, taking away much needed resources from schools, health care and affordable housing.
The prison system is corrupting our society and making us more threatened, rather than protecting us as its proponents claim.
It is a system built on fear, racism, and the exploitation of poverty.
Our current prison system has no place in a society that aspires to liberty, justice, and equality for all.”
So says Architects / Designers / Planners for Social Responsibility, which is asking professionals to pledge “to not participate in the design, construction, or renovation of prisons.”
The ACLU managed to get the U.S. government to cough up more documents about its torture policies.
And the New York Times got some interviews with people who’ve seen Guantánamo from the inside.
No surprise that among the things they’re hiding there is torture.
Did I say “torture?” I must have meant abuse, which, as Zeynep Toufe of Under the Same Sun notes, seems to be the officially-agreed-upon euphemism for torture-when-we-do-it.
Worthy of note is that the mainstream U.S. press (the above excerpt is the opening paragraph from the Los Angeles Times) is starting to lose its reluctance to call torture “torture” when it is done by U.S. personnel.
It had been traditional to use the term “abuse” instead when referring to torture committed by Americans.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Bush administration is not torturing prisoners because it is useful but because of its symbolism.
It originally was intended to be a form of what later, in the attack on Iraq, came to be called “shock and awe.”
It was meant as intimidation.
We will do these terrible things to demonstrate that nothing will stop us from conquering our enemies.
We are indifferent to world opinion.
We will stop at nothing.
In that respect, it is like the attack on Falluja last month, which — destructive as it was — was fundamentally a symbolic operation.
Any insurgent who wanted to escape could do so long before the much-advertised attack actually began.
Its real purpose was exemplary destruction: to deliver a message to all of Iraq that this is what the United States can do to you if you continue the resistance.
It is not easy to come to grips with the moral despair induced by the knowledge that one’s government is engaged in torture.
The people most besmirched by Abu Ghraib and Camp Delta — the ones at the top — have had their services retained rather than answering for the crime…
This is all, in a strict sense, beyond belief, and yet we are in the puzzling position of watching it happening and being powerless to stop it… One is charged with not getting used to this and not giving in to the temptation to pretend that everything is operating according to the normal rules.
The United States is now caught up in a hallucinatory fog, in which the one thing that cannot be admitted is that the attacks of succeeded in driving the country insane.
Sigh… It’s time for another U.S. Torture Policy Update.
In “Selling Indulgences,” David Luban has this observation about the lawyers who made the case for torture:
[W]hat happens when the client doesn’t want candid advice?
When the client says, in effect, “Give me a legal opinion saying I can do what I want to do”?
Lawyers confront such requests every day — but if the lawyer does the client’s bidding, she has crossed the fatal line from adviser to accomplice.
No longer an adviser or advocate, the lawyer now becomes an absolver or indulgence-seller.
There is some historical precedent here — Martin Luther launched the Reformation because early-Renaissance popes were selling papal dispensations to sin along with indulgences sparing sinners the flames of hell or a few years of purgatory.
Rodrigo Borgia once arranged a papal dispensation for a French count to sleep with his own sister.
It was a good career move: Borgia later became Pope Alexander Ⅵ, while Jay Bybee merely ended up on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The New Yorker remains very much on-the-case, and has released a set of correspondence between Justice Department torture policy advocate John C. Yoo and William Taft Ⅳ of the State Department, who wanted the U.S. to honor the Geneva Conventions.
Also run over by the White House torture policy blitz were lawyers from the military, whose objections were overruled.
Some of those vulnerable to the U.S. torture policy are youths, including Omar Khadr, who has been in U.S. custody since he was captured in Afghanistan at age 15.
“I submit,” submits libertarian Anthony Gregory, “that, overall, and despite the ambivalence some libertarians might have toward the issue, torture is actually worse than rent control.”
I give up.
I started this blog with a declaration of disgust over U.S. policy that pulled few punches, but in my list of complaints I allowed myself to say only that the U.S. “in , still condones torture when it wants to.”
We eventually learned that condoning wasn’t the half of it.
The U.S. was not only condoning torture, but facilitating it, committing it, contracting out for it, diligently creating legal loopholes for it, applauding it, voting for it, and blessing it after-the-fact.
When Abu Ghraib hit the press, I started covering the torture policy here.
I thought the revelations would be a rare piece of data peeking through the secrecy and coverup, and I was pleasantly surprised that the news media didn’t just pick it up and drop it again after a one-day news cycle.
, a friend warned me that The Picket Line was losing its focus and “was in danger of becoming yet another blog featuring an underqualified amateur pundit giving his unsolicited opinion on current events.”
I justified my coverage of the torture issue with two reasons: 1) that the torture policy is a good example of just how bad the government has gotten and just how important it is that people end their complicity with it, and 2) that the torture policy is a stark example that I can use to make more vivid my discussions of ethics, principle, complicity, resistance and the like.
But I miscalculated about just how much would be revealed.
Little did I know that the tip of the iceberg was going to be so huge.
Now hardly a day goes by without some new and more sickening revelation.
If I covered the issue today with as much detail as I have in the past, this blog would be nothing but news of Americans torturing people, day in and day out.
I don’t have the heart or the endurance for that.
There are other sites and other bloggers who are better equipped and qualified to pursue this.
I’m going to stick closer to my core topic of tax resistance.
The evidence is clear and convincing that the United States has a policy, deliberate and explicit, to engage in torture.
It also has no enthusiasm for preventing, discouraging, or punishing acts of torture that take place parallel to but outside of this explicit framework, except when evidence leaks so fragrantly, as in Abu Ghraib, as to be embarrassing.
Responsibility for this policy is enormously widespread, beyond the sadists actually torturing people.
The military has enthusiastically generated whitewashed investigations; the Dubya Squad doesn’t think there’s a problem; the Republican Congressional majority is completely in the rah-rah camp; the Democrats can hardly be bothered to bring the subject up; the voting public was never much concerned; the press sluggishly gnaws on bones it lets other people dig up.
I’ve had enough of sorting through the evidence and documenting it.
I know enough already.
If you don’t, I doubt anything else I say will help.
I had a big bitter nostalgia moment yesterday.
I’ve been reading Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life by Sissela Bok () — a book about lying and deception from the point of view of moral philosophy.
In an early section of the book Bok discusses the various attempts to come up with systems of moral principles that people can use to plug in the characteristics of their day-to-day moral choices in order to determine the correct choice.
She concludes:
Unfortunately, there is no evidence that systems, or overriding principles such as that of utility, or priority rules among principles, lead us to clear conclusions, much as the mind strains for such a result.
(I must stress here that I am talking about those concrete conflicts which conscientious persons find hard; needless to say, easier choices, such as the condemnation of torture, can be derived within any moral or religious system as well as through the use of common sense.)
[emphasis mine — ♇]
In the back of my mind I had this feeling that there was a time when this parenthetical “needless to say” remark was true, but it had been so long since I’d seen evidence of it that I’d begun to think it was some sort of false dream memory.
…[T]he torture photos taken at Abu Ghraib… along with memos from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that redefined torture in appalling new ways, were not in fact a public relations blow to the Bush administration, but a sort of foot in the door for looser torture standards — a way to begin desensitizing the American people to the kinds of abuse that had been going on in secret.
Two years after the images surfaced, Congress enacted a law essentially permitting the acts depicted.
And just as those images paved the way to our broader torture policy, the CIA torture tapes now stand to do the same thing for water-boarding in particular.
An investigation is currently underway to determine who authorized the destruction of those CIA interrogation tapes.
But as Attorney General Michael Mukasey announced , there will be no investigation into the water-boarding depicted in the tapes, because it’s not illegal, or it wasn’t at the time of the interrogations.
Our views on water-boarding seem to be on the same trajectory as our views on sexual humiliation and stress positions — it looked sort of awful at first, but after a few months it seemed more like a fraternity prank.
That’s the road we’re headed down with water-boarding.
We’ve gone from banning it to trivializing it to justifying it.
We are becoming inured to torture at approximately the same rate that it’s becoming legal.
How convenient.
I finished up The Solzhenitsyn Reader a couple of days back.
Here are some more excerpts and some thoughts that came to mind during my reading.
First, this bit from The Gulag Archepelago, in which he discusses the reluctance of the victims, perpetrators, and collaborators in the Soviet Union to try to come to some sort of accounting for what took place.
Yes, so-and-so many millions did get mowed down — but no one was to blame for it.
And if someone pipes up: “What about those who…” the answer comes from all sides, reproachfully and amicably at first:
“What are you talking about, comrade!
Why open old wounds?”
In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of
it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up
a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers,
we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping
the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. … Young people are
acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that
they always bring prosperity. ¶ It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to
live in such a country!
As long as the torturers and war criminals at loose in the United States enjoy
their legal and moral immunity, the torture policy of the United States
remains intact. Obama issued an executive order banning torture, but doesn’t
anyone remember that even Dubya did that? The policy of the United States is
that the government may torture its prisoners if the president says so, laws
and treaties be damned, and its torturers will enjoy effective immunity and
its victims will have no recourse to justice. That policy is still fully in
effect as far as I can see.
Of course, I don’t put my hope in Obama or The Law to put things right. But is
it too much to ask that someone like John Yoo be shunned as the repulsive
moral cretin he is? Do we have to leave it to Spain to call him the accused
while we continue to call him “professor” and pretend this is all just a
difference of opinion?
I think maybe I’m a patriot in spite of myself, considering how badly I feel
at how shamefully the United States is acting. If I didn’t have a little
patriotism lurking in my heart it wouldn’t bother me so much that the
U.S. doesn’t have
the moral fortitude to cast its torturers and war criminals out of respectable
society.
When Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
an event he hadn’t allowed himself to hope would happen in his lifetime, he
found a nation wrecked — “crushed beneath the rubble” of the collapsing
communist behemoth.
People had great hopes for the change of regime, but by the time Solzhenitsyn
returned their hopes had been dashed as kleptocratic remnants of the old
regime stayed on in new clothes to make themselves rich at public expense.
People told him:
“The common man is being robbed.”
“I don’t believe anything these authorities say.”
“Whoever works honestly has no future in life anymore.”
“Will we live to see the day when science is valued more than making a buck?”
“Kids in school go faint from hunger.”
“I set money aside, saved it all my life, and now they’ve turned it into nothing. What did they rob me for?”
“How many times have we been deceived already?”
“Legalized bandits occupy our highest levels of power.”
“If I should fall ill, I have no money for getting better.”
“We now are ruled by an ideology of seizing and envy.”
“The government has taken up pillaging.”
“Not a single official comes before a court.”
“The democrats turned out to be the biggest bribe-takers of all.”
Solzhenitsyn put some thought into coming up with a plan for saving Russia.
His advice was for Russians to come together and work on local solutions and
create their own grass-roots, small-scale political infrastructure,
independently of the state:
People’s real everyday life, four-fifths of it or more, depends not on the
events taking place on the national level, but on local events, and therefore
on local self-government that directs the course of life in a small
district. This is exactly how life is regulated in the nations of the West:
through effective local self-government, where each has the opportunity to
participate in the decisions that most directly affect his existence. Only
this type of arrangement can be called a democracy.
Now you’re probably thinking “where exactly in the nations of the
West is life regulated in this way?” Here in the
U.S., public policy
is mostly established by cabals of politicians and industry interest groups
without anything like “each [having] the opportunity to participate in the
decisions that most directly affect his existence.”
When Solzhenitsyn was exiled in the United States, he stayed in Cavendish,
Vermont. Vermont is among the New England states that periodically use the
very democratic
town meeting
to decide some political questions. He attended town meetings and was
impressed by the institution, which probably gave a romantic glow to his
general impression of democracy in America and “the nations of the West.”
When he left Vermont, he said that there, “I have observed the sensible and
sure process of grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most
of its problems on its own, not waiting for the decisions of higher
authorities” (he added, “unfortunately, we do not have this in Russia, and that
is still our greatest shortcoming.”)
And when he returned to Russia, he carried that message there:
Our State Duma, in both its sessions, one as indifferent as the other, put the
brakes on any substantive legislation enabling local self-government, refusing
to vest it with real authority and an independent financial base.
But even if no one will open the gates to local self-government, it is still
in the vital interest of the people to act! Let all who have not yet lost
their resolve act on their own, without waiting for the blessing of an
enabling statute out of the calicified Center, which may yet take a long time
before it awakens. Much already is not functioning in today’s Russia, and we
must not let the rest of it stall.
We should begin with patient decision-making about specific local problems,
coming together to address each and every issue that arises affecting the
community: physical, professional, cultural, social. We should come together
in active civic, professional, and cultural groups. In whatever place, and in
however small a number, we must work on every short-term and every long-term
task. Every such association, in form and substance, bridges the void of our
ill, indifferent times.
He’s calling for people to create their own parallel, voluntaryist, local
institutions to take the place of the government — rather than waiting in vain
for the national government to reconstitute itself and exert authority.
Remarkable stuff from someone who’s usually caricatured as a reactionary
nationalist.
Every time that there forms a little center, a link in a chain, an initiative — whether around culture, education, child-rearing, a particular profession,
local history, the environment, community planning, even just gardening — such groups are the seedlings of local self-government, and may even become
component parts in its future structure. It is for them to form in a common
endeavor, and to begin to guide local life — with wisdom, toward its
preservation, and not into a dead end, where many a boss and many a Decree
has led us. At the outset, it may be necessary to come together even before
the law permits real and meaningful elections of local government.
Some will complain: But we do not know how. Our people have weak
awareness of their rights. However, the calamities that have befallen the
people are actively sharpening such awareness. It will gain strength through
the very process of fighting for popular self-government. Besides,
one cannot create the finished product all at once, but only by stepwise
approximations, through constant attempts.
This all seems like sensible advice to me, not just for post-collapse Russia,
but for any country whose corrupt kleptocrats have lost the respect of its
citizens.
The U.S. torture policy has been buzzing around in my head like an angry wasp these last few days, making it hard for me to enjoy anything else.
I haven’t read the newly-released memos or followed the talking heads or read Obama’s recent speech at CIA headquarters.
I’ve only caught hints of this and that in headlines and blog commentary.
I feel like I got the message in its essentials a long time ago, and the emerging details are starting to become just atrocity porn.
On the other hand, lots of people don’t seem to have gotten the message, or it doesn’t mean the same thing to them that it means to me.
They don’t think it concerns them, or, at any rate, any further than requiring of them that they select an opinion to wear on appropriate occasions.
Others, smoking the same pipe Obama’s smoking, dream themselves a fantasy in which all the nastiness is behind us and we don’t have to much worry ourselves about it anymore except perhaps on rainy days when a sigh of melancholy reflection sounds like just the thing to match the weather.
The effect of a good government is to make life more valuable — of a bad government, to make it less valuable.
We can afford that railroad and all merely material stock should depreciate, for that only compels us to live more simply and economically; but suppose the value of life itself should be depreciated.
Every man in New England capable of the sentiment of patriotism must have lived the last three weeks with the sense of having suffered a vast, indefinite loss.…
Thoreau is referring to the Anthony Burns fugitive slave case, in which Massachusetts — ostensibly a “free state” — arrested Burns and returned him as property to his owner, with the full cooperation of the state government.
…I had never respected this government, but I had foolishly thought that I might manage to live here, attending to my private affairs, and forget it.
For my part, my old and worthiest pursuits have lost I cannot say how much of their attraction, and I feel that my investment in life here is worth many per cent. less since Massachusetts last deliberately and forcibly restored an innocent man, Anthony Burns, to slavery.
I dwelt before in the illusion that my life passed somewhere only between heaven and hell, but now I cannot persuade myself that I do not dwell wholly within hell.
The sight of that political organization called Massachusetts is to me morally covered with scoriæ and volcanic cinders, such as Milton imagined.
If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers and our people, I feel curious to visit it.
Life itself being worthless, all things with it, that feed it, are worthless.
Suppose you have a small library, with pictures to adorn the walls — a garden laid out around — and contemplate scientific and literary pursuits, &c, &c, and discover suddenly that your villa, with all its contents, is located in hell, and that the justice of the peace is one of the devil’s angels, has a cloven foot and a forked tail — do not these things suddenly lose their value in your eyes?
Are you not disposed to sell at a great sacrifice?
I went out back on an unusually hot afternoon yesterday to do some weeding in the garden and try to keep my mind from dwelling on waterboarding and sleep deprivation.
It’s Spring and everything is coming up, and the garlic are so vigorous they look almost like cornstalks, and on two occasions I lifted border-bricks and found clutches of wriggling baby salamanders, and Jay Bybee sits on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
I am surprised to see men going about their business as if nothing had happened, and say to myself, “Unfortunates!
they have not heard the news;” that the man whom I just met on horseback should be so earnest to overtake his newly bought cows running away — since all property is insecure, and if they do not run away again, they may be taken away from him when he gets them.
Fool! does he not know that his seed-corn is worth less this year — that all beneficent harvests fail as he approaches the empire of hell?
No prudent man will build a stone house under these circumstances, or engage in any peaceful enterprise which it requires a long time to accomplish.
Art is as long as ever, but life is more interrupted and less available for a man’s proper pursuits.
It is time we had done referring to our ancestors.
We have used up all our inherited freedom, like the young bird the albumen in the egg.
It is not an era of repose.
If we would save our lives, we must fight for them.
There is a fine ripple and sparkle on the pond, seen through the mist.
But what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base?
We walk to lakes to see our serenity reflected in them.
When we are not serene, we go not to them.
Who can be serene in a country where both rulers and ruled are without principle?
The remembrance of the baseness of politicians spoils my walks.
My thoughts are murder to the State; I endeavor in vain to observe nature; my thoughts involuntarily go plotting against the State.
I trust that all just men will conspire
The good news is that I’ve got a paying gig that’s keeping me very busy.
The bad news is that I’ve been very busy, and haven’t been able to update The Picket Line as much as I’d like.
: a bunch of links I thought were interesting enough to share but that I’ve given up hope about being able to weave in with some original commentary.
The European Court of Human Rights has denied an attempt by The Peace Tax Seven to establish that a country’s unwillingness to allow people to legally refuse to pay for military spending is a violation of the rights and freedoms set out in the European Convention.
The number and percentage of Earned Income Tax Credit claims that are fraudulent — those in which the person claiming the credit doesn’t qualify for it — has increased exponentially in recent years, and the IRS hasn’t been able to keep up.
Vargarquista at anarkismo.net writes about Smuggling as a strategy of tax resistance (Spanish).
This is a particularly urgent subject in countries that rely more on sales and value-added taxes than on taxes like poll taxes and income taxes that individuals can more directly resist.
If the “FairTax” scheme that some are pushing in the United States ever came to pass, this would become more of an issue in the U.S. as well.
(“Smuggling” is my best translation of “el contrabando,” but the author seems to include a lot of different sorts of underground-economy activity under that term.)
David John Marotta has an intriguing idea about manipulating the timing of traditional-to-Roth IRA transfers and recharacterizations so as to maximize your tax-free capital gains. It’s somewhat complex but very clever. Basically, you do a traditional-to-Roth conversion into several different Roth accounts using as many different investment strategies. Then file tax extensions so that you extend the amount of time in which you can recharacterize those conversions. Wait and see which of your new Roth accounts appreciate the most; keep those (if any) as Roth accounts in which the appreciation will remain tax free and pay the taxes on the principle now. For the rest, recharacterize them as traditional IRAs again, and avoid paying taxes on them now. Follow the link for details and a more leisurely and clearer explanation.
Radley Balko at The Agitator reminds us of this section from Dubya’s address to the nation on when he was launching the Iraq War:
And all Iraqi military and civilian personnel should listen carefully to this warning:
In any conflict, your fate will depend on your actions.
Do not destroy oil wells, a source of wealth that belongs to the Iraqi people.
Do not obey any command to use weapons of mass destruction against anyone, including the Iraqi people.
War crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished and it will be no defense to say, “I was just following orders.”
I love the smell of moral clarity in the morning.
Some this-and-that, in brief:
I’ve added the section on “The Sufferings of many, for Refuſing to pay the wicked Exactions of the Ceſs, Locality, Fynes &c. Vindicated” from Alexander Shields’s book A Hind let looſe, or An Hiſtorical Repreſentation of the Testimonies, of the Church of Scotland, for the Intereſt of Chriſt, vvith the true State thereof in all its Periods, &c as a stand-alone page.
I dropped the long “s”es for readability’s sake, and did some reformatting and breaking up of the multi-page paragraphs, but otherwise kept it pretty much as-was.
It’s tough reading, but represents an early and unusually methodical defense of tax resistance, and I hope to spend some time distilling its more interesting arguments into more modern English at some point.
Part of the new CIA Inspector General’s report that jumped out at me was this excerpt, found in an appendix, from the CIA Office of Medical Services [sic] guide on how to torture captives by waterboarding without inadvertently killing them:
“In our limited experience, extensive sustained use of the waterboard can introduce new risks.
Most seriously, for reasons of physical fatigue or psychological resignation, the subject may simply give up, allowing excess filling of the airways and loss of consciousness.
An unresponsive subject should be righted immediately, and the interrogator should deliver a sub-xyphoid thrust to expel the water.
If this fails to restore normal breathing, aggressive medical intervention is required.”
Lets say you send an envelope full of powdered sugar to the IRS with a cover letter saying its anthrax and they’re all gonna die.
Furthermore lets say you’re none too bright, and you sent the envelope from “an automated postal center where [you] paid postage with [your] credit card” and they trace the envelope back to you and successfully prosecute you.
What sentence will you face?
A year and a day, apparently.
Athens, Ohio — When Dr. Marjorie Nelson wrote “war tax deduction” on her federal income tax return to protest military spending, the Internal Revenue Service fined the 44-year-old Quaker $500 for filing a “frivolous tax return.”
Miss Nelson still hasn’t decided what to do with her tax forms, but says she’s willing to go to prison to uphold her religious beliefs if a court orders her to pay the fine.
At least a half dozen other Ohioans face a similar choice.
“This business of laboring with the IRS is not my career.
It’s just something that happened to me — I certainly find it strange,” said Miss Nelson, a teacher at Ohio University’s College of Osteopathic Medicine since .
In figuring a refund amount Miss Nelson believed was equal to her taxes that would go to support the military, she attached a letter explaining her religious objections.
She says the $500 fine is a ploy to limit free speech on the nuclear war issue.
“It seems to me the government’s main purpose should be to collect the taxes, not to stifle a statement of conscientiousness.
I get the feeling the government is trying to chill dissent, to intimidate people so they won’t speak up over issues of conscience.”
But the government attorney handling frivolous return cases in Ohio said efficient tax collection will be threatened if people aren’t stopped from filing inaccurate returns.
“It does not require great imagination to see that if all taxpayers were free to act as the plaintiff (Miss Nelson) acted here, our self-assessment system of taxation would be seriously jeopardized,” attorney Seth Heald said in documents filed in U.S. District Court at Columbus, where Miss Nelson’s case is pending.
Heald, of the U.S. Justice Department tax division, said incorrectly figuring a refund is just as wrong as falsifying income and causes just as much work for IRS clerks.
He said Congress passed the frivolous return law specifically to apply to war tax deductors and that waiting for a court to look at each return before judging it frivolous would let people ask for refunds “because the sky is blue.”
Since the frivolous return law took effect in , people across the country have challenged the fines in court.
Cases have been decided — all against the “war tax” deductors — in California and Massachusetts, but many people will fill out tax returns before their cases are decided.
If courts rule against them and they don’t pay the fines, Miss Nelson believes they could go to jail.
In court documents, Miss Nelson said the IRS doesn’t fine people who refuse to pay taxes without explaining their objection.
She said her dispute with the government is the only way people who have taxes deducted from paychecks can oppose military funding.
The self-employed can refuse to pay taxes, but most people can only ask for refunds of taxes they have already paid.
Bruce Campbell, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer handling Miss Nelson’s case, said it’s unlikely she or anyone else would go to prison.
Where are they now, 26 years later?
Nelson is still resisting war taxes, I believe, or at least was as late as when she was interviewed for another article on war tax resisters for the Dispatch.
I think also that Seth Heald is still working the tax angle at the Justice Department, and Bruce Campbell is still filing briefs for the ACLU.
We’re wrapping up our vacation in Mexico today, so I’ll soon be able to contribute more to The Picket Line, which has been getting a little dry lately with all of these yellowing-pages and microfiche posts I’d been saving up.
Have you seen the NWTRCC website lately?
We’ve been working on a redesign for several months now and it just recently rolled out.
Ought to make the site easier to use, kinder to the eye, and easier to keep up-to-date.
We tend to think of the IRS mainly as the government’s tool for taking money from us, but these days it’s also one of the primary ways the government distributes money to people and corporations.
Naturally, freelance crooks would like to get their hands on some of this officially stolen loot, and so I’m seeing more and more reports of organized tax fraud — the numbers after the dollar-sign, the number of people involved, and the brazenness of the schemes all seems to be increasing, as more people think, “the government bailed out the big guys — why not me?”
Alas, many of these schemes involve filing fraudulent returns using someone else’s identity, then cashing in the “refund.”
In such cases, the IRS tends to react by sending its enforcement branch after the victim of the identity-theft.
Elaine Silvestrini of the Tampa Tribune listened well to some of these victims recently and found they were telling “maddening stories of fighting a seemingly malevolent bureaucracy whose employees were unaccountable and either overwhelmed, incompetent or rude.”
The government of Spain recently amended the country’s constitution for the first time since 1992 in order to mandate deficit-cutting austerity measures and to give the repayment of government debt priority over other spending.
There have been widespread protests, and one group has called on Spaniards to “exercise the right of rebellion.” The constitutional amendment, they say, was “dictated by international capital and enacted behind the backs of the people” (translation mine):
Our commitment is to the common good, and for this reason, following our legitimate duty as citizens, we declare ourselves rebels to the constitution, insurrectionary to the State, and disobedient to all authority that it represents.
For this reason we declare ourselves citizens of the popular assemblies and the assemblies of postcapitalist projects in which we participate.
It is in this way that we exercise our sovereignty.
We pledge to do everything that is in our power to construct a new, popular power that enables a new society where the decisions will be actually realized by the people.
We understand that after the great outpouring of indignation the best way to regain our dignity is by means of rebellion.
We understand that with our dignity comes our ability to disobey laws that are unjust and/or contrary to the benefit of the people.
Therefore, we commit ourselves to the call to begin and extend an action of complete tax resistance against the Spanish state and those who control it, with consequent action to demonstrate that we will not pay “their debts,” because we do not recognize this constitution.
A tax resistance that serves to fund the popular assemblies, and from these, giving “absolute priority” to participatory funding of the resources that we really consider public.
Because the situation that we are experiencing in the Spanish state is common to many countries worldwide, and because the ruling economic powers are global, we encourage human beings around the world to assert their right of rebellion by means of manifestos like this.
Tax resistance was one of the civil disobedience strategies that raised India to independence from the British Empire; now it may be a key strategy for the independence of all from global capitalism.
We have already passed the stage of indignation, now we are a new insurgent fellowship!
I like the sound of that a lot more than anything I’m hearing coming out of the Wall Street protests these days.
Matt Yglesias penned a sobering speculation that one result of the difficulty the United States has had in coming up with a way to deal with its prisoners of war that is not medieval in its barbarity, is that now it prefers just to assassinate — finding a “take no prisoners” policy easier on the reputation.
