In September of 2021 the American Medical Association (AMA) released a guide that instructed doctors to disinform the general public by using psychological and linguistic tools in order to manipulate them into getting the Covid-19 vaccine.

The Winter 2021 “AMA COVID-19 Guide: Background/Messaging on Vaccines, Vaccine Clinical Trials & Combating Vaccine Misinformation,” issued by the American Medical Association (AMA) raises serious questions about the AMA’s adherence to transparency, honesty, ethics and the moral standards to which it will hold its members.

The AMA was founded in 1847 and is the largest professional association and lobbying group of physicians and medical students in the U.S. According to the AMA itself, its mission is to promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health.

How then do they explain this “COVID-19 messaging guide,” which explicitly teaches doctors how to deceive their patients and the media when asked tough questions about COVID-19, treatment options and COVID shots?

AMA Teaches Doctors How to Deceive

“It is critical that physicians and patients have confidence in the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines as they become available for public use,” the “AMA COVID-19 Guide” states, adding:

“To overcome vaccine hesitancy and ensure widespread vaccine acceptance among all demographic groups, physicians and the broader public health community must continue working to build trust in vaccine safety and efficacy, especially in marginalized and minoritized communities with historically well-founded mistrust in medical institutions.”

Indeed, the entire guide is aimed at teaching doctors how to foster confidence in the medical profession in general, as it pertains to treatment of COVID-19, but in particular as it pertains to the experimental COVID shots.

The guide provides “suggested narratives” for various engagements, such as when communicating on social media, as sell as “talking points to guide external communications,” such as when being interviewed. It lists nine specific “key messages” that they want doctors to focus on when communicating about COVID-19. These key messages can be summarized as follows:

AMA Concerned About Disinformation

On page 7 of the guide, under the science narrative heading, the AMA declares it is “deeply concerned that rampant disinformation and the politicization of health issues are eroding public confidence in science and undermining trust in physicians and medical institutions,” adding that “Science should be grounded in a common understanding of facts and evidence and able to empower people to make informed decisions about their health.”

To that end, the AMA is calling upon “all elected officials to affirm science and fact in their words and actions,” and for media to “be vigilant in communicating factual information” and to “challenge those who chose to trade in misinformation.”

AMA Then Instructs Doctors on How to Disinform

It’s a disappointment, then, to find the AMA instructing doctors on how to misinform the public using a variety of psychological and linguistic tools. Perhaps one of the most egregious examples of this is the recommended COVID-19 language swaps” detailed on page 9.

As you can see below, the AMA explicitly instructs doctors to swap out certain words and terms for other, more narrative-affirming choices. Shockingly, this includes swapping “hospitalization rates” to “deaths” — two terms that are not even remotely interchangeable!

It strains credulity that the AMA would actually tell doctors to substitute a factual data point with an outright lie. But with this swap, are they not telling doctors to state that people are dead, when in fact, they’ve only been hospitalized with COVID-19?

Hospitalization rate refers to how many people are sick in the hospital with COVID-19, whereas death refers to how many people have died. The first term refers to people who are still alive, and the other refers to patients who are not alive.

It strains credulity that the AMA would actually tell doctors to substitute a factual data point with an outright lie. But with this swap, are they not telling doctors to state that people are dead, when in fact, they’ve only been hospitalized with COVID-19?

Another highly questionable word swap is to not address the nitty, gritty details of vaccine trials, such as the number of participants, and instead simply refer to these trials as having gone through “a transparent, rigorous process.”

Swapping the factual term “Operation Warp Speed” for “standard process” is another outrageous misdirection. The two simply aren’t interchangeable. In fact, they’re actually diametrically opposed to one another. Standard process for vaccine development includes a long process of over a decade and a large number of steps that were either omitted or drastically shortened for the COVID shots.

Following standard process is what makes vaccine development take, on average, 10 years and often longer. Operation Warp Speed allowed vaccine makers to slap together these COVID shots in about nine months from start to finish. You cannot possibly say that the two terms describe an identical process.

The Power of Language

Other language swaps are less incredulous but still highlight the fact that the AMA wants its members to help push a very specific and one-sided narrative that makes power-grabbing overreaches and totalitarian tactics sound less bad than they actually are, and make questionable processes sound A-OK.

Language is a powerful tool with which we shape reality because it shapes how we think about things. As noted by storyteller and filmmaker Jason Silva:

“The use of language, the words you use to describe reality, can in fact engender reality, can disclose reality. Words are generative… We create and perceive our reality through language. We think reality into existence through linguistic construction in real-time.”

For example, “lockdown” sounds like involuntary imprisonment imposed by a totalitarian regime, which is what it is, whereas “stay-at-home order” sounds far less draconian. After all, “home” is typically associated with comfort and safety.

The same goes for using “COVID protocols” in lieu of “COVID mandates, directives, controls and orders.” “Protocols” sounds like something that is standard procedure, as if the COVID measures are nothing new, whereas “mandates, controls and orders” imply that, indeed, we’re in medical fascism territory, which we are.

How to Steer, Block, Deflect and Stall Inconvenient Questions

The AMA could have instructed its members to simply stick to the facts and be honest — and in some sections, it does do that — but it doesn’t end there. Rather, the AMA provides a full page of instructions on how to steer the conversation, and how to block, deflect and stall when faced with tough questions where an honest answer might actually break the official narrative.

Here’s a sampling of these instructions. I encourage you to read through page 8 of the guide, and pay attention to these psychological tricks when listening to interviews or reading the news.

It’s worth noting that the AMA also stresses that:

1) Doctors are to speak for the AMA, and

2) doctors are NOT to offer their personal views.

Speaking for the AMA is listed under “Your Responsibilities” when being interviewed, while not discussing personal views is listed under “Interview Don’ts.”

AMA Is Rapidly Eroding All Credibility

The AMA’s guidance isn’t all bad. Some of its advice makes perfect sense. But the inclusion of language swaps that result in false statements being made, and tools for steering, blocking, deflecting, redirecting and stalling in order to avoid direct answers do nothing but erode credibility and thus trust in the medical community.

Its direct instruction to not share personal views is another trust-eroding strategy. When people talk to their doctor, they want to hear what that doctor actually thinks, based on their own knowledge and experience.

They don’t expect their doctor — or a doctor appearing in an interview — to simply rehash a narrative dictated by the AMA. If we cannot trust our medical professionals to give their honest opinions and give direct answers, there’s little reason to even discuss our concerns with them, and that’s the opposite of what the AMA claims it seeks to achieve.

The AMA is concerned about the proliferation of misinformation and eroding trust, yet it’s telling its members to keep their professional views to themselves and lie about COVID deaths. With this guidance document, the AMA is essentially implicating itself as a source and instigator of medical misinformation that ultimately might injure patients.

In a Stew Peters Show interview, Dr. Bryan Ardis criticized the AMA guidance document, pointing out that while the AMA claims it put out the guidance to prevent political ideologies from dictating medicine, it is actually proving that the AMA itself is deferring to political ideology rather than medical facts.

The AMA wants its members to act as propagandists for a particular narrative — using “politically correct language” — rather than sharing information and acting in accordance with their own conscience and professional insight. As noted by Peters:

The Cruel Science Experiment They Want to Force You to Take. The Year Was 2012

In January of 2012 the American Medical Association (AMA) published a paper proposing the introduction of a new federal law that would force each individual to make a “mandated choice” to participate in vaccine trials. Your only way out of this directive would be to sign an ‘opt out form.’.

The paper was written by Susanne Sheehy, BM BCh, MRCP, DTM&H, and Joel Meyer, BM BCh, MRCP on the ‘Virtual Mentor’ website, it stated that there has been a steady decline in the numbers of healthy volunteers willing to participate in clinical trials.

The AMA believes that more people should want to help in the development of new vaccinations. They stated:

“Reasons for this decline are unclear but are likely to be multifaceted. One familiar problem is the payment of volunteers. To date, the relatively meager compensation that participants often receive could be seen to belittle and undervalue the contribution of these individuals to global health.”

Volunteer Participation to Become a Thing of The Past

Because of the decline in willing volunteers, the AMA has decided that volunteer participation in vaccination trials should become a thing of the past. They said:

“If progression of promising vaccines from the lab to the clinic is to remain unaffected and financial inducement is an ethically unacceptable solution to the recruitment shortage, other strategies need to be considered. Compulsory involvement in vaccine studies is one alternative solution that is not as outlandish as it might seem on first consideration. Many societies already mandate that citizens undertake activities for the good of society; in several European countries registration for organ-donation has switched from “opt-in” (the current U.S. system) to “opt out” systems (in which those who do not specifically register as non-donors are presumed to consent to donation, and most societies expect citizens to undertake jury service when called upon.”

That’s right; according to the AMA we should all sign ‘opt out’ forms if we do not want to participate in vaccination trials. If, for some reason, we should forget to do this, then we should automatically be classified as giving passive consent!

Proof Of What We Already Know

he paper, written by Dr. Lucija Tomljenovic and Dr. Christopher Shaw from the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, University of British Columbia, states:

“In the past several decades, there have been numerous studies and case reports documenting neurological and autoimmune adverse reactions (ADRs) following the use of various vaccines. Arthritis, vasculitis, systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), encephalopathy, neuropathy, seizure disorders and autoimmune demyelinating disease syndromes are the most frequently reported serious adverse events.”

The paper goes on to describe serious errors in the HPV vaccine Gardasil’s safety trials, which they say shows evidence of significant flaws in study design, data reporting and interpretation. They believe this has led to the death and injury of many young women.

Dr. Tomljenovic and Dr. Shaw have found the following alarming results after studying the brain samples of two young women who died shortly after they were administered with the Gardasil vaccination:

“In both cases, the autopsy revealed no anatomical, microbiological nor toxicological findings that might have explained the death of the individuals. In contrast, our IHC analysis showed evidence of an autoimmune vasculitis potentially triggered by the cross-reactive HPV-16L1 antibodies binding to the wall of cerebral blood vessels in all examined brain samples. We also detected the presence of HPV-16L1 particles within the cerebral vasculature with some HPV-16L1 particles adhering to the blood vessel walls. HPV-18L1 antibodies did not bind to cerebral blood vessels nor any other neural tissues. IHC also showed increased T-cell signaling and marked activation of the classical antibody-dependent complement pathway in cerebral vascular tissues from both cases. This pattern of complement activation in the absence of an active brain infection indicates an abnormal triggering of the immune response in which the immune attack is directed towards self-tissue.”

Bearing this knowledge in mind makes a mockery of the AMA’s belief that we should offer ourselves willingly as guinea pigs for vaccination experiments.

The AMA Wants You… Fore Deadly Diseases

If all this is a little hard to believe, the AMA goes on to state:

Unbelievable! The AMA is actually naïve enough to believe that society will be more willing to be used as guinea pigs in their vaccination trials, if the trials are for deadly diseases!

In my opinion, members of society are highly unlikely to be too keen to offer themselves up as human sacrifices in the pharmaceutical industry’s sick experiments, whether the experiments are for deadly diseases or not. I believe that society will more likely remember past vaccine trial disasters and turn around and run in the opposite direction as fast as they can.

CONCLUSION

It appears that pharmaceutical industries, medical professionals and government agencies have little regard for human life or indeed human suffering when it comes to vaccines. Their multi-billion-dollar industry must go on at all costs. Whether it is the homeless, the poor or the vulnerable, they will exploit them and kill them without so much as a backwards glance.

The AMA didn’t get their way in 2012, but given American law and politics in 2026, it may not be long before you or your child could be included into mandatory, legally obligated vaccination trials if you have not signed an ‘opt out form.’ This means that if your child comes home with a form scrunched up at the bottom of their school bag and you do not find it, or if you forget to sign it, then the drug company will classify your absent-mindedness as passive consent and your child will be used as a pharmaceutical industry guinea pig.

References

Virtual Mentor Susanne Sheehy, BM BCh, MRCP, DTM&H, and Joel Meyer, BM BCh, MRCP – Should Participation in Vaccine Clinical Trials be Mandated?

Homeless people die after bird flu vaccine trial in Poland

Without consent: how drugs companies exploit Indian ‘guinea pigs’

3 Reasons Not To Trust The American Medical Association on Vaccines

The Cruel Science Experiment They Want to Force You to Take

The American Medical Association Will Soon Be Able To Force People To Enter Experimental Vaccine Trials

The American Medical Association (AMA) has instructed doctors to disinform the general public

Margin of the Law publishes constitutional analysis, civic research, and legal education for people who want to understand the system they actually live in. Read the Full Constitutional Analysis Library at marginofthelaw.com.

© 2026 – MK3 Law Group

For republication or citation, please credit this article with link attribution to marginofthelaw.com.

Milton William “Bill” Cooper (6 May 1943 - 5 Nov 2001) was an American author best known for his book Behold a Pale Horse (1991). Cooper was considered an enemy of the State by Bill Clinton. Cooper was gunned down by Apache County sheriff’s deputies at his home in Eagar, Arizona, in November 2001. Cooper had the right to bear arms. The IRS sought charges on tax evasion. He was under U.S. surveillance since July 1998.

17 November 1989 Seminar

Mr. Cooper paused during his lecture and a lady in the audience asked, “Why haven’t YOU been assassinated?”

Cooper posed, “If they were to kill me right now, what would you think?”

“That it’s the truth,” someone chimed.

“I’ve got ’em right where I want ’em. If they touch me, everyone who’s ever heard me talk is gonna be absolutely enraged and is gonna know that everything I’ve said is true. As long as they don’t touch me there’s gonna be some of you who are always gonna be wondering. But eventually we’re gonna bring enough proof out, and if you’re here during the workshop you’re gonna see an awful lot of it that’s gonna prove to you that it’s true. It’s real. And it’s happening! Okay, I’ve tried to cover a lot of stuff, just briefly, because there’s no time in 45 minutes to get into anything very much.”

As the hour drew late another question, more clearly stated, was asked of Mr. Cooper by a woman, “Before you let us all out of here, there’s a bunch of us here wondering what can we all do to help bring this all out?”

A single word, “REVOLT” issued from several listeners simultaneously but Cooper responded, “Don’t revolt. What you need to do is what you should have been doing all along. You need to get involved with your government. The first thing you need to do is purchase a copy of the Constitution, which I know that most of you don’t have anywhere in your house, and if I were to go around this room and ask each person what the Constitution says, most of you couldn’t tell me what the Constitution says from your grocery bill. And that’s the truth! And that IS your country! So, if you don’t know what your Constitution is, you’re dead already! So, the first thing you do is you get a copy of your Constitution. The second thing you do is you learn it!

“The third thing you do is you start calling your senators and your representatives, and the President of the United States and you start leaning on them, and you tell them, ‘Unless you straighten up the government, and unless we start getting the truth, and I mean the whole truth, and no more of this baloney, this’s the last job you’re ever gonna have, period! And I’ll do everything in my power to make sure that comes true.’ And then write them, frequently, saying the same thing. And then when they’re in your area, in their area offices, take a little delegation and go see them, and make them understand that they’re gonna be living in poverty because they’re not gonna have a job anymore come election day...”

Conspiracy

Washington

26 July 2023 Hearing

Representative Tim Burchett, TN: “[Mr. Grusch do you have] personal knowledge of people who’ve been harmed or injured in efforts to cover up or conceal this extraterrestrial technology?”

David Grusch replied in the affirmative.

When pressed by Mr. Burchett about whether people have been murdered as part of a government effort to hide U.F.O.s, Grusch said he could not talk about it in a public session.

The Raid Revisited

The November 5, 2001, shootout that killed author and radio host William “Bill” Cooper in Eagar, Arizona, remains one of the most controversial law enforcement actions in recent American history. While officially ruled a justified response to an armed suspect, lingering questions about the raid’s circumstances—and the role of Cooper’s Porterville-born associate, Doyel Shamley—paint a far more complex picture.

From Central Valley to Conspiracy Circles

Doyel Shamley’s path from Porterville to the epicenter of Cooper’s conspiracy world reads like a noir thriller. A former Boy Scout with Naval Intelligence experience, Shamley became Cooper’s understudy in Arizona, assisting with his infamous Hour of the Time (HOTT) radio program. But their relationship took a dark turn: by 2001, Shamley was Cooper’s neighbor, and, some allege, an informant who helped set the stage for the fatal raid.

The Raid: Questions Unanswered

On the night of November 5, Apache County deputies and U.S. Marshals surrounded Cooper’s home. Authorities claimed Cooper fired first, but inconsistencies abound:

• No arrest attempt was made outside the property, despite Cooper’s public profile.

• Shamley, living next door, later claimed he “didn’t hear” the gunfire—an implausible assertion given the close proximity.

• Cooper’s estranged daughter, Danielle, had reportedly tipped off police about his firearms.

The operation left Cooper dead and cemented his martyrdom among “conspiracy theorists”. But it also buried troubling questions: Was this a justified use of force, or a deliberate silencing of a vocal government critic?

The Porterville Angle

Shamley’s roots in Porterville add intrigue to the story. How did a Central Valley native with a military background become entangled in Cooper’s radical orbit? And what might his ties to Naval Intelligence; a detail Cooper himself often cited as proof of his insider knowledge reveal about the case?

Local records show Shamley was active in Porterville’s Boy Scouts during the 1970s, embodying small-town American values. His later pivot to Cooper’s world of UFO theories and anti-government rhetoric underscores the bizarre trajectory of their association.

A Legacy of Suspicion

Two decades later, the raid remains a flashpoint. Cooper’s followers allege a cover-up, pointing to:

• The FBI’s refusal to release full files on Cooper’s surveillance.

• Shamley’s disappearance from public records post-2001.

• The timing of the raid, just months after 9/11, when dissent was heavily scrutinized.

For Porterville, the case is a strange footnote; a reminder that even quiet farm towns can produce figures who collide with history’s darker currents.

Conclusion: A Case That Demands Transparency

Until federal records are unsealed or Shamley speaks publicly, Cooper’s death will remain shrouded in doubt. But one thing is clear: the story of Doyel Shamley—the Boy Scout who crossed paths with a conspiracy legend—is a chapter of Central Valley history waiting to be fully told.

“In the end, Cooper’s death became the ultimate conspiracy, one that even he might have struggled to explain.”

Margin of the Law publishes constitutional analysis, civic research, and legal education for people who want to understand the system they actually live in. Read the Full Constitutional Analysis Library at marginofthelaw.com.

© 2026 – MK3 Law Group

For republication or citation, please credit this article with link attribution to marginofthelaw.com.

This was originally written in 2007 by Christopher Bollyn. I updated a few of the links when possible but this article is largely still in it’s original form.

-MK3

The “war on terror“ is a fraud and dangerous threat to the American people and republic.

It is nothing more than a Zionist deception that has been used to manipulate the U.S. military to wage war on Israel’s behalf while imposing a centralized police command under the guise of “homeland security” throughout the United States.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress have been bickering recently about using the phrase “global war on terror” in the 2008 budget for expenditures of untold billions of dollars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Democrats say they are tired of the Bush administration’s use of the blanket term “war on terror” to justify huge budgets for non-specific military operations.

Erin Conaton, the Democratic staff director of the House Armed Services Committee, urged aides in a March 27 memo to “avoid using colloquialisms,” such as the term “global war on terrorism.” The staff was directed to be more specific when preparing the 2008 defense authorization bill.

The “global war on terror,” a phrase first used by President George W. Bush shortly after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, should not be used, the memo said.

Staff members were directed to use specific references, such as “the war in Iraq,” the “war in Afghanistan, “operations in the Horn of Africa,” or “ongoing military operations throughout the world.”

“This is a philosophical and political question,” the GOP aide told the Military Times. “Republicans generally believe that by fighting the war on terror in Iraq, we are preventing terrorists from spreading elsewhere and are keeping them engaged so they are not attacking us at home.”

Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), the committee chairman, defended banning the terms saying in a statement that the Republicans’ “objections to our efforts to clarify legislative language represent the typical Republican leadership attempt to tie together the misadventure in Iraq and the overall war against terrorists.

“The Iraq war is separate and distinct from the war against terrorists, who have their genesis in Afghanistan and who attacked us on 9/11, and the American people understand this,” Skelton said.

WHAT IS THE “WAR ON TERROR?”

Although it’s hard to say what the “American people” understand, it is very clear that Skelton does not understand who is really behind 9/11 and the “war on terror.”

What the “American people” understand about the nebulous and fraudulent “war on terror” is difficult to gauge, but judging from the disinformation provided by the mass media, it appears that there is widespread ignorance about what it is and who is behind it.

Although 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have drastically changed the way Americans live and think, there is no evidence, in the media or elsewhere, to suggest that “the American people” understand what the “war on terror” is, against whom or how its being fought, or who provides the information that decision makers like Rep. Skelton rely on.

The incredible scenes of destruction at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, witnessed by millions of television viewers, profoundly affected the sense of peace and security that Americans have long enjoyed.

Creating a radical change in how Americans viewed the world was clearly one of the goals, perhaps the ultimate purpose, of the architectural-level planners of the 9/11 attacks. “Interpreting” what 9/11 meant to Americans is where Israeli “experts” on terrorism and the Zionist-controlled media played the key roles.

One month after 9/11, for example, Newsweek’s Arlene Getz interviewed Shabtai Shavit, the former director of Israel’s Mossad. “It may sound dramatic,” Shavit said, “but life in America is not going to be the same as it used to be before Sept. 11.”

Getz had asked Shavit what advice he would give to Americans who, after 9/11, faced “the kind of uncertainty that Israelis have lived with for years?”

“That’s a good question,” Shavit said. “It has to do with how you convince your people and how you educate them to an entirely new situation [in] the United States. It may sound dramatic, but life in America is not going to be the same as it used to be before Sept. 11. In order to be able to go on living, you have to be aware of the fact that you are going to have to give up some of your formal liberties, and you have to be ready to give up some of your pleasantries and conveniences.”

Shavit, who joined the Mossad in 1964, is the chairman of the Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, Israel. The IDC is “Mossad University” where colleges and programs are named after wealthy U.S. Zionists like Samuel Zell, Ronald Lauder, and Marc Rich who sponsor and fund the university tied to Israeli intelligence.

Link - https://www.idc.ac.il/eng/default.asp

Marc Rich was born Marc David Reich.

An Israeli politician helped pressure President Clinton into pardoning Marc Rich, as explained in this Washington Post article.

Lewis “Scooter” Libby also helped protect him, as explained in this Washington Post article.

Link: pow.idc.ac.il/pls/portal/url/page/EN_PROGRAM_ENG/EC_ZELL_PROGRAM

Shavit’s prediction has indeed become reality. Burdened with two costly and disastrous wars and an increasingly intrusive Department of Homeland Security, it is safe to say that most Americans would prefer a return to the way things used to be rather than to continue to live under the constant fear and insecurity the mass media has subjected the nation to since 9/11.

He is now a member of the New York City Fire Department Task Force for Future Preparedness Against Terrorism, among other programs, as mentioned here.

Shavit and senior level officers in the Mossad and Israeli military intelligence clearly had prior knowledge of the events of 9/11:

Link - Bollyn-mossad-911.html

ENDING THE “WAR ON TERROR”

In order to liberate our nation from the burdensome “war of terror,” which has been the main focus and preoccupation of the Bush administration, it is essential that we understand what this “war” really is and who is actually behind it.

To free ourselves from the tyranny of the “war on terror,” we need to do more than eliminate it as a phrase in the defense budget; we need to inform ourselves and understand the falsehoods and deception upon which this fraud is based.

Exposing the fraud behind the “war on terror” is much more than an academic exercise; this is a matter of vital importance for the citizens – and the future of the republic. The American way of life and our constitutional freedoms are threatened by the “homeland security” apparatus that was established as a response to 9/11 and which continues to grow in size and power.

A FALSE CONSTRUCT

The so-called “war on terror” is a false and artificial construct that has been designed by Zionist right-wing extremists from the highest levels of the Israeli government and military. It is based on a series of “false flag” terror attacks which began in the 1990s, including the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the bombing of the Oklahoma federal building, and attacks on U.S. targets abroad.

A brief video introduction to false flag operation:

The “war on terror” concept is the cornerstone of an agenda that has been actively promoted and articulated since the mid-1980s by Benjamin Netanyahu, the former right-wing prime minister of Israel.

The “war on terror” is, in fact, the Israeli-designed war for the United States to engage in as a response to a string of “false flag” terror attacks that culminated with the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It is meant to create fear and hatred for Islam and bring the armies of the western “democracies” into the Middle East to defeat and control the enemies of Israel.

Links:
• Bollyn-Evidence-of-Conspiracy.html
• Bollyn-Balkanize_Iraq.html

Today, Americans are unduly burdened with this fraudulent “war on terror,” which has been foisted on the nation by Mr. Netanyahu and a network of Israeli right-wing extremists and their sponsors and supporters in the United States.

Both the U.S.-led military invasions overseas and domestic security state apparatus were planned long before 9/11. These radical changes have been “interpreted” and explained to the American people by the Zionist-controlled media.

Corrupt or gullible government officials have been spoon-fed the fraudulent Zionist explanations and agenda, which are based on an utterly false “interpretation” of 9/11. Senior government and military officials have accepted this foreign agenda without even demanding to see the evidence or putting it through a critical examination.

While there is abundant evidence that Israeli intelligence agencies were involved in the terror attacks of 9/11, this line of investigation is taboo in the Zionist-controlled mainstream media and so-called “truth movement.”

Rather than calling for a rigorous and independent investigation of the facts and evidence, senior government officials and the controlled media have accepted and promoted an unproven fairy tale in which the culprits are all Arabs and Moslems.

Five years later, the same Israeli politicians and intelligence officials who interpreted 9/11 for the U.S. government and media are now controlling the discussion about how the United States should respond to future threats of terrorism.

Shabtai Shavit, for example, and senior Israeli military intelligence officers are still informing and guiding the U.S. response, the so-called “war on terror.”

WHOSE AGENDA IS IT?

The recent “Report of the Future of Terrorism Task Force” to Michael Chertoff, the Israeli-American Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), illustrates how the agenda of Israel’s military intelligence agencies has effectively become the agenda of the United States government. The report, which took 5 months to produce, was published on January 25, 2007.

Link to the PDF file:
The Future of Terrorism Task Force

When it comes to the Middle East, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies have depended on Israeli information for decades. The Future of Terrorism Task Force, part of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, is no different.

The task force consults with and is informed by “key subject matter experts.” The most obvious heavy hitters among the terrorism “experts” are two Israeli generals, namely Yosef “Yossi” Kuperwasser and Yisrael Ziv of something called Comprehensive Security Transformation or “CST International.”

CST is apparently an informal troika of Kuperwasser, Ziv, and Brigadier General Amos Ben-Avraham, a veteran of the army’s elite Sayeret Matkal unit. CST provides “unique, comprehensive and tailored responses to evolving terror threats,” according to its webpage.

Link - melinks.biz/alliances.html

Oddly enough, although more than 3,200 American soldiers have died in Iraq in the so-called “war on terror,” not one U.S. military official participated in the production of this report.

The key “finding” of the “Future of Terrorism” report is that “there is every indication that the number and magnitude of attacks on the United States, its interests and its allies will likely increase.” Everything else in the report follows from this dire assumption.

BRIG. GEN. YOSSI KUPERWASSER

Brigadier General Yossi Kuperwasser is the former deputy chief of the intelligence branch of the Israeli military (AMAN) and former head of its research department, which serves as the national assessor of intelligence.

The Israeli military’s research department works closely with the Mossad (foreign) and Shabak (internal) intelligence agencies. Currently he is a Charles Bronfman fellow at the Haim Saban Center at the Brookings Institute.

Kuperwasser headed the research department for the Israeli military from June 2001 until June 2006. He was responsible for strategic intelligence and shaping the way that Israel understood regional developments. Most importantly, Kuperwasser was responsible for how developments were communicated to U.S. officials.

A brief sample of his work reveals how Kuperwasser has a history of providing false or misleading information to U.S. officials:

In January 2002, Kuperwasser headed the Israeli delegation that briefed the U.S. on its findings regarding an alleged Iranian-Palestinian weapons deal involving a ship in the Red Sea. Large amounts of Iranian weapons were supposedly bound for the Gaza Strip.

In April 2003, when no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, Kuperwasser suggested that they had all been moved to Syria. This ridiculous idea was widely broadcast in the U.S. controlled media.

In November 2006, Kuperwasser told Canadian media that Iran would be able to produce a nuclear weapon by March 2007. For good measure he compared Iran with Nazi Germany.

In December 2006, Kuperwasser told Benny Avni of the New York Sun that the Lebanese Shi’ite movement Hezbollah “tolerates some Al Qaida presence in Lebanon and even cooperates with it.” He went on to say that “everybody in Lebanon” knows that Hezbollah is “operating on behalf of Iran.”

MAJ. GEN. YISRAEL ZIV

Major General Yisrael Ziv has hands-on experience with terrorism.

Ziv, as commander of Israeli forces in Gaza, has a documented record of planting bombs in civilian neighborhoods and blowing up apartment houses.

In November 2001, the Jerusalem Post reported that Ziv had “been behind the decision to lay the bomb” that killed five Palestinian schoolboys in Khan Yunis in the occupied Gaza Strip. Israeli special forces under Ziv’s command had laid the bomb in a civilian area the night before.

The Jerusalem Post article is gone, but the unformatted text is reproduced at the bottom of this page. Other articles about it are still online, such as here at oznik.com and here at Haaretz.com

In October 2002, his forces fired a missile into a crowd on a dirt road in Khan Yunis, killing at least 13 civilians. Ziv called it “a very important operation that once again shows that there is no terror bastion that is safe from our troops.”

In September 2003, Ziv planned to kill Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the paraplegic spiritual leader of Hamas, by dropping a 1,100 lb. bomb on a three-story building in Gaza. Rather than arrest the sheikh, Ziv decided to bomb the building he lived in. This attempt failed to kill Yassin.

The missiles killed Yassin, his bodyguards, and 8 innocent bystanders.

Ziv was also involved in scores of similar bombings and targeted extra-judicial killings in which hundreds of innocent Palestinian civilians were killed. When it comes to terrorism, Ziv certainly has experience.

FUTURE OF TERRORISM REPORT

The “future of terrorism” report to Secretary Michael Chertoff, an Israeli-American, begins, as one might expect, with a full-color page of the U.S. flag. The 13-page report, which took 5 months to produce, has three main objectives: to “assess future threats”; to “fine-tune processes to meet those threats”; and to “recommend how to better engage and prepare the American public for present and future challenges.”

The 21-member task force, headed by Lee Hamilton, includes Elliott Broidy, the wealthy Zionist billionaire from Los Angeles. James Schlesinger of the MITRE Corp., the vice chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, is also on task force.

He also held a private dinner party for the American Ballet Theatre at his home. Click here to see photos of America’s adorable “socialites”.

He spent time as CIA director, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of Energy.

President Carter eventually got rid of him in 1979, and now he helps companies with ties to Zionism.

Schlesinger’s MITRE technology is linked to the events of 9/11 in a number of significant ways.

Links:
• Bollyn-MITRE.html
• Bollyn-Ptech.html

“Based upon our work over the past five months,” the report began, “members believe that there is every indication that the number and magnitude of attacks on the United States, its interests and its allies will likely increase. Like crime or disease, terrorism should be conceived as a chronic problem requiring a sustained and patient strategy, with ever evolving tactics.”

While “it was not within the purview of the task force to undertake an exhaustive and in-depth examination of particular threats and the sources from which they emanate,” the report goes on to say that “the most significant terrorist threat to the homeland today stems from a global movement, underpinned by a jihadist/Salafist ideology,” which seeks to “overturn regimes considered to be apostate.”

Why any home-grown Middle Eastern movement seeking to overthrow “apostate” regimes in the Middle East would attack the American “homeland” thousands of miles from the regimes they are supposedly fighting is not explained. Most Americans don’t even know what is meant by a “jihadist/Salafist ideology.”

A CENTRALIZED POLICE FORCE

The report promotes the centralization of the local police departments under the Dept. of Homeland Security. In order to defend the “homeland” the report calls for creating a national police force that coordinates state and local forces with DHS:

Although progress has been made in moving towards a goal of a seamless coordination capability between federal, state and local authorities to ensure homeland security, there are still gaps in this coordination that must be closed.

The Task Force was encouraged by the Director of Intelligence’s initiative to staff state fusion centers with DHS analysts. This program will prove to be valuable not only in information sharing, but educating state and local agencies on what they should be looking for and reporting.

The report calls for DHS Secretary [Michael Chertoff] to “work directly with state, local, private sector and community leaders to educate them on the threat of radicalization, the necessity of taking preventative action at the local level, and to facilitate the sharing of other nations’ and communities’ best practices.

“As part of these community-based efforts aimed at mutual understanding and elimination of conditions that allow extremist ideologies to take root, the Secretary should assume the role of “catalyst” in order to incentivize state and local authorities to proactively address the potential for radicalization before home-grown terrorism evolves.

Specifically, the Secretary should actively work directly with Mayors, Governors, and community [law enforcement] leaders to educate them on the threat of radicalization, and to share best practices information from communities and other nations that have aggressively engaged this threat.”

Israel is clearly the first among the “other nations that have aggressively engaged this threat.”

Sharing information with the DHS is “a priority” in the centralized police state. Local authorities will be denied “federal resources” if they refuse to share information with DHS:

State and local capability to gather, process and share information within local regions and with the federal government must remain a priority, and should be developed through an operational partnership with the federal government, ensuring that training, analytical capability, and resources are consistent and meet the overall national need.

The Secretary should continue efforts with state and local authorities to build regional operating capabilities and plans for prevention, protection and response by requiring DHS components to develop their plans and capabilities in concert with state and local authorities.

DHS should also make federal resources to state and local authorities contingent upon regional collaboration.

Americans will be forced to learn more about and prepare for terrorism:

In collaboration with the Department of Education and state and local partners, consideration should be given to implementing developmentally appropriate education at the elementary school, high school and college/university levels.

In order to bring this agenda into practice at a national security level, the report calls for Secretary Chertoff to be named to the National Security Council:

We therefore recommend that consideration be given to fully integrating the domestic security perspective in the work of the NSC by naming the Secretary of Homeland Security to the NSC.

Margin of the Law publishes constitutional analysis, civic research, and legal education for people who want to understand the system they actually live in. Read the Full Constitutional Analysis Library at marginofthelaw.com.

© 2026 – MK3 Law Group

For republication or citation, please credit this article with link attribution to marginofthelaw.com.

Introduction to CAFR reporting

A CAFR stands for Comprehensive Annual Financial Report. This is what states, counties, cities and other governmental entities issue each year. It allows you to determine how a government took in and spent money as well as handled debt throughout the previous year. These reports follow guidelines laid out by the GASB (Governmental Accounting Standards Board). Which tell the governmental entities what financial statements to report and how they can be compared from year to year.

Purpose of CAFR

As stated before the CAFR will give you a snapshot of a governments financial condition. Just like a company would release their annual report so shareholders and banks can evaluate its condition. A government would release a CAFR so you the bond holder and regulators can evaluate its condition. Much like a grade card. You can tell if it had more income then expenses. If their reserves increased or decreased and how much long term debt they accrued.

Local and state governments will release a CAFR once they have completed their audit. This will ensure their financial statements are in accordance with the GASB and back up the numbers. You should read these reports yourself as well. While you know that the audit is saying the financial statements are fairly represented based on certain rules. You don't know if those decisions were smart or not. That is what you and your elected officials are for.

Many cities and counties issue bonds to help them grow and develop new roads and facilities. Bond holders want to know that a city can pay back their loans. You want to know this as well even if you don't purchase a bond. Bond payments will play into your cost for those projects. If bond holders can't get this information they will probably charge higher interest. Which will cause you to pay more in the future.

CAFR exists to provide transparency to the public. When you elect an official to represent you and handle your money they should be able to show you what they did with it. You can look at all the different funds in your area. General Fund, Special Revenue Funds and Debt Service to name a few. You can even see what transfers occurred and if they used one time funds to pay for recurring expenses.

Standardization of CAFR

The Scale of the Problem

As mentioned before there are over 90,000 governments in our country. According to analysts our country's local and state government spend around 11% of our GDP. As of Q1 2018 there was $3.8 Trillion in municipal securities. Having these amounts of money being spent and borrowed you want the reports to be similar so we can compare. Which can save money when we borrow for these projects.

There are many states and local governments that will publish their audited CAFR every year. Most of which publish their CAFR in PDF format. While this is nice to have it doesn't allow the numbers to be easily accessed. If you want to pull debt figures from your local county for the past 10 years you will have to go through each year. Enter those figures into a spreadsheet and hope you got it right. Multiply that by the 50 counties you want to pull numbers from. You can imagine how error prone this process becomes.

This process won't be automated any time soon either. You can write a program to find keywords in a PDF but not easily tag information. Say you want to pull a number for Total Long Term Debt from each of those 50 counties. And compare it to a rule you made up. That would take an extensive amount of time to pull and enter by hand. So analysts and government will continue to lose time.

What is XBRL?

There is a standardized way to pull numbers from corporate reports in the U.S. It's called XBRL. Which stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language. It allows you to tag each number and describe what that number is. By doing this you can use software to compare and contrast those numbers to one another.

A Taxonomy is used when you create these XBRL documents. It will define each of these tags and what they relate to. When creating an XBRL report for a company they will input all these numbers and their description. Then a program can look at those numbers and make sure they fit within that Taxonomy. Which can help eliminate errors that would go unnoticed if it was a PDF.

Let me give you an example. If you have a PDF and it says 4,200,000. Next to the words Net Position. You will have to figure out what Net Position is to that company. If you had an XBRL document that would state what Net Position is already and you could use your time to see if it changed from the previous year.

Companies that sell stock are required to file their financial statements using XBRL. This has been going on for about 10 years as we look at this article in 2018. Since companies that sell stock are publicly traded on a exchange they have to follow these rules by the SEC. We don't have these rules in place for our states and local governments.

Early Attempts at Standardization

While the SEC was deciding to require XBRL for publicly traded companies. There were discussions about implementing this for our government as well. The Association of Government Accountants created an article in 2008 about XBRL and Public Sector Financial Reporting. They went into depth on how they could convert the State of Oregons CAFR to an XBRL instance document.

The Municipal Securities Rule Making Board also wanted to implement XBRL into their EMMA system. This is where you can find most of your municipal bonds and disclosure information. Having this data in a standardized way would help you as the investor.

The GASB has created an Electronic Financial Reporting project. They have been trying to see what improvements can be made to electronically deliver information. Since they create the accounting rules they aren't a regulatory body. They can't require all local and state governments to file in this way.

Why Standardization Has Been Elusive

It seems like it will be a while before this can happen. We had the recession last decade which caused many local and state budgets to suffer. So implementing a new way to report would seem unnecessary to many.

There is no one that can require all local and state governments to publish in one format. The SEC can require companies that are publicly traded to report using XBRL. But since municipal, state and federal securities are excluded from the Securities Act of 1933. They aren't required to report through the SEC. Which is why we have the MSRB and continuing disclosure in place for our municipal bonds.

There are some countries that have started to report their financial statements this way. If all of our states and local governments started to report in this manner we would be one of the only countries to do so.

Florida Leads the Way

On March 23 2018 Florida became the first state to require its local governments to file their financial statements using XBRL. Governor Rick Scott signed the bill into law and will have the states CFO create an XBRL Taxonomy. While this doesn't solve all of our problems. It will allow us to see what tags can be used for local governments.

Will County in Illinois was the first local government to publish financial information in a standardized format. Using the CAFR demonstration Taxonomy. This allowed Will County to create an XBRL document.

The XBRL US State and Local Government Disclosure Modernization Working Group created this Taxonomy. IRIS is a member of this working group. By having a demonstration Taxonomy we can continue to find improvements that can be made to the final Taxonomy.

Impediments to standardization of CAFR

One of the reasons government reporting is difficult to tag is because there is no stock being sold. Our municipal bonds are bought and sold but not as frequently as companies that are publicly traded. Which causes the market to not want to implement this. But that shouldn't deter you from wanting better reporting.

Another reason governments will delay this is because of lack of personnel. Many local governments have part time employees that know the ropes. But may not have taken many classes on governmental accounting. Having them learn a new process can seem daunting. Which will cause them to put it off and spend more time doing it the old way.

Yes there are costs associated with creating XBRL documents. But many of these programs can pull information from a financial statement and tag it for you. IRIS CARBON is one program that has helped our clients create XBRL documents. Once your local or state government figures out what tags to use they can use a program like CARBON. Which will help scale the effort they put into this.

Can Standardization help local governments?

Having all of these governments file in the same manner will allow you to hold them accountable. You can see what information they have reported and what information they may have left out. Your officials can explain what happened in words but you can back it up with numbers. Which will create trust in the government you live in.

Since many municipalities use bonds to finance projects you will want to know if they can pay them back. You will look at credit ratings and disclosure information when deciding to purchase a bond. If you have more information about their financial position you can help decrease the interest rate they will pay. Which can allow your local or state government to spend that money on other things.

Of course there are other factors that can increase a bond rate. But if you have less unknown information about that municipality you will have lower interest rates. Which can help your local government save money on big projects.

Not only will this allow you to get information quicker but it will also help your government. They can spend less time inputting numbers into spreadsheets and analyzing their data. Other counties that have similar Taxonomies can help each other out. Allowing them to share costs on consultants and software.

My two cents

Any governments entity’s foremost responsibility is their duty towards its citizens. Publishing of government financial information in a standardized, machine-readable format, would not only help bring accolades and operational transparency but also enhance citizens confidence in their elected representatives. Municipal bonds are a large source of funds for roads, parks, schools, and other infrastructure developments. Muni-bonds are also a large investment market, where investors seek the credit rating of the issuer before buying. It would help reduce government expenditure in large bond-funded projects, such as road and park construction if the investors easily understood the fiscal health of the local governments through the readily available structured data. Making the financial information of local governments available to investors can help lower the risk and thus, the cost of bond-funded projects.

Margin of the Law publishes constitutional analysis, civic research, and legal education for people who want to understand the system they actually live in. Read the Full Constitutional Analysis Library at marginofthelaw.com.

© 2026 – MK3 Law Group

For republication or citation, please credit this article with link attribution to marginofthelaw.com.

Following is a compilation of selected quotations from prominent Israeli and Zionist figures that embodies the discourse of hatred, racism, and rejection that nurtured Israeli society throughout the short existence of Israel.

This language of negation of Palestinian existence and blatant disregard to the very humanity of the Palestinian people is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of Israeli and Zionist policies.

Perhaps, the most significant aim of this document is to draw attention to the futility of this discourse.

It is imperative that political leaders and prominent figures in any society promote principles of mutual respect, tolerance, and humanism, in order to nurture a more constructive outlook.

• "Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it." Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio.

• "There is a huge gap between us [Jews] and our enemies -not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbours here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy." Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001

• “Jordan is a part from Eretz Israel in history”. Ariel Sharon, When he became the Prime minister, 2000

• "The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more" Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000

• "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don't grab will go to them." Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.

• “The Oslo agreement is very important for the Palestinians since it is the only official agreed-upon document they got. We have another document, a much older one … the Bible.” Ariel Sharon, speaking at a Washington symposium, 8 May 1998

• "We did not know what to do with them [surrendered Egyptian POWs in 1956]. There was no choice but to kill them. This is not such a big deal if you take into consideration that I slept well after having escaped the crematories of Auschwitz." Retired Israeli brigadier general Arieh Biro, The New York Times, August 21, 1995

• "The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." " Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988

• "We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves." Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983.

• "We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimetre of Eretz Israel...Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours." Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces - Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot 13 April 1983, New York Times 14 April 1983.

• "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle." Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.

• “I don't mind if after the job is done you put me in front of a Nuremberg Trial and then jail me for life. Hang me if you want, as a war criminal. What you don't understand is that the dirty work of Zionism is not finished yet, far from it”. Ariel Sharon to Amos Oz, editor of Davar, Dec. 17, 1982

• "The Palestinians are beasts walking on two legs." Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the Beasts". New Statesman, 25 June 1982.

• "We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'" Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

• "It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands." Yoram Bar Porath, Yediot Aahronot, of 14 July 1972.

• "The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only a bluff, which was born and developed after the war." Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, 19 March 1972.

• "There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed." Golda Maier Israeli Prime Minister June 15, 1969.

• "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, April 4, 1969.

• "How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to." Golda Meir, March 8, 1969.

• "We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinians] never do return." Assuring his fellow Zionists that Palestinians will never come back to their homes. "The old will die and the young will forget." David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar's Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.

• “The term annexation is out of place. The measures adopted relate to the integration of Jerusalem in the administrative spheres and furnish a legal basis for the basis for the protection of the Holy Places in Jerusalem." Israeli Foreign Min. Abba Eban at the United Nations Assembly, 4 July 1967

• "We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters." Rabin's description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet - Uri Lubrani, PM Ben-Gurion's special adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960. From "The Arabs in Israel" by Sabri Jiryas.

• "I vow that if I was just an Israeli civilian and I met a Palestinian I would burn him and I would make him suffer before killing him. With one hit I've killed 750 Palestinians (in Rafah in 1956). I wanted to encourage my soldiers by raping Arabic girls as the Palestinian women is a slave for Jews, and we do whatever we want to her and nobody tells us what we shall do but we tell others what they shall do." Ariel Sharon, In an interview with General Ouze Merham, 1956.

• "I don't know something called International Principles. I vow that I'll burn every Palestinian child (that) will be born in this area. The Palestinian woman and child is more dangerous than the man, because the Palestinian child’s existence infers that generations will go on, but the man causes limited danger." Ariel Sharon, In an interview with General Ouze Merham, 1956.

• “The most spectacular event in the contemporary history of Palestine - more spectacular in a sense than the creation of the Jewish state - is the wholesale evacuation of its Arab population which has swept with it also thousands of Arabs from areas threatened and/or occupied by us outside our boundaries.” Moshe Shertok-latter Israeli Foreign Min-in a letter to Goldmann, 15 June 1948

• "We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai." David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff.

• There are a few hundred thousand Negroes but that is a matter of no significance. The British authorities to Chaim Weizman on the subject of the Palestinians prior to 1948.

• The Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates. It includes parts of Syria and Lebanon. Rabbi Fischmann, member of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, in his testimony to the U.N. Special Committee of Enquiry, 1947

• "Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both people in this country…there is no other way than to transfer the Arabs to the neighbouring countries, to transfer all of them; not one village, not one tribe should be left." Yosef Weitz of the Jewish National Fund, diary entry, 1940

• “Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves…politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.” Speech by David Ben- Gurion, 1938, quoted in Zionism and the Palestinians by Simha Flapan, 1979

• A partial Jewish State is not the end, but only the beginning. I am certain that we can not be prevented from settling in the other parts of the country and the region. David Ben Gurion, in a letter to his son, 1937

• "We and they [the Palestinians] want the same thing: we both want Palestine. And that is the fundamental conflict." David Ben-Gurion, 1936

• “Apart from the political danger, I can’t put up with the idea that our brethren are morally capable of behaving in such a way to humans of another people, and unwittingly the thought comes to my mind: if it is so now, what will be our relation to the others if in truth we shall achieve at the end of times power in Eretz Yisrael? And if this be the ‘Messiah’: I do not wish to see his coming.” Ahad HaKI’am, Russian Jewish writer and philosopher, in a letter written in 1913

• "Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine, Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry.

• After we become a strong force as the result of the creation of the state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine. David Ben-Gurion

• It's not a matter of maintaining the status quo. We have to create a dynamic state, oriented towards expansion. Ben Gurion

• There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbour than over those of a tenant. [I] tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument:... the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish... with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary. Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department. From Israel: an Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p.5

• "Let me extend Benny Morris's logic (G2, October 3) in arguing that if the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 had been complete, there might have been peace today in the Middle East. If the Nazi programme for the final solution of the Jewish problem had been complete, for sure there would be peace today in Palestine." Professor Baruch Kimmerling, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

• "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." Israel Koenig, "The Koenig Memorandum"

• "If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti - Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?" David Ben- Gurion - Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.

Margin of the Law publishes constitutional analysis, civic research, and legal education for people who want to understand the system they actually live in. Read the Full Constitutional Analysis Library at marginofthelaw.com.

© 2026 – MK3 Law Group

For republication or citation, please credit this article with link attribution to marginofthelaw.com.

§ 1. The Right To Know

The right to know the law, so as not to be ignorant, as ignorance of the law is no excuse.

The right to speak the law, so as to inform the citizenry.

The right to know and speak the law is the underpinning of government in ancient and modern times. The right to know and speak the law is the foundation of the doctrine of the Rule of Law, which provides:

• First, that the laws shall be public, that the arbitrary whims of individual men and women have no place in a society ruled by law. We declare ourselves to be nations of laws, not empires of men.

• Second, that the laws shall apply equally to all. There shall not be one minimum wage for people of color and another for white people. There shall not be one court for men and another for women. The vote shall not be reserved for the rich, disenfranchising the poor with poll taxes or other artificial barriers meant to come between a people and their government.

• Third, that there shall be due process under the law. Judgment shall only be applied after a fair and open proceeding; you shall know the charges levied against you and shall be provided counsel, so that you may be heard.

When we fail to live up to the Rule of Law, we have failed as a society. Despots may make excuses about extraordinary times or states of emergency, but those reasons are given sheepishly and accepted grudgingly, as we all know that a government that fails to live by the Rule of Law is one that will eventually face the springtime of revolt.

§ 2. The Rule of Law

In the early days of the Roman Republic, the commoners rose against their aristocratic masters and demanded that the laws by which they would be judged should be made known. When the aristocrats resisted, preferring to impose the law arbitrarily, the people quit the city of Rome, leaving the city defenseless and without workers to keep it running.

The great secession led in 450 BCE to the promulgation of the Twelve Tables of Law, which were inscribed on bronze tablets and placed in the agoras for all to read. All citizens were expected to read and know the law, indeed when the Gauls burnt the city in 390 BCE and the tablets were destroyed, all the schoolchildren were able to recite them from memory and they were easily reconstructed.

That the laws shall be written down and promulgated for all to know was a universal value. In Greece, the laws of Solon were inscribed on wooden cylinders and placed in the markets. Aristotle stated in Politics that “the rule of law…is preferable to that of any individual…[H]e who bids the law rule may be deemed to bid God and Reason alone rule, but he who bids man rule adds an element of the beast; for desire is a wild beast, and passion perverts the minds of rulers, even when they are the best of men. The law is reason unaffected by desire.”

In India, Ashoka the Great ruled from 269 BCE to 231 BCE and inscribed the Code of the Dhamma on 50-foot pillars of stone throughout the land, declaring in Edict Number 4 “that there should be uniformity in law and uniformity in sentencing.” Ashoka appointed Dhamma Officers who went out into the provinces, reading the edicts aloud to the people and helping them to understand his laws.

That the law should be known to all was fundamental, but equally important was that the law should not be for sale. When the Barons of England confronted King John in 1215 on the meadow of Runnymede, one of their chief complaints was that access to the courts had become matter of access to money and that judgments were for sale to those who chose to pay for them. This led to the most long-lasting provision of Magna Carta, one still in force in the United Kingdom and many other common law jurisdictions:

Article 40: “To no one will we sell—to no one will we deny or delay—access to right or justice.”

Likewise, in Japan, the 7th-century Prince Shokotu recognized that access to the law and justice should not be a matter of access to money. In the 17-Article Constitution, which is also still in effect, he instructed all Ministers and officials of state to observe the principles he set out:

Article 5: “Of complaints brought by the people there are a thousand in one day. If in one day there are so many, how many will there be in a series of years? If the man who is to decide suits at law makes gain his ordinary motive, and hears causes with a view to receiving bribes, then will the suits of the rich man be like a stone flung into water while the complaints of the poor will resemble water cast upon a stone. Under these circumstances the poor man will not know where to take their complaints.”

That all people should know their duties was expressed in China in the first printed book, The Diamond Sutra, which was dedicated to “universal free distribution.” In the Chinese Buddhist tradition, one gains merit by copying or printing. The writing of the laws began in China in 536 BCE, when Xing Shu inscribed the code of punishments on a bronze tripod for all to see. Then, 20 years later a neighboring state inscribed the laws on an iron tripod, then private citizens copied them onto bamboo. For the next millennium, the Chinese government balanced the Confucian precepts of rule-by-man with the codified principles of rule-by-law.

As new governments were formed to throw off colonial and dynastic yokes, equality under the law and government by Rule of Law became guiding principles. The U.S. Constitution enshrined equality and due process into the fabric of the newly United States. John Adams explained in his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law that the key to making this experiment in democracy work would be the participation of an informed citizenry:

“Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write. Let every order and degree among the people rouse their attention and animate their resolution. Let them all become attentive to the grounds and principles of government, ecclesiastical and civil. Let us study the law of nature; search into the spirit of the British constitution; read the histories of ancient ages; contemplate the great examples of Greece and Rome; set before us the conduct of our own British ancestors, who have defended for us the inherent rights of mankind against foreign and domestic tyrants and usurpers, against arbitrary kings and cruel priests, in short, against the gates of earth and hell.”

An informed citizenry requires the freedom to read and write the law. When the issue came before the U.S. Supreme Court, it ruled unanimously in Wheaton v. Peters (1834) that the law belonged to the people, not to the government and certainly not to private citizens, stating “no reporter has or can have any copyright in the written opinions delivered by this Court.”

The principle that the law belongs to the people was repeatedly affirmed. In Banks v. Manchester (1888), the Supreme Court rejected copyright claims over state court opinions. In Veeck v. Southern Bldg. Code Congress (2002), the 5th Circuit of the Court of Appeals rejected copyright claims over model building codes that were incorporated into law in Texas, stating “[P]ublic ownership of the law means precisely that ‘the law’ is in the ‘public domain’ for whatever use the citizens choose to make of it.”

In the 20th Century, governments all over the world have repeatedly reaffirmed the importance of the Rule of Law and of fundamental human rights, which include the right to know what our governments require of us. This right has been particularly important in the formation of the European Union. Article 15 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union emphasized the “right of access to documents of the Union’s institutions,” the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union guarantees a “right of access to documents,“ and the Treaty of Amsterdam firmly reaffirmed the principle:

Article 1: “The Union is founded on the principles of liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law, principles which are common to the Member States.”

The courts in Europe have repeatedly reaffirmed these principles. In the United Kingdom, for example, in Blackpool v. Locker (1948), the King’s Bench refused to enforce regulations that were not available for the public to read. In Fothergill v. Monarch Airlines (1981), the House of Lords stated that “the need for legal certainty demands that the rules by which the citizen is bound should be ascertainable by him.” In Sunday Times v. United Kingdom (1979), the European Court of Human Rights stated that “[T]he law must be adequately accessible: the citizen must be able to have an indication that is adequate in the circumstances of the legal rules applicable to a given case.”

The Rule of Law is not a concept limited to western or northern countries, to developed countries, or any other lines drawn that divide our world into sectors. The Rule of Law unites our world around a basic truth, that all human beings have basic rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) states:

Article 19: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes … to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

The rights of speech and expression are fundamental to any declaration of human rights. The right of access to justice is equally fundamental. There can be no human rights in any meaningful sense if we limit who is allowed to read the law and who is allowed to speak it. Human rights begin with all citizens knowing their duties and their rights under the law.

§ 3. Code is Law

Law has always been technical. Regulation of public safety and the promotion of standards for fair trade have always stood hand-in-hand with the regulation of the procedures of justice. When the Barons at Runnymede forced King John to agree to Magna Carta, the articles guaranteeing access to justice came right after the article proclaiming a system of uniform weights and measures:

Article 35: “Let there be throughout our kingdom a single measure for wine and a single measure for ale and a single measure for corn, namely ‘the London quarter,’ and a single width of cloth (whether dyed, russet or halberjet) namely two ells within the selvedges and let it be the same with weights and measures.”

England was not unique. In most of the ancient edicts of government, we see the regulation of technology for public safety and the promotion of trade sitting alongside the procedures of justice, the functioning of the divisions of government, and other constitutional issues. In Ashoka’s Second Edict he made provisions for the availability of important medical roots and fruits; in other edicts he established systems of irrigation and safe roads. In early Irish law we see provisions of family law sit alongside standards for beekeeping and the proper functioning of watermills.

As our modern era began, the provision of the public safety became an increasingly important function of government. Railways helped open up the United States, but at a tremendous cost in lives from manual hand brakes and link-and-pin couplers for the cars. With the passage of the Railroad Safety Appliance in 1893, the number of accidents fell dramatically as air brakes and automatic couplers became required on all trains.

In American cities, children were dying because milk was being adulterated with fillers such as chalk and kept in grossly unsanitary conditions. With the passage of the Food Act of 1899, the Board of Agriculture was finally able to issue the 1901 Sale of Milk Regulations, establishing standards of purity and hygiene, followed soon after by the Federal Foods and Drugs Act of 1906 which established the Food and Drug Administration.

Perhaps the most significant of the public safety regulations at the turn of the century were the fire codes. The impetus was the horrific New York Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, where the exit doors were locked shut and 146 garment workers died from fire and smoke, many of them leaping to their deaths from the 10th floor of the factory, a scene so horrific that an observer called it “the day it rained children.”

The fire led to the creation of a Committee on Public Safety led by Frances Perkins, and with the backing of Tammany Hall’s Al Smith, to the promulgation of mandatory fire codes. Since then, groups such as the National Fire Protection Association have created the high quality building, fire, electrical, and other public safety codes required throughout the world. When those codes are ignored, we see tragedies such as the Bangladesh Tazreen Fashions fire of 2012, a fire that bore a striking and horrifying resemblance to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire 101 years earlier.

In our modern world, public safety regulations are a key function of government. Natural gas and oil, for example, power our modern cities, but those substances can cause grave harm. In the United States, we learned this repeatedly when the Texas City refinery explosion of 2005 killed 15 and injured 170, when the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 threw 4.9 billion gallons of oil into the Gulf, and when a 30-inch gas pipeline in San Bruno, California, exploded and sent a blast of fire 1,000 feet high.

Technical regulations encompass a huge swathe of our modern life, a natural outcome of our technical society. Building and other codes, food safety, hazardous materials, the environment, occupational safety in factories and farms, and the safety of products are all subject to these regulations. While some may argue there is too much regulation and others argue there is too little, before we can have that discussion the citizenry must be informed.

§ 4. Indefensible Thunderbolts

Ignorantia juris non excusat is the well-established doctrine that ignorance of the law is no excuse. That citizens must be notified of the laws that affect them was the genesis of the Federal Register, an official gazette of the United States, established after the Supreme Court ruled in the Hot Oil Case (1935) that regulations that the government failed to publish were not valid. Notification of the citizenry of their rights and responsibilities is a requirement of lawmaking.

In most of the world, including the United States, there has arisen a system for technical laws known as incorporation by reference. The standards governing topics such as building codes or hazardous material transport are developed by ostensibly private bodies. The government then publishes a notice in an Official Gazette incorporating these standards into the law, but the text of the standards must often be purchased from a private body.

The private bodies that develop these standards have been delegated law-making authority from their governments. In most cases, these private bodies are created by their governments. The British Standards Institution, for example, was created by a Royal Charter in 1929 and represents the United Kingdom in numerous international forums, including the International Organization for Standardization (which it helped create) and the European Union’s European Committee for Standardization (CEN). As the duly delegated agent for this form of European Union regulation, the British Standards Institution is required to adopt and publish EU standards without change, making the law available to citizens. The official United Kingdom repository of statutes lists hundreds of statutory instruments that mention British Standards Institution documents.

While technical standards have the force of law, the governmental bodies that promulgate these standards and a series of nonprofit organizations that have sprung up besides them all to often maintain that the laws are their private property and can only be accessed after paying a fee. More insidiously, these organizations maintain that they continue to own the documents even after you have paid the fee, exercising controls such as restricting the ability to print the document, or copy it, or even to quote excerpts without their case-by-case prior written approval.

These restrictions on use are implemented through a number of techniques. Many standards are only available in a shrink-wrap license, an agreement that claims that by opening the packaging the reader agrees that they don’t own the document but only “license” it and agree not to redistribute or quote without permission. For online distribution, many standards come with Digital Rights Management (DRM) software that ties the document to a specific computer and restricts the ability to copy text from the standard or print it.

These restrictions on use are proclaimed loudly and prominently, with watermarks being put on every page of some documents purchased, strident terms of use, and publicity campaigns reminiscent of the “FBI Warnings” stamped on the beginning of many movies. But, there is a world of difference between a privately created movie and a legal document carrying out the edicts of government. To proclaim ownership of edicts of government is a false proclamation, what is known in the law as the Doctrine of Brutum Fulmen, the use of an indefensible thunderbolt to make others give up their rights under the law.

The law belongs to the people, and cannot become the private property of some governmental or non-governmental organization, no matter how seemingly well-deserved are the rents one could extract from winning a monopoly concession on a parcel of the law. While standards bodies need money to carry out their valuable work, and while it is clear that these standards bodies create high-quality documents that are essential to our public safety, one cannot cordon off the public domain simply because of an institutional desire for funds.

An examination of the financial status of standards organizations reveals a wide variation in composition and revenue streams. In India, for example, less than 4% of revenue at the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) comes from the sales of documents. BIS, like the British Standards Institution, Underwriters Laboratories, Standards New Zealand, and many other organizations throughout the world, have a thriving business in certification and testing.

Some standards bodies, such as the National Fire Protection Association and the International Organization for Standardization, depend more heavily on the sale of standards documents. However, even in these cases there are many other revenue streams and there are opportunities to adjust the business models to more properly reflect the importance of their work throughout society. And, in many cases, there is room for a fresh look at expenses, such as million-dollar CEO salaries, some of the highest salaries in the non-profit world.

Not all standards bodies have become addicted to these copious revenues that accompany these indefensible thunderbolts. In some countries, such as Thailand, Indonesia, and Ecuador, standards are freely available to citizens as a matter of public policy. Many standards bodies thrive on an open standards model, including key areas such as all the standards that govern the operation of the Internet created by the Internet Engineering Task Force and the World Wide Web Consortium, and the food safety standards promulgated in the Codex Alimentarius by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

One of the most insidious aspects of the current system is the wide variance of the price of standards. A basket of 11 public safety standards published by the International Organization for Standardization and also required by the European Union was assembled and priced by Public.Resource.Org in the retail outlets of 42 national standards bodies. Even within the European Union the prices varied wildly, from $175 in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to $2628 for the same standards in the United Kingdom. Because access to the standards (and the national forwards to the standards) is vital for economic activity across national borders, the opportunistic pricing by money-hungry standards bodies becomes a tall barrier to trade.

While extracting a tax on each reader of a standards document is an impediment to the Rule of Law, the restriction on reuse of the documents is even more serious. The law is the raw material of democracy, and being able to work with these documents to create better ways to inform the citizenry is crucial to the proper workings of justice, governance, and politics.

In many cases, the standards promulgated by standards bodies are only available electronically on a web site that only works on a particular browser, or as a PDF file with a plugin that only runs on certain operating systems. In many cases, the documents are so restricted in use that they won’t work with software used by the visually impaired, or the searching capabilities are so restricted that lawyers, paralegals, policy analysts, legislative aides, and government officials are unable to find the passages they need.

One of the most important reasons the law has no restrictions on use is so that innovation may flourish in the marketplace, creating better solutions for citizens, lawyers, government workers, and public safety professionals. Restrictions on reuse have frozen the format of standards documents inside dozens of old web sites and outmoded formats maintained by standards organizations, many of whom run Internet sites that are littered with technical errors and broken software.

Perhaps the most troubling indefensible thunderbolts are when the law is kept secret and may not be consulted. In Estonia, one of the most advanced and democratic societies and generally an exemplar of open government practices, Eesti Standardikeskuse (EVS) received an order with payment via PayPal from Public.Resource.Org for €3,208.68 for the purchase of 166 technical standards required under Estonian law. The next day, the order was cancelled, the money returned, and a notice dispatched indicating that the service was being refused. When we inquired as to why, the answer was a curt 1-line response:

“We would keep the circumstances to ourselves and we recommend to order the standards from another country.”

Even in the case of European Union regulations, which must be adopted by all European Union nations without change, there is a national foreword. Other standards are developed specifically for Estonia and are only available from EVS. Public.Resource.Org wrote to the Honorable Thomas Hendrik Ilves, the President of Estonia and a leader in open government and asked him for help. When he didn’t answer, we wrote to the President’s aide, and then to the President’s son, neither of whom answered. In a society governed by the Rule of Law, should one have to know the President’s son to be able to purchase the law? In a modern democracy, should the government be able to pick and choose who shall know the rules?

§ 5. This Law is Your Law

The U.S. Copyright Office, in the Compendium of Copyright Office Practices, states:

“Edicts of government, such as judicial opinions, administrative rulings, legislative enactments, public ordinances, and similar official legal documents are not copyrightable for reasons of public policy.”

In order to promote public education and public safety, equal justice for all, a better informed citizenry, the rule of law, world trade and world peace, Public.Resource.Org has undertaken to make technical edicts of government available on a noncommercial basis, as it is the right of all humans to know and speak the laws that govern them.

The focus in this release is on mandatory public safety standards. In many nations, public safety standards are expressly mandatory. In other countries, elaborate dances are undertaken to protect an illusion that the standards are somehow voluntary, but in each of the documents published there is a compelling public interest and the documents have been promulgated under the direction of government and play a key role in society.

A number of the documents released come directly from the standard bodies, because they make the documents available in draft or in final form. In other cases, such as China, the documents were submitted to the World Trade Organization, which maintains a portal with thousands of standards. These standards are made available to the public as part of the WTO’s mandate to promote world trade by requiring full disclosure of the rules and standards governing trade with a country.

Many of the documents released were purchased directly from standards organizations after careful research. Most of the standards were ordered in paper format. For PDF files, such as those that were obtained from the World Trade Organization, the documents were fixed by properly embedding fonts and fixing technical errors.

One of the most important reasons for making standards available is to allow for transformative uses, proving better access and utility for citizens. Of the standards being published, several hundred have so far been rekeyed and reset by Public.Resource.Org into valid HTML files. Many of the graphics have been redrawn into the open Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format so that the graphics can be resized and manipulated. Likewise, mathematical formulas are being reset into the Math Markup Language (MML), providing better access for the visually impaired and better functionality for those wishing to cut and paste formulas.

A number of other transformative uses become possible when the documents have been rekeyed into valid HTML. Proper metadata is added to the document headers, making them accessible and discoverable by search engines. Access protocols such as FTP and rsync allow bulk access and resynchronization to large collections of standards documents. Digital signatures allow users to verify that the documents have not been modified by comparing them to a known good version of the document.

All over the world, for centuries, nations have embraced the concept of the Rule of Law—the principle that prescribed law, rather than the whims and desires of any individual, should govern society. The Rule of Law is enshrined in ancient texts and in modern legislation, treaties, and judicial decisions. It is a central protection against tyranny and against a society where justice is arbitrary and some gain unfair advantage over others.

Only if the law is truly free and available can we expect people and enterprises to obey the law, to know their rights under the law, and to evaluate and participate in the work of improving the law. Only if the law is accessible to all, can we truly say that a society is governed by the Rule of Law.

By making technical standards governing building safety, transportation safety, energy safety, food and water safety, and other important areas readily available to all without restriction, we make society better. First responders and government officials can do more to protect citizens. Small enterprises can more easily and affordable comply with the law and build new businesses. Students, educators, scientists, engineers, policy advocates, journalists, and government workers can more easily read the standards and learn about technology, commerce, and government. They can work to improve the standards themselves, and they can improve upon the accessibility and usefulness of the standards by making searchable databases or better navigational tools.

Innovation and education will benefit by opening up this world, but at the root are basic issues of democracy and justice. We cannot tell citizens to obey laws that are only available for the rich to read. The current system acts as a poll tax on access to justice, a deliberate rationing and restriction of information critical to our public safety and economic progress.

The law must be easily available to all people, access to the legal system and the texts that make up the law should not be bought, or sold, or rationed. People must have the right—an unfettered right—to read the law.

People must also have the right to communicate the provisions of law to others—to speak the law. When Justice Stephen Breyer said, “if a law isn’t public, it isn’t a law,” he was expressing the long-standing doctrine of the Rule of Law, one that has become ever more important in our information age.

Nobody can deny you the right to read and know the law. Nobody can tell you that justice is for sale. Read the law and make it better. Make your society better and make it safer.

You own your government.

The Rule of Law is the rule of the people.

The law is yours to read, yours to know, yours to speak, and yours to practice in a court of law anytime you see fit. This law is your law.

In order to promote public education and public safety, equal justice for all, a better informed citizenry, the rule of law, world trade and world peace, this legal document is hereby made available on a noncommercial basis, as it is the right of all humans to know and speak the laws that govern them.

Margin of the Law publishes constitutional analysis, civic research, and legal education for people who want to understand the system they actually live in. Read the Full Constitutional Analysis Library at marginofthelaw.com.

© 2026 – MK3 Law Group

For republication or citation, please credit this article with link attribution to marginofthelaw.com.

Specifically, there is a defendant living in Florida who discovered the answer to this puzzle and properly embraced his (all caps name / strawman) by registering it as a “Fictitious Name” with the state of Florida.

This process identified him as having a commercial and intellectual proprietary interest in the (all caps name). He, by entering it as such clearly on the Public Record, successfully rebutted all (12) presumptions on the private side of the Admiralty Court and nullified its “jurisdiction.”

What did he do?

The Registration of a Fictitious Name is something you might do if you wanted to open a commercial business and you wanted to reserve a “creative name” to identify that business. The process, however, does not obligate you to ever open a business or to incorporate. It simply reserves the name for your future use and as your commercial and intellectual proprietary property.

For many years patriots have attempted to disassociate their sovereign beings from the legal fiction – the all caps name / strawman - created by the corporate government because this was designed to make you personally vulnerable and convert your living being into a corporation – a thing – and the property of the corporate government.

Certain patriots properly decided to embrace the corporate fiction / strawman as their own personal property by affidavit using a Financing Statement filed under the UCC (Uniform Commercial Code) as a notice to the world. This is because an un-rebutted affidavit stands as Truth in Commerce and the government never rebuts these affidavits.

So why didn’t it work?

The patriots bypassed one crucial step. They failed to rebut the presumptions of the private side of the corporate government and courts that imprisoned their sweat equity and labor.

An un-rebutted presumption stands as Truth in Commerce. Their presumption nullified the affidavit and placed them on the private side.

There are twelve (12) key presumptions asserted by the Private Bar Guilds, which, if left unchallenged, stand as Truth in Commerce.

These are:

The Public Record

Public Service

Public Oath

Immunity

Summons

Custody

Court of Guardians

Court of Trustees

Government as Executor/Beneficiary

Executor De Son Tort (not a party to)

Incompetence

Guilt

I’m only going to discuss (6) of those (12) presumptions. However, Frank O’Collins did a superb job addressing these presumptions in an expose’ titled “A history of today’s slavery” and I encourage you all to read it.

Canon 3228 (i): The Presumption Of Public Record

Any matter brought before a lower Roman Court is a matter for the public record, when in fact it is presumed by the Private Bar Guild as private business. Unless this presumption is openly rebutted by filing or stating clearly on the Public Record that the matter is to be a part of the Public Record, the matter remains on the private side as private Bar Guild business under private Guild rules.

The defendant in this particular case recorded on the Public Record the Registration Certificate issued by the state of Florida, identifying his registered ownership of the fictitious (all caps name), which proved that he was not the alleged defendant on the Courts Docket. I believe I should refer to him as the alleged defendant from here on.

Canon 3228 (ii), (iii) and (iv): The Presumptions Of Public Service; Oath And Immunity.

If the Judge ignores the alleged defendants Fictitious Name Registration entered into the Public Record, which is clearly presented to him in open Court and then decides to move forward with the case, he violates his public service oath and judicial immunity under these sub-sections.

Canon 3228 (v): The Presumption Of Summons

A summons, when unrebutted, stands as Truth in Commerce. Attendance in a Court is usually invoked by invitation and therefore one who attends Court initiated by a summons, warrant, subpoena or replevin bond, is presumed to accept the position of a (defendant, juror, witness or thing) and the (jurisdiction) of the Court.

If these instruments are not rejected and returned, with a copy of the rejection filed clearly on the Public Record (jurisdiction) the presumed position and the presumption of guilt also stands as Truth in Commerce.

In this particular case the alleged defendant rebutted his forced appearance by presenting the Judge with the recorded registration certificate issued by Florida. This certificate stated he is not the defendant on the courts docket. ‘The name is fictitious and I am the registered owner of that name under Florida law.’

Canon 3228 (vi): The Presumption Of Custody

Those who attend a Court initiated pursuant to the command of a summons or warrant, is presumed to be “corporate property or a thing” and therefore is liable to be detained in custody by the Courts appointed or elected “Custodian.”

Custodians may only retain custody over “property and things” and not flesh and blood living beings. Unless this presumption is openly challenged by rejection of the summons or warrant on the Public Record, the presumption stands as Truth in Commerce and you are thereafter treated as a “thing or property.”

In this particular case this presumption was absolutely rebutted when the alleged defendant proved his arrest was a case of mistaken identity and in no way could the Court Custodian detain him after that.

Sixteen words written across the face of the summons or warrant; notarized and filed on the Public Record will cure most problems. Those words are:

I do not accept this offer to contract and I do not consent to these proceedings.

In addition to the above sections of Canon Law 3228, the defendant has also unknowingly rebutted the balance of the (12) presumptions:

Court Guardians

Court Trustees

Government as Executor and Beneficiary

Executor De Son Tort (not a party to)

Incompetence

Guilt

This particular defendant succeeded in accomplishing all of this by “registering” his ALL CAPS name as a “Fictitious Name” in which only he now owns an absolute commercial and intellectual proprietary interest in the state of Florida. By entering it in the (Public Record) he has overcome all (12) presumptions and nullified the “prosecution and jurisdiction” of the private Roman court. His next step would be to record it in the UCC, which is a notice to the world.

Checkmate.

There is no way for the corporate government and private Roman Court to proceed against this living being. If the prosecutor was to disclose the presumptive frauds that the Court has been operating under in the private side, it would also nullify the case and subject the judge to arrest and damages for “prosecutorial fraud” and the “absence of jurisdiction.”

Please note that the judge’s only legal response to the alleged defendant is to Order a “Stay” until the defendant secures counsel (meaning an attorney and BAR Guild member). If it is reported that the alleged defendant has not secured counsel the case remains absolutely deadlocked! If this open “stay” does not cause him any harm (and it shouldn’t) he can choose to:

do nothing or

he can file a two page “Motion to Dismiss” or

he can file a “Rule to Show Cause” seeking a summary judgment for damages on behalf of his living being.

What would happen if the individual follows the judge’s advice and hires an attorney? In all probability his attorney would use the alleged defendant’s “signed power of attorney” to withdraw the “Fictitious Name Registration” from the Public Record. The defendant would more than likely be imprisoned, tried on the private side, and convicted!

What other applications can this process be used for?

licensing

tax collections

foreclosures

debt collections

the vehicle code, to name a few.

All of these matters are found on the private side and none could withstand a Constitutional challenge.

Again, checkmate! (Don’t you just love a good story with a happy ending?

Margin of the Law publishes constitutional analysis, civic research, and legal education for people who want to understand the system they actually live in. Read the Full Constitutional Analysis Library at marginofthelaw.com.

© 2026 – MK3 Law Group

For republication or citation, please credit this article with link attribution to marginofthelaw.com.

The source for this article: The Journal of Historical Review

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s role in the events that led to the Second World War has received far less scrutiny than the scale of his actions would suggest. Public attention has centered on the Pearl Harbor attack and America’s later entry into the conflict. Yet a body of evidence shows that Roosevelt conducted a sustained campaign, beginning well before September 1939, to push Britain, France, and Poland into war with Germany.

In 1982 and 1983, ceremonies marked the centenary of Roosevelt’s birth and the fiftieth anniversary of his first inauguration. Political leaders from both parties and most major media outlets presented a uniformly favorable portrait. President Reagan joined the tributes. Within a short time, however, additional records surfaced that contradicted the prevailing narrative. These records had been captured by German forces when they took Warsaw in late September 1939. They consist of confidential reports sent to the Polish Foreign Ministry by its ambassadors in Washington, Paris, and London. The documents detail conversations with senior American officials, above all William C. Bullitt, Roosevelt’s personal envoy in Europe, and to a lesser extent Joseph P. Kennedy, the ambassador in London.

The German government published a selection of the documents in March 1940 under the title Polnische Dokumente zur Vorgeschichte des Krieges. An English edition appeared in New York the same year, though the translation contained numerous omissions and errors. The Polish originals were examined by foreign journalists in Berlin at the time of release. Later, Polish diplomats who had authored some of the reports confirmed their authenticity in published memoirs and diaries. Historians Charles C. Tansill and Harry Elmer Barnes each stated that the documents were genuine. Edward Raczynski, Polish ambassador in London from 1934 to 1945, wrote in his diary on 20 June 1940 that the facsimiles matched originals he had seen. Juliusz Lukasiewicz, ambassador in Paris, included several of the same texts in his postwar papers. Tyler Kent, a U.S. embassy official in London, reported that copies of American messages in the files corroborated the Polish accounts.

The reports describe a consistent policy. Roosevelt viewed Germany’s recovery and its demand for revision of the post-1919 territorial settlement as a threat that required active opposition. He instructed his representatives to discourage any negotiated settlement that would leave Germany stronger. Bullitt, who enjoyed direct telephone access to the president and often bypassed Secretary of State Cordell Hull, conveyed these instructions to the French and Polish governments. In conversations recorded by Polish ambassadors, Bullitt stated that the United States would ultimately join Britain and France if they went to war with Germany, though it would not enter at the outset. He urged both countries to refuse any territorial concessions and to accelerate rearmament. He indicated that American material support would be available once hostilities began.

Polish Ambassador Jerzy Potocki reported from Washington on 9 February 1938 that Jewish organizations were exerting strong pressure on the administration to adopt a confrontational stance toward Germany. He noted that this pressure was shaping public information through radio, film, and the press. In a longer report dated 12 January 1939, Potocki described the domestic political setting in detail. He observed that Roosevelt faced mounting labor unrest and persistent unemployment. The president, according to Potocki, sought to shift attention outward by emphasizing foreign dangers. The same report recorded that prominent Jewish figures close to Roosevelt supported this approach. Potocki concluded that the administration was using the European crisis to justify large increases in military spending and to prepare public opinion for eventual involvement.

Bullitt’s statements to Polish diplomats became more explicit as the crisis deepened. On 21 November 1938 he told Potocki that Britain, France, and the United States needed roughly two more years to complete rearmament. In the interim, he said, Germany should be allowed or encouraged to move eastward. Once Germany was engaged with the Soviet Union, the Western powers could intervene from a position of strength. On 16 January 1939 Bullitt repeated to Potocki that the United States would place its resources at the disposal of Britain and France once war began. On 29 March 1939 Lukasiewicz reported that Bullitt had assured him of full American backing for Poland’s refusal to negotiate over Danzig or the Corridor.

These exchanges occurred against a background of specific diplomatic moves. After the Munich agreement of September 1938, Roosevelt publicly criticized the settlement and privately pressed Britain and France to adopt a firmer line. In March 1939, following the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, he sent a message to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain warning that continued cooperation with Germany would cost Britain American support. Chamberlain altered course within days. On 31 March 1939 Britain extended a guarantee to Poland. The guarantee contained no provision for negotiation and no requirement that Poland first attempt to settle its disputes with Germany. Polish leaders interpreted the pledge as unconditional backing. They therefore declined German offers to discuss Danzig and the Corridor.

Roosevelt also rejected opportunities to encourage direct talks. In September 1938 he did not respond to French requests that the United States consider arbitration of the Sudeten question. In August 1939, after Britain had committed itself to Poland, Chamberlain asked Roosevelt through Ambassador Kennedy to urge the Poles to open negotiations. Roosevelt declined. On 11 September 1939, after war had started, Kennedy again cabled that the president might still act to limit the conflict. Roosevelt replied that no American peace initiative was possible.

The Polish documents make clear that the ambassadors understood the gap between American public opinion and the administration’s private commitments. Potocki noted repeatedly that the majority of Americans opposed involvement in another European war. He recorded that Roosevelt therefore avoided explicit pledges in public while authorizing Bullitt to convey firmer assurances in private. The same pattern appears in Roosevelt’s 23 October 1940 campaign speech, in which he denied the existence of any secret understanding that would draw the United States into war.

Additional contemporary records support the Polish reports. British Ambassador Sir Ronald Lindsay’s confidential dispatch of 19 September 1938 describes a White House meeting in which Roosevelt outlined a plan for Britain and France to impose a blockade on Germany without a formal declaration of war. The president argued that this approach would allow him to maintain the appearance of American neutrality while supplying material aid. U.S. Ambassador William Phillips later wrote that by late 1938 he had concluded that American entry on the Allied side was only a matter of timing. Swiss diplomat Carl J. Burckhardt recorded a December 1938 conversation with Ambassador Anthony Drexel Biddle in which Biddle expressed confidence that Poland would fight over Danzig and that American opinion would support intervention.

After the war, former Ambassador Joseph Kennedy told Secretary of Defense James Forrestal that neither Britain nor France would have guaranteed Poland without sustained pressure from Washington. Kennedy stated that Bullitt had repeatedly assured Roosevelt that Germany would not fight and that Chamberlain had complained that American and Jewish influence had forced Britain into the conflict. French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet wrote in 1971 that Bullitt had done everything possible in 1939 to bring France into war.

The documents also record Polish perceptions of the interests at work. Potocki and Lukasiewicz observed that certain financial and political groups in the United States stood to gain from increased arms production and from loans to Britain. They noted that these groups operated through organizations such as the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, which received support from major banking houses and from individuals with holdings in war-related industries. The Polish envoys distinguished between these organized pressures and the broader American public, which they described as largely unaware of the administration’s private diplomacy.

Roosevelt’s domestic political situation supplied an additional motive. Potocki reported in January 1939 that the president faced growing criticism over unemployment and labor conflict. By directing attention to foreign threats, Roosevelt could justify new expenditures and rally support. The same report observed that the administration carefully avoided linking the Soviet Union with the totalitarian states in its public statements, thereby preserving the possibility of later cooperation with Moscow.

The Polish ambassadors themselves were not sympathetic to Germany. They reported what they heard and saw without endorsement. Their accounts are consistent with one another and with independent records. They show that Roosevelt’s representatives conveyed, well before September 1939, a clear message: the United States would support Britain and France if they resisted German demands, and it would eventually join them in war. The message was delivered to governments that were already inclined to resist. The result was the British guarantee to Poland, Poland’s refusal to negotiate, and the subsequent declarations of war by Britain and France after the German attack on 1 September 1939.

The captured documents were dismissed at the time by American officials as fabrications. Secretary Hull stated that no such conversations had occurred. Bullitt denied making the statements attributed to him. In 1940 most Americans still placed confidence in official denials. Later releases of records and the testimony of participants have removed the basis for that confidence. The documents stand as a primary record of the private diplomacy that preceded the public outbreak of war in Europe.

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On March 16, 1986, President Ronald Reagan went on national television to make a desperate pitch for the restoration of congressional aid to the Nicaraguan Contras. This particular war had never been popular with Americans, who stubbornly remained indifferent to lurid scenarios proffered by the Great Communicator that the Sandinistas might sweep north through Guatemala and Mexico to menace Texas. So Reagan deployed a new tactic, denouncing the Sandinistas as a regime that had its hand in the drug trade.

For the previous six months, Oliver North and his colleagues at the National Security Council and the CIA had been leaking stories to the Washington press corps charging that the leadership of the Nicaraguan government, including Defense Minister Humberto Ortega, was in league with the Medellin cartel and with Fidel Castro in a hemisphere –wide cocaine-trafficking network. On that March evening, Reagan displayed a series of grainy photographs purporting to show Sandinista officials loading duffel bags of cocaine in a C-123K military transport plane destined for Miami, Florida.

“I know that every American parent concerned about the drug problem will be outrage to hear that top Nicaraguan government officials are deeply involved in drug trafficking,” Reagan said. “This picture, secretly taken at a military airfield outside Managua, shows Frederico Vaughn, a top aide to one of the nine commandants who rule Nicaragua, loading aircraft with illegal narcotics bound for the United States.”

As that Time magazine editor told his reporter Lawrence Zuckerman, this was precisely the kind of drug story that would end up on the front pages of American newspapers. But it turned out to be a setup, part of an elaborate sting operation concocted by Oliver North, the CIA, George Bush’s drug task force and a convicted drug runner named Barriman Alder Seal. It was Seal who had piloted the plane, equipped with CIA-installed cameras, to that Nicaraguan airstrip and brought the cocaine back to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. In return for his services, Seal received more than $700,000 and a reduced sentence on pending drug convictions.

Years later the DEA admitted that Seal’s CIA-sponsored mission was the only drug flight involving the Sandinistas it had any information about. To this day, Frederico Vaughn remains a figure clouded by mystery, with no one quite sure who he is or who he was working for. Seal wasn’t around to answer any questions either. A few weeks before Reagan’s television address, Seal was gunned down while in a federal witness protection program in Baton Rouge, Louisiana- a victim of Oliver North’s press leaks.

Barry Seal was a veteran of both the drug trade and the intelligence business. Born in Baton Rouge, Seal was a bulky, athletic man with a beguiling presence. He was 5-feet-7 inches tall, weighed 250 pounds and wore thick muttonchop sideburns. He had a passion for cars, women and Snickers bars, though he neither smoked nor drank nor used cocaine.

Seal’s first contact with the CIA came in the 1960s while he served as a pilot for the US Army’s Special Forces division. He left the army in 1965 to become, at the age of twenty-six, a pilot for TransWorld Airlines, and it’s apparent that Seal continued his relationship with the Agency during his employment with the airline. In 1972 Seal was busted by the US Customs Service for attempting to smuggle 14,000 pounds of C-4 explosives into Mexico. The bomb-making material was destined for a CIA-trained cell of anti-Castro Cubans. Seal lost his job at TWA but escaped prosecution when the CIA intervened. The agency told the US Attorney’s office that a trial would “threaten national security interests.”

It wasn’t long before Seal turned his considerable skills as a pilot and entrepreneur to Latin America’s emerging black market in drugs and guns. In the mid-1970s he bought a small fleet of planes, recruited a network of ace pilots and mechanics (many of whom were veterans of the war in Vietnam and Laos) and developed ties to the leadership of the Medellin drug cartel.

By his own admission, Seal became the Medellin cartel’s chief link to the cocaine markets of the southeastern United States. In federal court, Seal testified as a government witness in a drug trial that he earned more than $50 million smuggling cocaine and marijuana. But the pilot was most certainly being uncharacteristically modest. Investigators for the Arkansas State Police told the US Justice Department that they believed Seal’s enterprise had raked in between $3 billion and $5 billion from the late 1970s up to his bloody death in 1986. Seal’s bank records show that in 1981 he was making daily deposits of $50,000 in his favorite bank in the Bahamas. The drug money was reinvested in a variety of schemes, from hotels and casinos to a TV network and a drug company.

In 1982 Seal moved his base of operations from New Orleans to the small town of Mena in the Ouachita Mountains of western Arkansas. It was in this same year that Seal once again hooked up with his friends in the CIA, who were anxious to use Seal’s fleet of planes to ferry supplies to Contra camps in Honduras and Costa Rica. The flight plans for Seal’s drug enterprise provided the perfect cover for the illicit resupply missions. Seal’s planes
would fly from Mena to Medellin cartel airstrips in the mountains of Colombia and Venezuela, make refueling stops in Panama and Honduras, and then return to Mena, where the planes would drop parachute-equipped duffel bags loaded with cocaine over Seal-controlled farms near Mena. Seal’s men would retrieve the drugs in pickup trucks and deliver them to the cartel’s distributors in New Orleans, Miami and New York. Each flight packed between 200 to 500 kilos of cocaine, a load that would then fetch about $13 million on the street. By the early 1980s Seal’s planes were making several flights a week.

In 1982, the CIA approached Seal about adding a new element to his flight plans. They wanted him to carry loads of supplies and guns on his trips to Central America. The quid pro quo seemed clear enough to Seal. If he would consent to help the US intelligence agencies, they would once again act as his protectors, keeping his planes from being hassled by US customs and the DEA. In addition, the CIA agreed to outfit Seal’s squadron of planes with the latest in high-tech aviation electronics. The CIA was familiar with at least some of Seal’s aircraft, which by then included a Learjet, several helicopters and some large cargo planes, because many of them had been bought from CIA proprietaries, such as Air America and Southern Air Transport. The deal seemed to pay off for Seal. In the early 1980s, the US Customs Service backed off a drug investigation into one of Seal’s pilots. In a memo to his superiors, a Customs agent noted, “Joe [name redacted] works for Seal and cannot be touched because Seal works for the CIA.”

Some of the weapons Seal’s plane flew to the Contra camps were manufactured by a Fayetteville, Arkansas gunmaker named William Holmes. Holmes specialized in the production of automatic pistols mounted with silencers, a weapon of choice for CIA executive actions.

Holmes, who had been making guns for the CIA since the mid-1950s, testified in a federal court case that the Agency asked him to make 250 of the weapons for Seal. He later described Seal as “the ramrod of the Mena gun deal.”

In 1983, Seal’s luck with law enforcement seemed to run out. The DEA nailed him for smuggling 200,000 Quaaludes into a Fort Lauderdale airport, as part of a sting called Operation Screamer. After his indictment, Seal approached the DEA and offered his services as an informant. The DEA turned him down. Seal was convicted in February 1984 and faced the possibility of spending the next ten years in federal prison. Desperate to retain his freedom, Seal, apparently on the advice of his contacts in the CIA, made one last call, this time to Vice President George Bush’s drug task force. The drug runner was swiftly granted an appointment. He fired up his Learjet and flew to Washington, D.C., where he met with a Bush staffer named Jim Howell. Howell, a former drug agent at US Customs, interviewed Seal and then took him to see a top DEA agent named Kenneth Kennedy. Howell vouched for Seal, and Seal complained bitterly that the DEA agents in Fort Lauderdale had brushed him off for personal reasons. Although the official position of the DEA was that Seal offered to help the agency gain information on the Medellin cartel, Kennedy recalls that Seal also boasted that he could help the Reagan administration expose the Sandinistas’ role in the drug trade. Kennedy told a congressional committee that Seal informed him at their initial meeting that “officials of the Nicaraguan government are involved in smuggling cocaine into the United States, specifically the Sandinistas.” Kennedy said that Seal promised to fly to Nicaragua, pick up loads of cocaine and bring them back to the United States.

Kennedy referred Seal to two Miami-based DEA agents, Ernst Jacobsen and Robert Joura. “After he was debriefed in Washington, a phone call was made to Group Six in the Miami Field Division,” Jacobsen said in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in 1989. “We were asked if I wanted to work with Mr. Seal. I said I would.”

Seal flew to Miami the next day, where he met with Joura, Jacobsen and Steve LeClair, an attorney with the US Justice Department. Seal told the DEA men that he could easily set up a delivery of 3,000 kilos of cocaine from Jorge Ochoa’s operation in Colombia. After this meeting, Seal was officially signed up as a confidential informant for the DEA: his DEA ID number was SGI-84-0028. The DEA agreed to pay him $800,000 a year for his services and postponed his sentencing on the Quaalude-smuggling conviction.

A few days later Seal called two of the Medellin cartel’s top operatives in Miami, Felix Dixon Bates and Carlos “Lito” Bustamante, to let them know that he was back in business. Bustamante oversaw the distribution of Medellin cocaine in the US. Bates was a long-time pilot for the Ochoa network who specialized in smuggling exotic animals to Jorge Ochoa’s ranch in Colombia. Bustamante told Seal that Ochoa wanted him to ferry a Titan 404 plane from Miami to Medellin. Seal agreed to the plan and on April 4, 1984, he and Bates flew to Colombia. They were met at the airstrip by Jorge Ochoa. Precisely what happened at this meeting is the subject of some controversy. DEA agents Joura and Jacobsen claim that it was at this session that the subject of Nicaragua first came up. They say that Ochoa told Seal that the cartel was moving most of its operations to Nicaragua because of increasing pressures on them in Colombia. This scenario seems far-fetched for a number of reasons, not least because at that time the cartel seemed to be operating with near impunity in Colombia, Panama, Honduras and Costa Rica. An alliance with the Sandinistas would only antagonize the US government, which the cartel was trying so hard to placate.

A more likely story is that Seal and Ochoa used this meeting to plan a sting operation against the Sandinistas designed to keep Seal out of prison and ensure the Medellin cartel the continued good graces of the US intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Over the next week, Seal visited Panama and Guatemala before returning to Miami, where he conferred with Bustamante and other US representatives of the Medellin cartel. They set up plans for a series of drug flights from Colombia and Panama to Miami, and Seal invited the Colombians to come with him to Mena to inspect the planes that Seal was planning to use for the cocaine flights. The next day Seal flew four Colombians to Mena, where he treated the drug dealers to a lunch of Cajun food and took them for a spin in his new Lockheed Lodestar jet. The Colombians were duly impressed and gave the green light for the drug flights to begin.

The following day Seal relayed the plans to DEA agent Jacobsen, who got approval from the Colombian government for Seal to enter the country and pick up a load of cocaine. Before taking off for Colombia, Seal took the opportunity to make two trips to his bank in the Bahamas, where he deposited several hundred thousand dollars in cash.

A week before Seal was scheduled to fly to Medellin, he blew out an engine on his Learjet during a test run. The DEA paid to have the plane repaired. In the meantime, a DEA agent named S.B. Billbough passed on to the CIA Seal’s contention that the Ochoa organization was preparing to move its base of operations to Nicaragua. According to a memo prepared by DEA agent Joura, the CIA expressed “considerable interest” in the Seal operation.

With his Learjet still in the repair hangar, Seal flew to Panama City on May 18 for a meeting with the equivalent of the board of directors of the Medellin cartel. At the session were Jorge Ochoa, his brother Fabio Ochoa, Pablo Escobar, Bates, and Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha. Seal arranged to trade one of his helicopters (previously owned by a CIA front) for a Merlin 3B owned by the cartel. It was also at this session that Seal said he was introduced to the mysterious figure of Frederico Vaughn.

The CIA would later claim that Vaughn was a “close associate” of the Sandinistas’ interior minister, Tomas Borge. But Vaughn has long been suspected of having his own ties to the CIA. His cousin Barney Vaughn worked for the Popular Bank and Trust Company, once owned by Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. The bank was also used by the CIA and Oliver North’s operation to funnel money to the Contras. In addition, a telephone number Seal later claimed to be Vaughn’s Managua home number turned out to be a line used by US intelligence assets from 1981 to 1986. The Sandinistas claimed that Vaughn had worked as an assistant manager of an import/export company in the capital after the revolution, but had left Nicaragua for Panama in 1983.

Seal said that he and Vaughn flew the next day on Copa Airlines to Managua, where Vaughn showed the pilot the 3,000-foot Los Brasiles airstrip northwest of Managua. Vaughn, Seal said, also pointed out the location of Sandinista anti-aircraft guns stationed throughout the capital. Seal spent the night at Vaughn’s house and returned to Florida the next day, just in time for his long-delayed sentencing hearing in Fort Lauderdale on his Quaalude-smuggling conviction.

Seal was sentenced to ten years, but because of his cooperation in the drug operation the sentence was reduced to six months’ probation. Federal Judge Norman Roettinger, a law-and-order conservative who had received letters on Seal’s behalf from the DEA and the CIA, praised Seal for his work undermining the Sandinista regime.

These problems behind him, Barry Seal was cleared for his first DEA-sanctioned cocaine run. On May 28, Seal and his longtime copilot Emile Camp took of from Mena’s Intermountain Regional Airport in Seal’s retooled Lockheed Lodestar jet bound for Colombia. They arrived at a small airstrip in the mountains outside Medellin in a driving rainstorm that turned the dirt runway into a strip of mud. Seal nearly wrecked the plane on landing when the jet slid off the runway and into a ditch. The plane suffered damage to its landing gear and Seal was forced to run the return flight in a smaller plane owned by the Medellin cartel. This plane was the same Titan 404 that Seal and Bates had delivered to Medellin a month earlier. According to Seal, senior cartel executive Carlos Lehder himself was at the airstrip to meet his plane. From astride a white Arabian stallion, Lehder supervised a team of Indians who loaded the Titan with more than a tone of cocaine.

The smaller plane’s limited range, Seal claimed, forced him to stop in Nicaragua for refueling. He landed at los Brasiles airport, where he and Camp were greeted by Frederico Vaughn. The plane was quickly refueled and took off for Miami. But almost immediately, Seal told his DEA handlers, his plane was struck by anti-aircraft fire and he was forced to crash-land the plane at the Managua airport. One of Vaughn’s associates arrived in a military-style truck and took the cocaine away for safekeeping. Seal and Camp were detained overnight by the Nicaraguan police. But once again, Seal said, in his thoroughly bizarre narrative of this episode, Vaughn came to the rescue, arranging their release from jail and providing them with a new plane to fly back to Florida. Seal claimed that this plane belonged to Pablo Escobar. Vaughn assured Seal that he would safeguard the cocaine until Seal could come back for it.

Seal arrived back in Miami and told his astounding tale to Joura and Jacobsen. Far from being a disaster, Seal told the DEA men, this created a great opportunity to move against the Sandinistas. Plans were swiftly made by the DEA and CIA for a return flight to Nicaragua. The first order of business was to get Seal a new plane. On June 10, Seal traded his Merlin 3B, recently acquired from Jorge Ochoa, for a C-123K military cargo plane owned by a CIA contractor. Before it could be flown, however, the C-123K needed structural repairs and engine work. DEA agent Jacobsen arranged for the Pentagon to have the planed shipped to Rickenbacker Air Force Base outside Columbus, Ohio, where Air Force mechanics performed $40,000 worth of free work on Seal’s plane. After the repairs were completed, the cargo plane was flown to Homestead Air Force Base outside Miami, where CIA technicians installed two hidden cameras, one in the plane’s nosecone and the other in the rear cargo hold. The cameras were rigged so that Seal could use a remote control button hidden in his pocket to snap photos at will.

On the morning of June 25, Seal, Camp and their mechanic, Peter Everson, landed the C-123K at Los Brasiles airstrip. Although the CIA and President Reagan would refer to los Brasiles as a military airbase, it was in fact a civilian runway used primarily by crop-dusters and other agricultural aircraft. Seal claimed that the plane was met by Frederico Vaughn, Pablo Escobar, Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha and some Nicaraguan soldiers, who helped carry more than 1,200 pounds of cocaine stuffed in duffel bags from a hangar into a the rear of the plane. Seal clicked off a set of grainy and indistinct photos of the drug transfer.

The plane took off about an hour later, after taking on about 2,000 gallons of fuel. The next morning Seal landed his C-123K, nicknamed the Fat Lady, at Homestead Air Force Base, where the DEA took control of the cocaine and CIA agents rushed Seal’s roll of film off to be developed. In the Agency’s photo labs.

Shortly after Seal returned to Florida, Ron Caffery, the head of the DEA’s cocaine desk in Washington, D.C., received a call from his boss, David Westrate, assistant administrator of the DEA. Westrate instructed Caffery to brief members of the National Security Council and the CIA on Seal’s mission. The next day Caffery met with Oliver North and CIA agent Dewey Clarridge at the Old Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. He showed North and Clarridge blowups of Seals’ photos and identified pictures of Seal, Camp, Vaughn and Escobar. But Caffery was surprised to discover that both North and Clarridge were already well-acquainted with the photos. Caffrey recalled being somewhat unaware of Vaughn’s background, but noticed that Clarridge seemed to be packing a dossier on the man. “The CIA representative told me that he [Vaughn] was an associate of a government officer, of the Nicaraguan government, which was news to me,” Caffrey told a congressional committee looking into the Seal affair.

The discussion between North, Clarridge and the DEA man rapidly turned to planning a new sting involving Seal. They decide that Seal should be sent back to Nicaragua with $1.5 million in DEA cash, along with assorted “toys” for Escobar and Vaughn, to arrange a new drug deal. At this point, Oliver North suggested that perhaps Seal could arrange a deal outside Nicaragua, so that Vaughn and Escobar could be arrested and the $1.5 million be turned over to the Contras. Caffery told North that the US Attorney’s office would never countenance such a scheme. Then North suggested that perhaps it was time for the DEA to go public with Seal’s photos. North told Caffrey that “there was an important vote coming up on an appropriations bill to fund the Contras” and that information on Sandinista drug dealing could swing the vote in the administration’s favor.

Again Caffery shot down North’s idea. He told North that release of any information on the Nicaragua flight would jeopardize their investigation of the Medellin cartel and place Seal’s life at risk. But the information was already beginning to leak out as part of the Reagan administration’s propaganda campaign to demonize the Sandinistas. On June 27, General Paul Gorman, head of the Pentagon’s Southern Command, made an anti-Sandinista speech at a meeting hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce in El Salvador. Gorman claimed to have proof that the Sandinista leadership was involved in drug smuggling.

This exposure, however, didn’t stop the DEA from sending Seal back to Nicaragua for another cocaine buy on July 7. The deal was apparently aborted at the last minute, when, Seal said, he was warned that the Sandinistas had learned about the mission.

By now the NSC and CIA were leaking reports of Seal’s Nicaraguan exploits to their friends in the Washington press corps. The Washington Times, in a July 17, 1984 front page story by Edmond Jacoby, was the first to report on “evidence” of Sandinista drug trafficking. But Oliver North’s diaries reveal that other reporters were also hot for the story. One of the first to lunge at the bait was Doyle McManus, the Los Angeles Times writer who savaged Gary Webb. In North’s July 17 entry he wrote: “McManus, LA Times says NSC resource claims WH [White House] has pictures of Borge loading cocaine in Nic.” McManus’s source was dead wrong, of course. Borge had been nowhere near the Seal plane.

Within weeks all the major national papers and news magazines were running stories quoting “high-level” sources in the US government who claimed that they had hard evidence that the Sandinista leadership was “actively participating” in the drug trade. The two names most often cited in the stories were Borge and Defense Minister Humberto Ortega, brother of the president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega.

On September 7, with the Contra aid vote fast approaching, Senator Paula Hawkins, a right-wing Republican from Florida, convened a press conference in Washington at which she attacked the Sandinistas as “a brutal regime financed by the drug trade.” Hawkins unveiled to the press four obscure photos taken on Seal’s June 25 mission. She also displayed a high-altitude photo of Los Brasiles “military airbase” taken by an American U-2 spy plane. The photos were not released to the press, but her press conference put the story on the front page once again.

By now Barry Seal’s cover as a secret drug agent was completely blown and he went back to what he did best, running drugs and guns. Fortunately for Seal, Congress was not persuaded to renew Contra funding in the fall of 1984 and instead enacted the Boland amendment prohibiting any direct military aid. This meant Seal still had a job shuttling lethal contraband for North’s network from Mena to El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. An Arkansas police officer investigating Seal’s operation in August 1985 wrote in his report: “Every time Bari [sic] Seal flies a load of dope for the US govt., he flies two for himself.”

In late December 1984, Seal was caught flying a load of marijuana into Louisiana. He was released the next day after he posted a $250,000 cash bond. Seal made a call to his friends in the DEA, and on January 7 he was interviewed by Special Agent Dale Hahn of the FBI. According to Hahn’s notes, Seal offered to testify against low-level members of the Medellin cartel in exchange for a guilty plea and light sentence on the marijuana-trafficking charges. Over the next year, Seal testified in three major drug cases, helping the feds secure convictions. Seal was eventually sentenced to a six-month term in a halfway house in Baton Rouge. Shortly after Seal’s arrest in Louisiana, his old friend and co-pilot Emile Camp died when his Seneca plane, equipped with state-of-the-art navigational equipment, slammed into a mountain near Mena. Many of Camp’s associates believe that his plane had been sabotaged and point out that he was one of the few to witness many of Seal’s activities for the CIA and DEA.

In the summer of 1985, Seal decided to sell his C-123K cargo plane for $250,000. The buyer was the same CIA contractor, Harold Doan, from whom Seal had acquired the plane a year earlier. The plane later ended up in the service of Oliver North’s Contra resupply program and entered aviation history on October 3, 1986, when it was shot down over Nicaraguan air space and its cargo kicker, Eugene Hasenfus, was taken into custody by the Sandinistas and paraded before the world as living proof of the Reagan administration’s war against their country.

Although supposedly in a witness protection program, Seal said he considered himself “a clay pigeon.” He was eventually tracked down by a team of assassins working for Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar. On February 19, 1986, Seal’s body was riddled with hundreds of bullets as he sat in his whit Cadillac outside the Salvation Army Center in Baton Rouge.

After Seal’s death, IRS agents examined his bank records. They determined his estate owed more than $86 million in back taxes, but ended up forgiving much of the debt, citing Seal’s “CIA-DEA employment.”

By the mid-1980s, Arkansas was an important staging post in the Contra War against Nicaragua being run from Washington. One scheme for maintaining a cover-up for Oliver North’s network was, it appears, played out in the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock, Arkansas occupied by a young Bill Clinton.

Among the occupants of that same mansion was buddy Young, the man in charge of Clinton’s security. According to court documents filed by Terry-Reed, a former CIA asset involved in North’s Contra resupply effort, Young was a pivotal figure in a case designed to land Reed in prison not long after Reed had walked out of an arms-for-drugs operation in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he had been working with CIA man Felix Rodriguez.

Arkansas’s role in the Contra War and in an arms-for-drugs supply network goes back to the early 1980s and the airport at Mena. A federal investigation aided by the Arkansas State Police established that Barry Seal had his planes refitted at Mena for drug drops, trained pilots there and laundered his profits partly through financial institutions in Arkansas. Seal at this time was in close contact with North, who acknowledged the relationship in his notebooks and his memoir.

Among those recruited by North was-so the man subsequently asserted in court papers-Terry Reed, formerly with Air America in Thailand. Reed says he was working for North in 1983. North put Reed in touch with a Seal, and by 1984 Reed had established a base at the hamlet of Nella, ten miles north of Mena in Ouachita National Forest. There Nicaraguan Contras and other recruits from Latin America were trained in resupply missions, night landings, precision airdrops and similar maneuvers. Reed, familiar with the commercial affairs of Mena, asserts that large sums of drug money were being laundered through leading Arkansas bond brokers, an allegation also being considered by a federal investigator just as his researches were abruptly terminated.

One of Reed’s contacts in North’s network was William Cooper, another Air America veteran then working for Southern Air Transport. Cooper was at the controls of the C-123K once owned by Seal that was shot down by a Sandinista soldier in October 1986. That plane had been serviced at Mena. Cooper died in the crash. His crewman, Eugene Hasenfus, survived.

Back in 1985, Cooper had suggested to Reed that he go to Mexico and set up an operation expanding the supply network. Reed agreed, traveled to Vera Cruz for discussions with Felix Rodriguez and, in July 1986, set up a front company, Machinery International, in Guadalajara.

Three months later Cooper was dead and Hasenfus was being paraded by Sandinistas before the Managua press corps. Reed says that Machinery International’s business, “trans-shipping items” in “support of our foreign politics,” was put on hold until January 1987, this at a time when the Iran/Contra cover-up was pressing forward in Washington. Seven months later, Reed says, he became aware that drugs were part of the shuttle passing through Machinery International’s premises in Guadalajara and that he himself was a likely candidate for fall guy if things came unglued.

Reed says he confronted Rodriguez and told him he was quitting. By early September 1987 he had returned to the United States. A month later Governor Clinton’s security chief, Buddy Young, was activating from the governor’s mansion- a sequence of events seemingly designed to land the potentially troublesome Reed in prison.

The instrument at hand was a plane owned by Reed.

On March 24, 1983, Reed’s plane had been stolen from a repair shop in Joplin, Missouri (Reed’s home state). Prior to this, Reed says, Oliver North had asked him to contribute this same plane to Project Democracy, a scheme by which individuals would allow their fully insured planes and boats to “disappear” for the sake of counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua. Reed claims he had refused the request. At all events, the plane was removed while Reed was out of town. Reed duly reported the theft to his insurance company and received compensation. He says that in 1985 North’s people contacted him in Mena, told him that his plane was being returned after having been in Central America for two years and asked that he not report its return because they might need to “borrow” it again. Reed consented. He had the plane stored at his hangar in the North Little Rock Airport and left for Guadalajara soon thereafter.

On October 8, 1987, Tommy Baker, a former Arkansas State Police officer and longtime friend of Buddy Young, says he happened to be passing Reed’s hangar when a powerful gust of wind blew the door open, revealing a plane. Baker said he thought the plane looked “suspicious” and so called his pal Young at the Governor’s Mansion. Young later claimed in testimony that he contacted the National Crime Information Center to check if the plane’s registration number came up on a list of stolen planes, found no record of this and then instructed Baker to check if the plane’s markings had been changed, a common practice of plane thieves (also a routine practice at Mena and in North’s Project Democracy). Baker established that they had been altered, and by October 21, the two claim, they turned the case over to the FBI.

Under scrutiny, the sequence of events as set out by Baker and Young did not stand up. On October 5, three days before fortuitous gust blew open the hangar door, Young was phoning Reed’s parents masquerading as an old friend of their son, according to legal papers filed by Reed. Young had called in the plane’s correct registration number to the National Crime Information Center- so the center’s records show-on October 7, before Baker had, by his own account, even set eyes on the plane (and before Young had called in with the doctored number). That same evening Young had called Joplin to inquire about the plane’s original disappearance. In June 1988, Reed was indicted on mail fraud charges in connection with his 1983 insurance claim on the plane.

Reed accused Young and Baker of preparing and presenting false evidence for the purpose of furthering a false prosecution. This much is clear. In efforts to discredit someone familiar with the Mena operation, Buddy Young made his calls from Bill Clinton’s mansion. Young and Baker have admitted to entering Reed’s hangar three times without a warrant. They also admitted to tampering with the plane. When they finally did obtain a warrant, it was on the basis of misrepresentations. According to court documents, they subsequently made false statements to a federal grand jury as well as, on more than one occasion, in hearings related to United States v. Reed. Finally, evidence that might have helped Reed’s case was secreted in Young’s office in Clinton’s mansion when it was supposed to have been in federal court. A federal judge involved in the case, Frank Theis, declared that Baker and Young had acted with “reckless disregard for the truth.” Reed was acquitted when the court determined that the government did not have enough legitimate evidence to convict him.

Three months before his assassination Barry Seal described in sworn testimony to federal and state investigators a nexus of airstrips, front corporations, “legitimate” Arkansas companies and banks participating in the shipment of drugs and laundering of drug profits. His interrogators-IRS agent Bill Duncan and Russell Welch of the Arkansas State Police- had hoped to get Seal to gradually detail the bigger picture and were frustrated in their efforts when Seal, then under a drug conviction in Louisiana, was returned to that state for sentencing. When he was killed, one important path toward uncovering the Contra resupply operation in Arkansas turned cold.

Nevertheless, Duncan and Welch were determined to continue their investigation and follow the trails leading out from Mena into the rest of the state. Where the money trail ultimately led, the investigators never were able to discover fully because their investigation was abruptly halted. One alleged money launderer, conspicuous in Arkansas’s politico-financial world and profitably involved in state business, was- according to a source whose information had proved reliable in the past in receipt of large sums of drug money from Seal. Duncan and Welch eventually prepared a 3,000-page file on Mena, documenting wide spread money laundering and drug running. Duncan prepared thirty-five indictments for the US Attorney, but they were never acted upon and in 1988 the Arkansas State Police began shredding its Mena files, including all documents linking Oliver North to Seal and Seal’s associate Terry Reed.

There is every indication that many of the illicit activities linking intelligence agencies to drug traffickers continued into the 1990s. An IRS report from the fall of 1991, three years after Duncan left the agency, notes that the “CIA has ongoing operations out of Mena, Arkansas airport…one of the operations at the airport is laundering money.”

Duncan, a special agent in the IRS’s criminal division, was assigned to the Mena investigation in 1983. In 1989, he was called to testify before the House Judiciary Committee about the goings-on at Mena, The committee had convened to probe the lack of criminal indictments and the possible hampering of the investigations by the CIA and Clinton’s gubernatorial staff in Little Rock. Another agency under scrutiny was the US Attorney’s office, which had been empowered to convene a grand jury and bring indictments in the affair, but did not do so.

Duncan had learned of an alleged payoff to US Attorney General Ed Meese by suspects in the Mena investigation. He was told by the IRS’s attorney to deny to congressional investigators that he had any knowledge of this allegation and to state that he had “no opinion” on the reluctance of the US Attorney to convene a grand jury. He refused. Shortly thereafter Duncan was transferred from his IRS job to a position with the Subcommittee on Crime of the House Judiciary Committee, where he continued to probe Mena. Later that year, Duncan was arrested at the Capitol Building in Washington for possession of a concealed weapon (his service pistol) as he tried to enter his office. The case went to the US Attorney General’s office, where it was held in limbo for more than a year, effectively preventing Duncan from pursuing the Mena case. He quit the House Judiciary Committee and went to a position with the Arkansas Attorney General’s office.

Russell Welch also suffered a similarly rocky career. He had been a criminal investigator for the Arkansas State Police and had worked closely with Duncan on the Mena case since 1983. When the federal government closed down its inquiry, Welch’s superiors in Arkansas also took him off the case. Welch claims that an attempt was made on his life in 1991 while he was meeting with Duncan in Little Rock.

In 1992 Clinton spokeswoman Max Parker was asked why Clinton had never responded to the 1990 request of Deputy Prosecutor Charles Black for assistance in forwarding a state inquiry into “the rather wide array of illegal activities” centering on the Mena airport. Black, whose jurisdiction includes Mena, suspected a federal cover-up of activities there. Parker claimed that Black was merely a subordinate in the prosecutor’s office and that Clinton went straight to the top. She said Clinton told State Police commander Tommy Goodwin that he would allow $25,000 to be released to the chief prosecutor in Black’s district, Joe Hardagree. Hardagree, Parker said, rejected Clinton’s offer of funds as proffered by Goodwin, presumably (according to Parker) because $25,000 was insufficient for such a probe.

But this claim contradicts what Hardagree said in a 1992 letter to Mark Swaney of the Arkansas Committee, a group of citizens looking into the Mena affair: “During my tenure as prosecuting attorney, I did not receive $25,000 in State funds, or any part of this amount of money, nor did I hear anything concerning these State funds, from Colonel Goodwin or anyone at Arkansas State Police or anyone in the Governor’s office. The only investigation that I am aware of which has expended funds or resources has been the Grand Jury investigation of the Federal Court for the Western District of Arkansas.”

In October 1991 the US Congress appropriated another $25,000 upon the intervention of Arkansas Representative Bill Alexander. The money languished unused in the State Police headquarters. Parker said that it was just a matter of completing some paperwork and that Goodwin would straighten everything out.

But Goodwin was less than forthcoming on the matter in an interview during 1992 election season. Where once the policeman had been enthusiastic about the resumption of an investigation, now he said he wasn’t sure there would be any “value” to it, adding that even if the Mena investigation was to proceed, the chief investigator, Duncan who was at that time sequestered from reporters’ inquiries by his superiors in the Attorney General’s office – would not have subpoena power. Hardagree said that it looked as if political pressure had been exerted on Goodwin. “These are all good people, but they are too involved in politics,” Hardagree said “I think the world of Tommy Goodwin, but someone’s put the heat on him.”

At a crucial stage in the Contra War, Governor Bill Clinton’s personal creation, the Arkansas Development Finance Authority, made its first industrial development loan. The year was 1985, and the recipient of the loan was Park on Meter, Inc., or POM, a parking meter manufacturer based in Russellville, Arkansas. POM, it has been alleged by Michael Riconosciuto, a computer expert serving a prison sentence on drug charges in Washington state, was under secret contract to make components of prototype chemical and biological weapons for use by the Contras, as well as special equipment for C-130 transport planes. Such planes were at that time ferrying drugs and weapons in and out of Mena, which is just a few miles away in western Arkansas. Clinton’s state was thus an important link in the Contra supply chain at a time when military aid to the Contras had been banned by Congress.

About a mile north of the airport in Russellville on Highway 331 sits POM’S headquarters and factory in a low building made of corrugated metal. POM began making parking meters at this site in 1976. Except for some superficial alterations, its premises are the same ones once owned and occupied by defense giant Rockwell International. Back when POM took over the site from Rockwell, its property covered a little more than thirty-six acres. But between 1976 and 1992 a complicated series of real estate transactions (the country court documents fifteen mortgages or deeds concerning this property over this period) left POM itself owning only about eight acres. The remainder of the property POM deeded to a partnership called MBVG. In 1990, one of the partners in MBVG, a man named Mac Van Horn, leased a portion of this property to the US Army Reserve. A plot of land northwest of POM’s property housed the 354th Chemical Company of the 122nd Army Reserve Command.

When Mark Swaney of the Arkansas Committee investigated the site he saw two camouflaged trucks with trailers mounted with what looked like generators for creating smoke screens, along with some military transport trucks and a number of industrial drums. Swaney talked to some of the soldiers there, who told him that they were part of a “smoke unit.” A few days later former IRS investigator Bill Duncan took a trip out to Russellville. Duncan saw the drums sitting next to two corrugated metal sheds without windows or markings of any kind. Duncan also saw what he described as “chemical tanker trucks” at the Army Reserve Post. In short, here in a scruffy corner of Russellville was a kind of military/industrial landscape, a setting appropriate to our tale.

Southwest of Russellville there is another kind of military/industrial landscape, this one in a wooded valley that Surrounds Mena. So far we have described Mena as a center for covert operations involving Contra training and resupply missions, as well as drug smuggling and money laundering. Mena was also important as a base for aircraft maintenance and retrofitting.

We come now to Michael Riconosciuto, a former contract employee of the CIA, who says he worked at Mena on and off between 1980 and 1989. Riconosciuto was arrested on drug charges shortly after being named as a witness in the Inslaw Corporation’s case against the US government for the latter’s alleged unauthorized use of the PROMIS software, which Riconosciuto wrote for Inslaw. Riconosciuto claims he was set up. He is now in prison in Washington state.

According to Riconosciuto, Mena was part of a network of bases that evolved over time, rising and receding in importance with the changing needs of US covert operations. He says that at the time he was involved, Mena was crucial because of its central location relative to other bases, because of its retrofitting and maintenance facilities and because of its role as the administrative center of the operations. Finally, he says, Mena was the main drop-off point for narcotics shipments, the other bases serving as distribution points or as “nesting facilities” for the aircraft, mainly a fleet of about thirty C-130 transport planes.

Thus Riconosciuto is the third person who stepped forward with details of the covert military and narcotics operations at Mena, corroborating information already supplied by Barry Seal and Terry Reed. But unlike Seal, who was primarily a drug smuggler, and Reed, who supervised the training of pilots and participated in resupply operations, Riconosciuto served in a technical and administrative capacity that gave him a broader picture of the whole operation. He came to Mena with a background in computer technology and programming as well as intelligence experience, gained from working with the Wackenhut Corporation, a private security firm whose imbrication with the intelligence world is well known. In Mena, Riconosciuto supervised the transshipment of high-tech equipment (including infrared gun scopes and night vision goggles) to the Contras, maintained the administrative computer network and developed accounting software to facilitate the electronic transfers of funds for the money-laundering side of the operation.

Riconosciuto says that to his knowledge no drugs were ever unloaded at the Mena airport itself. As with Seal’s setup in Louisiana, planes flying at low altitude would use drag chutes to drop containers of drugs in the surrounding countryside. Sometimes the dope would be dropped onto clearcuts in the Ouachita National Forest. More often it would be dropped onto farmland outside Mena. The drugs would be picked up by helicopter or truck and taken to a loading area, from which they would be sent to distribution points via truck or two-engine plane. He described a constellation of support facilities for both the shipment of drugs and for the manufacture of airplane parts. Independent sources for parts were especially necessary both to ensure a ready supply of equipment that could not be easily traced it a plane crashed or was captured.

Riconosciuto’s account of these support facilities matched, in many of its particulars, the evidence gathered by state and federal investigators who were on the trail of the Mena operation from 1983 to 1988. But in the same way that his story augmented the picture drawn from Seal and Reed, so it extends the line of supporting actors beyond the environs of Mena. Which brings us back to the headquarters of POM.

POM, according to Riconosciuto, was not merely in the business of making parking meters. He says that beginning in 1981, the company also made ferry drop tanks-external fuel canisters- for use on C-130s.

Drop tanks are essentially nothing more that aerodynamic metal containers, well within the production capabilities of a company set up to make parking meters. These tanks, attached to pylons on the wings and jettisoned when empty, are necessary to fuel long-range transport missions. While standard on C-130s and other military aircraft, they are virtually unknown in civilian use.

To this point, most of our discussion of Mena has centered on conventional weapons delivery and more or less conventional training. But Riconosciuto points to other, even more sinister, tactics that began to take shape in Arkansas. By 1983, he says, it was clear to US intelligence that the Contras were unable to inflict real damage on the Sandinista troops and needed a tactical advantage – either through the use of high-tech weaponry and equipment, such as the infrared and night –vision devices mentioned above, or through unconventional weaponry. To this end, Riconosciuto says, POM was enlisted in a project with the Stormont labs of Woodland, California, and the Wackenhut Corporation to develop chemical and biological weapons that could be deployed in guerrilla warfare. POM was assigned the task of producing the munitions themselves.

Recall the configurations on the ground in that corner of Russellville described above. According to Riconosciuto, the Army Chemical unit had an arrangement to provide POM with chemical agents once the prototypes had become advanced enough for testing. These prototypes were meant to be fairly simple devices-a hand-held grenade, a mortar shell, a small bomb – all of which could have been produced with the machinery on hand at POM.

Stormont confirmed in 1992 that in the early 1980s it was approached by Wackenhut in connection with the development of biological weapons, but denied that anything went beyond the talking stage. Wackenhut denied any involvement with Stormont, POM or Riconosciuto. When asked in 1992 about allegations by Riconosciuto that POM built aircraft drop-tanks and had been engaged to produce bio-chem munitions, “Skeeter” Ward, boss of POM, said breezily to Bryce Hoffman of the Nation, “Hell no. What we make is re-entry nose cones for the nuclear warheads on the MX missile and nozzles for rocket engines.” He also said “We have got a contract with McDonnell Douglas to make aircraft parts, but I don’t even know what that’s about.” “Skeeter” Ward is the brother-in-law of Webster Hubbell, Clinton’s disgraced assistant attorney general. POM was founded by Seth Ward Sr., the father of Hubbell’s wife, Suzie. While an attorney at Rose Law firm, Hubbell had shepherded POM’s application to become the first company to receive an industrial development loan from the Arkansas Development Finance Authority. This loan for $2.75 million was rushed to completion in the closing hours of 1985.

The Arkansas Development Finance Authority came into being in April of that year as part of Clinton’s sweeping Economic Development Initiative. What had previously been the Arkansas Housing Development Agency, which offered low-interest loans to develop single-family housing, was now revamped into a kind of full-service financial institution charged with attracting capital into the state for the purposes of industrial development, job creation, agricultural and even aquacultural financing. It advertised itself as an agency especially helpful to small companies “who have traditionally been excluded from the bond market by high issuance costs and servicing fees” but which under the umbrella of ADFA bond issues would be able to trim such costs.

The crux of ADFA’s mission was to offer companies long-term loans financed through the sale of tax-exempt bonds. Companies in need of capital would come to ADFA, which in turn arranged for the issuance of a bond from a private bondholder, which ADFA then offered for sale. (The state of Arkansas did not guarantee these bonds, but by virtue of ADFA’s involvement the bonds receive tax-free status.) When the bonds were sold, ADFA delivered the indenture and a record of the bond owners to a bank, which became the trustee of the deal. ADFA thus served as a kind of middleman in a deal between the trustee and the companies. The trustee was responsible for collecting the payments on the loan and interest and was also responsible for paying out dividends and ultimately the principal to the bond holders. In turn, the trustee bank was allowed to invest the money it got from the bond issue in Treasury bills, CDs, money market accounts, or even time deposit accounts at other banks.

The trustee had huge latitude in deciding where to invest these funds. According to ADFA’s standard contract the trustee was limited only by the stipulation that wherever the money was invested, it had to be guaranteed by the US government in some way. However, this stipulation was not always honored. There are records of a deal in which a trustee invested in Fuji Bank’s Grand Cayman Islands branch, a favorite depository of drug dealers.

Many of the beneficiaries of ADFA deals bore the aroma of Clinton’s inner circle. Among underwriters of the agency’s bond issues, Stephen’s INC. featured prominently. The company’s chairman, Jackson Stephens, and his son Warren helped Clinton raise more than $100,000 for his 1992 campaign. In January of that year, the bank Stephens has a controlling interest in, Worthen National, extended to Clinton a $2 million line of credit. The name of the Worthen bank, represented by Hillary’s Rodham Clinton’s Rose Law firm on several occasions, appeared among institutions that have from time to time had liens on POM.

Another familiar name on the bond issues was the now-defunct Lasater and Co. Dan Lasater, who headed the company, is a long-time friend of Clinton and his brother, Roger. Both Roger Clinton and Lasater were convicted on cocaine charges.

This ADFA was at the center of financial dealings in which large amounts of money could be moved around easily and, it would seem, discreetly. Because ADFA was not subject to legislative oversight- being solely within the purview of the governor’s office- and because of the loose strictures upon the trustee bank, it also opened the gate for questionable, possibly illicit financial dealings. As IRS man Bill Duncan explained, theoretically, bonds could be issued to provide a loan to a company involved in laundering drug profits. That loan represented clean money. The loan could in turn be paid back with drug profits, slowly over time and in small increments. In this way drug money could be successfully filtered into the legitimate financial system. If the company in question did nothing more with the loan than redeposit it into its bank account, then the company had lost nothing but it had gained clean money. Thus, in effect, ADFA could serve as a washing machine – dirty money could be cleaned simply by passing through its system. Duncan suggested that it would also be possible for ADFA clients never to repay a loan and for the money simply to be circulated through the trustee’s investment end of the arrangement.

In the case of POM, records concerning the $2.75 million loan were curiously incomplete. One ADFA document stated that twenty-four jobs had been created; another cited total wages paid of $2.56 million. No repayment records for POM were available in 1992, when ADFA’s operations were under our scrutiny, though ADFA officials said that POM had paid off the loan in 1991, two years ahead of schedule.

The Mena story was going critical in the spring of 1992 amid Clinton’s bid for the Democratic nomination. The major networks were poised to do big probes. Then beneath the banner headline “Anatomy of a Smear,” Time took up the Mena saga in its April 15, 1992 issue. Time’s reporter, Richard Behar, took a full page to suggest that the story was all non-sense and that Governor Bill Clinton had been maligned.

Leaving aside for the moment the matter of Behar’s motives, Time’s story was ludicrous, claiming that all reports of Contra resupply and CIA activities in western Arkansas stemmed from allegations by Terry Reed, the former pilot, trainer of the Contras and associate of George Bush’s pal Felix Rodriguez. Reed, according to Behar, said that the drugs and arms “enterprise” in Mena was “personally supervised” by Clinton. Reed had never said that to anyone. In an extensive clip file on Mena, including many stories in the Arkansas press dating back to 1987, no trace of any such claim can be found, even in the form of dismissals of assertions too silly to be taken seriously.

But Time’s hit piece was successful. The networks abandoned the story in those important weeks. Later one of Time’s senior editors, Strobe Talbott, was appointed to a high-level post in the Clinton State Department. Talbott’s wife, Brooke Shearer, also landed a job in the administration.

The suppression of the Mena story did not end with the election of Bill Clinton. In 1994, while researching a book on Bill and Hillary Clinton, investigative reporter Roger Morris came across a mound of new information on Mena, including Barry Seal’s notebooks, tax filings and bank records. Morris was a former National Security Advisor to Richard Nixon who resigned his position in protest of the invasion of Cambodia. He went on to write a biography of Nixon, as well as trenchant books on Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig.

To pursue the Mena story, Morris joined forces with another investigative reporter, Sally Denton. Denton was the author of The Bluegrass Conspiracy, a gripping account of political corruption and drug dealing in Kentucky. By the fall of 1994, Morris and Denton had amassed a 2,000-page file on Seal, Clinton and Mena. They wrote up part of the story and submitted it to the op-ed page of the New York Times. The story was swiftly rejected. When Morris asked the Time’s op-ed page editor, Michael Levitas, why the paper turned down the article, Levitas replied that this was a “Wall Street Journal kind of story.” Levitas replied that the Time’s news staff had looked at Mena and declined to cover it.

So Morris and Denton took their piece to the Outlook section of the Washington Post, whose deputy editor, Jeffrey Frank, accepted the story, praising the authors for writing an explosive and extraordinary article. But the story ran into innumerable roadblocks. Over the next eleven weeks the article was edited, re-edited, fact-checked and reviewed by the Post’s legal team. Morris and Denton were subject to detailed questioning from Post reporters and editors from the news section. Finally, on January 25, 1995, the story seemed ready to go. The galleys were set, contracts were signed and the story was scheduled to run on Sunday, January 29, 1995.

As the Outlook section was headed to press, Jeffrey Frank called Morris, leaving a message on his answering message to the effect that the Post’s managing editor, Robert Kaiser, had killed the story. Morris called Kaiser for an explanation, but the Post editor refused to take his call. Kaiser’s secretary told the exasperated writer, “He doesn’t want to talk to you.”

Why did Kaiser kill the piece? Morris doesn’t know. But a former Washington Post staffer tells us that Walter Pincus, the paper’s long-time intelligence reporter, had dismissed the story as “garbage.” Editors at the Post had leaked the substance of Morris and Denton’s story to both the White House and the CIA, which furiously denied the story.

Eventually, Morris and Denton’s excellent article appeared in Penthouse magazine and hardly met with the explosive reception that such a story deserved. A similar fate awaited Morris’s book on the Clintons, Partners in Power, which was greeted by reviewers in the mainstream press with a mixture of indifference and hostility.

For his part, Bill Clinton has studiously avoided the subject, mentioning Mena in public only once since being elected president. His statement came in response to a question at an October 1994 press conference from the Associated Press White House correspondent, Helen Thomas, who asked the president what he knew about the use of Mena as an outpost for gun/drug runners associated with the Contra War. “They didn’t tell me anything about it,” Clinton said. “The state really had next to nothing to do with it. The local prosecutor did conduct an investigation based on what was in jurisdiction of state law. The rest of it was under the jurisdiction of the United States attorneys who were appointed successively by previous administrations. We had nothing -zero- to do with it.”

But Clinton’s claim of ignorance didn’t ring true. One of his state prosecutors, Charles Black, brought the issue to Clinton’s attention in 1988, emphasizing it role as a nexus for international drug operations.

Five years before that there was a federal investigation into drug money laundering at Mena-an investigation joined by Clinton’s own state police. As part of that investigation, a federal grand jury was assembled. This grand jury was eventually dismissed, and the local press carried reports that members of the panel had been prevented from seeing crucial evidence, hearing important witnesses and even seeing the 29-count draft indictment on money laundering drawn up by an attorney with the Justice Department’s Operation Greenback. In 1989 Clinton received petitions from Arkansas citizens demanding that he convene a state grand jury and continue the investigation. Winston Bryant made Mena an issue in his successful campaign for attorney general in 1990. A year later Bryant turned over the state files involving Mena, along with petitions from 1,000 citizens, to Iran/Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. Later that year, on August 12, 1991, Clinton’s adviser on criminal justice wrote to a concerned citizen to say that Clinton understood the matter of criminal activity in Mena was being studied by Bryant, Walsh and Arkansas Representative Bill Alexander.

Yet with all this knowledge Clinton did nothing. The state attorney general did not have the power to conduct an investigation, but the state prosecutors did. When Charles Black urged Clinton to allocate funds for such an investigation, Clinton refused his request. The Arkansas State Police were taken off the case their files shredded.

Clinton’s protestations of ignorance on the matter also don’t square with the story told by a former Clinton friend and Arkansas state trooper L.D. Brown. Brown worked on Clinton’s security detail in the 1980s. He says that in 1984 Clinton encouraged the 29-year-old trooper to apply for a position with the CIA. Clinton, Brown claims, even helped prepare a writing sample to accompany his application to the intelligence agency. The paper was an analysis of Marxist movements in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Brown says the essay took a hard-line Reaganite approach and did not display any sympathy for the cause of the Sandinistas or the Salvadoran revolutionaries.

In a 1995 court case, Brown testified that he was contacted by the CIA in October 1984 and instructed to meet with Barry Seal at the Cajun Wharf restaurant outside Little Rock. At the meeting, Seal asked Brown to fly with him on a mission to Central America. Brown testified that he and Seal left Mena airport on October 23 in Seal’s C-123K transport, dropped cartons of M-16s over Contra base camps and landed for refueling at an airstrip in Honduras. There, Brown Said, he saw Seal take on board more than a dozen duffel bags, which were kicked out of the plane over fields near Mena on the return flight. Brown later learned these bags were filled with cocaine.

After two more of these flights, Brown says he confronted Clinton about Seal’s operation. Clinton, Brown testified, didn’t seem surprised, telling the trooper, who was an admirer of George Bush, “Your hero Bush knows about it.” Of the cocaine coming into Mena, Brown testified that Clinton snapped, “That’s Lasater’s deal.” The reference appears to have been to long-time Clinton intimate Dan Lasater, the Little Rock-based bond magnate who was on of the governor’s biggest campaign contributors. Lasater had also been convicted of distributing cocaine and was suspected, according to Roger Morris’s account, of using his deals with ADFA to launder some of his drug profits.

Like Clinton, the CIA kept a low profile during the decade of controversy over Mena. The Agency repeatedly denied any activities at Mena, claiming at most that it was “a Rouge operation of the DEA.” Then, in 1995, with the Republicans newly in charge of congress, Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa used his position as chairman of the House Banking Committee to launch a new investigation into money laundering, drug-running and intelligence operations at Mena. One of Leach’s first orders of business was to request that the CIA’s Inspector General, Frederick Hitz, review the agency’s files and prepare a report on Mena.

The report was completed in November 1996. It remains classified, but a summary of the report was released by Leach. Thought still a whitewash, the IG report for the first time admitted that the CIA did have a sustained presence at Mena through the 1980s and early 1990s. According to Hitz’s report, the CIA conducted “authorized and legal activities at the airport.” These activities included contracts for “routine aviation-related services.” They also involved a still top-secret “joint training operation with another federal agency.” The other federal agency is almost certainly the National Security Council, which the Inspector General’s report claims handled the “interface with local officials.” The investigation also confirmed L.D. Brown’s claim that he applied for a position with the Agency in 1984.

The confession that Leach finally extracted from the CIA regarding its operations at Mena received scant notice from the press, with only the Wall Street Journal covering the report in any detail. The Post’s Walter Pincus wrote a short item on the report, faithfully echoing the CIA’s line that it had no involvement in “money laundering, narcotics trafficking, [or] arms smuggling.”

Christopher Reed, a reporter with the Guardian, recalls asking a senior news executive at the Los Angeles Times if the paper had investigated the allegations of drugs and arms smuggling at Mena. “Yes,” the executive told Reed. “But nobody in authority would confirm it.”

Such passivity on the part of the press allowed the CIA and Bill Clinton to portray the Mena scandal as, in the words of White House spin doctor Mark Fabiani, “the darkest backwater of right-wing conspiracy theories.”

This essay is adapted from Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press.

Source: Jeffrey St. Clair - Alexander Cockburn@ CounterPunch

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Whenever we examine law, and whatever the law is we are examining, it must be compared to the Constitution of these united States of America. Any statute, ordinance, regulation, order, commandment, directive, or guideline throughout the entire land of this country whether local, State, Federal, or even those the U.N. would demand we enforce, must be in agreement with the entire Constitution, The Declaration of Independence, State Constitutions, and Supreme Court rulings in line with those, and if it is not it is wholly null and void as if it did not exist.

All law is law, notwithstanding the Supreme Law of The Land. The Supreme Law Of The Land, is the common law, and the Constitution is an instrument of common law procedure.  As 64% of the Constitution is reasoned directly from Deuteronomy and commentary upon Deuteronomy, the common law is the divine connection between the Constitution and the bible.  All behavior is legal regardless of whatever statute would claim the contrary as long as a behavior does not cause actual damage or injury, or violation of a legal right.

The legacy of this country is based upon not what most are taught to believe, but upon the premise of men being willing to die to live under god's law and to forever resist the rule of other men. Our founders cleverly never defined god, as such all faiths are welcome. Not many know that all religions were present at the Constitutional convention and that is a travesty of history.

The common law, originated circa 8th century in the Christian churches in England, and is the application of cannon and biblical law, the only law our founders ever spoke of.

 A License offered by government confers no right upon an American, but only confers a privilege. The absence of a privileged does not cause an absence of any inherent right. As such no license can be required of any American to engage in a rightful behavior, and again any behavior may be engage in by any American provided there is no damage or injury or violation of a right.

Consent is the determining factor in most cases.

If a man punches a man in the back of the head without provocation assault has been committed and that establishes the violation of the legal right to not be assaulted as well as damage and injury. However if two men decide to consent to engage in a hand to hand altercation their mutual consent implies they accept responsibility for the injuries they may sustain. The consent to engage in hand to hand combat is an American right, and no law may render this right criminal, nor convert the right into a priviledge, nor impose sanction or penalty upon either party of any kind, unless there is further damage to other private or public property or person not a party to the consented conflict.

 Americans have many inherent rights which have been converted into licensed and monitored privileges, and non criminal behaviors have since been criminalized. Americans may; Own and Carry a displayed firearm, Hunt, Fish, Marry, Drive, Own a Pet, Open a private business, Drive a boat, obtain medicine, drink alcohol, make additions or changes to their property, tear down and rebuild on their property, work, and engage in any other behavior as long as it does not actually cause damage or injury to another, or violation of another's inherent rights. Without any requirement or encumbrance of licensure, or other government encumbrances.

Americans have rights not priviledges, and any law that runs contrary to these rights is in fact not law, but again, wholly null and void retroactively to the date it was passed as if it never existed.

 Our constitution is the supreme law of the land, it is the common law, that law which is written plainly for everyone to understand. This principle is what has ensured and protected the god given right of every American to be on equal footing under the law. The courts have been corrupted to a degree where the common man no longer has access to the courts, but against conventional wisdom everyone has a right to use the courts regarding their own affairs without a lawyer if they choose. The constitution is the supreme law in every court regardless of whether or not the judge acknowledges this fact. Any court that does not recognize the Constitution is not an American court and no party is required to obey any order from a court which does not recognize the constitution.

 Many grand claims have been made here that go against conventional wisdom but these are by no means my opinion. This is all 100% fact based upon solid supreme court rulings which never having been overturned, represent the law of the land as they are in agreement with the constitution. Americans are not even legally required to obey any statute or color of law which defies the spirit of liberty in the expressed and unenumerated rights contained within the constitution.

Our rights supersede ALL LAW, and any laws which infringe upon them are wholly null and void as if they never existed.

 Corpus Delicti must exist for any case to have standing in American court. The 3 elements necessary to be proven to establish corpus delicti are ;

1. alleged damage or injury,

2. alleged violation of a legal right, and

3. redress ability of the court.

Corpus Delicti must be proven not merely asserted, and any case in which corpus delicti cannot be proven there is no standing, and without standing the court does not have jurisdiction to hear any case. Clifford v Superior Court 45 Cal Rptr 2nd 333, 335 Without standing there is no actual or justicable controversy and courts will not entertain such cases.

";All laws which are repugnant to the Constitution are null and void. "; Marbury vs Madison, 5 US (2 Cranch) 137, 174, 176, (1803)

Finding that the statute conflicted with the Federal Constitution, Marshall considered it “the essence of judicial duty” (p. 178) to follow the Constitution. He concluded that “the particular phraseology of the Constitution of the United States confirms and strengthens the principle, supposed to be essential to all written constitutions, that a law repugnant to the constitution is void; and that courts, as well as other departments, are bound by that instrument” (p. 180).13

It is a proposition too plain to be contested, that the constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it; or, that the legislature may alter the constitution by an ordinary act…. Between these alternatives there is no middle ground. The constitution is either a superior, paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, and like other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it… . If the former part of the alternative be true, then a legislative act contrary to the constitution is not law: if the latter part be true, then written constitutions are absurd attempts, on the part of the people, to limit a power in its own nature illimitable.

";Where rights secured by the Constitution are involved, there can be no rule making or legislation which would abrogate them.";Miranda vs Arizona, 384 US 436 p. 491.

";An unconstitutional act is not law; it confers no right; it imposes no duties; affords no protection; it creates no office; it is in legal contemplation, as inoperative as though it had never been passed."; Norton vs Shelby County118 US 425 p.442

";The general rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having the form and the name of law, in in reality no law, but is wholly void, and ineffective for any purpose; since unconstitutionality dates from the time of its enactment, and not merely from the date of the decision so branding it. No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are bound to enforce it.";16th American Jurisprudence 2d, Section 177, late 2nd, Section 256

Where rights secured by the Constitution are involved, there can be no rule making or legislation which would abrogate them."; Miranda vs. Arizona, 384 US 436, 491.

";The claim and exercise ...of a constitutional Right cannot be converted into... a crime."; Miller vs. U.S., 230 F. 486, 489.

";There can be no sanction or penalty imposed upon one because of this exercise of constitutional Rights."; Snerer vs. Cullen, 481 F. 946.

SPECIFICALLY RELATED TO THE RIGHT TO TRAVEL

";The use of the highways for the purpose of travel and transportation is not a mere privilege, but a common and fundamental Right of which the public and the individual cannot be rightfully deprived."; [emphasis added] Chicago Motor Coach vs. Chicago, 169 NE 22; Ligare vs. Chicago, 28 NE 934; Boon vs. Clark, 214 SSW 607; 25 Am.Jur. (1st) Highways Sect.163.

";The Right of the Citizen to travel upon the public highways and to transport his property thereon, either by horse drawn carriage or by automobile, is not a mere privilege which a city can prohibit or permit at will, but a common Right which he has under the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."; [emphasis added] Thompson vs. Smith, 154 SE 579.

";...For while a Citizen has the Right to travel upon the public highways and to transport his property thereon, that Right does not extend to the use of the highways, either in whole or in part, as a place for private gain. For the latter purpose no person has a vested right to use the highways of the state, but is a privilege or a license which the legislature may grant or withhold at its discretion."; State vs. Johnson, 243 P. 1073; Hadfield, supra; Cummins vs. Homes, 155 P. 171; Packard vs. Banton, 44 S.Ct. 256; and other cases too numerous to mention.

";Heretofore the court has held, and we think correctly, that while a Citizen has the Right to travel upon the public highways and to transport his property thereon, that Right does not extend to the use of the highways, either in whole or in part, as a place of business for private gain."; Barney vs. Board of Railroad Commissioners, 17 P.2d 82; Willis vs. Buck, 263 P.l 982.

What is this Right of the Citizen which differs so ";radically and obviously"; from one who uses the highway as a place of business? Who better to enlighten us than Justice Tolman of the Supreme Court of Washington State? In State vs. City of Spokane, supra, the Court also noted a very ";radical and obvious"; difference, but went on to explain just what the difference is: ";The former is the usual and ordinary right of the Citizen, a common right to all, while the latter is special, unusual, and extraordinary.";

";This distinction, elementary and fundamental in character, is recognized by all the authorities."; State vs. City of Spokane, supra.

";the right of the Citizen to travel upon the highway and to transport his property thereon in the ordinary course of life and business, differs radically and obviously from that of one who makes the highway his place of business and uses it for private gain in the running of a stagecoach or omnibus. The former is the usual and ordinary right of the Citizen, a right common to all, while the latter is special, unusual, and extraordinary."; Ex Parte Dickey, (Dickey vs. Davis), 85 SE 781.

The right of the Citizen to travel upon the public highways and to transport his property thereon, in the ordinary course of life and business, is a common right which he has under the right to enjoy life and liberty, to acquire and possess property, and to pursue happiness and safety. It includes the right, in so doing, to use the ordinary and usual conveyances of the day, and under the existing modes of travel, includes the right to drive a horse drawn carriage or wagon thereon or to operate an automobile thereon, for the usual and ordinary purpose of life and business."; Teche Lines vs. Danforth, Miss., 12 S.2d 784; Thompson vs. Smith, supra.

";Personal liberty -- or the right to enjoyment of life and liberty -- is one of the fundamental or natural rights, which has been protected by its inclusion as a guarantee in the various constitutions, which is not derived from nor dependent on the U.S. Constitution... It is one of the most sacred and valuable rights [remember the words of Justice Tolman, supra.] as sacred as the right to private property...and is regarded as inalienable."; 16 C.J.S. Const. Law, Sect.202, p.987.

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In the later half of the twentieth century, the United States of America—hitherto the world’s most powerful and prosperous country—opened its borders to hostile foreign multitudes, lost its will to enforce civilized standards of behavior upon blacks and other “minority groups,” began enforcing novel “antidiscrimination” laws in a manner clearly discriminatory against its own founding European stock, repurposed its institutions of higher education for the inculcation of radical politics and maladaptive behavior upon the young, and submitted its foreign and military policy to the interests of a belligerent little country half way around the world. In the process, we destroyed our inherited republican institutions, wasted vast amounts of blood and treasure, and left a trail of blighted lives in a country which had formerly taken for granted that each rising generation would be better off than the last. One-quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, the continued existence of anything deserving the name “United States of America” would seem very much in doubt. What on earth happened?

While there is plenty of blame to go around, including some that rightfully belongs with America’s own founding stock, the full story cannot be honestly told without paying considerable attention to the rise of Eastern European Jews to elite status.

This population is characterized by a number of positive traits, including high verbal intelligence and an overall average IQ of 111. They typically have stable marriages, practice high-investment parenting, and enjoy high levels of social trust within their own community. In their European homelands they lived for many centuries in shtetls, closed townships composed exclusively of Jews, carefully maintaining social and (especially) genetic separation from the surrounding, usually Slavic population. This was in accord with an ancient Jewish custom going back at least to the Biblical Book of Numbers, in which the prophet Balaam tells the children of Israel “you shall be a people that shall dwell alone.”

If one wants to preserve social and genetic separation, few methods are more reliable than the cultivation of negative affect toward outsiders. This is what was done in such traditional, religiously organized Jewish communities: gentiles were considered treif, or ritually unclean, and Jewish children were encouraged to think of them as violent drunkards best avoided apart from occasional self-interested economic transactions.

Following the enlightenment and the French Revolution, Jews were “emancipated” from previous legal disabilities, but ancient habits of mind are not changed as easily as laws. One consequence was the attraction of many newly-emancipated Jews to radical politics. Radicals by definition believe there is something fundamentally wrong and unjust about the societies in which they live, which disposes them to form small, tightly-knit groups of like-minded comrades united in opposition to an outside world conceived as both hostile and morally inferior. In other words, radicalism fosters a social and mental environment similar to a shtetl. It is not really such a big step as first appears from rejecting a society because its members are ritually unclean and putative idolaters to rejecting it for being exploitative, capitalist, racist, and anti-Semitic. Jews themselves have often been conscious of this congruence between radicalism and traditional Jewish life: the late American neoconservative David Horowitz, e.g., wrote in his memoir Radical Son: “What my parents had done in joining the Communist Party and moving to Sunnyside was to return to the ghetto.”

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Eastern European Jewish population had grown beyond the capacity of traditional forms of Jewish economic activity to support it, resulting in widespread and sometimes dire poverty. Many turned to fanatical messianic movements of a religious or political character. Then, beginning in the 1890s, an increasing number of these impoverished and disaffected Jews started migrating to the United States. Contrary to a widespread legend, the great majority were not “fleeing pogroms”—they were looking for economic opportunity.

Even so, many Jews brought their radicalism and hostility to gentile society with them to their new homeland, and these persisted even in the absence of legal restrictions upon them and long after they had overcome their initial poverty. Jewish sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset has written colorfully of the countless wealthy and successful American Jewish “families which around the breakfast table, day after day, in Scarsdale, Newton, Great Neck, and Beverly Hills have discussed what an awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society the United States is.”

Over the course of the twentieth century, these smart, ambitious, and ethnically well-networked Eastern European Jews rose to elite status in the academy, the communications media, law, business, and politics. By the 1960s, they had succeeded in replacing the old Protestant ruling class with an alliance between themselves, other “minorities” with grudges against the American majority, and a sizeable dose of loyalty-free White sociopaths on the make. Unlike the old elite it replaced, the new rulers were at best suspicious of—and often actually hostile toward—the people they came to govern, and we have already enumerated some of the most disastrous consequences of their rule in our opening paragraph.

Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique describes several influential movements created and promoted by Jews during the twentieth century in the course of their rise. It is the best book you will find on the Jewish role in America’s decline. First published by Praeger in 1998, a second paperback edition augmented with a new Preface appeared in 2002. Now, twenty-three years later, he has brought out a third edition of the work through Antelope Hill Publishing. In addition to expanding the earlier editions’ accounts of Boasian Anthropology, Freudian Psychoanalysis, various Marxist or quasi-Marxist forms of radicalism, and Jewish immigration activism, he has added an entirely new chapter on neoconservatism. As he explains:

I argue that these movements are attempts to alter Western societies in a manner that would neutralize or end anti-Semitism and enhance the prospects for Jewish group continuity and upward mobility. At a theoretical level, these movements are viewed as the outcome of conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews in the construction of culture and in various public policy issues.

This edition is fully 40 percent longer than its predecessor, yet a detailed table of contents makes it easier for readers to navigate.

* * *

We shall have a detailed look at the chapter on “The Boasian School of Anthropology and the Decline of Darwinism in the Social Sciences,” since it is both representative of the work as a whole and significantly augmented over the version in previous editions.

Anthropology was still a relatively new discipline in America at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, but it enjoyed a promising theoretical foundation in Darwinian natural selection and the rapidly developing science of genetics. Darwinists and Mendelians, however, were opposed by Lamarckians who believed that acquired characteristics could be inherited: e.g., that if a man spent every day practicing the piano and then fathered a son, his son might have an inborn advantage in learning the piano. This idea was scientifically discredited by the 1930s, but long remained popular among Jewish intellectuals for nonscientific reasons, as a writer cited by MacDonald testifies:

Lenz cites an “extremely characteristic” statement of a Jewish intellectual: “The denial of the racial importance of acquired characters favours race hatred.” The obvious interpretation of such sentiments is that Jewish intellectuals opposed the theory of natural selection because of its negative political implications.

In one famous case a Jewish researcher committed suicide when the fraudulent nature of his study in support of Lamarckism was exposed.

Franz Boas was among the Jewish intellectuals to cling to Lamarckism long after its discrediting. He had what Derek Freeman describes as an “obscurantist antipathy to genetics” that extended even to opposing genetic research. This attitude was bound up with what Carl Degler called his “life-long assault on the idea that race was a primary source of the differences to be found in the mental or social capabilities of human groups.” He did not arrive at this position as a result of disinterested scientific inquiry. Rather, as Degler explains, he thought racial explanations “undesirable for society” and had “a persistent interest in pressing his social values upon the profession and the public.”

Boas appeared to wear his Jewishness lightly; MacDonald remarks that he “sought to be identified foremost as a German and as little as possible as a Jew.” Anthropologist and historian Leonard B. Glick wrote:

He did not acknowledge a specifically Jewish cultural or ethnic identity. . . . To the extent that Jews were possessed of a culture, it was . . . strictly a matter of religious adherence. . . . He was determined . . . not to be classified as a member of any group.

Yet such surface appearances can be misleading. From a very early age, Boas was deeply concerned with anti-Semitism and felt alienated from the Germany of his time. These appear to have been the motives for his emigration to America. He also maintained close associations with the Jewish activist community in his new homeland. Especially in his early years at Columbia, most of his students were Jewish, and of the nine whom Leslie White singles out as his most important protegés, six were Jews. According to David S. Koffman: “these Jews tended to marry other Jews, be buried in Jewish cemeteries, and socialize with fellow Jews, all core features of Jewish ethnicity, though they conceived of themselves as agents of science and enlightenment, not Jewish activists.”

Boas was also dependent on Jewish patronage. In the 1930s, for instance, he worked to set up a research program to “attack the racial craze” (as he put it). The resulting Council of Research of the Social Sciences was, as Elazar Barkan acknowledges in The Retreat of Scientific Racism (1993) “largely a façade for the work of Boas and his students.” Financial support was principally Jewish, since others declined solicitations. Yet Boas was aware of the desirability of disguising Jewish motivations and involvement publicly, writing to Felix Warburg: “it seemed important to show the general applicability of the results to all races both from the scientific point of view and in order to avoid the impression that this is a purely Jewish undertaking.”

One of Boas’s Jewish students remarked that young Jews of her generation felt they had only three choices in life—go live in Paris, hawk communist newspapers on street corners, or study anthropology at Columbia. The latter option was clearly perceived as a distinctively “Jewish” thing to do. Why is this?

Many Jews have supplemented Jewish advocacy with activism on behalf of “pluralism” and other ethnic “minority groups.” Boas himself, for example, maintained close connections with the NAACP and the Urban League. David S. Lewis has described such activities as an effort to “fight anti-Semitism by remote control.” And anthropology itself as conceived by Boas was not merely a scholarly discipline but an extension of these same concerns.

Much of the actual fieldwork conducted by Boas and his students focused on the American Indian. In a passage new to this edition, MacDonald quotes from David S. Koffman’s The Jews’ Indian (2019) on the Jewish motivations that frequently lay behind their work:

Jewishness shaped the profession’s engagement with its practical object of study, the American Indian. Jews’ efforts—presented as the efforts of science itself—to salvage, collect, and preserve disappearing American Indian culture was a form of ventriloquism. [Yet they] assumed their own Jewishness would remain an invisible and insignificant force in shaping the ideas they would use to shape ideas about others.

Boasian anthropologists did not draw any sharp distinction between their professional and their political concerns:

Political action formed a part of many anthropologists’ sense of the intellectual mission of the field. Their findings, and the framing of distinct cultures, each worthy of careful attention in its own right, mattered to social existence in the United States. Their scholarship on Native American cultures developed alongside their personal and political work on behalf of Jewish causes.

Koffman highlights the case of Boas’s protegé Edward Sapir:

Sapir’s Jewish background continuously influenced and intersected with his scholarship on American Indians. Sapir’s biography shows a fascinating parallel preoccupation with both Native and Jewish social issues. These tracks run side by side, concerned as both were with parallel questions about ethnic survival, adaptability, dignity, cultural autonomy, and ethnicity.

Some Jews from Boas’s circle of influence even went to work for the US government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs, where they “consistently linked Indian uplift with an articulation of minority rights and cultural pluralism.” In this way, writes Koffman, “Jewish enlightened self-interest impacted the course of American Indian life in the middle of the twentieth century.”

Boas had a number of gentile students as well, of course, especially in the later part of his career. Yet some observers have commented upon differences in the thinking and motivations of his Jewish and gentile followers. While the rejection of racial explanations was a moral crusade for many of the Jews, as it was for Boas himself, his gentile students were more inclined to view the matter simply as a theoretical issue. Alfred Kroeber, for example, once impatiently remarked that “our business is to promote anthropology rather than to wage battles on behalf of tolerance.”

Two of Boas’s best known gentile disciples were Margeret Meade and Ruth Benedict, and it may not be an accident that both of these women were lesbians. As Sarich and Miele write in Race: The Reality of Human Difference (2004): “Their sexual preferences are relevant because developing a critique of traditional American values was as much a part of the Boasian program in anthropology as was their attacks on eugenics and nativism.” More generally, they note, “the Boasians felt deeply estranged from American society and the male WASP elites they were displacing in anthropology.” Jewish or not, they saw themselves as a morally superior ingroup engaged in a struggle against a numerically superior outgroup. In this respect, they formed a historical link between the radical cells and shtetls of the old world and the hostile elite ruling America today.

Boas posed as a skeptic and champion of methodological rigor when confronted with theories of cultural evolution or genetic influence on human differences, but as the evolutionary anthropologist Leslie White pointed out, the burden of proof rested lightly on Boas’s own shoulders: his “historical reconstructions are inferences, guesses, and unsupported assertions [ranging] from the possible to the preposterous. Almost none is verifiable.”

MacDonald writes:

An important technique of the Boasian school was to cast doubt on general theories of human evolution . . . by emphasizing the vast diversity and chaotic minutiae of human behavior, as well as the relativism of standards of evaluation. The Boasians argued that general theories of cultural evolution must await a detailed cataloguing of cultural diversity, but in fact no general theories emerged from this body of research in the ensuing half-century of its dominance of the profession. Leslie White, an evolutionary anthropologist whose professional opportunities were limited because of his theoretical orientation, noted that because of its rejection of fundamental scientific activities such as generalization and classification, Boasian anthropology should be classed more as an anti-theory than a theory of human culture.

Boas brooked no dissent from his followers:

Individuals who disagreed with the leader, such as Clark Wissler, were simply excluded from the movement. Wissler was a member of the Galton society, which promoted eugenics, and accepted the theory that there is a gradation of cultures from lowest to highest, with Western civilization at the top.

Among Boas’s most egregious sins against the scientific spirit was a study he produced at the request of the US Immigration Commission called into being by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907. This was eventually published as Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants. It maintained the extremely implausible thesis that the skulls of the children of immigrants to the US differed significantly from those of their parents—in spite of the influence of heredity, and due entirely to growing up in America. The paper came to be cited countless times by writers of textbooks and anyone who wished to deprecate the importance of heredity or stress that of environment.

Ninety years later, anthropologists Corey S. Sparks and Richard L. Janz reanalyzed Boas’s original data. While they stop short of accusing him of deliberate fraud, they did find that his data fail to support his conclusions. In MacDonald’s words:

Boas made inflated claims about the results: very minor changes in cranial index were described as changes of “type” so that Boas was claiming that within one generation immigrants developed the long-headed type characteristic of northwest Europeans. Several modern studies show that cranial shape is under strong genetic influence. [Sparks and Janz’s] reanalysis of Boas’s data indicated that no more than one percent of the variation between groups could be ascribed to the environmental effects of immigration.

In short, Boas’s study was not disinterested science but propaganda in a political battle over immigration. At a minimum, he was guilty of sloppy work inspired by wishful thinking.

Boas’s actual anthropological studies, such as those on the Kwakiutl Indians of Vancouver Island, contributed little to human knowledge. But this was not where his talent lay: his true achievement was in the realm of academic politics. He built a movement that served as an extension of himself long after his death, capturing and jealously controlling anthropological institutions and publications, and making it difficult for those who dissented from his scientifically groundless views to achieve professional success. As MacDonald writes:

By 1915 his followers controlled the American Anthropological Association and held a two-thirds majority on its executive board. In 1919 Boas could state that “most of the anthropological work done at the present time in the United States” was done by his students at Columbia. By 1926 every major department of anthropology was headed by Boas’s students, the majority of whom were Jewish.

Boas strenuously promoted the work of his disciples, but rarely cited works of people outside his group except to disparage them. A section new to this third edition explains how his influential student Melville Herskovits also blocked from publication and research funding those not indebted to him or not supporting his positions. Margaret Meade’s fairy tale of a sexually liberated Samoa, on the other hand, became the bestselling anthropological work of all time due almost entirely to zealous promotion by her fellow Boasians at prominent American universities.

Among the more obvious biases of anthropological work carried out by Boas’s disciples was a nearly complete ignoring of warfare and violence among the peoples they studied. Their ethnographic studies, such as Ruth Benedict’s account of the Zuni Indians in Patterns of Culture (1934), promoted romantic primitivism as a means of critiquing modern Western civilization. Works like Primitive War (1949) by Harry Holbert Turney-High, which documented the universality and savagery of war, were simply ignored. As MacDonald explains:

The behavior of primitive peoples was bowdlerized while the behavior of European peoples was not only excoriated as uniquely evil but also as responsible for all extant examples of warfare among primitive peoples. From this perspective, it is only the fundamental inadequacy of European culture that prevents an idyllic world free from between-group conflict.

Leslie White wrote that “Boas has all the attributes of the head of a cult, a revered charismatic teacher and master, literally worshiped by disciples whose permanent loyalty has been effectively established.” MacDonald describes his position as closer to that of a Hasidic Rebbe among his followers than to the leader of a genuinely scientific research program—the results of which can never be known in advance.

Due to the success of Boas’s mostly Jewish disciples in gaining control of institutional anthropology, by the middle of the twentieth century it became commonplace for well-read American laymen to refer to human differences in cultural terms. Western Civilization was merely different from, not better than, the ways of headhunters and cannibals. A vague impression was successfully propagated to the public that “science had proven” the equality of the races; few indeed understood that the “proof” consisted in the scientists who thought otherwise having been driven into unemployment. Objective research into race and racial differences largely ceased, and an intellectual atmosphere was created in which many imagined that the opening of America’s borders to the world would make little practical difference.

* * *

Space precludes us from looking in similar detail at all the book’s chapters, but we must give the reader an idea of the material new to this third edition. Some of the most important is found in an 85-page Preface, and concerns the rise of Jews in the American academic world. Boasian anthropology may be seen in hindsight as an early episode in this rise, but Boas died in 1942 and our main story here concerns the postwar period. As MacDonald writes:

The transformation of the faculty was well under way in the 1950s and by the late 1960s was largely complete. It was during this period that the image of the radical leftist professor replaced the image of the ivory tower professor—the unworldly person at home with his books, pipe, and tweed jacket, totally immersed in discussions of Renaissance poetry.

The old academic elite had been better educated than the public at large, of course, but saw themselves as trustees of the same Christian European civilization, and did not desire radical changes to the society in which they lived. Today’s representative professor “almost instinctively loathes the traditional institutions of European-American culture: its religion, customs, manners, and sexual attitudes.”

This matters, because the academy is a crucial locus of moral and intellectual authority:

Contemporary views on issues like race, gender, immigration are manufactured in the academy (especially elite universities), disseminated throughout the media and the lower levels of the educational system, and ultimately consumed by the educated and not-so-educated public. Newspaper articles and television programs on these issues routinely include quotes from academic experts.

By 1968 Jews, who made up less than three percent of the US population, constituted 20 percent of the faculty of elite American colleges and universities, with overrepresentation most pronounced among younger faculty. Studies found Jewish faculty well to the left of other academics, more supportive of student radicals, and more likely to approve relaxing standards in order to recruit non-White faculty and students. By 1974, a study of articles published in the top twenty academic journals found that Jews made up 56 percent of the social scientists and 61 percent of the humanities scholars.

A possibly extreme but telling example of left-wing bias is Jonathan Haidt’s informal 2011 survey at a convention of social psychologists, reputedly the most left-leaning area of academic psychology. Haidt found only three participants out of 1000 willing publicly to label themselves “conservative.” He acknowledges that this discipline has evolved into a “tribal moral community” that shuns and ostracizes political conservatives, with the result that research conflicting with its core political attitudes is either not performed or is likely to be excluded from peer-reviewed journals.

MacDonald devotes considerable attention to a widely discussed 2012 paper “Why Are Professors Liberal?” by Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse. The authors argue that academics are more liberal than the population at large for three reasons. First and most importantly, due to the higher proportion of academics with advanced educational credentials, an effect they consider independent of the role IQ plays in helping obtain such credentials. MacDonald remarks that this liberal shift may be due either to socialization and conditioning in the graduate school environment or to perceived self-interest in adopting liberal views and/or identifying with an officially sanctioned victim group.

Second, Gross and Fosse believe liberalism results from academic’s greater tolerance for controversial ideas. MacDonald is dismissive of this proposal, writing that in his observation such tolerance does not exist outside the professoriate’s self-conception.

Third, they find that liberalism corelates with the larger fraction of the religiously unaffiliated in the academy. MacDonald points out that many of the religiously unaffiliated are probably Jews, and remarks that the study would have been more informative if race and Jewish ethnic background had been included as variables alongside religious affiliation.

Gross and Fosse acknowledge that their data can be interpreted in a number of ways, but their own argument is that

the liberalism of professors . . . is a function . . . of the systematic sorting of young adults who are already liberally—or conservatively—inclined into and out of the academic profession, respectively. We argue that the professoriate, along with a number of other knowledge work fields, has been “politically typed” as appropriate for and welcoming of people with broadly liberal political sensibilities, and as inappropriate for conservatives.

In other words, academic liberalism is the product of a natural sorting process similar to that which has resulted in a career such as nursing being typecast as appropriate for women. It should be emphasized, however, that much of this sorting is done by the academy itself, not by prospective academics: many professors unhesitatingly acknowledge their willingness to discriminate against conservative job candidates.

The Gross and Fosse study also fails to explore the way the meaning of being liberal or left wing has changed over the years. The academy was already considered left-leaning when the White Protestant ascendency was still intact. But in those days being liberal meant supporting labor unions and other institutions aimed at improving the lot of the (predominantly White) working class.

The New Left abandoned the White working class because it was insufficiently radical, desiring incremental improvements of its own situation rather than communist revolution. The large Jewish component of the New Left, typified by the Frankfurt School, was also shaken by Hitler’s success in gaining the support of German labor. So they abandoned orthodox Marxism in a search for aggrieved groups more likely to demand radical change. These they found in ethnic and sexual minority groups such as Blacks, feminists, and homosexuals. They also advocated for massive non-White immigration to dilute the power of the White majority, leave Jews less conspicuous, and recruit new ethnic groups easily persuadable to cultivate grievances against the dwindling White majority.

Today’s academy is a product of the New Left of the 1960s. While it is more “liberal” (in the American sense) than the general public on economic issues, what makes it truly distinctive is its attitudes on social issues: sexual liberation (including homosexuality and abortion), moral relativism, religion, church-state separation, the replacement of patriotism by cosmopolitan ideals, and the whole range of what has been called “expressive individualism.”

Sorting can explain how an existing ideological hegemony within the academy maintains itself, but not how it could have arisen in the first place. To account for the rise of today’s academic left, Gross and Fosse propose a conflict theory of successful intellectual movements. In particular, they cite sociological research indicating that such movements have three key ingredients: 1) they originate with people with high-status positions having complaints against the current environment, resulting in conflict with the status quo; 2) these intellectuals form cohesive and cooperative networks; and 3) this network has access to prestigious institutions and publication outlets.

This fits Kevin MacDonald’s theory of Jewish intellectual movements to a T. Indeed, since the academic left is so heavily Jewish, we are in part dealing with the same subject matter. Even Gross and Fosse show some awareness of this, as MacDonald writes:

Gross and Fosse are at least somewhat cognizant of the importance of Jewish influence. They deem it relevant to point out that Jews entered the academic world in large numbers after World War II and became overrepresented among professors, especially in elite academic departments in the social sciences.

So let us apply the Gross and Fosse three-part scheme to radical Jewish academics. First, Jews do indeed have a complaint against the environment in which they live, or rather two related complaints: the long history of anti-Semitism and the predominance of White Christian culture.

As MacDonald notes, “it is common for Jews to hate all manifestations of Christianity.” In his book Why Are Jews Liberals? (2009), Norman Podhoretz formulates this Jewish complaint as follows:

[The Jews] emerged from the Middle Ages knowing for a certainty that—individual exceptions duly noted—the worst enemy they had in the world was Christianity: the churches in which it was embodied—whether Roman Catholic or Russian Orthodox or Protestant—and the people who prayed in and were shaped by them.

Anti-Jewish attitudes, however, by no means depend on Christian belief. In the nineteenth century Jews began to be criticized as an economically successful alien race intent on subverting national cultures. Accordingly, the complaint of many Jews today is no longer merely Christianity but the entire civilization created by Europeans in both its religious and its secular aspects.

From this point it is a very short step to locating the source of anti-Semitism in the nature of European-descended people themselves. The Frankfurt School took this step, and the insurgent Jewish academic left followed them. MacDonald writes:

This explicit or implicit sense that Europeans themselves are the problem is the crux of the Jewish complaint. [It] has resonated powerfully among Jewish intellectuals. Hostility to the people and culture of the West was characteristic of all the Jewish intellectual movements of the left that came to be ensconced in the academic world of the United States and other Western societies.

The second item in Gross and Fosse’s list of the traits of successful intellectual movements is that their partisans form cohesive, cooperative networks. All the Jewish movements studied by Kevin MacDonald have done this, as he has been at pains to emphasize. Group strategies outcompete individualist strategies in the intellectual and academic world just as they do in politics and the broader society. It does not matter that Western science is an individualistic enterprise in which people can defect from any group consensus easily in response to new discoveries or more plausible theories. The Jewish intellectual movements studied by MacDonald are not scientific research programs at all, but “hermeneutic exercise[s] in which any and all events can be interpreted within the context of the theory.” These authoritarian movements thus represent a corruption of the Western scientific ideal, yet that does nothing to prevent them from being effective in the context of academic politics.

Finally, Gross and Fosse note that the most successful intellectual movements are those with access to prestigious institutions and publication outlets. This has clearly been true of the Jewish movements Kevin MacDonald has studied, as he himself notes:

The New York Intellectuals developed ties with elite universities, particularly Harvard, Columbia, the University of Chicago, and the University of California-Berkeley, while psychoanalysis and Boasian anthropology became entrenched throughout academia. The Frankfurt School intellectuals were associated with Columbia and the University of California-Berkeley, and their intellectual descendants are dispersed through the academic world. The neoconservatives are mainly associated with the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins University, and they were able to get their material published by the academic presses at these universities as well as Cornell University.

The academic world is a top-down system in which the highest levels are rigorously policed to ensure that dissenting ideas cannot benefit from institutional prestige. The panic produced by occasional leaks in the system, as when the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer teamed up with Harvard’s Stephen Walt to offer some cautious criticisms of the Israel lobby, demonstrate the importance of obtaining and monopolizing academic prestige.

Moreover, once an institution has been captured by the partisans of a particular intellectual perspective, informal scholarly networks become de facto gatekeeping mechanisms, creating enormous inertia. As MacDonald writes: “there is tremendous psychological pressure to adopt the fundamental assumptions at the center of the power hierarchy of the discipline. It is not surprising that people [are] attracted to these movements because of the prestige associated with them.”

What MacDonald calls the final step in the transformation of the university into a bastion of the anti-White left is the creation since the 1970s of whole programs of study revolving around aggrieved groups:

My former university is typical of academia generally in having departments or programs in American Indian Studies, Africana Studies (formerly Black Studies), American Studies (whose subject matter emphasizes “How do diverse groups within the Americas imagine their identities and their relation to the United States?”), Asian and Asian-American Studies, Chicano and Latino Studies, Jewish Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. All of these departments and programs are politically committed to advancing their special grievances against Whites and their culture.

Although it is difficult to specify the exact linkage, the academic triumph of Jewish radicals was followed in short order by the establishment of these other pillars of the cultural left within the university.

As MacDonald notes, women make up an important component of the grievance coalition in academia, and not only in the area of “Women’s Studies.” They make up around 60 percent of PhDs and 80 percent of bachelor’s degrees in ethnic, gender and cultural studies.

Overall, compared to men, women are more in favor of leftist programs to end free speech and censor speech they disagree with. They are more inclined toward activism, and less inclined toward dispassionate inquiry; they are more likely to agree that hate speech is violence, that it’s acceptable to shout down a speaker, that controversial scientific findings should be censored, and that it should be illegal to say offensive things about minorities.

Such differences are likely due to women’s evolutionary selection for empathy and fear. No amount of bravado about “smashing the patriarchy” can conceal women’s tendency to timid conformism, and that is precisely what leads to success in academic grievance studies.

Although MacDonald does not consider feminism a fundamentally Jewish movement, many Jewish women have unquestionably played a prominent role within it, and it is marked by the same disregard of biological realities we observed in Boasian anthropology. The new Preface accordingly offers some brief remarks on Jewish lesbian and academic gender theorist Judith Butler. One of her leading ideas is that gender identity is “performative,” and unconstrained by genetic or hormonal influences. This leaves us free to rebel against the patriarchy by engaging in “subversive performances of various kinds.” Obviously, the contemporary transgender movement would count as an example of such a performance.

Jews have been greatly overrepresented in the student bodies of elite American universities for several decades, to a degree that their intelligence and academic qualifications cannot begin to account for:

Any sign that the enrollment of Jews at elite universities is less than about 20 percent is seen as indicative of anti-Semitism. A 2009 article in The Daily Princetonian cited data from Hillel [a Jewish campus organization] indicating that, with the exception of Princeton and Dartmouth, on average Jews made up 24 percent of Ivy League undergraduates. Princeton had only 13 percent Jews, leading to much anxiety and a drive to recruit more Jewish students. The result was extensive national coverage, including articles in The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. The rabbi leading the campaign said she “would love 20 percent”—an increase from over six times the Jewish percentage in the population to around ten times.

According to Ron Unz:

These articles included denunciations of Princeton’s long historical legacy of anti-Semitism and quickly led to official apologies, followed by an immediate 30 percent rebound in Jewish numbers. During these same years, non-Jewish white enrollment across the entire Ivy League had dropped by roughly 50 percent, reducing those numbers to far below parity, but this was met with media silence or even occasional congratulations on the further “multicultural” progress of America’s elite education system.

The Preface to this new edition of The Culture of Critique also contains additions on the psychology of media influence and Jewish efforts to censor the internet, along with an updating of information on Jewish ownership and control of major communications media.

Chapter Three on “Jews and the Left” includes a new sixteen-page section “Jews as Elite in the USSR,” as well as shorter additions on Jews and McCarthyism, and even the author’s own reminiscences of Jewish participation in the New Left at the University of Wisconsin in his youth. The additions incorporate material from important works published since the second edition, including Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together (2002), Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century (2004), and Philip Mendes’s Jews and the Left (2014).

Chapter Four on “Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement” is new to this edition, although its core has already appeared in the author’s previous book Cultural Insurrections (2007) and elsewhere. MacDonald’s account of how the neocons maintained a self-image as a beleaguered and embattled minority even as they determined the destiny of the world’s most powerful country is an impressive testament to the unchanging nature of the Jewish shtetl mindset.

Chapter Five on “Jewish Involvement in the Psychoanalytic Movement” has been expanded with material on Freud’s Hungarian-Jewish disciple Sándor Ferenczi and the Budapest school of psychoanalysis.

Chapter Six on “The Frankfurt School of Social Research and the Pathologization of Gentile Group Allegiances” includes new biographical sketches of the major figures and cites extensively from the recently published private correspondences of Horkheimer and Adorno. A new section on Samuel H. Flowerman (based on the research of Andrew Joyce) throws light on the nexus between the Frankfurt School and influential Jews in the communications media. There is also expanded coverage of Jaques Derrida and the Dada movement.

Chapter Eight on “Jewish Shaping of US Immigration Policy” has been updated and corroborated using more recent scholarship by Daniel Okrent Daniel Tichenor, and Otis Graham, as well as Harry Richardson and Frank Salter’s Anglophobia (2023) on Jewish pro-immigration activism in Australia. MacDonald makes clear that Jewish pro-immigration activism was motivated by fear of an anti-Jewish movement among a homogeneous White Christian society, as occurred in Germany from 1933–1945) Moreover:

Nevertheless, despite its clear importance to the activist Jewish community [and its eventual tranformative effects], the most prominent sponsors of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965,

did their best to downplay the law’s importance in public discourse. National policymakers were well aware that the general public was opposed to increases in either the volume or diversity of immigration to the United States. . . . [However,] in truth the policy departures of the mid-1960s dramatically recast immigration patterns and concomitantly the nation. Annual admissions increased sharply in the years after the law’s passage. (Daniel Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America, Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 218)

The Conclusion, “Whither Judaism and the West?” is heavily updated from the previous version. MacDonald speculates on the possible rise of a new non-Jewish elite that might challenge Jewish hegemony in three key areas: the media, political funding, and the academy. He sees Elon Musk, with his support for Donald Trump’s populism and (relatively) free speech, as a possible harbinger of such an elite. Musk has commented explicitly on Jewish hostility to Whites and taken heat for it.

Regarding the media, MacDonald writes:

If the 2024 election shows anything, it’s that the legacy mainstream media is distrusted more than ever and has been effectively replaced among wide swaths of voters, especially young voters, by alternative media, particularly podcasts and social media. […] The influence of the legacy media, a main power base of the mainstream liberal-left Jewish community, appears to be in terminal decline.

A recent sign of the times was the eviction of the New York Times, National Public Radio, NBC and Politico from their Pentagon offices to make room for outlets such as One America News Network and Breitbart.

Jewish financial clout is still in place, but may be of diminishing importance as well. As of August 2024, twenty-two of the twenty-six top donors to the Trump campaign were gentiles, and only one Jew—Miriam Adelson at $100 million—made the top ten. (Musk eventually contributed around $300 million. The author quotes a description of all the wealthy people in attendance at Trump’s second inaugural, and only one of the six men named was Jewish. MacDonald notes that “most of these tycoons were likely just trying to ingratiate themselves with the new administration, but this is a huge change from the 2017 and suggests that they are quite comfortable with at least some of the sea changes Trump is pursuing.”

The university is the most difficult pillar of Jewish power to challenge, as MacDonald notes, “because hiring is rigorously policed to make sure new faculty and administrators are on the left.” There has recently been a challenge to Jewish interests in the academy by students protesting—or attempting to protest—Israeli actions in the Gaza strip. But Ron Unz vividly describes what can happen to such students:

At UCLA an encampment of peaceful protestors was violently attacked and beaten by a mob of pro-Israel thugs having no university connection but armed with bars, clubs, and fireworks, resulting in some serious injuries. Police stood aside while UCLA students were attacked by outsiders, then arrested some 200 of the former. Most of these students were absolutely stunned. For decades, they had freely protested on a wide range of political causes without ever encountering a sliver of such vicious retaliation. Some student organizations were immediately banned and the future careers of the protestors were harshly threatened.

Protesting Israel is not treated like protesting “heteronormativity.” Two Ivy League presidents were quickly forced to resign for allowing students to express themselves.

Despite this awesome display of continuing Jewish power, anti-White “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” policies are now under serious attack at American universities. MacDonald also notes that the academy is a less important a power base than either the media or political funding.

The Conclusion has also been updated with a consideration of whether multiculturalism may be backfiring on its Jewish creators as some members of the anti-White coalition turn to anti-Semitism.

It should be acknowledged that the insertion of new material into this updated edition required the deletion of a certain amount of the old. I was sorry to note, e.g., the removal of the table contrasting European and Jewish cultural forms, found on page xxxi of the second edition. So while everyone concerned with the question of Jewish influence should promptly procure this new third edition, I am not ready to part with my copy of the second.

Margin of the Law publishes constitutional analysis, civic research, and legal education for people who want to understand the system they actually live in. Read the Full Constitutional Analysis Library at marginofthelaw.com.

© 2026 – MK3 Law Group

For republication or citation, please credit this article with link attribution to marginofthelaw.com.

What George Hunt Recorded

In the early 1990s, a man named George Hunt attended a high-level environmental conference and came back with recordings. What he documented was not a gathering of concerned scientists debating carbon cycles. It was a planning session. The language used by attendees was direct enough that it required no interpretation. Ordinary people were referred to as “cannon fodder, unfortunately, that populates the Earth.” The financial architecture being proposed centered on one family. And the political objectives being discussed had nothing to do with saving rivers or protecting forests.

Hunt’s recordings captured Maurice Strong, one of the most influential environmental bureaucrats of the twentieth century, stating that no one was better suited to lead the emerging global environmental movement than Edmond de Rothschild. Strong did not hedge this claim. He said Rothschild “epitomizes in his own life that positive synthesis between environment and conservation on the one hand and economics on the other.”

That statement is worth sitting with. The man being positioned to lead what would become one of the most consequential political movements of the modern era was the head of one of the most powerful banking dynasties in history. The connection was stated openly, at a conference that was not supposed to be public.

What follows is a careful examination of what that connection means, where it leads, and what the documented record shows about who is actually driving the global sustainability agenda, and why.

The Financial Architecture Behind the Green Agenda

The centerpiece of the new global order being proposed at the conference Hunt attended was a banking and trading system. Not conservation easements. Not pollution controls. A financial system, designed to generate revenue and create new mechanisms of control.

That framing was not accidental. Simon Linnett, Executive Vice Chairman of Rothschild, made the financial logic explicit in a document titled “Trading Emissions: Full Global Potential,” published by the Social Market Foundation in London. Linnett defined greenhouse emissions as the new form of “social market.” His language was careful but unmistakable.

He wrote that such a market “has to be established on a world basis coordinated by an international institution with a constitution to match.” He argued that this structure “might be regarded as having wider benefits than merely saving the planet, perhaps it might be the basis of a new world order, one that is not based on trade and conflict resolution.”

He acknowledged the political costs of implementing this structure. Loss of national sovereignty. Loss of direct control over economic policy. Loss of competitive independence. But he dismissed these concerns, arguing that nations had already accepted similar losses when they created independent central banks, and that subordinating sovereignty to a global carbon trading body was “a relatively small price to pay for such inclusion.”

He also identified where this system should be headquartered. In a section titled “A Natural Role for London,” Linnett described London as “a world financial centre, possibly the world financial centre” and argued it “would make a compelling case to house the World Environmental Agency.”

The organization that would profit most from building and managing this system was the same organization whose executive vice chairman wrote the blueprint for it. The Rothschild banking house was positioned to be the central node of the carbon trading market it helped design. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the documented record of what was proposed, by whom, and for whose benefit.

Communism by Another Name

To understand what the sustainability agenda represents, it helps to understand what it replaced.

Marxism was not a spontaneous uprising of the working class. It was a system developed by intellectuals, funded by specific financial interests, and deployed as an ideological tool to concentrate power while promising liberation. The historian and anarcho-syndicalist Mikhail Bakunin, who was Karl Marx’s chief rival in the First International, identified the financial interests behind Marx’s project. He documented the Rothschild connection to the early communist movement with enough precision that his observations remain relevant today.

Marxism succeeded in attracting genuine idealists, people who wanted workers to be treated fairly, who were appalled by the abuses of industrial capitalism, and who believed a more equitable system was possible. What they got instead was a system of total state control that produced death tolls measured in tens of millions. The ideology promised liberation and delivered the gulag.

The sustainability movement follows the same structural pattern. It attracts genuine environmentalists, people with legitimate concerns about pollution, species loss, and industrial damage to ecosystems. What is being built on top of those concerns, however, is a system of global financial and political control that has very little to do with protecting the environment and a great deal to do with restructuring power.

James Billington, Librarian of Congress, noted in his book “Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith” that green was the “sacred” color of communism, while red was the “revolutionary” color. That historical footnote is less trivial than it sounds. The same financial interests that funded the communist experiment in the twentieth century are now positioned at the center of the green movement in the twenty-first.

Maurice Strong’s Document

Among the materials Hunt retrieved from the conference was a document attributed to Maurice Strong. Strong was not a peripheral figure. He organized the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and served as the first executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme. He was one of the most consequential environmental bureaucrats in history.

The document attributed to him at the Hunt conference is not comfortable reading.

It opens by noting that “insufficient progress has been made in population reduction” since the Club of Rome was founded in 1968. It calls for “firm control of world technology, weaponry, and resources” and states that “the immediate reduction of world population, according to the mid-1970s recommendation of the Draper Fund, must be immediately affected.”

The language escalates. It states that current population levels “cannot be answered by future reductions in the birth rate due to contraception, sterilization and abortion, but must be met in the present by the reduction of numbers presently existing. This must be done by whatever means necessary.”

It dismisses the sovereignty of the 166 nations then in existence, calling their leaders “irresolute, conditioned by localist cultures and lacking the appropriate notions of the New World Order.” It states that “debate only means delay and forfeiture of our goals.”

It invokes the legacy of Cecil Rhodes and Lord Milner, framing the project in explicitly racial terms: “We too are British Race Patriots and our patriotism is the speech, the tradition, the principles, the aspirations of the British Race. Do you fear to take this stand, at the very last moment when this purpose can be realized? Do you not see that failure now is to be pulled down by the billions of Lilliputians of lesser race who care little or nothing for the Anglo-Saxon system?”

It proposes that the UN Security Council enforce population quotas “by selective or total embargo of credit, food, medicine or military force, when required.” It states that “not all races are equal, nor should they be” and that “those races proven superior by superior achievements ought to rule the lesser races.”

It closes with a phrase that carries its own weight: “Open declaration of intent followed by decisive force is the final solution.”

The document is attributed to Strong. The conference at which it was distributed was attended by people who did not object to its contents. That fact matters more than any single phrase it contains.

World Government: The Longer History

The ambition for a centrally administered global order predates the environmental movement by decades. After World War II, the fear of nuclear annihilation was the primary tool used to advance the case for a world government. The argument was simple: either humanity unified under a single governing authority, or it destroyed itself with atomic weapons.

Bernard Baruch was one of the most prominent advocates of this position. He had operated at the center of American financial and political power since World War I, when he told a Senate committee: “I probably had more power than perhaps any other man did in the war; doubtless that is true.” After World War II, he brought that same confidence to the UN Atomic Energy Commission, where he argued for international control of atomic energy under a world authority with enforcement powers.

His speech to the Commission stated: “We must elect world peace or world destruction. The peoples of these democracies gathered here are not afraid of an internationalism that protects; they are unwilling to be fobbed off by mouthing about narrow sovereignty, which is today’s phrase for yesterday’s isolation.”

Stalin refused this arrangement. He was pursuing his own vision of empire, and a world government structured around Anglo-American interests was not part of it. The Cold War followed.

What makes this period particularly relevant is what was happening behind the scenes. Major George Racey Jordan documented in his diaries that Harry Hopkins, one of Roosevelt’s key advisers, supplied the Soviet Union with materials related to atomic weapons development during World War II. Researcher Antony Sutton spent years documenting the broader pattern of Western technology transfer to the Soviet Union in his book “The Best Enemy Money Can Buy.” The conclusion Sutton reached was that the Cold War was in significant part a managed conflict, with both sides receiving support from the same financial interests.

The proposition that American and Soviet elites were working toward convergence rather than competing for dominance was advanced explicitly by people inside the system. In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev stated: “We are moving toward a New World, the world of Communism. We shall never turn off that road.” The Soviet defector Vladimir Bukovsky examined secret Soviet archives and produced a monograph titled “EUSSR: The Soviet Roots of European Integration,” which documents that the modern European Union was built through a coordinated effort between the Soviet Politburo and key members of the Trilateral Commission, including David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Yasuhiro Nakasone, and Valery Giscard d’Estaing.

The EU is the proof of concept for what global governance looks like in practice. It is not a federation of free peoples. It is a supranational bureaucratic structure that transfers decision-making power away from elected governments to appointed bodies. Its development followed the exact pattern that former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Richard Gardner outlined in a 1974 Foreign Affairs article titled “The Hard Road to World Order.”

Gardner wrote that the goal of world order would not be achieved through direct announcement. Instead, “the house of world order would have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. An end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.” That is what the EU represents. And according to people like Linnett, it is what global carbon governance is designed to extend.

The Club of Rome and Manufactured Crisis

The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 at David Rockefeller’s estate in Bellagio. Its stated purpose was to address global problems. Its actual function, as the documentary record shows, was to generate the intellectual framework for centralized global control by creating and amplifying crises that could only be solved at the global level.

The Club of Rome’s 1972 book “Limits to Growth” established the template. It used computer modeling to project catastrophic resource depletion and population overshoot within decades. The projections were wrong. Every major prediction in the book failed to materialize on the timelines proposed. But the book succeeded in establishing the intellectual framework that genuine environmental concern could be channeled into support for global governance.

The Club followed this with a report titled “Regionalized and Adaptive Model of the Global World System,” which proposed dividing the world into ten administrative regions for the convenience of a world government. The same structure appears in Agenda 21 and subsequent UN governance documents.

Their texts “Mankind at the Turning Point” and “RIO: Reshaping the International Order” elaborated the plan. “Goals for Mankind,” released in 1977, provided insight into the technocratic framework through which global management was to operate. “Global 2000,” a U.S. policy document written in 1979, amplified the overpopulation alarm and called for “an intensively managed world” with fertility reduction programs.

Then, in 1991, the Club of Rome published “The First Global Revolution,” which contained a passage that should have ended any remaining ambiguity about the organization’s methods and objectives.

The relevant section is titled “The Vacuum.” It reads:

“The need for enemies seems to be a common historical factor. States have striven to overcome domestic failure and internal contradictions by designating external enemies... With the disappearance of the traditional enemy, the temptation is to designate as scapegoat religious or ethnic minorities whose differences are disturbing.”

It continues: “Democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.”

And then: “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine, and the like would fit the bill. In their totality and interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which demands the solidarity of all peoples. But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”

The Club of Rome admitted, in print, that it selected global warming as a manufactured external threat designed to produce solidarity and justify centralized control. The same organization that generated decades of population and climate hysteria stated explicitly that these were strategic choices, not scientific conclusions.

The Climate Fraud: A Documented Record

The anthropogenic global warming thesis rests on two foundational claims: that human carbon emissions are the primary driver of global temperature change, and that this change will produce catastrophic consequences without immediate global intervention. Both claims have been contested by significant bodies of peer-reviewed scientific literature. The contestation has been systematically suppressed, misrepresented, and ignored.

Before the global warming narrative was established, the same institutions and publications pushing catastrophic warming were pushing catastrophic cooling. A Newsweek article from April 28, 1975, warned of impending climate disaster driven by global cooling. Time magazine ran a piece in June 1974 titled “Science: Another Ice Age?” A 1958 article in Harper’s magazine was titled “The Coming Ice Age.”

The CIA took these cooling predictions seriously enough to classify them. The 1970s global cooling scare was not fringe science. It was the consensus position of many of the same institutions that later pivoted, without explanation or accountability, to global warming alarm.

The pivot matters because it reveals the function of the narrative. The specific predicted catastrophe changed. The political prescription remained constant: global governance, resource control, and population management. The science was a vehicle for the policy, not the basis for it.

The paper most frequently cited to establish scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming is Cook et al. (2013), which claimed a 97% consensus among scientists. Scientists whose work was included in the Cook study publicly stated that the paper misrepresented their positions. The methodology used to generate the 97% figure has been challenged and refuted in peer-reviewed literature. More than 1,350 peer-reviewed papers examining specific claims of the anthropogenic global warming thesis have raised substantive objections to those claims, covering topics ranging from sea level rise to polar bear populations to the alleged correlation between human activity and extreme weather events.

The Climategate scandal, and its successor Climategate 2.0, provided direct documentary evidence of data manipulation, suppression of contradictory findings, and coordinated efforts to control the peer review process. The scientists involved faced no meaningful professional consequences. The narrative continued.

The U.S. Navy recorded a 25% increase in Arctic ice volume between 2008 and 2010. This data point received no sustained media coverage. It contradicted the narrative, so it was not useful.

What makes this pattern significant is not the question of whether human activity affects climate, which is a legitimate scientific question. What is significant is that a specific set of policy prescriptions, all pointing toward centralized global control, has been locked in place regardless of what the data shows. When the data showed cooling, global governance was the answer. When the data showed warming, global governance was the answer. When the data showed neither clearly, global governance remained the answer. The conclusion preceded the evidence, which is the definition of ideology, not science.

The Overpopulation Myth

The second pillar of the sustainability agenda is overpopulation. The claim is that human population has exceeded or is rapidly approaching the carrying capacity of Earth, and that this requires managed reduction. The claim is false. It has been false for as long as it has been made. And the people making it have known it was false.

Henry George refuted Malthus in “Progress and Poverty” in 1879, demonstrating that scarcity is primarily a function of land monopoly and political economy, not of population size relative to resources. His work was subsequently buried. Mason Gaffney’s “The Corruption of Economics” documents the deliberate academic suppression of George’s analysis by economists funded by interests that benefited from land monopoly.

Harrison Brown, who mentored Obama-era Science Czar John Holdren, noted in his own text “The Challenge of Man’s Future” that Earth’s human carrying capacity is between 50 and 200 billion people at a lower standard of living. Brown made this calculation and then proceeded to advocate for aggressive population reduction anyway. The carrying capacity data was irrelevant to him. The policy objective was fixed. The data was adjusted to fit it.

Buckminster Fuller reached similar conclusions through a different analytical framework, demonstrating that optimum utilization of existing resources and technology could support current and projected populations while rapidly improving quality of life. This analysis has been consistently marginalized in mainstream policy discussions.

The population projections generated by the Club of Rome and its affiliated institutions have been consistently wrong. The catastrophic timelines they predicted have not materialized. Food production has exceeded population growth. Resource depletion has not occurred on the schedules projected. The demographic transition, the natural decline in birth rates that accompanies increases in education and economic security, is occurring across the developing world without coercion.

None of this has shifted the population reduction agenda. Because the agenda is not driven by the data. It is driven by the policy objective, and the population data is a tool for advancing it.

What the Planners Actually Propose

The policy documents and public statements of the people driving the sustainability agenda make their intentions clear enough that there is no need to speculate about what they want.

John Holdren, who served as Science Czar during the Obama administration, co-authored a book titled “Ecoscience” with Paul Ehrlich in which he proposed the following:

Compulsory abortion laws could be sustained under the existing Constitution if population crisis became “sufficiently severe.” Involuntary sterilization of women after a second or third child was proposed as a policy option. Adding sterilants to drinking water or staple foods was discussed as a mechanism for “involuntary fertility control.” A “Planetary Regime” was proposed with authority to “control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources” and to determine “the optimum population for the world and for each region.” Military enforcement of international population agreements was proposed. Partial surrender of national sovereignty to an international organization was described as a necessary first step.

Senate Commerce Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV said of Holdren at a Congressional hearing: “Dr. Holdren, I don’t want to embarrass you, but I sometimes refer to you as walking on water.”

Holdren’s mentor Harrison Brown wrote, in “The Challenge of Man’s Future,” that sterilization of “feeble-minded” persons and people with hereditary conditions including “congenital deafness, dumbness, blindness, or absence of limbs” should be implemented. He also wrote that “population stabilization and a world composed of completely independent sovereign states are incompatible” and that a world authority with jurisdiction over population problems was necessary.

Brown described the human species in the following terms: “If humanity had its way, it would not rest content until the earth is covered completely and to a considerable depth with a writhing mass of human beings, much as a dead cow is covered with a pulsating mass of maggots.”

This is the intellectual tradition that produced the Obama administration’s science policy. It is not fringe. It is mainstream within the specific network of institutions and think tanks that have driven global governance agendas for decades.

Prince Philip stated: “If I were to be reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus, to lower human population levels.”

Bill Gates, whose foundation controls significant portions of global health and agricultural policy, stated: “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”

He said this while discussing vaccines in the context of population reduction. The implication is either that he misspoke, or that he understood vaccines and health interventions as tools that, by reducing childhood mortality and increasing access to contraception, would lower birth rates. The charitable interpretation is possible. The statement stands.

GMOs and the Perversion of Ecology

The people driving the sustainability agenda are also among the primary forces behind the proliferation of genetically modified organisms in the global food supply. This is not incidental. It is structural.

William Engdahl’s book “Seeds of Destruction” documents the Rockefeller Foundation’s central role in developing and globalizing GMO agriculture. The same foundation that funds population reduction research and global governance initiatives also funded the Green Revolution and the subsequent introduction of patented GMO crops into food systems worldwide.

The environmental consequences of GMO proliferation have been documented and are ongoing. In 2001, Mexican government officials attempted to pressure Professor Ignacio Chapela into withdrawing his research showing that Mexico’s native maize varieties had been contaminated by GM cross-pollination. The contamination of wild crop varieties by patented GM strains eliminates biodiversity and creates dependencies on the corporations that hold the patents.

The military-industrial complex has contributed additional environmental damage through the use of depleted uranium in munitions. Significant quantities of radioactive material have been introduced into the soil and groundwater of regions where these munitions were used. This damage has been systematically underreported and deprioritized.

What emerges from this pattern is that the people who claim to be the guardians of the environment are responsible for some of the most significant environmental damage occurring. The GMO contamination of wild seed stocks, the radioactive contamination from depleted uranium, the chemical contamination from industrial agriculture are all products of the same network of institutions that produces the sustainability agenda. The agenda does not address these problems. It does not address them because the institutions driving the agenda are the same institutions causing the damage.

The ecology being pushed is not ecological protection. It is ecological management by the entities that are doing the most damage.

Arnold Toynbee and the Plan for Managed Sovereignty

Arnold Toynbee served as director of studies for the Royal Institute of International Affairs. He was not a peripheral figure. He was one of the most influential historians and policy intellectuals of the twentieth century, operating at the center of the British foreign policy establishment.

In the RIIA’s own journal, he stated: “We are at present working, discreetly but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious political force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands, because to impugn the sovereignty of the local national state of the world is still a heresy for which a statesman or a publicist can be, perhaps not quite burnt at the stake, but certainly ostracized and discredited.”

He added: “The fifty or sixty local states of the world will no doubt survive as administrative conveniences. But sooner or later sovereignty will depart from them.”

In a separate address, Toynbee stated that addressing the challenges he identified would require “a severely regimented way of life to be imposed by a ruthless authoritarian government.”

These statements were not made at a private dinner. They were published in institutional journals. Toynbee was describing, in plain language, a coordinated effort to transfer sovereignty from nations to supranational bodies while publicly denying that this was occurring. This is the strategy that Gardner later described as an “end run around national sovereignty.” It is the strategy that produced the EU. It is the strategy that the carbon trading framework is designed to extend.

The people implementing this strategy are not hiding it. They are publishing it in their own journals and policy documents. What they are hiding is the fact that they are implementing it, because they know that if the population understood what was being done, it would not cooperate.

Perception Management and the Next Wave

A presentation at the Center for Strategic and International Studies captured the operational thinking of this network with unusual clarity. The audio is on record.

At approximately 45 minutes into the presentation, a participant stated: “I feel we have to become a little more comfortable with perception management, psychological operations. These are bad words in Washington right now, but ultimately a lot of the activities we’re going to have the overt function.”

Later, at approximately one hour into the same presentation, Marc Sageman stated: “Unfortunately, I think the next wave is going to make those jihadis look a little quaint. My fear, and you know, fundamentalist environmentalists, Earth First, Gaia, we’re ruining the world, we’re ruining the Earth, because of pollution, because of global warming, and in order to save the planet and preserve the human race, you may have to kill 80% of the people, because what’s really ruining it is overpopulation, and the only thing that can kill that efficiently are biological weapons. This is a covert biological weapon, and you already see this on some extremist website, and this is really scary. I mean, you’re talking about five billion people dying here.”

Sageman attributed this logic to fringe environmental groups like Earth First. That attribution is not credible. Earth First does not have the resources, the institutional infrastructure, or the access to biological weapons programs that a campaign of this scale would require.

The organizations that have advocated for population reduction at the scale Sageman describes are the Club of Rome, the Draper Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, and affiliated policy institutions. Paul Ehrlich, whose population hysteria provided the intellectual basis for decades of reduction advocacy, has been funded by these institutions throughout his career. John Holdren, who proposed sterilants in drinking water, served as Science Czar of the United States.

If a biological event were to kill a significant portion of the global population, the institutional framework for absorbing the resulting chaos, managing the remaining population, and implementing the carbon trading and world governance structures already designed is in place. The people who built that framework are the same people who have been publishing population reduction proposals for fifty years.

The CSIS presentation named the threat, attributed it to the wrong source, and moved on. That is a precise description of perception management.

The Report from Iron Mountain

Between 1963 and 1966, a document was produced that outlined the logic behind what has been described in this analysis. The document presented itself as the product of a high-level government study group, possibly commissioned by the Hudson Institute, a spinoff of the RAND Corporation. It was titled “The Report from Iron Mountain.”

The document argued that war had historically served as the primary mechanism for population control, resource management, and social cohesion. As globalization advanced, the authors argued, war between major powers would become less viable as a control mechanism. Substitutes would be needed. Those substitutes had to meet specific criteria: they had to expand government power, generate economic waste, and be fueled by external threats that could only be addressed through adherence to centralized authority.

The document discussed several possible substitutes, including compulsory service for “antisocial” elements, manufactured external threats analogous to a potential alien invasion, and the threat of environmental catastrophe requiring global solutions.

The document was subsequently attributed to Leonard Lewin and dismissed as a hoax. John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the most prominent economists of the twentieth century, publicly vouched for the authenticity of the group that produced it.

Whether or not the document is authentic, the framework it describes is operational. The substitution of environmental crisis for military threat as a mechanism of social control and governance consolidation is precisely what the Club of Rome documents describe and what the current global governance architecture implements. The Report from Iron Mountain is not evidence. It is a description of a logic that is visible in the documented record of real institutions and real policy.

What Gorbachev Did Next

After the Soviet Union formally dissolved in 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev founded Green Cross International. He co-authored the Earth Charter with Maurice Strong, the same Maurice Strong whose document called for population reduction “by whatever means necessary.” Gorbachev stated that the Earth Charter should replace the Ten Commandments.

He also stated: “The threat of environmental crisis will be the international disaster key that will unlock the New World Order.”

The framing is precise. The environmental crisis is not, in Gorbachev’s formulation, a problem to be solved. It is a key. A key is a tool for opening something. What it was designed to open was the New World Order, the same phrase used in the documents produced by the club of Rome, by Linnett at Rothschild, by Maurice Strong, and by the planners whose work George Hunt recorded.

The green movement served as the replacement for the red movement. The financial interests that funded the original communist experiment found that direct revolutionary ideology had limitations. It required visible state terror to maintain. It generated organized opposition. It could not be sustained in open societies with functioning information systems.

The green movement solved these problems. It attracted genuine idealists. It operated through international NGOs and UN bodies rather than through military force. It built its authority on scientific consensus rather than revolutionary vanguardism. It proposed economic mechanisms, carbon markets, sustainability frameworks, rather than nationalization. And it pointed toward the same destination: concentrated control over resources, production, and population, administered by appointed technocrats, insulated from democratic accountability.

The Constitutional Question

The United States is a Constitutional Republic, not a democracy. That distinction is not semantic. A democracy is majority rule. A Constitutional Republic is a system in which individual rights are protected from majority override by a written constitution, in which power is divided between branches of government, and in which the federal government is constrained by enumerated powers.

The global governance architecture being assembled operates outside this framework. It does not require constitutional amendment. It does not require congressional approval. It operates through treaty obligations, regulatory frameworks, trade agreements, and the gradual harmonization of domestic law with international standards. The sovereignty erosion that Toynbee described as the goal, that Gardner described as the strategy, and that Linnett described as the price, occurs incrementally, through processes that most citizens never observe.

The carbon trading system, if fully implemented on the model Linnett proposed, would place authority over the American economy in the hands of a world body operating from London, accountable to no American voter, constrained by no American constitutional provision. Compliance would be enforced through the denial of credit, market access, or essential goods. This is not a speculative future. It is the explicit proposal in a published document by the executive vice chairman of Rothschild.

The constitutional framework of the United States was designed precisely to prevent this kind of power concentration. The architects of that framework understood that concentrated power tends toward tyranny regardless of the ideology it wears. They built a system of distributed authority specifically because they did not trust any single institution, any single class, or any single nation to exercise power without corruption.

The people designing the global governance architecture are dismantling that distributed system, piece by piece, in exactly the manner Gardner described. They are doing it openly, in documents available to anyone willing to read them. They are doing it with the stated goal, documented in their own publications, of eliminating what Linnett called “outmoded notions of sovereignty.”

What the Record Shows

Pull back from any single document or statement and look at the full pattern. A network of financial, political, and institutional actors has been pursuing global governance for over a century. Their methods have evolved. Their stated justifications have changed. The specific crisis they invoke has shifted from nuclear war to population collapse to global cooling to global warming. But the destination has remained constant.

The same families, the same foundations, the same policy institutions appear at every stage. The Rothschilds at the center of the carbon trading system they helped design. The Rockefellers at the center of the Club of Rome, the GMO agriculture network, and the population reduction advocacy. The Trilateral Commission members coordinating EU integration with Soviet Politburo officials. The RIIA openly describing, in its own journal, a coordinated effort to dismantle national sovereignty while publicly denying it.

The environmental language is a vehicle. It carries a political payload. That payload is the same one that Marxism carried: a promise of liberation that delivers control, proposed by elites who will not be subject to the controls they impose, advanced through manufactured crisis and managed consensus.

The manufacturing of that consensus is documented. The Club of Rome said it directly. The 97% climate consensus was built on misrepresented data. The overpopulation alarm was maintained by people who knew their own calculations showed it was false. The media amplified the alarm and suppressed the contradictions.

What George Hunt recorded at that conference was a planning session, not a collection of environmental idealists. The people in that room were not worried about the Earth. They were discussing how to use concern for the Earth to build a financial and governance system that would transfer sovereign power from nations and individuals to a network of unelected international bodies, positioned at the center of which was the Rothschild banking dynasty.

The record is available. The documents are published. The statements are on tape. The pattern is consistent across decades and institutions.

The question is not whether this is happening. The question is whether enough people will look at the documented record clearly enough to understand what they are looking at before the architecture being built is complete enough to be irreversible.

The answer to that question is not determined by institutions. It is determined by individuals who are willing to read carefully, think clearly, and state plainly what the evidence shows.

That is where this ends.

Margin of the Law publishes constitutional analysis, civic research, and legal education for people who want to understand the system they actually live in. Read the Full Constitutional Analysis Library at marginofthelaw.com.

© 2026 – MK3 Law Group

For republication or citation, please credit this article with link attribution to marginofthelaw.com.

Walter Lippmann understood something that most people today have never been taught. “Because of their transcendent practical importance,” he wrote, “no successful leader has ever been too busy to cultivate the symbols which organize his following.” That observation, made a century ago, explains more about the COVID-19 era than most medical journals ever will.

This is not a piece about conspiracy. It is about something more fundamental: the documented, historical use of symbols to organize mass behavior. Specifically, it examines how one ancient symbol, the Staff of Aesculapius, has been deployed in the present era to generate compliance with a global medico-political agenda whose ambitions extend well beyond public health.

Understanding how this works requires looking at where the symbol came from, what it encoded in ancient cultures, how those encoded meanings transfer into modern institutions, and what the full arc of this symbolism suggests about where the current trajectory leads. The analysis draws on documented history, published research, and publicly available national security documents. The conclusions are uncomfortable. They are also defensible.

Symbols are not decorative. They are functional. They carry compressed meaning across generations, embedding assumptions about authority, obedience, healing, and punishment into the unconscious architecture of entire cultures. When you understand what a symbol codes for, you understand what behavior it is designed to produce.

The staff and the serpent code for something specific. That specificity matters now more than it has in decades.

Part One: Where the Symbol Came From

The earliest recorded encounter between human beings and the symbol of the serpent as a curative agent appears in the Biblical book of Numbers. The Israelites, wandering in the Sinai wilderness, were afflicted by venomous snakes. Moses, under divine instruction, fashioned a bronze serpent and raised it on a staff. Those bitten who looked upon it were healed.

The mechanics of that story are worth examining. The healing was not pharmacological. It was symbolic and conditional. Faith was the operative variable. Those who looked, those who submitted in belief to the authority of Moses and to the God Moses represented, received the cure. Those who refused, those who questioned or dismissed the instruction, did not. The serpent on the staff did not heal independently. It healed as an instrument of institutional authority, and only in those who surrendered to that authority without reservation.

This is not a minor theological footnote. It is the structural blueprint for every medicalized authority relationship that followed.

Over time, the bronze serpent stopped being a symbol of divine instruction and became an object of independent worship. The Israelites began to burn incense to it. The idol was eventually destroyed by King Hezekiah precisely because it had drifted from its original purpose and accumulated its own unearned reverence. The object had consumed the meaning that was supposed to transcend it. This pattern, where the symbol displaces the truth it was built to represent, recurs throughout human history with disturbing regularity.

In ancient Greece, the figure of Asclepius, the demigod healer, carried a wooden staff with a single serpent coiled around it. The association of the serpent with Asclepius was rooted in the same dual logic that animated the Mosaic bronze serpent: the snake’s venom could kill or cure. Its power was not fixed. It was conditional, dependent on who wielded it and for what purpose.

The temples of Asclepius, called Asclepieia, were ancient medical institutions. Patients came to them bearing illness and left, if the ritual was successful, bearing healing. The priests of these temples interpreted symptoms, prescribed remedies, administered treatments, and mediated between the patient and the divine power of the healer. The patient’s role was submission. The priest’s role was authority. The serpent on the staff encoded both roles simultaneously: the dangerous power of medicine and the obedience it demanded from those who sought it.

The staff and serpent, taken together, combined the authority of the king’s scepter with the dangerous magic of the creature whose venom made death reversible in the right hands. Together they signified an alchemical transaction: condemnation transformed to redemption, poison rendered curative, death becoming life, but only through faithful submission to the anointed bearer of the staff.

That encoded meaning never left the symbol. It traveled with it into modernity.

Part Two: What the Symbol Encodes in Modern Medicine

The Staff of Aesculapius is today the internationally recognized symbol of medicine. It appears on the emblems of the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, military medical corps around the world, and hundreds of other medical institutions. Its presence is so pervasive that most people register it without conscious attention. That is precisely the condition in which symbols exert their greatest influence.

The symbol does not merely represent medicine as a profession. It encodes a specific relationship between healer and patient, and specific expectations for both parties.

Doctors are expected to know things the lay public cannot know. Medical training is long, specialized, and deliberately insulated from casual public comprehension. The language of medicine, its Latin terminology, its statistical frameworks, its institutional hierarchies, creates a barrier between the initiated and the uninitiated that mirrors the ancient separation between priest and supplicant. Doctors are expected to lead. Patients are expected to follow. The clinical encounter is structurally asymmetric, and that asymmetry is not incidental. It is built into the symbol that represents the entire enterprise.

This is not inherently corrupt. Asymmetry of expertise is real and necessary. The problem emerges when the structural expectation of deference migrates from the appropriate domain of clinical medicine into the political domain, where it was never designed to operate and where its effects are not therapeutic but authoritarian.

Lippmann observed that “in the symbol, emotion is discharged at a common target, and the idiosyncrasy of real ideas blotted out.” Consistent exposure to the signs and symbols of medical authority, through education, advertising, and public discourse, conditions people to respond emotionally to medical figures in ways that bypass critical evaluation. The doctor who appears with a clipboard, who speaks in technical language, who stands before institutional credentials, activates a pre-loaded response pattern. Compliance. Deference. Faith.

Stanley Milgram documented this dynamic in clinical conditions. His experiments demonstrated that ordinary people, showing no particular authoritarian tendencies, would administer what they believed were lethal electrical shocks to other human beings on the instruction of a figure in a white lab coat. The coat, not any argument, not any evidence, not any rational persuasion, was sufficient to override the subject’s own moral judgment. The symbol of medical authority, visually encoded in the coat, was enough.

Milgram was horrified by what his experiments confirmed: not simply that evil can be banal, but that symbols of accepted authority can produce obedience to almost any instruction when the population has been sufficiently primed. The priming is the work of education, media, and repetition. The symbol is the trigger.

Part Three: The Politicization of Medical Symbolism

The COVID-19 period represents the most significant transfer of medical symbolic authority into political territory in recorded modern history. What happened between 2020 and 2023 was not simply a public health response to a novel pathogen. It was the fusion of two previously distinct institutional domains: medicine and the state. The consequences of that fusion are still unfolding.

Prior to 2020, the doctor-patient relationship operated, at least in principle, within the domain of interpersonal medical judgment. A physician assessed an individual patient, gathered information specific to that patient’s condition and history, and made recommendations calibrated to that individual. The relationship was private, bounded, and grounded in individual biology.

The COVID era eliminated that structure. Medical recommendations became state mandates. Individual clinical judgment was replaced by centralized protocol. The question of whether a given intervention was appropriate for a specific individual was subordinated to population-level directives issued by public health bureaucracies whose authority was, in most cases, legally unaccountable to the public they claimed to serve.

Anthony Fauci, as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, embodied this transition with remarkable precision. His statement, “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” was not a medical claim. It was a theological one. It positioned a mortal bureaucrat, whose agency received billions in pharmaceutical funding and maintained patent relationships with products it was simultaneously regulating, as coextensive with the foundational principles of empirical inquiry. The institutional conflict of interest was not hidden. It was documented in the public record. The claim, nonetheless, was advanced without irony and accepted without widespread challenge by institutional media.

This is not a technical failure of reasoning. It is the precise function of symbolism. Fauci, positioned beneath the banner of public health institutions whose emblem carried the staff and serpent, was encoded by association with the entire weight of that symbol’s historical meaning: the anointed healer, the staff-bearer, the mediator between ordinary people and the power of medicine. To question him was, symbolically, to question healing itself.

The market confirmed the dynamic. Devotional candles bearing Fauci’s image were manufactured and sold. His face appeared on prayer-style cards. Celebrity endorsements positioned him as a figure of moral heroism rather than public administration. Mark Crispin Miller documented the mechanics of this cult of personality construction in detail. The symbolic machinery that produced it was ancient. Only the delivery mechanism was new.

Citizens, meanwhile, were recast. Corporate media framing positioned the entire civilian population not as functioning members of a constitutional republic exercising rights, but as potential vectors of infection whose primary civic obligation was medical compliance. The active citizen, the person who questions, debates, demands accountability, and refuses to surrender judgment, became the “anti-science” threat. The passive patient, who accepts instructions without independent evaluation, became the model of civic virtue.

This is a structural inversion of the relationship between citizen and state in a constitutional republic. It is also a precise replication of the ancient symbolic schema: the serpent-bearer demands submission; the faithful receive healing; the skeptical court death in the wilderness.

Part Four: The Antiseptic Architecture of Behavioral Control

Integration propaganda and agitation propaganda function as complementary mechanisms. Agitation propaganda generates fear and urgency sufficient to destabilize rational evaluation. Integration propaganda provides the symbolic framework into which the destabilized population is absorbed, organized, and directed.

The COVID communications architecture deployed both in sequence and simultaneously. Agitation: constant case counts, hospitalization projections, death tallies, variant naming, and the sustained projection of civilizational threat. Integration: the WHO’s staff and serpent, the clinical white backgrounds of press briefings, the coordinated messaging of institutional medicine, the symbolic framing of vaccination as civic participation in collective healing.

The effect, documented in survey data across multiple countries, was measurable suppression of the population’s willingness to question institutional medical claims. Vaccine hesitancy, a clinically neutral term for the ordinary human behavior of evaluating risk before accepting a medical procedure, was reframed as a public health threat. The questioning patient became the dangerous patient. Critical thinking, the operational requirement of genuine informed consent, became a vector of harm.

When the actual clinical data began to complicate the initial messaging, the corrections did not travel through the same channels as the original claims. Studies questioning vaccine efficacy in the Lancet, the British Medical Journal, and other peer-reviewed publications received institutional silence where the original mandate messaging received coordinated amplification. The symbolic framework, once established, filtered subsequent information through its own encoded assumptions. Data that supported the narrative was elevated. Data that complicated it was managed.

The word “blasphemy” had not been used in secular political commentary for decades before Tucker Carlson applied it to criticism of the official 9/11 report in the post-2001 environment. The theological language was jarring then. By 2021, its equivalent was the operating vocabulary of mainstream institutional discourse. “Misinformation.” “Disinformation.” “Dangerous.” These are functional synonyms for heresy in a system where medical authority has assumed the symbolic weight previously carried by religious institution.

The dissenting scientist, the questioning physician, the journalist who published contradictory data: these figures were treated not as contributors to an ongoing empirical process but as threats to public safety requiring suppression. Scientists lost institutional positions. Physicians faced licensing consequences. Journalists lost platforms. The mechanism of excommunication, stripped of its ecclesiastical name, functioned with contemporary efficiency.

Part Five: The Bio-Nano Blueprint and the 2020 Target Date

The COVID-19 period did not emerge from a vacuum. In 2001, a document produced under NASA’s aegis and citing DARPA, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Australia’s Defence Department outlined a developmental roadmap for what it termed the Bio-Nano Age. The document identified 2020 as the approximate commencement date for a new era characterized by social and economic disruption that would enable the adoption of technologies including genetic modification of human beings, synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology applications, and pervasive digital connectivity.

The document was not classified. It is publicly available. Its projections were not vague futurism. They were operational planning, backed by the specific institutional names and research agendas of the organizations cited.

Daniel Broudy and Valerie Kyrie published research tracing the connections between the COVID-19 institutional response and this documented national security roadmap. Their analysis identified several convergences: the mRNA technology deployed in COVID-19 vaccines originated in DARPA-funded research; the same institutional actors connected to transhumanist research on human biological enhancement were centrally involved in COVID-19 intervention design; the genetic and nanotechnological mechanisms of mRNA vaccine platforms overlap directly with the technological categories identified in NASA’s Bio-Nano blueprint.

These are not speculative connections. They are documented institutional relationships, funding histories, and patent records, assembled from public sources and published in peer-reviewed form.

Transhumanism, as an ideology, has ancient roots in the human aspiration to transcend biological limitation. As a contemporary scientific and social movement, it focuses specifically on the development of technologies designed to extend lifespan, enhance cognitive capacity, augment sensory perception, and ultimately integrate human biological systems with synthetic and digital infrastructure. The head of the World Economic Forum has stated consistently over years that humanity must prepare for a future defined by the convergence of biological life, synthetic technologies, and digital financial systems.

This is not an obscure fringe position. It is the stated agenda of institutions whose membership includes heads of state, central bank governors, and the leadership of the world’s largest corporations. The agenda is public. The timeline is documented. The technologies are in development or already deployed.

The question the COVID era raises is whether the sustained deployment of medical symbolic authority, positioned beneath the staff and serpent of Aesclepius, served to generate the behavioral preconditions for that transition: populations habituated to accepting injected genetic material on institutional instruction, conditioned to suppress the impulse to question medical authority, and primed to understand bodily intervention not as violation but as civic virtue.

Part Six: The Psychological Architecture of Mass Compliance

Psychologically, the COVID-era compliance campaign operated on several levels simultaneously.

At the most basic level, it weaponized fear. Sustained exposure to elevated threat messaging, specifically calibrated to emphasize mortality and social exclusion, activated the limbic system’s threat-response circuitry, suppressing the prefrontal cortical functions responsible for complex evaluation. People under sustained fear process information differently. They are more susceptible to authority, less tolerant of ambiguity, and more likely to reject information that complicates the threat narrative they have accepted.

At a deeper level, the campaign mobilized the psychological architecture of religious devotion. The parallels were not accidental and not invisible to analysts paying attention. The unclean state of the infectious human body. The ritual of mask-wearing as public display of contamination acknowledgment. The injection as sacrament, a moment of submission to purifying intervention. The booster sequence as ongoing spiritual maintenance, the perpetual renewal of devotion required by the faithful.

The suffering that followed injection, the injection site pain, the fatigue, the fever, the more serious adverse events that were documented in VAERS data and in the post-market surveillance studies that regulatory agencies received and declined to act on with urgency, was not framed as a problem. It was absorbed into the symbolic framework as evidence of the intervention’s power. You feel it working. You are paying the price for protection. The discomfort is the cost of community.

This is not the logic of medicine. It is the logic of penance.

The zealous institutional rejection of natural immunity during this period, in direct contradiction of decades of immunological understanding and without adequate evidentiary basis, functioned as a necessary component of this framework. Natural immunity, if acknowledged, would have eliminated the medical justification for universal vaccination mandates. It would also have acknowledged the biological sufficiency of the unmodified human immune system. In the symbolic architecture of a transhumanist agenda, that acknowledgment is structurally inconvenient. The unenhanced human body must be positioned as insufficient. Its natural capabilities must be minimized or denied. Only then does the case for perpetual technological upgrade become morally compelling.

The psychological erasure of natural immunity accomplished, in symbolic terms, what the ancient Israelites experienced when the bronze serpent became an idol: it displaced a real thing, functioning biological immunity, with a symbolic substitute, institutional vaccination, and then demanded that the substitute be treated as superior to the original.

Part Seven: Where This Trajectory Points

The implications of the documented convergence between COVID-era medical symbolism, national security transhumanist planning, and the behavioral changes produced by the 2020 to 2023 period are not speculative. They follow directly from the stated goals of the institutions involved.

A population that has accepted, repeatedly and under institutional instruction, the injection of genetic nanoparticle material as a civic responsibility has crossed a specific psychological threshold. It has accepted, as normalized, the principle that the state has legitimate authority over the molecular architecture of the human body. That principle, once embedded, does not require re-argument with each successive application. It requires only the invocation of the appropriate symbols and the appropriate threat to activate the compliance response already conditioned into place.

The six-month booster cadence proposed by pharmaceutical manufacturers and adopted by regulatory guidance in multiple countries represents, structurally, a permanent biotechnological maintenance schedule for the human population. The logical endpoint of that trajectory, combined with the developing capacity of synthetic biology and nanotechnology, is precisely what the 2001 national security planning document described: a world in which technological upgrades to human biological systems are routine, institutionally administered, and symbolically framed as healthcare.

The citizen who questions this trajectory is not, in the dominant symbolic framework, exercising a constitutional right. They are refusing medical compliance. They are the noncompliant patient, the infectious threat, the heretic who endangers the community by refusing the sacrament.

This is how symbols work. They do not make arguments. They encode assumptions so deeply that the assumptions become invisible, and the conclusions that follow from them feel obvious, natural, and morally self-evident.

The Documented Record

Stanley Milgram asked how ordinary people could participate in the organized slaughter of millions of their fellow human beings (this never happened). His experiments answered the question. They did not do it because they were monsters. They did it because a symbol of legitimate authority, a man in a white coat with a clipboard, told them to, and the symbol was sufficient to override their own moral assessment of what they were doing.

The Palestinians are cast in jew public discourse as disease vectors, as vermin, as existential biological threats to the healthy social body, while they are currently subjected to systemic exclusion and elimination. The symbolic language was medical before it was murderous. The dehumanization operated through the same framework that the COVID era replicated when it positioned the unvaccinated as threats to public health requiring restriction, exclusion from employment, travel, and social participation.

The parallels are not comfortable. They are not presented to be comfortable. They are presented because they are documented, because the mechanisms are identical, and because the historical record of where this symbolic architecture leads is unambiguous.

The WHO’s staff and serpent flies over an institution that claims jurisdiction over the health governance of every nation on earth. Its proposed International Health Regulations amendments, negotiated in closed sessions with limited public transparency, sought to expand that jurisdiction substantially, transferring authority over pandemic declaration and response from elected national governments to an unelected international body. The symbolic encoding of that institution in the imagery of ancient healing authority was not accidental. It was the condition of the proposal’s acceptance.

What the symbol did was what symbols always do: it organized emotion at a common target, suppressed the idiosyncrasy of real critical thinking, and created the conditions under which people who would never voluntarily surrender their national sovereignty or their bodily autonomy could be moved to do precisely that, not because they were argued into it, but because the symbol made submission feel like healing.

The staff is ancient. The serpent is ancient. The mechanism is ancient.

The agenda it is currently serving is new. But the compliance it requires looks exactly like every compliance campaign in recorded history: coded in the language of protection, enforced through the imagery of healing, and sustained by the suppression of every voice that raises its hand to ask what, exactly, is in the needle.

That question is not blasphemy.

It is the first obligation of a free person in a constitutional republic.

Margin of the Law publishes constitutional analysis, civic research, and legal education for people who want to understand the system they actually live in. Read the Full Constitutional Analysis Library at marginofthelaw.com.

© 2026 – MK3 Law Group

For republication or citation, please credit this article with link attribution to marginofthelaw.com.

Surveillance capitalism represents a new form of capitalism that converts human behavior into data for tracking, analysis, and monetization. Yet this framing obscures the deeper architecture that sustains it. More than a business model, surveillance capitalism constitutes a geopolitical system with institutional scaffolding—grounded in regulation (or its absence), legitimized by economic theory, promoted by trade rules, and protected by powerful states. Its endurance depends not only on market incentives but on a distributed architecture of norms, institutions, actors, and governance failures. At its core, surveillance capitalism is an extractive political economy built on the systematic capture and monetization of human experience. As Shoshana Zuboff (2022a) argues, this system enacts an “epistemic coup,” through which corporations assert ownership over behavioral data, eroding privacy, self-knowledge, and democratic legitimacy. This outcome is the product of deliberate political choices, neoliberal ideologies, and the retreat of the American Republic.

The Core Question

Mass surveillance sits at the center of a growing debate about individual agency, freedom, and self-governance. The question is not simply whether data is being collected. It is who collects it, under what rules, and with what consequences for the people being watched.

Over the past two decades, a specific critique has taken shape under the label “surveillance capitalism.” The argument, developed most thoroughly by Shoshana Zuboff, is that major technology companies, starting with Google and followed by Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, have built a new economic model around the commodification of human behavior. These companies collect micro-level data on users, process it using artificial intelligence and machine learning, and sell it to third parties who use it to predict and modify behavior. According to critics, this process strips individuals of dignity, undermines freedom, and threatens the functioning of self-governance in a Constitutional Republic.

This framing captures something real. But it also leaves something important out.

Data collection is not unique to private technology companies. Governments collect data too, and they have been doing so for far longer. The welfare consequences of data collection, whether it harms or benefits the people being surveilled, depend not on the act of collection itself but on the institutional environment in which that collection takes place. Private markets and government institutions operate under fundamentally different incentive structures and knowledge conditions. Those differences matter enormously when evaluating what surveillance means for individual freedom.

This analysis applies comparative institutional analysis to examine those differences. It considers surveillance capitalism in the context of private markets, where competitive pressures, feedback mechanisms, and legal constraints shape how data is collected and used. It then examines the surveillance state, distinguishing between its potentially protective functions and its demonstrably predatory ones. The goal is a clearer picture of how data collection actually affects individual agency, freedom, and self-governance, grounded in institutional reality rather than technological anxiety.

The analysis focuses on the United States. The major companies associated with surveillance capitalism are American. And the United States, as a Constitutional Republic with explicit commitments to individual rights and limited government, provides an instructive case for examining how surveillance operates when formal constraints exist and what happens when those constraints fail.

What Surveillance Capitalism Actually Is

Zuboff defines surveillance capitalism along three dimensions. The first is the collection of personal data generated as a by-product of interacting with digital devices and platforms, including cell phones, search engines, and social media. The second is the use of computational tools, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, to predict human behavior based on that data. The third is behavioral modification, where third-party entities purchase predictions derived from the first two dimensions and use them to alter how people act in ways those people are not aware of.

In this framework, surveillance capitalism is a negative-sum relationship. For-profit firms extract what Zuboff calls a “behavioral surplus,” meaning data collected beyond what is needed to improve the service being offered to the user directly. That surplus is processed, packaged, and sold. The buyers use it to influence behavior. The people whose behavior is being influenced have no meaningful knowledge that this is happening.

The examples Zuboff offers are instructive. In 2012, Facebook ran an experiment adding features to users’ news feeds, including an “I Voted” button, the locations of voting booths, and information about how many other users had voted. Users who received this content were measurably more likely to vote than the control group. Playing the augmented reality mobile game Pokemon Go required users to move through physical space searching for digital objects. Private retailers partnered with the game’s developers to position those objects near their locations, directing foot traffic to specific commercial spaces.

Zuboff reads both examples as evidence of mass behavioral control exercised by private corporations with neither the knowledge nor the consent of the people being influenced. From this, she concludes that surveillance capitalism is not simply a business model but a political threat. She describes it as a “market-driven coup from above,” a form of tyranny that does not require force because it operates through manipulation of attention and behavior at scale.

This is a strong claim. And like many strong claims, it contains real concerns wrapped around analytical problems that need to be separated out.

Earlier Critiques: The Same Argument in Different Clothes

The concerns embedded in the surveillance capitalism critique are not new. They connect directly to earlier debates about markets, advertising, and consumer manipulation that stretch back over a century.

Thorstein Veblen offered one of the earliest critiques of advertising. In his account, businesses used advertising to shift consumer perception from the use value of goods to their symbolic value, generating social waste while benefiting firms at the expense of consumers. Advertising, Veblen argued, also fostered monopoly power by locking in consumer habits in ways that were difficult to reverse. Once an advertiser succeeded in shaping a person’s habits of thought, reversing that conviction required considerable effort.

John Kenneth Galbraith extended this critique with his concept of the “dependence effect.” His argument was that production increases create consumer wants, with advertising playing a central role in that creation. Producers actively manufacture desires for the goods and services they sell. If wants are artificially created by advertisers rather than authentically held by consumers, then increasing production to satisfy those wants does not actually increase welfare. Consumer sovereignty, in this view, is an illusion maintained by the advertising apparatus.

Today’s critique of surveillance capitalism follows the same structure. Technology firms collect data on past and current consumer decisions, including search histories, social media activity, location data, and smartphone use. That data is processed and sold to third parties for targeted advertising. The concern, as before, is that those third parties use the data to manipulate consumers into behaviors that do not serve their genuine interests, while data collection firms use their position to entrench market power.

Concerns about privacy are equally well-established. Vance Packard warned in 1964 about a “naked society” emerging from widespread data collection that threatened privacy, individual autonomy, and democratic governance. Debates about surveillance, data banks, and the erosion of private life have existed in the United States since the late nineteenth century, spanning journalistic technologies, market research practices, workplace testing, and government programs.

What makes surveillance capitalism different is the scale and precision of data collection, not its fundamental nature. Greater micro-level data and more effective targeting represent a difference of degree. The underlying concerns about manipulation, behavioral modification, and privacy remain structurally the same. Whether those concerns are realized in practice depends on the institutional environment.

Surveillance Capitalism in Private Markets

Evaluating surveillance capitalism in private markets requires taking seriously the institutional features of those markets, particularly the role of competition, feedback, and legal constraint. Critics focus on the harms. A complete analysis requires accounting for the mechanisms that limit those harms and the benefits that data collection produces.

Advertising as Information

George Stigler’s foundational work on the economics of information established that advertising performs a genuine informational function. In any market, consumers face search costs. They do not have perfect knowledge of available products, prices, or sellers. Advertising reduces those search costs by providing information about what is available and from whom. The result is lower prices, either in monetary terms or in terms of the time required to make a purchase.

This logic applies directly to surveillance capitalism. When data-collection firms package consumer behavior data and sell it to third parties for targeted advertising, one legitimate function of that process is connecting consumers with information about products they are likely to want. The existence of intermediary data brokers does not eliminate the welfare-enhancing function of reducing search costs. It restructures who performs that function and how.

Advertising as Entrepreneurship and Persuasion

Israel Kirzner’s work on entrepreneurship adds a second dimension. Advertising does not simply reduce the cost of finding information that consumers are already looking for. It alerts consumers to opportunities they did not know existed. This is a different function from search cost reduction. A consumer cannot search for something they do not know is available. Entrepreneurial advertising creates awareness where none existed.

Persuasion plays a related role. Deirdre McCloskey has argued that what she calls “sweet talk” operates throughout economic life, facilitating cooperation and exchange through language and human interaction. Persuasion is not inherently deceptive. Most of it is not. The fact that advertising aims to persuade consumers rather than simply inform them does not make it manipulative in the pejorative sense. It makes it one instance of the broader human practice of communicating value and fostering voluntary exchange.

Surveillance capitalism incorporates both functions. Micro-level data allows advertisers to target their entrepreneurial efforts at specific consumers, alerting them to products and services that fit with their existing preferences and behavior patterns. Effective persuasion of this kind advances consumer welfare by expanding the range of opportunities people are aware of.

Advertising as Competition

Friedrich Hayek understood competition not as a static state but as a dynamic process of discovery and learning. In this context, advertising is one dimension of competitive activity. Competing advertisers developing strategies to capture consumer attention disseminate information that no one knew was needed and stimulate the provision of goods and services whose importance to consumers would otherwise go unrecognized.

Harold Demsetz extended this by arguing that advertising fosters contestability rather than monopoly. Advertising allows new entrants and smaller firms to compete with established incumbents by informing consumers that alternatives exist and persuading them to consider those alternatives. Without advertising, incumbents benefit from the advantages of familiarity and established reputation. Restricting advertising does not promote competition. It protects incumbents.

The surveillance capitalism critique argues that a small number of Big Tech companies, primarily Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple, are using their data collection capabilities to entrench monopoly power. This concern has historical parallels in earlier critiques of advertising-based monopoly that also proved incomplete. AOL, BlackBerry, IBM, Myspace, and Yahoo all held dominant positions in their respective markets. Competitive entrepreneurship displaced each of them. More recently, dissatisfaction with major social media platforms’ content moderation practices has driven the emergence of alternative platforms competing for users with different values and preferences.

The Manipulation Problem and Its Limits

The manipulation concern at the core of the surveillance capitalism critique deserves serious attention. If behavioral targeting is effective at changing consumer behavior in ways that consumers would not endorse if they understood what was happening, that is a genuine harm.

The empirical evidence on this question is more complicated than the critics allow. Studies of behavioral targeting find that targeted advertisements are effective only when they align with a consumer’s prior behavior. An ad connecting to someone’s demonstrated environmental concerns increases the likelihood of a click-through and purchase. An ad for a random product or one that cuts against established interests does not affect behavior. This suggests that targeted advertising amplifies pre-existing preferences by surfacing relevant opportunities. It does not create wants from scratch as Galbraith argued.

Hugo Mercier’s work on human cognition reaches a similar conclusion. People are not passive recipients of information. They evaluate communicated information using dedicated cognitive mechanisms, weighing cues about credibility, expertise, and trustworthiness before updating their beliefs or behavior. Attempts at mass manipulation fail far more often than they succeed. The gap between public perception of media influence and the reality of that influence is substantial.

This does not mean manipulation never occurs. It means the claim that surveillance capitalism systematically manipulates millions of people against their genuine interests requires evidence that the empirical record does not consistently support.

Counteracting Institutions

Private markets also generate mechanisms that limit information asymmetries between data collectors and users. George Akerlof identified the problem of adverse selection in markets with information asymmetries and noted that entrepreneurial innovation generates counteracting institutions to address those asymmetries. The same dynamic operates in the context of data collection.

Apple introduced privacy features through its mobile operating system allowing users to control whether apps can access the Identifier for Advertising assigned to their device. These features were marketed as a competitive differentiator, informing consumers about data collection practices while distinguishing Apple products from competitors. Third-party tracking blockers, browser extensions, and privacy-focused browsers including Brave, DuckDuckGo, Waterfox, and Epic Privacy Browser give users tools to limit data collection.

Virtual private networks offered by for-profit firms encrypt internet activity and hide users’ IP addresses by routing traffic through private servers, making it significantly harder for third parties to collect data on specific individuals. Personal data removal services contact data holders on behalf of clients to remove sensitive information from public databases.

These innovations demonstrate the market’s capacity to respond to consumer demand for privacy. Where information asymmetries exist, competitive entrepreneurship creates tools that give consumers greater control. This is not a complete solution. But it is a meaningful constraint on the unchecked data collection that critics of surveillance capitalism treat as the inevitable outcome of the current system.

Surveillance capitalists operating in the United States face institutional constraints that private markets impose directly. Freedom of entry allows competitors to offer privacy-protective alternatives. Freedom of voice allows consumers and competitors to challenge deceptive or manipulative practices. Legal institutions including courts and state enforcement of fraud and false advertising law provide formal recourse. The protection of property rights means that surveillance capitalists cannot use force to prevent the emergence of technologies that limit their data collection.

These constraints are imperfect. But their existence is institutionally significant.

The Surveillance State

The surveillance state refers to the collection, processing, and use of data by government agencies to monitor citizens and residents. Understanding its welfare consequences requires distinguishing between two fundamentally different functions that government surveillance can serve: the protective-productive function, where surveillance supports legitimate state activities that enhance citizen welfare, and the predatory function, where surveillance is used to benefit political elites at the expense of the general population.

James Buchanan’s framework for analyzing the state provides the analytical foundation. The protective-productive state enhances welfare by protecting constitutional rights and providing valued services. The predatory state reduces welfare by violating rights or extracting resources from citizens to benefit the politically connected. Both functions are available to governments that possess surveillance capabilities. The institutional environment determines which function dominates.

The Protective-Productive Surveillance State

Government service provision inherently involves the collection and processing of information. Citizens filing taxes provide identifying information and income details. Census data informs resource allocation across public services. Traffic monitoring data informs infrastructure planning. In each case, data collection serves a direct function in the provision of government services.

Smart cities represent a contemporary application of this principle. Technologically integrated urban environments collect data from multiple sources including citizen activity, infrastructure sensors, and service usage patterns. Processed in real time, this data can improve the delivery of utilities, transportation, public safety, and other services. Data collection used this way serves the interests of the citizens from whom the data is collected.

The national security surveillance state presents a more complex case. The argument for mass surveillance as a protective-productive function rests on its effectiveness as an input into security and policing activities. To the extent that surveillance is limited in scope, subject to meaningful oversight, and effective in identifying genuine threats, it can contribute to the protection of rights and institutions. Government advertising also serves legitimate functions in informing citizens about candidates and available public services, and interjurisdictional competition, where jurisdictions advertise their advantages to attract residents and businesses, can discipline governments to be responsive to citizen preferences.

The Effectiveness Problem

The protective-productive surveillance state faces systematic institutional problems that limit its effectiveness and create openings for predation.

Government institutions lack the price mechanism that coordinates activity in private markets. Property rights, prices, and profit and loss are absent in government settings. Without these mechanisms, the information and incentive functions they perform in markets must be replaced by political substitutes. Those substitutes generate systematically different outcomes.

Richard Wagner and Diego Yazigi draw a distinction between logical and non-logical action. Markets are the domain of logical action where producer offerings can be compared directly using prices and qualities. Politics is the domain of non-logical action where no such direct comparison is available. Because political activity cannot leverage the economic knowledge that emerges through market exchange, decisions made in political settings are systematically less informed than comparable market decisions.

The incentive problems in democratic political institutions compound the knowledge problems. Rational voter ignorance, vote bundling, the limitations of a single vote, the timing gaps between elections, principal-agent problems between voters and elected officials, the concentration of benefits and diffusion of costs by special interest groups, and the incentives facing elected officials and bureaucrats to secure immediate benefits while shifting costs to others in the present and future all weaken the link between political action and citizen preferences.

Many political goods are credence goods, meaning that voters cannot assess their quality before, during, or after consumption. A politician makes claims about the benefits of a national security program or a large-scale stimulus investment. There is no way for citizen-voters to observe the counterfactual, evaluate whether the program actually produced the claimed benefits, or identify the specific factors responsible for the observable outcome. This informational structure severely limits voter accountability over the surveillance state.

The Predatory Surveillance State

The predatory surveillance state is not a hypothetical concern. It is a documented pattern in American history and a present reality in multiple countries.

The paradox of government power is structural. A government capable of protecting rights is capable of violating them. Once established as sovereign, government does not necessarily remain within its delegated authority. The national security state is particularly vulnerable to this dynamic. As Norman Dorsen observed, foreign affairs and national security have historically been a graveyard for civil liberties in the United States.

The most documented historical example is COINTELPRO, a covert surveillance program run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation from the 1950s through the 1970s. The program infiltrated and collected intelligence on peace activists, anti-war groups, civil rights leaders, and political parties. Its purpose was not to prevent violence but to limit the exercise of First Amendment rights. The U.S. Senate Select Committee that investigated COINTELPRO after it became public concluded that the Bureau had conducted a vigilante operation aimed at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, using techniques that would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all targets had been involved in violent activity.

This was not an isolated incident. Following the September 11 attacks, Muslim Americans were subjected to broad surveillance without individualized suspicion. Research suggests that awareness of this surveillance led members of that community to alter their daily behavior out of fear, a direct suppression of constitutionally protected activity through the chilling effect of state monitoring.

Several institutional features make the national security surveillance state particularly conducive to predation.

First, national security is a government monopoly. Unlike surveillance capitalism, which operates in a market where users can switch to alternatives, exit from national security surveillance is not available. Citizens cannot choose a different government security provider. The discipline that competitive markets impose through the threat of losing customers does not operate here.

Second, political power concentrated in the national security apparatus is both discretionary and extra-constitutional. The justification is that security threats require rapid responses to unforeseen circumstances. The effect is that a small group of people holds powers that the constitutional structure does not clearly authorize and that existing oversight mechanisms cannot effectively check.

Third, the national security state operates under conditions of purposeful secrecy. This is not simply the rational ignorance of voters who choose not to pay attention because information gathering is costly relative to the marginal influence of their vote. It is the structural inability of citizens to access information they would want if they could get it. The secrecy that protects genuine security information also protects abuses of power from scrutiny.

The NSA programs revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013 illustrate the scale of the problem. Snowden’s disclosures established that the PRISM program collected data from at least nine major technology companies including Apple, Google, and Microsoft, requiring those companies to comply. The NSA tapped directly into the data centers of Google and Yahoo without their knowledge. The XKeyscore program allowed NSA analysts to search comprehensive databases of metadata and content without prior authorization. The NSA actively weakened internet security standards and required technology companies to install backdoors providing government access.

Earlier, in 2005, the New York Times reported that the Bush administration had authorized warrantless monitoring of communications between people in the United States and people abroad through the NSA. The administration classified this program as a “covert action” rather than an “intelligence activity,” a distinction that allowed it to brief only eight congressional leaders rather than the full intelligence committees. Even after the program became public, congressional oversight was limited. Republican control of both the legislative and executive branches at the time reduced the likelihood of serious pushback on national security grounds.

Amy Zegart’s research on congressional oversight of intelligence activities identifies structural reasons for this weakness: insufficient expertise among oversight committee members and inadequate budget authority over the intelligence community. These structural deficits create substantial space for intelligence agencies to act with discretion, unchecked by mechanisms that might align their behavior with citizen welfare.

Entanglement Between Government and Private Institutions

The relationship between the surveillance state and private data collection firms is not simply parallel. In significant cases, the two are entangled in ways that change the nature of both.

One form of entanglement is parasitic. State institutions take data collected by private firms, sometimes with the firms’ knowledge and compliance, and sometimes without it. The Snowden revelations established that the NSA accessed private firm data through multiple mechanisms including legal compulsion, covert technical access, and exploitation of security vulnerabilities. Under these conditions, the data that surveillance capitalists collect to facilitate coordination in private markets becomes infrastructure for broad state monitoring and control of private persons. The nature of surveillance capitalism activities changes fundamentally when the data ends up in government hands for purposes of tracking and control rather than targeted commercial advertising.

The second form of entanglement is through government funding. The military funding of technology firms has a long history in the United States. Amazon, Palantir, Google, and Microsoft all hold significant government contracts. Google has created a standalone division, Google Public Sector, specifically to improve its efficiency in securing government work.

This funding creates conditions for what Randall Holcombe calls “political capitalism,” characterized by rent seeking, rent extraction, and regulatory capture. When firms derive substantial revenue from government contracts, competition for that revenue shifts from market activity to political activity. Success depends less on satisfying consumer preferences than on cultivating political relationships. Firms that secure government contracts gain advantages over new entrants that have nothing to do with the quality of their products or services.

Government demand for private services is also structurally different from private market demand. Contract budgets are fixed for given periods. Demand is relatively price inelastic because political institutions lack the incentive structures that make price sensitivity rational in markets. There is no clear residual claimant with an interest in minimizing costs. New entrants cannot rely on expanding the market by offering better value at lower prices. They must displace established incumbents competing for fixed government funds. The result is reduced competitive pressure in markets that are nominally private but substantially shaped by government purchasing.

Amazon’s trajectory illustrates the dynamic. The company attracted intense scrutiny as a potential retail monopolist. But its future increasingly depends on securing classified government contracts including intelligence agency data services. Government privilege and political relationships, not market competition alone, shape the boundaries of its market position.

Finally, the legal coercive capacity of the surveillance state produces consequences that surveillance capitalism cannot. Governments can legally restrict competition, mandate compliance, and suppress the emergence of counteracting institutions. The Chinese government’s extensive internet censorship eliminates the informational alternatives that competitive markets generate. The Biden administration’s documented pressure on Facebook and Twitter to censor COVID-related content it deemed disinformation demonstrates that this dynamic is not limited to authoritarian governments. The FBI’s shutdown of Silk Road and the Chinese government’s prosecution of VPN providers show that governments can legally suppress the privacy-protective technologies that emerge in private markets as counteracting institutions.

Surveillance capitalists cannot do any of this. They can create information asymmetries and engage in persuasion. They cannot compel compliance, prohibit alternatives, or suppress tools that limit their data collection.

What the Institutional Comparison Shows

Comparing surveillance capitalism and the surveillance state through the lens of comparative institutional analysis yields several conclusions that neither the critics of surveillance capitalism nor the defenders of national security surveillance typically acknowledge.

Weak Agency

Both surveillance capitalism and the surveillance state raise concerns about weak agency, meaning the ability of people to act independently to pursue their own interests and welfare. People subject to either form of surveillance often lack meaningful knowledge about how data collected on them is being used. This informational gap limits their capacity for autonomous decision-making.

The degree of weak agency differs between the two contexts.

Surveillance capitalists are required to provide disclosures about their data practices, however inadequate those disclosures may be in practice. Private markets create rivalry that generates innovation over time, producing the privacy tools described above. The structural conditions exist for weak agency to be reduced through market responses to consumer demand.

The surveillance state operates differently. National security surveillance specifically aims to keep its activities hidden. Citizens are surveilled without knowledge of any terms or conditions. There are no disclosures. The monopoly structure of government security eliminates the rivalry that drives innovation toward privacy protection in private markets. Principal-agent problems between citizens and security officials are pervasive and documented.

Property Rights and Enforcement

The weak agency problem in surveillance capitalism stems in part from the absence of clearly defined digital property rights. It is not legally settled whether surveillance capitalists should face penalties for using consumer data in ways those consumers would not have authorized if asked. Establishing and enforcing digital property rights in government would reduce weak agency in private markets by creating legal accountability.

The surveillance state’s monopolistic and secretive character limits its vulnerability to feedback from citizens even where property rights are legally established. The probability of discovery and legal accountability for welfare-reducing surveillance operations by government is structurally lower than for private actors. This asymmetry means that weak agency in markets where behavioral surplus flows to government remains more difficult to address.

Coercive Capacity

The most fundamental institutional difference is coercive capacity. Private institutions cannot legally use force or coercion to achieve their goals. Government institutions can. This difference determines the character and magnitude of potential harms.

Addressing the Predatory State

The structural difficulty in addressing predatory surveillance by the government is that the default response, passing laws restricting surveillance with enforcement by political authorities, reproduces the problem it is meant to solve. Authorities assigned to enforce privacy protections retain access to surveillance capabilities. The legal constraint creates an appearance of protection without necessarily providing the reality.

David Brin argued in 1998 that advances in surveillance technology are not reversible. The question is not whether surveillance will exist but who can watch whom. His proposed response is reciprocal transparency. Citizens should be able to observe authorities in the same way authorities can observe citizens. Where secrecy is the institutional rule, political elites retain surveillance capability regardless of legal restrictions on its use. Where non-elites can monitor elites, it creates a meaningful check on abuses of power.

Reciprocal transparency is not a complete solution. Implementing it within existing institutional structures faces serious practical obstacles. But as a principle, it identifies the core problem clearly. The danger of the predatory surveillance state is not simply that it watches citizens. It is that it watches citizens without being watched in return, under conditions of secrecy that prevent accountability.

Conclusion

Data collection is not inherently harmful or beneficial. Whether it enhances or reduces the welfare of surveilled individuals depends on the institutional environment in which it takes place, specifically the incentive structures, knowledge conditions, feedback mechanisms, and coercive capacities of the institutions involved.

The rise of surveillance capitalism reflects technological advances that make data collection more extensive and targeting more precise. Critics are right that these developments raise genuine concerns about privacy, manipulation, and the concentration of market power. But those concerns need to be evaluated against the institutional features of private markets: competitive pressure, consumer feedback, legal accountability, and the entrepreneurial generation of counteracting institutions. Private markets are imperfect. The forces that discipline opportunistic behavior in those markets are real and operate continuously.

The surveillance state raises concerns that are structurally different in kind. Government surveillance operates under conditions of legal coercion, monopoly control, purposeful secrecy, and systematic insulation from citizen feedback. The documented history of predatory surveillance by the United States government, from COINTELPRO through the NSA programs revealed by Snowden, demonstrates that these concerns are not theoretical. They are realized in practice in a Constitutional Republic with explicit commitments to individual rights and limited government.

The entanglement of private surveillance capitalism with the surveillance state compounds both problems. Data collected in private markets for commercial purposes becomes infrastructure for state monitoring and control. Government contracts reshape the competitive structure of private technology markets in ways that benefit politically connected firms at the expense of market competition. Coercive capacity that surveillance capitalists do not possess is exercised over data that surveillance capitalists collect.

The central insight of comparative institutional analysis is that no institution is perfect and no comparison is between a flawed reality and an ideal alternative. Both private markets and government institutions have structural features that can produce good and bad outcomes. Evaluating those outcomes requires examining actual institutions with their actual incentives and constraints, not imagined alternatives.

In the context of surveillance, that examination points in a clear direction. The institutional features of private markets, imperfect as they are, create conditions that limit predatory surveillance and generate responses to consumer demand for privacy. The institutional features of the national security surveillance state create conditions that enable predatory surveillance and limit accountability. The coercive capacity that differentiates government from private actors determines the magnitude of the harms that can result.

Individual agency, freedom, and self-governance are undermined when surveillance operates without accountability. The institutional environment determines when that condition is met. In private markets, accountability mechanisms exist and function, however imperfectly. In the national security surveillance state, those mechanisms have been systematically circumvented. That difference is the beginning of an honest evaluation of what mass surveillance means for human freedom.

Margin of the Law publishes constitutional analysis, civic research, and legal education for people who want to understand the system they actually live in. Read the Full Constitutional Analysis Library at marginofthelaw.com.

© 2026 – MK3 Law Group

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Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in 1928 that the makers of the Constitution “undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness” and that they “conferred against the Government the right to be let alone, the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.”

That was nearly a century ago. Brandeis was writing in dissent, warning about wiretapping. He lost that argument at the time. The majority said wiretapping was fine because no one physically entered a home.

It took until 1967 for the Supreme Court to adopt the Brandeis position. By then the technology had already outpaced the law, and the pattern has not changed since.

We are now living inside the next version of that same argument, and most people do not know it is happening.

WHAT IS ACTUALLY BEING BUILT

Across the United States, more than 7,000 police departments have deployed automated license plate reader systems. These are not cameras that record when a crime occurs. They are cameras that record continuously, feeding data into searchable databases that can reconstruct where your vehicle was, when it was there, and how it moved through a city over days, weeks, or months.

The systems operate without any suspicion attached to the vehicle being recorded. They do not require a warrant. They do not require a judge’s approval. In most jurisdictions, they do not require any legislative authorization at all. A police department decides to buy the equipment, applies for a federal grant, and installs the hardware. The policy questions, who can access the data, how long it is kept, what searches are permitted, are answered internally by the department itself.

That is not a regulatory system. That is the absence of one.

The cameras read every plate that passes within their field of view. Modern systems can process thousands of plates per hour per camera. In a city with several hundred cameras, the data accumulates fast. Some departments retain plate data for 30 days. Others retain it for a year. Some have no defined retention limit at all. In jurisdictions where departments share data with regional fusion centers, individual plate reads can be matched across multiple cities and states, producing a movement profile far more detailed than anything a physical surveillance team could generate.

The technology works. That is precisely what makes it worth examining carefully.

HOW IT REVERSES THE CONSTITUTIONAL PRESUMPTION

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

That language establishes a structure. Government must justify its intrusion into personal liberty. The individual does not have to justify being left alone. The burden belongs to the government, not to the citizen.

This is not a procedural technicality. It reflects a specific theory of political power. Government in this constitutional system exists to serve and protect individual rights. It does not possess inherent authority over individuals. Every power it exercises must be traceable back to a legitimate purpose and constrained by defined limits. The Fourth Amendment is one of those limits.

License plate surveillance systems reverse this structure. They collect information about every person whose vehicle passes the camera, regardless of any suspicion, any crime, any governmental purpose connected to that specific person. The data is stored. Officials can later search it. If a person objects to the collection, the burden falls on that person to challenge it after the fact.

Collect first. Justify later, if ever.

That sequence is the opposite of what the Fourth Amendment requires.

THE ARGUMENT FOR THE CAMERAS

The law enforcement argument is straightforward and worth stating clearly, because it is not dishonest. Plate readers help recover stolen vehicles. They help identify vehicles connected to serious crimes. They assist in locating missing persons. They generate investigative leads that would otherwise require far more labor-intensive surveillance. They work.

Departments also point to the public nature of the spaces being recorded. If you drive your car down a public street, you are in public. Anyone standing on that street could observe your vehicle. A police officer could write down your plate number. The camera, the argument goes, just does what a human officer could do, only faster and at greater scale.

This is the argument the Supreme Court majority made in 1928 about wiretapping. No physical intrusion occurred, so no search occurred. The Court eventually rejected that reasoning in Katz v. United States in 1967, establishing that the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places, and that what a person seeks to preserve as private, even in a public area, may be constitutionally protected.

The question is not whether a single observation of a vehicle in public is a search. It is not. The question is whether systematic, automated, continuous recording and long-term retention of that vehicle’s movements constitutes something categorically different.

The Supreme Court addressed this directly in Carpenter v. United States in 2018. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a 5-4 majority, held that the government’s collection of historical cell phone location data constituted a search requiring a warrant. The Court recognized that pervasive, continuous location tracking is qualitatively different from any single observation, even when the data is collected from a third party.

Roberts wrote that “seismic shifts in digital technology” required the Court to “ensure that the progress of science and technology” does not “erode the privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.” The Carpenter decision has not been uniformly applied to license plate readers, and lower courts have reached conflicting conclusions. But the legal principle it established is directly relevant.

THE SCALE PROBLEM

A police officer who happens to note your plate while on patrol is not conducting surveillance. He is doing his job in a specific context, responding to something specific or traveling through an area as part of routine patrol. His observation is incidental. He has no system for retaining and cross-referencing that observation with thousands of other observations over months.

A license plate reader database can do exactly that. It can answer questions no human observer could answer: Where was this vehicle on every occasion it passed any camera in this system over the past 90 days? What other vehicles were consistently in proximity to it? What times of day did it pass specific locations? Which addresses did it frequent?

That is not observation. It is reconstruction. It produces a detailed map of a person’s life, their workplace, their medical appointments, their religious attendance, their political activities, their personal associations, without any individualized suspicion and without judicial authorization.

The Supreme Court recognized this distinction in United States v. Jones in 2012, a case involving a GPS tracker placed on a vehicle. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a concurring opinion that GPS monitoring “generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.” She argued this type of surveillance “chills associational and expressive freedoms.”

Justice Samuel Alito, also concurring, noted that “the use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy.”

These are not positions from civil libertarians outside the legal mainstream. These are sitting Supreme Court justices, appointed by presidents of both parties, recognizing that the scale of technological surveillance changes its constitutional character.

WHO MAKES THE POLICY DECISIONS

Here is where the problem becomes concrete and specific.

When a police department in a mid-sized American city purchases a license plate reader system, the decision is typically made inside the department, sometimes with city council approval, often without. The policy questions that follow, how long data is retained, who can query the database, what purposes justify a search, whether data can be shared with federal agencies or with departments in other jurisdictions, are answered by police administrators.

These are not administrative questions. They are constitutional questions about the scope of government surveillance of citizens. They should be answered by elected legislators, subject to public debate, challenged in court, and revised by voters.

Instead, they are being answered by police procurement processes and vendor contracts.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police and various state law enforcement associations have lobbied consistently against legislation that would require warrants for plate reader searches, limit retention periods, or mandate legislative authorization before deployment. Their argument is that such requirements would hamper effective policing.

That argument has been made against every constitutional constraint on government power since the founding. The answer the Constitution provides is that effective government is not the only value. Liberty is also a value, and it requires structural protection, not just good intentions.

Some states have begun to legislate. New Hampshire passed a law prohibiting license plate reader data from being retained for more than three minutes unless connected to a specific investigation. Maine requires a warrant to access plate reader data. Virginia and Utah have enacted retention limits. These are partial measures, and they apply only within their jurisdictions, but they demonstrate that legislative solutions are possible.

They also demonstrate that where legislatures have not acted, the policy vacuum has been filled by police departments making their own rules.

THE FUSION CENTER LAYER

License plate reader data does not stay local. Across the country, regional intelligence-sharing networks called fusion centers aggregate data from multiple departments, federal agencies, and in some cases, private sources. The Department of Homeland Security funds many of these centers. They were established after September 11, 2001, on the theory that better information sharing would prevent terrorist attacks.

The practical result is that a plate read in one city can be accessible to agencies in other cities, other states, and federal law enforcement. A person whose vehicle is recorded in their hometown may have that record available to an investigator in another state who has never heard of them and has no specific reason to look at their data.

This is not speculation. The data sharing arrangements are documented in public records obtained through freedom of information requests by journalists and civil liberties organizations. The scope varies by region and by the specific systems involved, but the basic architecture of aggregated, cross-jurisdictional plate data is established.

When plate reader data combines with other data sources, facial recognition systems, cell tower records, social media monitoring tools, the resulting capability for government tracking of individuals is substantial. No single piece of technology produces a surveillance state. The combination does.

THE BRANDEIS PROBLEM, RESTATED

Return to the Brandeis dissent. He was warning about a specific thing: that technological capability, deployed by government without constitutional constraint, would gradually displace the rights the Constitution was designed to protect. He used the word “subtly” because the erosion does not happen all at once.

Each new technology arrives with a specific justification. Wiretapping catches gangsters. Traffic cameras reduce accidents. License plate readers recover stolen cars. Facial recognition identifies suspects. Cell phone location data solves murders. Each justification is real. The crimes exist. The technology helps. The specific cases are compelling.

What accumulates is infrastructure. Each justified addition becomes a permanent piece of a larger system. The system develops its own momentum. The data it collects becomes a resource that investigators are inclined to use. The capability expands. The uses multiply. The original justification becomes one small part of a much larger operational reality.

By the time the cumulative effect becomes visible, it is already embedded in the law enforcement apparatus. Removing it requires fighting against entrenched institutional interests, existing vendor contracts, federal funding streams, and the genuine operational value the technology provides.

This is how surveillance infrastructure gets built in a constitutional republic. Not through a dramatic decision to construct a surveillance state. Through thousands of individual procurement decisions, each locally justified, accumulating into a national capability that no legislature ever explicitly authorized.

THE LIBERTY SIDE OF THE LEDGER

The public conversation about license plate readers, when it happens at all, is structured as a balance. Safety on one side, privacy on the other. Reasonable people disagree about where the balance point is, officials are entitled to find their preferred balance, and the result is a policy question rather than a constitutional one.

That framing is the problem.

Privacy is not a preference to be weighed against safety. It is a right protected by the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment does not say that government cannot conduct unreasonable searches unless safety requires it. It says the right to be secure against unreasonable searches shall not be violated.

Rights do not dissolve when government asserts a compelling interest. If they did, they would not be rights. They would be provisional allowances subject to withdrawal whenever government decided the circumstances justified it.

Safety is a legitimate governmental purpose. The Constitution acknowledges this. Government is authorized to enforce criminal laws, apprehend suspects, investigate crimes, and protect public order. The question is never whether those purposes are legitimate. The question is what constraints apply to how government pursues them.

The Fourth Amendment’s answer is specific: warrant requirement, probable cause, particularity. Government must demonstrate to an independent judicial officer that it has specific reason to believe that a specific search will produce specific evidence of a specific crime. The judge, not the investigator, makes the call. This structure exists precisely because investigators have institutional incentives to search and gather information, and someone without those incentives needs to evaluate whether the justification is sufficient.

License plate reader systems operate entirely outside this structure. They search everyone. They retain the results. They make the data available for later queries. The judicial check never occurs at the front end.

WHAT LEGISLATIVE ACTION LOOKS LIKE

The absence of federal legislation governing law enforcement use of license plate readers is not an accident. Law enforcement lobbies have successfully blocked comprehensive federal regulation. The result is a patchwork of inconsistent state laws, varying department policies, and a default position of minimal constraint.

Effective legislation would address several specific things.

Warrant requirements. Law enforcement access to plate reader data for investigative purposes, meaning queries designed to track a specific individual’s movements, should require a warrant supported by probable cause. This is what Carpenter suggests is constitutionally required for comprehensive location data. Legislation would codify that requirement and eliminate uncertainty about its application to plate reader systems.

Retention limits. Data from plate reads not connected to an active investigation should be deleted within a defined short period. The specific limit is a legislative judgment call, but 30 days represents a reasonable outer boundary for data with no identified investigative connection. Some jurisdictions have gone much shorter. The point is that long-term retention of data about innocent people serves no legitimate law enforcement purpose that justifies the privacy cost.

Use limitations. Plate reader data should be usable only for defined law enforcement purposes. Immigration enforcement, civil debt collection, asset forfeiture investigations disconnected from criminal charges, and commercial or political intelligence gathering should be prohibited uses.

Transparency requirements. Departments operating plate reader systems should be required to report annually on the number of plates recorded, number of queries conducted, purposes of queries, number of warrants obtained, and any data sharing with other agencies. This information should be public.

Legislative authorization. Before a jurisdiction deploys a plate reader system, elected legislators should vote to authorize it. The policy judgment that systematic surveillance of vehicle movements serves the public interest is a decision that should be made by people accountable to the public, not by police administrators.

These are not radical proposals. They are the application of existing constitutional principles to a specific technology. Courts have not uniformly required them. That means legislatures must act.

THE JEFFERSON PRINCIPLE

Thomas Jefferson wrote that the people must chain down government with the Constitution. The image is specific and intentional. Government is not a partner that can be trusted to exercise restraint when restraint is inconvenient. It is a force that must be structurally constrained, because the people who operate it are human beings with institutional interests and individual incentives that do not always align with the rights of citizens.

The Fourth Amendment is one of those chains. It constrains investigative methods not because crime is unimportant but because unconstrained government power is a threat independent of crime. A government with the technical ability to track all movements, access all communications, and reconstruct all associations, exercised without judicial oversight, is dangerous regardless of the intentions of the people operating it.

The danger is not primarily that a corrupt official will misuse the data today, though that happens. The danger is structural. A government that possesses comprehensive surveillance infrastructure and is not required to justify its use has capabilities that can be activated in any future circumstance, by any future administration, for any future purpose.

Rights are not primarily useful in ordinary times. They are primarily useful when extraordinary claims of necessity are made. When a government says it needs to suspend a right for safety, security, or emergency reasons, the right either holds or it does not. If it holds, it was worth protecting. If it dissolves under pressure, it was not really a right at all.

The current trajectory of license plate surveillance is building infrastructure that will test that proposition. The technology is spreading. The data is accumulating. The interoperability between systems is increasing. The fusion of plate data with other surveillance data is advancing. What is being constructed, through thousands of individual procurement decisions, is a national vehicle tracking capability with no comprehensive legal framework governing its use.

THE QUESTION BEHIND THE QUESTION

Supporters of license plate surveillance often ask: If you have nothing to hide, what do you have to fear?

The question reveals a specific theory of the relationship between citizens and government. In that theory, government surveillance is normal and acceptable, and privacy is something you claim only when you are trying to conceal wrongdoing.

That theory is not the one embedded in the Constitution. The Constitution’s theory is the opposite: liberty is the default, government intrusion requires justification, and the right to be left alone is fundamental.

The “nothing to hide” framing also misunderstands what is at stake. The concern is not that innocent people will be falsely accused because their movements were recorded, though that happens. The concern is what happens when government possesses the ability to reconstruct any person’s movements, associations, and activities without restriction. That ability changes the relationship between the citizen and the state in ways that do not depend on any specific wrongdoing.

People who know they are being watched change their behavior. They avoid associations that might look suspicious. They stop attending certain meetings, visiting certain places, or contacting certain people. This is not hypothetical. The research on surveillance effects is consistent. Monitored behavior changes, and the changes cluster around legal activities that people fear will be misunderstood.

A government with comprehensive surveillance capability does not need to prosecute people to influence their behavior. The existence of the capability is sufficient. That is a form of power that does not appear on any official policy document but is real and consequential.

WHERE THIS ENDS UP

The question is not whether technology will be used in law enforcement. It will be, and some of that use is legitimate and valuable.

The question is whether technology deployed by government will operate within constitutional constraints or whether the practical utility of the technology will be treated as sufficient justification to set those constraints aside.

The answer the Constitution gives is clear. Utility does not dissolve constitutional requirements. Government must fight crime chained down by the Constitution. Safety cannot become the phrase that ends every constitutional argument.

License plate reader systems, as currently deployed across most of the United States, do not operate within constitutional constraints. They collect data about everyone without individualized suspicion. They retain it without defined limits. They make it available for searches without judicial oversight. They expand through procurement processes that bypass legislative authorization.

The decision that should be made is this: No government surveillance without a warrant. No retention of data about people not connected to a specific investigation. No deployment of surveillance technology without explicit legislative authorization. No policy decisions made by police administrators that belong to elected legislators.

If elected representatives believe that systematic vehicle tracking serves the public interest sufficiently to justify the constitutional cost, they should say so publicly, debate the evidence, enact specific legislation with defined constraints, and accept responsibility to the voters for that judgment.

What they should not do is allow that judgment to be made by default, through procurement decisions, vendor contracts, and departmental policies that accumulate in the absence of legislative action.

The right to be left alone is not a luxury. It is not a preference. It is not something government grants when it finds it convenient. It is what a free people possess by default, and what government must justify taking away, with evidence, with particularity, with judicial oversight, one case at a time.

The Constitution does not prohibit effective policing. It prohibits the kind of policing that treats every citizen as a potential subject of investigation until the government decides otherwise. That distinction is the difference between a constitutional republic and a surveillance state.

We are closer to one than the other right now, and most people are not paying attention.

Margin of the Law publishes constitutional analysis, civic research, and legal education for people who want to understand the system they actually live in. Read the Full Constitutional Analysis Library at marginofthelaw.com.

© 2026 – MK3 Law Group

For republication or citation, please credit this article with link attribution to marginofthelaw.com.

Blind support for Israel has become something close to a civic religion in mainstream American politics. Politicians across party lines treat the alliance as sacred. Questioning it, even mildly, triggers swift accusations of anti-Semitism and threatens political careers. Israel and Palestine represent the hardest third rail in U.S. foreign policy. Touch it and you burn.

That silence has a price. And that price is no longer sustainable.

This piece does not argue that Israel has no right to exist (it doesn’t), no right to defend itself, or no claim to American friendship. Those are separate questions. This piece argues something narrower and more defensible: that Washington’s reflexive, no-strings-attached support for Israeli policy has generated measurable strategic costs for the United States, has undermined American credibility across the Muslim world, and has placed American soldiers and citizens at greater risk. Those are not emotional claims. They are documented, operational facts that serious people have raised for decades and that the political class has consistently suppressed.

The suppression itself is worth examining before the substance.

WHY THE SILENCE EXISTS

American politicians do not stay quiet about Israeli policy because the policy is beyond criticism. They stay quiet because the political cost of criticism is immediate and severe, while the strategic costs of silence are slow, diffuse, and easy to externalize onto soldiers, taxpayers, and populations that don’t write campaign checks.

The Israel lobby, led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, operates with a level of organizational discipline and financial reach that is simply not matched by any comparable foreign policy constituency. This is not conspiracy theory. It is documented political reality. AIPAC spends heavily on congressional races, tracks voting records on Israel-related legislation, and makes clear to candidates on both sides of the aisle what the cost of deviation will be.

The result is a Congress that debates Israeli policy in one direction only. Resolutions expressing unconditional support for Israel pass without serious debate. Resolutions questioning Israeli conduct, or calling for Palestinian rights, stall or never reach the floor. This is not democracy functioning as designed. In a Constitutional Republic, elected representatives are supposed to weigh national interest. On this issue, national interest rarely enters the room.

The political machinery does not just silence politicians. It polices journalists, academics, and public figures. Careers have ended over comparatively mild criticism of Israeli military operations. Professors have been denied tenure. Journalists have been reassigned or fired. The label of anti-Semitism, a serious charge with serious historical weight, has been stretched to cover policy disagreements that have nothing to do with ethnic or religious hatred.

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar criticized Israeli lobbying power in Washington. She was not wrong on the facts. The blowback from both parties was immediate and severe. Democratic leadership, including Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, publicly rebuked her. The criticism itself became the story. The actual substance of what she raised, the documented influence of foreign-policy lobbying on American legislative behavior, never received serious examination.

That is how the silence reproduces itself.

THE STRATEGIC COST OF UNCONDITIONAL SUPPORT

Set aside the moral dimension for a moment. Look strictly at outcomes.

The United States has fought two of its longest and most costly wars in Muslim-majority countries since 2001. Thousands of American soldiers died. Trillions of dollars were spent. The strategic gains remain questionable at best. During those same years, Washington’s posture toward Israel remained largely unchanged: unconditional military aid, diplomatic cover at the United Nations, and consistent refusal to apply meaningful pressure on Israeli settlement expansion in occupied Palestinian territory.

These two facts are not unrelated.

General David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and later CIA Director, stated publicly in 2010 that American favoritism toward Israel and the stalled peace process endangered his troops. He said this in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Petraeus was not a liberal activist or a foreign-policy idealist. He was a four-star general with direct operational responsibility for American lives. His assessment was grounded in what he observed on the ground.

The response from the Israel lobby and its congressional allies was swift condemnation. Petraeus was accused of providing cover for anti-Semitism. The substance of his operational assessment, that U.S.-Israel policy was generating real-world blowback that put soldiers at risk, was not seriously refuted. It was simply attacked.

This is a recurring pattern. The messenger gets destroyed. The message never gets examined.

The former army officer who writes these words heard the same thing directly, in Baghdad apartments decorated with pictures of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, in conversations with Iraqi and Afghan moderates who were not radical, not terrorist-adjacent, not driven by religious extremism. They were ordinary people who cared about Palestinian suffering and watched American policy ignore it. That is not a marginal demographic. That is a broad cross-section of the Muslim world, and their anger at American double standards is legitimate, documented, and strategically consequential.

Islamist extremist organizations do not recruit in a vacuum. They recruit into grievances. The grievance of Palestinian suffering under Israeli military occupation, sustained and protected by American diplomatic and financial support, is one of the most effective recruiting narratives in the Islamic world. This is not speculation. It is the documented assessment of American intelligence agencies, military commanders, and foreign policy analysts stretching back decades. The United States has spent trillions fighting the symptoms of this dynamic while refusing to address its structural causes.

The bill keeps coming due.

WHAT WASHINGTON ACTUALLY SUPPORTS

To assess the cost of American support for Israeli policy, it helps to be specific about what that policy involves.

Israel has occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1967. That occupation is now more than fifty years old. UN Resolution 242, passed in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war, required Israel’s withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders. That resolution remains in effect and unimplemented. UN Resolution 194, protecting the right of return for Palestinian refugees, similarly remains unimplemented.

The word occupation is not editorial. It is the legal and factual description of the situation. Israel exercises military control over Palestinian territory, controls the movement of Palestinian civilians, demolishes Palestinian homes, and permits Israeli settlers to build permanent communities on land that international law designates as occupied territory. Those settlements are illegal under international law. The International Court of Justice and the UN Security Council have said so repeatedly. American administrations have acknowledged it, in careful diplomatic language, for decades. No meaningful consequence has followed.

The West Bank settlement enterprise has not slowed. It has accelerated. Under the Netanyahu government, settlement construction has expanded at a pace that makes any viable two-state resolution increasingly impossible on geographic grounds. The map of the West Bank today, carved up by Israeli settlements, bypass roads, checkpoints, and military zones, does not leave room for a contiguous Palestinian state. Whatever a future peace process might produce, the physical facts on the ground have been arranged to foreclose the options.

Gaza is a different, and in many ways worse, situation. Israel withdrew its settlements from Gaza in 2005 but maintained control of Gaza’s borders, airspace, and coastline. After Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, Israel imposed a blockade that the United Nations has described as collective punishment of the civilian population. That blockade controls the import of construction materials, food, medicine, and fuel. It has produced an economic catastrophe. Unemployment in Gaza has exceeded 40 percent. The civilian infrastructure has been repeatedly destroyed in Israeli military operations and the blockade has prevented its reconstruction.

A UN Human Rights Committee report examined the Israeli military’s response to Palestinian protests along the Gaza border. The protests, organized under the banner of the Great March of Return, were largely nonviolent. The Israeli military response was not. Over the course of those protests, Israeli snipers shot and killed more than 130 unarmed Palestinians, including 35 children. More than 6,000 others were wounded. Two Israeli soldiers died. Netanyahu’s government dismissed the UN report without engaging its findings.

These are not contested numbers. They are documented. The question is not whether they are accurate. The question is why they generated so little response in Washington.

THE AMERICAN POLITICAL RESPONSE

The U.S. Senate, in the context of documented Israeli military conduct and an accelerating settlement enterprise, did not debate Israeli policy. It passed legislation targeting Americans who criticize Israeli policy.

The legislation made it illegal, or created legal liability, for American citizens and organizations to participate in or support the BDS movement, an international campaign to pressure Israel through boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. BDS mirrors the strategy used against apartheid South Africa. Whether you agree with BDS or not, the question of whether American citizens have a constitutional right to engage in it is not complicated. They do. The First Amendment does not have an Israel exception.

The legislation passed anyway. It did so with bipartisan support. Democrats and Republicans joined to protect Israel from American political speech. That is the clearest possible demonstration of what AIPAC’s political reach actually looks like in practice.

Congress did not pass this legislation because American voters demanded it. There is no significant constituency of ordinary Americans who wanted laws restricting their right to criticize a foreign government’s policies. The legislation happened because the lobby wanted it and because the political machinery that supports the lobby was able to deliver votes. That is not representative government. That is something else.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister who has received more unconditional American support than any Israeli leader in recent memory, was facing criminal indictment in Israel on multiple corruption charges. His government has lurched further right with each election cycle, incorporating political figures whose views on Palestinian rights would be described as extremist by any neutral standard. Netanyahu’s political survival depends on maintaining a posture of maximum conflict with Palestinians and maximum dependence on American support. His incentives run directly against a negotiated resolution.

He has also demonstrated a willingness to intervene in American politics that would generate bipartisan outrage if the country in question were Russia or China. He addressed the U.S. Congress in 2015 in open opposition to the sitting American president’s foreign policy. He coordinated with Republican leadership to deliver that speech as a campaign tool ahead of Israeli elections. The response from the American political class was applause.

THE TRUMP RECORD

Donald Trump presented himself, at various points, as a foreign-policy realist willing to question the assumptions that produced decades of costly American intervention in the Middle East. He criticized the Iraq War. He talked about ending aimless military adventures. He expressed skepticism about nation-building and regime change.

On Israel, those instincts vanished entirely.

Trump moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognizing the contested city as the sole capital of Israel. Jerusalem’s status is one of the core unresolved issues in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Palestinian political and religious claims to East Jerusalem, including its holy sites, are central to any conceivable two-state arrangement. By declaring the matter settled in Israel’s favor, the Trump administration removed one of the most significant negotiating variables from the table.

The international response was isolation. The UN General Assembly voted 128 to 9 to condemn the move. America stood with Israel, Hungary, and a handful of small nations. The broader community of nations, including American allies in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, voted against the United States. This is the concrete face of what Washington’s Israel policy costs in terms of global standing.

Trump also cut American funding to UNRWA, the UN agency that provides food, education, and medical care to Palestinian refugees. He cut funding to Palestinian hospitals in East Jerusalem. He recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, Syrian territory captured in 1967 and annexed in violation of international law. Each of these moves was welcomed by Netanyahu and condemned internationally.

The pattern is consistent. Trump, whatever his stated instincts about reducing American military exposure in the Middle East, has made the political environment more volatile, not less. He has taken unilateral actions that foreclosed negotiating space, generated international isolation, and handed Islamist recruiters a series of documented American policy choices that directly disadvantage Muslims and Palestinians.

If the goal is reducing the conditions that produce Islamist radicalization and terrorism, these moves work against that goal. If the goal is political signaling to domestic constituencies and satisfying a major donor network, they make more sense. The two goals are not compatible.

ISRAEL’S WEAPONS ECONOMY AND AMERICAN INCENTIVES

Part of the structural reason American policy toward Israel persists is economic. Israel purchases significant quantities of American military equipment. The defense industry, one of the most powerful lobbying forces in Washington, has a direct financial interest in maintaining and expanding that relationship. Trump, as a self-described businessman, has made no secret of his appreciation for arms sales as a metric of alliance value. He applied the same logic to Saudi Arabia, another American partner whose human rights record and foreign policy conduct would attract serious scrutiny if it were not a major weapons customer.

This creates a feedback loop. American weapons sales to Israel generate profits for American defense contractors, who fund lobbying efforts in Washington, which help sustain the political conditions that protect the arms relationship. The Palestinian civilians on the receiving end of those weapons are not part of the equation.

The same logic applies to Saudi Arabia, which has used American weapons to conduct a military campaign in Yemen that has produced one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the current century. Washington supplies the weapons. Washington provides logistical and intelligence support. Washington maintains diplomatic cover. And when serious criticism of the relationship arises, the economic argument, those are American jobs, that is American industry, returns to center the conversation.

This is not foreign policy. It is weapons marketing with a flag attached.

THE APARTHEID COMPARISON

The word apartheid is not used lightly here. Its use carries weight because apartheid was a specific legal and political system of racial domination, enforced by law, that the international community ultimately identified as a crime against humanity.

The comparison to Israeli policy in the occupied territories is one that has been made not only by Palestinian advocates and leftist critics, but by former Israeli prime ministers, current Israeli human rights organizations, and international bodies including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. These are not fringe sources.

Within the occupied territories, two distinct legal systems apply to the same geographic space. Israeli settlers live under Israeli civil law, with full rights and legal protections. Palestinians living in adjacent villages live under Israeli military law, with no political rights, no right to vote in Israeli elections, and no recourse through the Israeli judicial system for most disputes involving settlers or the military. They require permits to travel within the West Bank. Their movement is controlled through a checkpoint system. Their homes can be demolished by administrative order without appeal. Their land can be confiscated for settlement expansion.

That is not a description of temporary military occupation managing a security threat. That is a description of a dual legal system administered on ethnic grounds.

The historical comparison to South Africa carries additional weight. During the 1980s, when international pressure on South Africa’s apartheid government was building toward the sanctions and isolation that eventually contributed to its collapse, the United States and Israel were among the most reliable defenders of the apartheid regime. Washington opposed sanctions. Israel maintained military and economic cooperation with Pretoria, including documented cooperation on sensitive weapons programs. The two countries stood together in defending a regime that the rest of the world ultimately recognized as a moral catastrophe.

That history has not been widely examined. The behavior it represents has not been reckoned with. The United States got on the right side of South African history eventually, though it required sustained international pressure and domestic activism to get there. The question is how much damage gets done before the same reckoning arrives on Israel and Palestine.

THE STRATEGIC CASE FOR REASSESSMENT

The argument here is not that the United States should abandon Israel (It should, and fast) It is that unconditional support for Israeli policy, regardless of what that policy involves, is not a strategy. It is a habit.

A genuinely strategic American posture toward Israel would look different from the current one. It would apply the same standards to Israeli conduct that Washington applies, at least rhetorically, to the conduct of adversaries. It would treat settlement expansion as what it is under international law, illegal, and condition American support on compliance with that legal standard. It would push for a negotiated resolution that addresses Palestinian political rights as a genuine interest, not as a talking point. It would recognize that the United States cannot simultaneously claim to represent international law and provide diplomatic cover for a country that violates it continuously.

None of this requires hostility toward Israel. It requires treating Israel as a normal country, subject to normal standards, rather than as a protected class immune from the rules that apply to everyone else.

The strategic benefits of this shift are real. American credibility in the Muslim world, shredded by decades of perceived double standards, would begin to recover. The recruiting narrative available to Islamist extremist organizations, that the United States is the guarantor of Muslim oppression, would weaken. The conditions that make American soldiers targets would begin to change. General Petraeus said as much in 2010. Serious analysts have said it consistently since then.

The argument that changing American policy toward Israel would betray a democratic ally ignores two things. First, Israel is not a democracy for the population it actually governs. Within the occupied territories, millions of Palestinians live under Israeli military control without political rights of any kind. A state that permanently controls a subject population without extending them political rights is not a democracy by the definition that matters. Second, genuine allies do not require unconditional support. Genuine allies can hear honest assessments from their partners. Genuine allies operate within international law, not outside it, and expect to be held to their commitments.

American support for Israel was built on the premise that the alliance served American interests and American values. If it no longer does, or if it does so only by setting aside those values entirely in one specific context, then reassessment is not a betrayal. It is the responsible exercise of strategic judgment.

WHERE THIS ENDS

The United States is currently on the wrong side of history on Israel and Palestine. That is a statement of trajectory, not of ultimate outcome. The trajectory of international opinion, of documented human rights assessments, of legal judgments from international courts, points consistently toward the conclusion that Israeli policy in the occupied territories is illegitimate and unsustainable.

American support for that policy is generating costs that compound over time. Costs in credibility. Costs in strategic positioning. Costs in the lives of soldiers placed at greater risk by a political environment shaped by American double standards. Costs in treasure spent fighting conflicts that are partially rooted in the grievance structure that American policy sustains.

The political system has so far been unable to process these costs honestly because the machinery protecting the status quo is too powerful and the consequences of speaking plainly too immediate and severe. That is not a permanent condition. Political systems change when costs become too visible to ignore.

South Africa changed. The American position on South Africa changed. History will record what the United States did in the meantime.

The question for American policymakers, if any of them are reading, is simple: what does this cost, and who pays it?

American soldiers pay some of it. American taxpayers pay some of it. Palestinians pay the largest share. And the bill keeps accumulating, year after year, while Congress debates how to make it illegal for Americans to say so.

That is where we are. The costs are real. The documentation exists. The strategic case for change is stronger now than it has ever been.

What is missing is the political will to act on the evidence.

Margin of the Law publishes constitutional analysis, civic research, and legal education for people who want to understand the system they actually live in. Read the Full Constitutional Analysis Library at marginofthelaw.com.

© 2026 – MK3 Law Group

For republication or citation, please credit this article with link attribution to marginofthelaw.com.

The bill for establishing a National Bank undertakes among other things:

1. To form the subscribers into a corporation.

2. To enable them in their corporate capacities to receive grants of land; and so far is against the laws of Mortmain.(1)

3. To make alien subscribers capable of holding lands, and so far is against the laws of Alienage.

4. To transmit these lands, on the death of a proprietor, to a certain line of successors; and so far changes the course of Descents.

5. To put the lands out of the reach of forfeiture or escheat, and so far is against the laws of Forfeiture and Escheat.

6. To transmit personal chattels to successors in a certain line and so far is against the laws of Distribution.

7. To give them the sole and exclusive right of banking under the national authority; and so far is against the laws of Monopoly.

8. To communicate to them a power to make laws paramount to the laws of the States; for so they must be construed, to protect the institution from the control of the State legislatures, and so, probably, they will be construed.

I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That “ all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people.” [XIIth amendment.] To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.

The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by this bill, have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States, by the Constitution.

I. -They are not among the powers specially enumerated: for these are: 1st A power to lay taxes for the purpose of paying the debts of the United States; but no debt is paid by this bill, nor any tax laid. Were it a bill to raise money, its origination in the Senate would condemn it by the Constitution.

2.- “To borrow money.” But this bill neither borrows money nor ensures the borrowing it. The proprietors of the bank will be just as free as any other money holders, to lend or not to lend their money to the public. The operation proposed in the bill first, to lend them two millions, and then to borrow them back again, cannot change the nature of the latter act, which will still be a payment, and not a loan, call it by what name you please.

3.- To “regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the States, and with the Indian tribes.” To erect a bank, and to regulate commerce, are very different acts. He who erects a bank, creates a subject of commerce in its bills, so does he who makes a bushel of wheat, or digs a dollar out of the mines; yet neither of these persons regulates commerce thereby. To make a thing which may be bought and sold, is not to prescribe regulations for buying and selling. Besides, if this was an exercise of the power of regulating commerce, it would be void, as extending as much to the internal commerce of every State, as to its external. For the power given to Congress by the Constitution does not extend to the internal regulation of the commerce of a State, (that is to say of the commerce between citizen and citizen,) which remain exclusively with its own legislature; but to its external commerce only, that is to say, its commerce with another State, or with foreign nations, or with the Indian tribes. Accordingly the bill does not propose the measure as a regulation of trace, but as `’ productive of considerable advantages to trade.” Still less are these powers covered by any other of the special enumerations.

II.- Nor are they within either of the general phrases, which are the two following:

1.- To lay taxes to provide for the general welfare of the United States, that is to say, “to lay taxes for the purpose of providing for the general welfare.” For the laying of taxes is the power, and the general welfare the purpose for which the power is to be exercised. They are not to lay taxes ad libitum for any purpose they please; but only to pay the debts or provide for the welfare of the Union. In like manner, they are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare, but only to lay taxes for that purpose. To consider the latter phrase, not as describing the purpose of the first, but as giving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please, which might be for the good of the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless.

It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and, as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please.

It is an established rule of construction where a phrase will bear either of two meanings, to give it that which will allow some meaning to the other parts of the instrument, and not that which would render all the others useless. Certainly no such universal power was meant to be given them. It was intended to lace them up straitly within the enumerated powers, and those without which, as means, these powers could not be carried into effect. It is known that the very power now proposed as a means was rejected as an end by the Convention which formed the Constitution. A proposition was made to them to authorize Congress to open canals, and an amendatory one to empower them to incorporate. But the whole was rejected, and one of the reasons for rejection urged in debate was, that then they would have a power to erect a bank, which would render the great cities, where there were prejudices and jealousies on the subject, adverse to the reception of the Constitution.

2.- The second general phrase is, “to make all laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution the enumerated powers.” But they can all be carried into execution without a bank. A bank therefore is not necessary, and consequently not authorized by this phrase.

If has been urged that a bank will give great facility or convenience in the collection of taxes, Suppose this were true: yet the Constitution allows only the means which are “necessary,” not those which are merely “convenient” for effecting the enumerated powers. If such a latitude of construction be allowed to this phrase as to give any non-enumerated power, it will go to everyone, for there is not one which ingenuity may not torture into a convenience in some instance or other, to some one of so long a list of enumerated powers. It would swallow up all the delegated powers, and reduce the whole to one power, as before observed. Therefore it was that the Constitution restrained them to the necessary means, that is to say, to those means without which the grant of power would be nugatory

But let us examine this convenience and see what it is. The report on this subject, page 3, states the only general convenience to be, the preventing the transportation and re-transportation of money between the States and the treasury, (for I pass over the increase of circulating medium, ascribed to it as a want, and which, according to my ideas of paper money, is clearly a demerit.) Every State will have to pay a sum of tax money into the treasury; and the treasury will have to pay, in every State, a part of the interest on the public debt, and salaries to the officers of government resident in that State. In most of the States there will still be a surplus of tax money to come up to the seat of government for the officers residing there. The payments of interest and salary in each State may he made by treasury orders on the State collector. This will take up the greater part of the money he has collected in his State, and consequently prevent the great mass of it from being drawn out of the State. If there be a balance of commerce in favor of that State against the one in which the government resides, the surplus of taxes will be remitted by the bills of exchange drawn for that commercial balance. And so it must be if there was a bank. But if there be no balance of commerce, either direct or circuitous, all the banks in the world could not bring up the surplus of taxes, but in the form of money. Treasury orders then, and bills of exchange may prevent the displacement of the main mass of the money collected, without the aid of any bank; and where these fail, it cannot be prevented even with that aid.

Perhaps, indeed, bank bills may be a more convenient vehicle than treasury orders. But a little difference in the degree of convenience cannot constitute the necessity which the Constitution makes the ground for assuming any non-enumerated power.

Besides, the existing banks will, without a doubt, enter into arrangements for lending their agency, and the more favorable, as there will be a competition among them for it; whereas the bill delivers us up bound to the national bank, who are free to refuse all arrangement, but on their own terms, and the public not free, on such refusal, to employ any other bank. That of Philadelphia I believe, now does this business, by their post-notes, which, by an arrangement with the treasury, are paid by any State collector to whom they are presented. This expedient alone suffices to prevent the existence of that necessity which may justify the assumption of a non-enumerated power as a means for carrying into effect an enumerated one. The thing may be done, and has been done, and well done, without this assumption, therefore it does not stand on that degree of necessity which can honestly justify it.

It may be said that a bank whose bills would have a currency all over the States, would be more convenient than one whose currency is limited to a single State. So it would be still more convenient that there should be a bank, whose bills should have a currency all over the world. But it does not follow from this superior conveniency, that there exists anywhere a power to establish such a bank; or that the world may not go on very well without it.

Can it be thought that the Constitution intended that for a shade or two of convenience, more or less, Congress should be authorized to break down the most ancient and fundamental laws of the several States; such as those against Mortmain, the laws of Alienage, the rules of descent, the acts of distribution, the laws of escheat and forfeiture, the laws of monopoly? Nothing but a necessity invincible by any other means, can justify such a prostitution of laws, which constitute the pillars of our whole system of jurisprudence. Will Congress be too strait-laced to carry the Constitution into honest effect, unless they may pass over the foundation-laws of the State government for the slightest convenience of theirs ?

The negative of the President is the shield provided by the Constitution to protect against the invasions of the legislature:

1. The right of the Executive.

2. Of the Judiciary.

3. Of the States and State legislatures.

The present is the case of a right remaining exclusively with the States, and consequently one of those intended by the Constitution to be placed under its protection,

It must be added, however, that unless the President’s mind on a view of everything which is urged for and against this bill, is tolerably clear that it is unauthorized by the Constitution; if the pro and the con hang so even as to balance his judgment, a just respect for the wisdom of the legislature would naturally decide the balance in favor of their opinion. It is chiefly for cases where they are clearly misled by error, ambition, or interest, that the Constitution has placed a check in the negative of the President.

(1) Though the Constitution controls the laws of Mortmain so far as to permit Congress itself to hold land for certain purposes, yet not so far as to permit them to communicate a similar right to other corporate bodies.-T. J

Source:

Ford, Paul Leicester
The Federalist : A commentary on the Constitution of the United States by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay edited with notes, illustrative documents and a copious index by Paul Leicester Ford.
New York : Henry Holt and Company, 1898.

Margin of the Law publishes constitutional analysis, civic research, and legal education for people who want to understand the system they actually live in. Read the Full Constitutional Analysis Library at marginofthelaw.com.

© 2026 – MK3 Law Group

For republication or citation, please credit this article with link attribution to marginofthelaw.com.

Data

The nonprofit sector of the “Israel lobby” in the United States is made up of many organizations. This section uses the term “Israel Affinity Organization” or “IAOs” when referring to individual organizations in an attempt to be precise. Not all IAOs lobby. A handful of large IAOs—in terms of revenue—are not predominantly Jewish in terms of their leadership, members and donors, though most are. In order to be included in this IAO analysis, an organization must have all of the following attributes. It must be an IRS recognized tax-exempt 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) organization. This means a group that incorporated (or in some instances was brought into being by legislative action), then applied to the IRS or its predecessor for tax-exempt status as a social welfare providing organization and now operates with tax-exempt status.

To be included an IAO must actively and unconditionally support Israel as a major function. This must either be a formal component of the organization’s mission statement or a top priority in programs or observable as its core mission. Some organizations, such as the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, are dedicated to framing Israeli issues as American concerns and hiding their affinity. They make no mention of Israel in their mission statements. We include such organizations if their output on behalf of Israel is so high it can realistically be presumed to be a primary purpose. We also include the main evangelical Christian organizations to the extent possible. One of the highest profile thanks to heavy expenditures on public relations, Christians United for Israel, has hidden behind its status as an “association of churches” to conduct lobbying activities and conceal basic information from the public. Though Christian evangelical influence and entry into the fray are relatively recent and somewhat overestimated, they are an important component of the ecosystem because they tap an entirely different revenue stream and can mobilize large numbers of voters. They also sometimes undertake risky overseas ventures on Israel’s behalf that carry a high potential for blowback against the United States.

Summary (follow links for full listing)

Subsidy

Fundraising and Political Action

Advocacy

Education

To be included here an IAO must raise the majority of its funding in the United States. Some of the “startup” funding that launched the American Zionist Council and AIPAC was actually foreign money, laundered through various entities, by the Jewish Agency. Today most IAOs appear to raise the majority of their funding in the United States—though there is much consultation with Israeli officials on how it should be spent. This activity creates a quantifiable, largely unexplored, and highly negative impact on U.S. taxpayers tapped to fill the revenue holes created by the tax-deductibility of the billions of dollars moving every year through the system.

Lastly, to pass through the IAO screen an organization must be headquartered in the United States. While many large and small IAOs have offices in Israel and conduct their ongoing private consultations with government officials there, no advantage can be gained by actually headquartering in Israel. The Jewish Agency for Israel ran into innumerable woes and tangles with the Foreign Agents Registration Act office of the Justice Department as a foreign-based entity. While offices in Israel offer prestige and easier private communications with Israeli government officials, there is no longer any worthwhile tax or influence advantage to headquartering in the state of central IAO concern.

Analysis of IAO activities may be found in the book Big Israel: How Israel’s Lobby Moves America available at Middle East Books and More as well as Amazon.com

Margin of the Law publishes constitutional analysis, civic research, and legal education for people who want to understand the system they actually live in. Read the Full Constitutional Analysis Library at marginofthelaw.com.

© 2026 – MK3 Law Group

For republication or citation, please credit this article with link attribution to marginofthelaw.com.

Whatever you believe about Covid policy, the documented record shows the plans were worse than what was implemented. The vaccine passport scheme alone tells you something important. Six cities restricted public indoor spaces to vaccinated individuals only: New York City, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington D.C., and Seattle. Enforcement depended on a passport system. That system collapsed when evidence surfaced that the shots did not stop infection or transmission. Public support evaporated. The planners retreated.

That retreat was not a victory. It was a course correction forced by circumstance. The underlying architecture remained. And while the passport scheme drew public attention and debate, a separate CDC document was sitting on a government website, largely unread, describing something far more serious.

On July 26, 2020, the CDC published a plan for establishing quarantine camps across the United States. The document remained on the CDC’s official public site until approximately March 26, 2023. Nearly three years. Minimal press coverage. Almost no public controversy. Then it was quietly removed.

That sequence matters. It was not a draft that never left an office. It was not a theoretical exercise buried in an archive. It was a published, official document from the CDC, available to anyone with an internet connection, describing the forced physical separation of American citizens based on health status determinations made by public health authorities.

The document was titled “Interim Operational Considerations for Implementing the Shielding Approach to Prevent COVID-19 Infections in Humanitarian Settings.”

The authors were unnamed. The document included 26 footnotes. It was formatted and published as official CDC guidance.

WHAT THE DOCUMENT ACTUALLY SAYS

The CDC framed the purpose this way: “This document presents considerations from the perspective of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for implementing the shielding approach in humanitarian settings as outlined in guidance documents focused on camps, displaced populations and low-resource settings. This approach has never been documented and has raised questions and concerns among humanitarian partners who support response activities in these settings. The purpose of this document is to highlight potential implementation challenges of the shielding approach from CDC’s perspective and guide thinking around implementation in the absence of empirical data.”

Read that last phrase carefully. “In the absence of empirical data” means nothing like this had ever been tested. The document was not summarizing results. It was mapping out how to build something new. It was a planning document. Its purpose was to identify how to implement these camps and flag the operational obstacles that administrators would need to solve.

The CDC defined “shielding” as follows: “to reduce the number of severe Covid-19 cases by limiting contact between individuals at higher risk of developing severe disease (’high-risk’) and the general population (’low-risk’). High-risk individuals would be temporarily relocated to safe or ‘green zones’ established at the household, neighborhood, camp/sector, or community level depending on the context and setting. They would have minimal contact with family members and other low-risk residents.”

That is the official language. Strip it down and you get this: certain people, identified by public health authorities as high-risk, would be removed from their homes and placed in designated zones. Their contact with family would be restricted. Their movement would be controlled. The word “temporarily” appears in the text. No mechanism for determining what temporary means is defined anywhere in the document.

WHO GETS TARGETED

The document identifies the targets as “older adults and people of any age who have serious underlying medical conditions.” The determination of who qualifies falls to public health authorities. No judicial review is mentioned. No legal standard is established. No independent oversight is described.

The stated justification for physical separation is to “prioritize the use of the limited available resources.”

That framing is worth examining directly. The CDC is saying that removing certain people from circulation allows authorities to allocate resources more efficiently. The people being removed are framed as both the protected and the problem. Their separation serves the system’s resource management goals. Their own interests are secondary to that function.

This is not a misreading. The document says it plainly.

THE THREE-LEVEL STRUCTURE

The plan organizes intervention into three levels of escalating control.

Level one is the household. Here, high-risk individuals are “physically isolated from other household members.” The CDC frames this as protective. The practical consequence is that an elderly person living with family is separated within their own home. The family cannot provide care in the normal sense. The elder is isolated from the people who know them, love them, and understand their needs. The government inserts itself into the most basic unit of human organization and restructures it according to a public health calculus.

Level two is the neighborhood. The same logic applies at a wider scale. High-risk individuals in a geographic area are separated from the general population. The document does not specify what this looks like in physical terms, but the operational logic is clear. Separation is the goal. The neighborhood becomes a managed zone.

Level three is the camp or sector level. This is where the document becomes explicit. “A group of shelters such as schools, community buildings within a camp/sector (max 50 high-risk individuals per single green zone) where high-risk individuals are physically isolated together. One entry point is used for exchange of food, supplies, etc. A meeting area is used for residents and visitors to interact while practicing physical distancing (2 meters). No movement into or outside the green zone.”

One entry point. No movement in or out. A controlled perimeter. Residents confined by designation rather than conviction. No legal process described. No appeal mechanism established. No defined end date.

The document calls these “green zones.” The historical term for facilities that confine people based on a group characteristic, with controlled entry and exit, is more direct. The CDC’s preferred terminology does not change the operational structure.

STAFFING AND CONTROL

The plan requires dedicated staff to monitor each green zone. The document describes this monitoring function as covering both adherence to protocols and the observation of “potential adverse effects or outcomes due to isolation and stigma.”

The text goes further: “It may be necessary to assign someone within the green zone, if feasible, to minimize movement in/out of green zones.”

This describes internal surveillance. Someone placed among the confined population to observe and report. The document notes that staffing is a challenge and offers a solution: “each green zone should include able-bodied high-risk individuals capable of caring for residents who have disabilities or are less mobile. Otherwise, designate low-risk individuals for these tasks, preferably who have recovered from confirmed COVID-19 and are assumed to be immune.”

The word “assumed” is doing significant work in that sentence. The document elsewhere states: “Currently, we do not know if prior infection confers immunity.” The plan simultaneously acknowledges uncertainty about immunity while using assumed immunity as an operational staffing solution. The internal contradiction is not addressed.

The plan also acknowledges that residents will need explanations for why they cannot attend religious services. The document frames this as a communication challenge: “Proactive planning ahead of time, including strong community engagement and risk communication is needed to better understand the issues and concerns of restricting individuals from participating in communal practices because they are being shielded. Failure to do so could lead to both interpersonal and communal violence.”

The concern here is operational. The document is not questioning whether banning religious practice is acceptable. It is identifying community violence as a risk that needs to be managed through communication strategy. The right to religious exercise is not weighed. It is bracketed as an obstacle to implementation.

SUICIDE PREVENTION AS AN OPERATIONAL CONCERN

The document includes provisions for suicide prevention. The relevant passage reads:

“Additional stress and worry are common during any epidemic and may be more pronounced with COVID-19 due to the novelty of the disease and increased fear of infection, increased childcare responsibilities due to school closures, and loss of livelihoods. Thus, in addition to the risk of stigmatization and feeling of isolation, this shielding approach may have an important psychological impact and may lead to significant emotional distress, exacerbate existing mental illness or contribute to anxiety, depression, helplessness, grief, substance abuse, or thoughts of suicide among those who are separated or have been left behind. Shielded individuals with concurrent severe mental health conditions should not be left alone. There must be a caregiver allocated to them to prevent further protection risks such as neglect and abuse.”

The document lists depression, helplessness, grief, substance abuse, and suicidal ideation as anticipated outcomes of the shielding approach. It then offers caregiver allocation as the response. There is no reconsideration of whether the approach itself produces harm that outweighs its benefits. The psychological destruction is treated as a side effect to be managed, not a reason to question the underlying plan.

This is a significant feature of the document’s logic. Consequences that would ordinarily prompt reconsideration of a policy are instead treated as technical problems requiring operational solutions. The frame never shifts.

THE COERCION ADMISSION

The document contains one sentence that is worth reading more than once: “While the shielding approach is not meant to be coercive, it may appear forced or be misunderstood in humanitarian settings.”

This sentence is presented as a risk communication note. The concern is not that the approach might actually be coercive. The concern is that it might appear coercive or be misunderstood. The document positions public perception as the problem, not the nature of the policy.

An approach that removes people from their homes, confines them in controlled facilities, restricts their movement, limits their religious practice, anticipates their suicidal ideation, and monitors their behavior through dedicated staff is not made non-coercive by the intentions of its designers. The operational structure determines the experience of the people inside it.

THE RIGHTS FRAMEWORK THAT IS ABSENT

The document contains no mention of habeas corpus. It contains no mention of due process. It contains no mention of the right to legal counsel. It contains no mention of judicial review. It contains no mechanism by which a person designated as high-risk can contest that designation or challenge their confinement.

In the Constitutional Republic that is the United States, the government cannot deprive a person of liberty without due process of law. That is the Fifth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment extends that protection against state action. The right to legal counsel exists. The right to contest confinement exists. The right to religious exercise exists.

None of these are acknowledged in the document. The plan does not say these rights are suspended. It simply proceeds as though they do not apply. The operational framework treats American citizens as subjects of administrative management rather than rights-bearing individuals whose consent and legal standing matter.

That absence is not an oversight. A document with 26 footnotes, produced by a federal agency with 10,600 employees and an $11.5 billion budget, does not accidentally omit constitutional considerations from a plan to confine American citizens in controlled facilities. The absence reflects how the CDC understood its own authority: as something that operates outside the legal framework that governs everyone else.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THIS AND FOCUSED PROTECTION

Because some readers may conflate this CDC document with other proposals that discussed protecting vulnerable populations during Covid, the distinction needs to be stated clearly.

The Great Barrington Declaration, signed by epidemiologists and public health scientists, proposed focused protection as an alternative to broad lockdowns. Its approach was specific: “schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.”

The key phrase is “may participate if they wish.” Focused protection as proposed in the Great Barrington Declaration was voluntary. The CDC’s shielding approach is not. One leaves choice with the individual. The other removes it and places it with public health authorities. These are not variations on the same idea. They are opposite approaches.

THE BROADER COVID POLICY RECORD

To understand what the quarantine camp plan represents, it needs to be placed against the full record of what the CDC actually implemented during Covid.

The rent moratorium was a CDC decree. The agency claimed public health authority to override contract law and property rights nationwide. The Supreme Court eventually struck it down, but not before it had been in effect long enough to cause significant economic disruption and establish the precedent that the CDC believed it held this power.

The six-foot distancing rule was presented as science. It was not. No solid empirical basis supported that specific distance as meaningful. It was a round number applied with regulatory force. It restructured commercial space, school layouts, and public behavior for years.

Mask mandates were imposed by the CDC with the same regulatory confidence. The evidence base for masking in community settings, particularly for cloth masks, was disputed among researchers throughout the pandemic. The CDC treated contested evidence as settled.

Plexiglas barriers were installed in commercial settings across the country based on CDC guidance. Research published later indicated that in many indoor settings, these barriers may have worsened air circulation and increased transmission risk. The CDC has not addressed this with the same force it used to mandate the barriers.

The mail-in ballot expansion was not a CDC decree, but the CDC’s posture toward in-person activities created political pressure that shaped election administration decisions in several states. The downstream effects on election outcomes are genuinely contested, but the CDC’s role in shaping the conditions that led to those decisions is not.

Each of these interventions caused real harm. Closed schools produced documented learning loss that researchers continue to measure. Business closures destroyed enterprises that had operated for decades. Isolation policies produced mental health consequences that overwhelmed treatment capacity. The rent moratorium disrupted housing markets in ways that contributed to the affordability crisis that followed.

The quarantine camp plan sits at the far end of this spectrum. It represents what the institutional logic, if left unchecked, was prepared to reach.

THE INSTITUTIONAL QUESTION

The CDC document was published on July 26, 2020. The George Floyd protests had de-escalated. The country was exhausted. The document sat on the CDC’s public website for nearly three years. It was not leaked. It was not hidden. It was publicly accessible. The agency did not publicize it, but it also did not remove it until March 2023.

That timeline has operational implications. A document that remains on an agency’s public site for nearly three years is not a discarded draft. It represents something the agency considered worth preserving in accessible form. It was removed, not because the agency renounced the approach, but because enough attention had finally reached it that the political cost of its continued presence outweighed whatever value the agency placed on keeping it available.

The authors of the document are unnamed. That is standard for CDC guidance documents, where institutional authorship replaces individual attribution. But it means no individual has been identified as responsible for producing a plan to confine American citizens without legal process. No one has answered for it publicly. No congressional hearing has put the document’s architects under oath and asked them to explain their thinking. No accountability has attached to it.

The CDC employs 10,600 people. Its budget is $11.5 billion. The agency used that institutional scale to produce and publish a plan for concentration camps justified by public health authority, and then quietly removed it three years later with no explanation.

THE QUESTION OF INSTITUTIONAL PATHOLOGY

What kind of institution produces this document?

One that has internalized the belief that public health emergencies suspend normal legal and ethical constraints. One that treats the rights of individuals as variables in an optimization problem rather than limits on government power. One that has operated for long enough without meaningful external accountability that it has lost the ability to recognize when it has crossed a line that cannot be crossed.

The CDC did not develop this institutional posture overnight. It accumulated it over decades of expanding regulatory authority, decreasing congressional oversight, and public health framing that positions expert consensus as a category above legal challenge. When the Covid period began, the agency had the institutional confidence to act as though its authority was effectively unlimited. The quarantine camp document is a product of that confidence.

The rent moratorium told you the CDC believed it could override property law. The six-foot rule told you the CDC believed it could enforce contested science as binding regulation. The vaccine passport support told you the CDC believed it could create a two-tier system of public participation based on medical compliance. The quarantine camp document tells you where that logic leads if nothing stops it.

Nothing stopped it until the courts intervened on the rent moratorium and public pressure collapsed the vaccine passport scheme. The quarantine camp plan was never implemented, but not because the CDC decided it was wrong. It was never implemented because the conditions that would have required it did not fully materialize, and because implementation would have required a level of public compliance and political support that did not exist.

The plan survived on the website for three years because the agency saw no reason to remove it.

WHAT THE DOCUMENT ESTABLISHES

Several things are now part of the documented record.

The CDC produced an official plan for confining American citizens in controlled facilities based on public health status determinations made by government authorities. The plan contained no legal process, no rights framework, no appeal mechanism, and no defined endpoint for confinement. The plan anticipated that confined individuals would experience depression, grief, substance abuse, and suicidal ideation and treated those outcomes as operational problems rather than reasons to abandon the approach. The plan restricted religious practice and framed community resistance as a communication challenge. The plan remained on the CDC’s official public website for nearly three years before being quietly removed.

None of this is disputed. The document existed. Its contents are quoted directly above. The publication and removal timeline is verifiable through archived web records.

What you do with that information is your decision. But the information itself is not ambiguous. The CDC, a federal agency funded by American taxpayers and operating under the authority of the federal government, published a plan for concentration camps.

That sentence is uncomfortable to write. It is more uncomfortable to know it is accurate.

The question is not whether this happened. The document answers that. The question is what kind of government agency produces such a document, publishes it publicly, and then removes it without explanation or accountability three years later.

The answer to that question matters more than any single policy debate about masks, vaccines, or distancing. It goes to what the CDC believes its authority to be, how it understands the people it claims to protect, and whether any external force has the will to find out who built this plan and why they thought they could.

Margin of the Law publishes constitutional analysis, civic research, and legal education for people who want to understand the system they actually live in. Read the Full Constitutional Analysis Library at marginofthelaw.com.

© 2026 – MK3 Law Group

For republication or citation, please credit this article with link attribution to marginofthelaw.com.

America has a system in place that uses the same tech to identify, locate and track gun owners and political dissents among other things.-MK3

You can find this report and others at the Artificial Weapons Website

How four interconnected AI systems transformed the IDF’s kill chain — flagging 37,000+ targets, compressing approval windows to 20 seconds, and setting precedents that will define warfare for decades.

Published March 2024 Updated December 2024 3,200 words Sources: +972 Magazine, UN Reports, IDF Statements

The Architecture of Machine-Assisted Killing

When Israeli forces began their military campaign in Gaza following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, they did so with a targeting apparatus unlike anything previously disclosed in the history of modern warfare. For the first time, a military had publicly — through both leaks and partial official acknowledgment — deployed an interconnected network of AI systems designed to identify, prioritize, locate, and schedule the killing of human targets at industrial scale.

The system was not a single program but an ecosystem: four distinct AI tools, each handling a different stage of the kill chain, collectively enabling a tempo of strikes that would have been impossible using traditional intelligence analysis. This report maps that ecosystem, drawing on the landmark +972 Magazine and Local Call investigation published in April 2024, subsequent reporting, and official IDF responses.

The implications extend far beyond Gaza. What Israel demonstrated — intentionally or not — is a proof of concept for machine-assisted war that every major military on Earth is now studying closely.

37,000+ Targets Flagged by Lavender

20 sec Typical Human Approval Window

100:1 Civilian-to-Target Kill Ratio (Low-Rank)

4 AI Systems in Targeting Chain

System 1: Lavender — The Target Generator

Lavender is an AI system trained on signals intelligence, communications data, social network analysis, and behavioral metadata to identify individuals it classifies as members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). According to the +972 Magazine investigation — based on testimony from six Israeli intelligence officers who used the system — Lavender had flagged approximately 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants by the early weeks of the campaign.

The system assigns each individual a score from 1 to 100, reflecting the AI’s confidence in its classification. A score of 90 or above was treated, according to sources, as equivalent to a confirmed identification. Crucially, intelligence officers interviewed by +972 described reviewing Lavender’s outputs with only cursory scrutiny — spending as little as 20 seconds per target to confirm the AI’s recommendation before the target was added to a strike list.

One officer told +972: “We were not looking for errors. The machine gave the target. We just needed to make sure it wasn’t a woman. That was the main check.” This account, which the IDF disputed in its official response, suggests that human review had been reduced to a rubber-stamping function — legally present but operationally hollow.

Lavender’s training data and algorithmic logic remain classified. The +972 report does not specify which data inputs were weighted most heavily, though officers described the system drawing on phone data, WhatsApp group membership, proximity to known militants, and other behavioral signals. The system was reportedly developed by Unit 8200, the IDF’s signals intelligence and technology unit, and had been in development for several years prior to its deployment at scale in Gaza.

The error rate acknowledged within the IDF’s own analysis was reportedly around 10% — meaning roughly 3,700 of those flagged may have been wrongly identified. At the casualty ratios accepted for low-ranking targets (discussed below), this margin translates to thousands of civilian deaths from targeting errors alone, before accounting for collateral damage to family members and neighbors.

System 2: Gospel — The Building Target Engine

While Lavender identifies human targets, Gospel operates one level up the abstraction hierarchy, identifying infrastructure and building targets. Gospel uses aerial surveillance, satellite imagery, and signals data to flag structures associated with Hamas military activity — command nodes, weapons storage, tunnel infrastructure, and operational meeting sites.

Officers described Gospel as having dramatically accelerated the pace at which the IDF could generate fresh target sets. Before AI-assisted targeting, the process of identifying and verifying a significant building target might take days or weeks, requiring analysts to correlate multiple intelligence streams manually. Gospel compressed this to hours or less, creating what sources called a “target bank” that could be refreshed continuously.

The scale of building destruction in Gaza — more than 60% of structures in Gaza City damaged or destroyed by February 2024 according to satellite analysis by UNOSAT — reflects in part the throughput Gospel enabled. Critics have argued that the system’s classification criteria are opaque and its error tolerance, when applied to densely populated urban environments, inherently produces mass civilian casualties.

The Gospel-Lavender Interaction

Gospel and Lavender interact in a critical way: once Lavender identifies a human target, Gospel (or related systems) is used to identify that target’s likely location — their home, known gathering points, or associated facilities. The strike decision then combines human identity (Lavender) with precise location (Gospel/related imagery analysis) and routes the package to Fire Factory for munitions assignment.

System 3: Fire Factory — Automated Munitions Matching

Fire Factory handles logistics and munitions selection. Given a target package — a location, a target type, a desired effect — Fire Factory cross-references available ordnance, flight windows, and aircraft availability to propose a complete strike plan. Sources describe it recommending specific bomb types and yields calibrated to the target.

Officers with direct knowledge of Fire Factory’s operation described it as generating attack schedules: a queue of targets, each with recommended munitions, timing windows, and aircraft assignments. Human commanders reviewed and approved the schedule, but the computational work of matching bombs to buildings — and managing the deconfliction of simultaneous strikes — was handled by the machine.

This automation of logistics created a throughput that exceeded what Israeli air assets could historically process. One indirect indicator: in the first weeks of the conflict, the IDF conducted upwards of 1,000 air strikes in under a week — a pace requiring coordination that manual processes could not have sustained.

System 4: Where’s Daddy? — Home Strike Targeting

The most disturbing system in the ecosystem, from an IHL perspective, is Where’s Daddy? — a tracking tool designed to alert operators when a targeted individual has returned to their family home. The name reflects its operational logic: wait for the militant to visit his family, then strike.

Under IHL, homes are protected civilian structures unless they have been appropriated for military use. Targeting an individual in their family home — especially with a bomb large enough to destroy the structure — means knowingly killing or risking the lives of family members, including children. The +972 investigation describes explicit IDF policy for lower-ranking targets permitting the deaths of up to 100 civilians as acceptable collateral damage to eliminate a single low-ranking Hamas operative.

Where’s Daddy? operationalized a doctrine of home strikes. When a target’s phone signal indicated they had returned home, the system generated an alert and the target was slotted for a nighttime strike — chosen because targets were most likely to be home asleep, maximizing the probability of killing the individual. The timing, however, also maximized the probability that family members would be present.

The Four-System Kill Chain: End-to-End

Lavender

Human Target ID

Scores 2.3M Gazans, flags 37,000+ as suspected militants. Assigns probability scores 1-100. Officers confirm/reject in ~20 seconds.

Gospel

Infrastructure Targeting

Identifies buildings, command nodes, tunnel infrastructure. Generates a continuously refreshed “target bank” at machine speed.

Fire Factory

Munitions Logistics

Matches targets to available ordnance, recommends bomb types/yields, schedules strikes, deconflicts air assets automatically.

Where’s Daddy?

Location Tracking

Monitors target’s phone signal. Alerts operators when they return home. Enables nighttime strikes on family residences.

Pre-AI vs Post-AI Targeting: A Structural Comparison

To understand what changed, it is necessary to compare targeting practices before and after AI integration. Traditional targeting in a conflict like Gaza — as practiced in earlier Israeli operations such as Operation Cast Lead (2008) or Operation Protective Edge (2014) — was limited by human intelligence analyst capacity.

Dimension Pre-AI Targeting AI-Assisted (Gaza 2023+) Target identification speed Days to weeks per significant target Hours to minutes (Lavender) Target volume Hundreds of targets per campaign 37,000+ human targets flagged Human review time Hours per target, multi-analyst review ~20 seconds per Lavender output Building target generation Manual imagery analysis, days per target Automated, continuous refresh (Gospel) Munitions assignment Manual targeting officer review Automated matching (Fire Factory) Strike tempo Hundreds per campaign 1,000+ per week at peak Accountability Named analysts per target decision Diffuse — AI outputs, human “confirms”

Collateral Damage Ratios and the Tiered Target System

Perhaps the most ethically significant disclosure in the +972 investigation concerns the explicit casualty ratios the IDF authorized for different categories of target. According to sources, the IDF operated a tiered system:

Senior Hamas commanders: Up to 100 or more civilian deaths were authorized as acceptable collateral damage. These strikes could involve large munitions dropped on populated multi-story buildings where the target was known to be present.

Mid-ranking operatives: The acceptable civilian death threshold was lower but still substantial — sources described figures in the range of 15-20 civilians per mid-level target.

Low-ranking operatives (Lavender-generated targets): Sources described a threshold of up to 15-20 civilians, with some accounts suggesting thresholds as high as 100 for certain target types. Critically, low-ranking targets were often struck with “dumb bombs” — unguided or semi-guided munitions — rather than precision weapons, increasing collateral damage.

The scale arithmetic is stark. If Lavender flagged 37,000 targets, and if even a fraction were struck under these collateral ratios, the resulting civilian death toll would run into the tens of thousands — consistent with the casualty data reported by Palestinian health authorities and cross-referenced by international monitoring organizations.

Casualty Data

By December 2024, the Gaza Health Ministry reported more than 44,000 confirmed deaths, with the UN estimating the true toll could be significantly higher once those buried in rubble are accounted for. Lancet researchers published analysis in July 2024 suggesting that indirect deaths from disease, malnutrition, and infrastructure destruction could bring the total toll to over 186,000 by August 2024 if conflict continued at the prevailing rate.

Israel disputes these figures and the methodology behind them. The IDF’s official position holds that Hamas embeds in civilian infrastructure, that precautions are taken to minimize civilian harm, and that responsibility for civilian deaths rests with Hamas for its use of human shields.

International Humanitarian Law Analysis

The use of AI systems in targeting raises acute questions under IHL, specifically under the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution.

Distinction

IHL requires that parties to a conflict distinguish at all times between combatants and civilians. A system like Lavender — which generates probabilistic scores rather than confirmed identifications, has a self-reported ~10% error rate, and receives only 20 seconds of human review — raises serious questions about whether the legal standard of distinction is being met. If an algorithm classifies an individual as a combatant and a human rubber-stamps that classification in 20 seconds without independent verification, the legal accountability chain has been functionally severed.

Proportionality

IHL prohibits attacks expected to cause civilian harm that is excessive relative to the anticipated military advantage. The disclosed collateral damage thresholds — up to 100 civilians per low-ranking operative — represent explicit calculations that many international law scholars argue exceed what proportionality permits. Several United Nations Special Rapporteurs have characterized aspects of the campaign as potentially constituting war crimes, independent of the AI question.

Precaution

IHL requires parties to take all feasible precautions to avoid or minimize civilian harm. Critics argue that the 20-second review window and the “dumb bomb” policy for Lavender-generated targets represent the active abandonment of precaution. If a higher standard of review were applied, the strike tempo would necessarily decrease — which suggests the 20-second window was a deliberate operational choice to maintain throughput, not a minimum imposed by circumstance.

The IDF’s Official Position

The IDF disputed several key claims in the +972 report. In a statement, the IDF said:

The IDF’s denial is notably specific in scope — denying that AI “recommends targets” — while not addressing whether AI systems like those described are used for other functions in the targeting pipeline. The framing that AI assists with “cross-referencing” rather than “recommending” is a definitional distinction that critics argue is immaterial to the legal and ethical analysis.

Subsequent reporting by The Guardian and other outlets citing additional sources broadly corroborated the +972 findings. The New York Times published its own investigation reaching similar conclusions about the scale and nature of AI-assisted targeting in the conflict.

Precedent-Setting Implications

The Gaza conflict has established several precedents — whether or not they were intended as such — that will shape the future of autonomous and AI-assisted warfare globally.

1. Scale of AI-generated targeting: No prior conflict had seen AI systems flag tens of thousands of humans for potential lethal action. The normalization of this scale, absent international legal pushback, sets a floor for future conflicts.

2. The rubber-stamp review problem: The 20-second review window demonstrates that “meaningful human control” — the standard proposed by advocates for responsible autonomous weapons — can be present in form while being absent in function. Policymakers working on autonomous weapons treaties must grapple with this gap.

3. Explicit collateral ratios: The disclosed practice of pre-authorizing specific civilian death numbers per target class represents a level of systematization of civilian harm that, if replicated, would fundamentally transform the calculus of urban warfare.

4. Home strike doctrine: The Where’s Daddy? system operationalizes a doctrine of targeting individuals in civilian residences. If accepted as precedent, this doctrine would eliminate the protection historically afforded to homes under IHL.

5. AI accountability gap: When targeting decisions flow from AI outputs confirmed by humans in 20-second windows, the traditional accountability structures of military command — where a named officer takes responsibility for a targeting decision — become functionally inapplicable. This accountability gap has no established remedy in international law.

Global Military Response

Defense establishments in the United States, United Kingdom, China, France, and Australia have all indicated interest in the capabilities demonstrated in Gaza. The US Department of Defense’s Project Maven — which uses AI to analyze drone footage — represents a parallel development track. DARPA’s autonomous targeting research programs have accelerated timelines following the conflict.

The key lesson militaries are drawing is not necessarily that the specific systems should be replicated, but that the integration model — AI flagging, human rubber-stamping, automated logistics — represents a viable operational architecture. The controversy around the collateral ratios and the +972 disclosures is treated by most defense establishments as a disclosure problem rather than a capability problem.

China’s PLA has been particularly attentive. Its published military AI doctrine emphasizes “intelligentized warfare” (智能化战争) and calls for AI integration across all phases of the kill chain. The Gaza model, flawed as it is legally, provides the first real-world validation that such integration is operationally feasible at scale.

What International Law Must Confront

The Gaza AI targeting case arrives at a moment when international negotiations on autonomous weapons systems have stalled. The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) process at the United Nations has been discussing lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) since 2014 without producing a binding instrument. The Gaza disclosures inject new urgency — and new complexity — into that debate.

The core challenge is that the systems described are not “fully autonomous” in the science-fiction sense of a robot deciding independently to kill. They are human-machine hybrids in which human oversight has been compressed to near-zero without being formally removed. Existing proposals for LAWS governance struggle to address this architecture, because it technically preserves human decision-making while gutting its substance.

Scholars of international humanitarian law have proposed several responses: minimum review time standards, mandatory transparency reporting on AI use in targeting, prohibition on AI systems trained on datasets without independent verification, and criminal accountability standards that address rubber-stamp approval chains. None of these proposals currently has sufficient state support to advance.

Key Takeaways

• Lavender flagged 37,000+ targets using behavioral data and social network analysis, with officers reviewing outputs in approximately 20 seconds.

• Gospel automated building target generation, creating a continuously refreshed “target bank” that enabled unprecedented strike volume.

• Fire Factory handled munitions matching and scheduling, automating the logistics of which bomb hits which target at what time.

• Where’s Daddy? tracked targets to their family homes and triggered nighttime strikes when they returned — a doctrine that knowingly put civilians at risk.

• Collateral damage thresholds were pre-authorized at up to 100 civilian deaths per low-ranking militant, according to +972 investigation sources.

• The IDF disputed the characterization of these systems as target-recommenders while not fully denying their existence or use.

• No international legal framework currently governs AI-assisted targeting at this scale or with this architecture.

• Every major military is studying this model, making the legal and ethical precedents set here likely to propagate globally.

Sources and Further Reading

+972 Magazine / Local Call: “Lavender: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza” — Yuval Abraham, April 3, 2024

+972 Magazine: “A mass assassination factory: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza” — Yuval Abraham, Meron Rapoport, November 30, 2023

The Guardian: “Israel used AI to identify targets in Gaza, intelligence sources say” — November 2023

UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs: Gaza Situation Reports, 2023-2024

UNOSAT: Building Damage Assessment, Gaza Strip, 2024

The Lancet: “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential” — July 2024

Human Rights Watch: “Gaza: Israeli Strikes Killed Families” — 2024

IDF Spokesperson: Official statement in response to +972 Magazine investigation, April 2024

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