Will Grigg's Liberty Minutes
Link to Will's Blog

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 30 2010

The Oklahoma House of Representatives has passed a measure criminalizing “membership in an unauthorized militia or the Ku Klux Klan,” reports The Oklahoman newspaper.

“In Oklahoma, we have seen the damage done by militia fanatics,” declares Democratic state Rep. Mike Shelton, referring to the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing.

Shelton neglected to mention that Timothy McVeigh, the disgruntled former federal employee executed for that crime, was never a member of a private militia. He was, however, a military veteran who learned his lethal skills during the orgy of state terrorism called the first Iraq War.

McVeigh’s un-indicted co-conspirators included several informant/provocateurs on the payroll of various federal agencies. Many of them were attached to a federally protected neo-Nazi gang called the Aryan Republican Army.

If Shelton seriously considers Timothy McVeigh the embodiment of the “gang” threat, he would have to ban military recruiters from the Sooner State. A better idea would be to stop trying to use legislation to exploit ill-informed fears and score cheap political points.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 29, 2010

Despite all of the difficulties afflicting us, American citizenship remains a cherished blessing. Yet an increasing number of U.S. citizens living abroad are being driven to repudiate their citizenship.

In the last quarter of 2009, 509 Americans renounced their citizenship – more than double the total number of expatriations that took place in 2008. Time magazine reports that hundreds of additional applications for expatriation have been filed with U.S. embassies around the world.

As Time points out, “the U.S. is the only industrialized nation that taxes its overseas citizens, subjecting them to taxation in both their country of citizenship and country of residence.”
The Regime’s implacable appetite for revenue has led to imposition of draconian and invasive financial reporting requirements regarding assets deposited by U.S. citizens in foreign banks. Washington also demands that foreign banks enforce its rules when handling the assets of Americans living abroad.

The fact that so many are willing to surrender U.S. citizenship is a potent indictment of the federal government’s utter depravity.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

 Download

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 28, 2010

Supporters of the new Arizona immigration law, which permits police to demand identity documents from anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant, insist such measures are necessary in order to deal with an unprecedented crisis.

An estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants reside in Arizona, many of them arriving during the past decade. During that same period, the rate of violent crime has fallen 19 percent, and property crime has dropped by 20 percent. Since the real estate bubble burst in 2007, immigration – both legal and illegal – has declined sharply both in Arizona and nation-wide.

We should capitalize on this trend by abolishing welfare subsidies for illegal immigrants (and for everyone else, while we’re at it). We should also call off the so-called War on Drugs, which is a price support program for Mexican narcotics cartels.

This wouldn’t solve the problem outright, but it would help reduce it to manageable size.

If the "solution" is a police state, the "problem" is one we can probably live with.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

 Download

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 27, 2010

Law-abiding residents of Chicago are forbidden to own handguns. This hasn’t prevented criminals from acquiring firearms of every size and description.

Since the beginning of the year, 113 Chicago residents have been murdered by criminals wielding firearms. That body count matches the number of U.S. troops killed so far this year in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two members of the Illinois state legislature, invoking that grim statistic, have called for the deployment of National Guard troops on the streets of Chicago in order to suppress violent crime.

"We are not talking about rolling tanks down the streets or having armed guards on each corner,” insists Rep. John Fritchley. Instead, he suggests that troops supplement some 100 special urban police units deployed to notoriously crime-prone areas.

For decades, Chicago residents have been disarmed by law, and trapped between violent criminals and corrupt police. Overt martial law may be the final act in the Second City’s unfolding tragedy – and an ominous portent for the rest of the country.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

 Download

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 26, 2010

After he pulled into the weigh station on the morning of April 22, Phoenix resident Abdon (he has declined to provide his last name) was asked to present proof of legal residence. He dutifully displayed his Arizona commercial driver’s license and supplied his Social Security number, as well as several other key pieces of personal information.

Nonetheless, he was arrested, handcuffed, and taken to a federal detention facility. His wife was interrupted at work with the demand that she go home and retrieve Abdon’s birth certificate, which proved that he had been born in Fresno, California.

“It doesn't feel like it's a good way of life, to live with fear … [and] have to carry documents around,” complained Abdon’s wife Jackie.

Unfortunately, a measure signed into law by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer on April 24 could institutionalize similar harassment and detention of American citizens suspected of being illegal immigrants.

There are many ways to address the problems created by uncontrolled immigration. Creating a police state is surely the worst and least effective option.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

 Download

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 23. 2010

An entity that can collect taxes must be called a government. The International Monetary Fund, one of the tentpoles of the UN-centered system of global governance, is demanding the power to impose global taxes for the supposed purpose of addressing the global banking crisis.

The IMF’s proposal calls for the imposition of a so-called Financial Stability Contribution (or FSC), which would be collected from all financial institutions world-wide, as well as a Financial Activity Tax (or FAT), which would be based on the profits and bonuses paid by those firms. The revenue collected by the FSC and FAT would be used to bail out weak or failing financial institutions, thereby subsidizing corruption and incompetence.

It’s important to remember that corporations do not pay taxes; they collect them from customers by raising prices or increasing fees. A global taxation scheme of this kind would require a collection mechanism of unprecedented size, power, and invasiveness – and destroy what’s left of our independence.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

 Download

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 21, 2010

James Madison regarded war to be the greatest enemy of public liberty. Karl Marx considered war the greatest ally in his quest to liquidate what he and his disciples called the “bourgeoise” – what we call the middle class.

Marx would approve of the Iraq war just as heartily as Madison would oppose it.

The war and occupation have demolished “Iraq’s college-educated and largely secular middle class,” observes Deborah Amos in the New York Review of Books. At least two million Iraqis, including nearly all of that nation’s Christian population, have been driven into exile abroad. More than two million more remain displaced within the country, driven from their homes into ever-expanding ghettos.
Amos points out that “The flight of Iraqis since the 2003 invasion ranks as the largest human displacement in the Middle East since 1948.”

Imagine how our country would look if sixty million Americans were driven from their homes. That’s what our government has done to the Iraqis.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

 Download

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 20, 2010

The Golden Rule – Do Unto Others, as You Would Have Them Do Unto You – has universal jurisdiction. It governs all people everywhere at all times, irrespective of their status or station.

A timely and tragic reminder of this principle is found in a remarkable letter written by Iraq war veterans Josh Steiber and Ethan McCord. They were prompted to write that letter by the recent release of a horrifying video showing US military personnel gunning down unarmed Iraqi civilians, and then attacking a Good Samaritan who came to the aid of the wounded. The rescuer’s children were among the victims of the second attack.

“The soldier in the video said that your husband shouldn't have brought your children to battle, but we are acknowledging our responsibility for bringing the battle to your neighborhood, and to your family,” write Steiber and McCord to the rescuer’s wife. “We did unto you what we would not want done to us.”

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Here is the Letter in its entirety:

AN OPEN LETTER OF RECONCILIATION & RESPONSIBILITY TO THE IRAQI PEOPLE

From Current and Former Members of the U.S. Military

Peace be with you.

To all of those who were injured or lost loved ones during the July 2007 Baghdad shootings depicted in the “Collateral Murder” Wikileaks video:

We write to you, your family, and your community with awareness that our words and actions can never restore your losses.

We are both soldiers who occupied your neighborhood for 14 months. Ethan McCord pulled your daughter and son from the van, and when doing so, saw the faces of his own children back home. Josh Stieber was in the same company but was not there that day, though he contributed to the your pain, and the pain of your community on many other occasions.

There is no bringing back all that was lost. What we seek is to learn from our mistakes and do everything we can to tell others of our experiences and how the people of the United States need to realize we have done and are doing to you and the people of your country. We humbly ask you what we can do to begin to repair the damage we caused.

We have been speaking to whoever will listen, telling them that what was shown in the Wikileaks video only begins to depict the suffering we have created. From our own experiences, and the experiences of other veterans we have talked to, we know that the acts depicted in this video are everyday occurrences of this war: this is the nature of how U.S.-led wars are carried out in this region.

We acknowledge our part in the deaths and injuries of your loved ones as we tell Americans what we were trained to do and what we carried out in the name of "god and country". The soldier in the video said that your husband shouldn't have brought your children to battle, but we are acknowledging our responsibility for bringing the battle to your neighborhood, and to your family. We did unto you what we would not want done to us.

More and more Americans are taking responsibility for what was done in our name. Though we have acted with cold hearts far too many times, we have not forgotten our actions towards you. Our heavy hearts still hold hope that we can restore inside our country the acknowledgment of your humanity, that we were taught to deny.

Our government may ignore you, concerned more with its public image. It has also ignored many veterans who have returned physically injured or mentally troubled by what they saw and did in your country. But the time is long overdue that we say that the value of our nation's leaders no longer represent us. Our secretary of defense may say the U.S. won't lose its reputation over this, but we stand and say that our reputation's importance pales in comparison to our common humanity.

We have asked our fellow veterans and service-members, as well as civilians both in the United States and abroad, to sign in support of this letter, and to offer their names as a testimony to our common humanity, to distance ourselves from the destructive policies of our nation's leaders, and to extend our hands to you.

With such pain, friendship might be too much to ask. Please accept our apology, our sorrow, our care, and our dedication to change from the inside out. We are doing what we can to speak out against the wars and military policies responsible for what happened to you and your loved ones. Our hearts are open to hearing how we can take any steps to support you through the pain that we have caused.

Solemnly and Sincerely,
Josh Stieber, former specialist, U.S. Army
Ethan McCord, former specialist, U.S. Army

 Download

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 19. 2010

July 4th is Independence Day, and informed Americans recognize September 17 as Constitution Day. A growing number of Americans commemorate April 19 as Patriots Day – not in memory of the 1993 federal massacre of the Branch Davidians near Waco, or the horrific Oklahoma City bombing, but because of the battles at Lexington and Concord that began our War for Independence.

The armed citizens who mustered in defense of their rights in 1775 displayed patriotism in its purest sense: They loved their country and liberties enough to defend them against the criminal aggression of the government ruling them. Understanding that the right to armed self-defense separates the citizen from the slave, they refused to be disarmed.

That act of righteous insurrection, like the independence struggle that followed, was an assertion of the most elemental right of free men – the right to say “no” to the government and compel it to honor that answer. That right should be celebrated today, and exercised much more frequently.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 16, 2010

Any human predicament can be turned into a fatal tragedy through police intervention.

On April 9, New Orleans resident Tyralyn Harris called 911 to report that her emotionally troubled husband Brian had taken too many sleeping pills. Rather than sending medical personnel, the dispatcher sent two police officers; when they arrived, one was carrying an assault rifle.

The police barged into the bedroom in which Harris had barricaded himself. Shortly thereafter they tasered Harris. When that failed to subdue the suicidal man to their satisfaction, the police opened fire, killing him. The entire confrontation lasted less than ten minutes.

Harris supposedly threatened the officers with a knife. The attorney representing the slain man’s family points out that he had a pocket knife, which is hardly a formidable weapon. The original police report says that Harris was found lying face-down, which meant that he couldn’t have posed a lethal threat to two armed policemen – that is, if they had actually intended to help.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 15, 2010

Any day that begins with armed strangers on your doorstep is likely to end badly. Shortly after sunrise on March 31, police visited the Prairie Village, Kansas home of Susan L. Stuckey to conduct a “welfare check.” Less than three hours later, she was dead.

The 47-year-old woman refused the offered help, which should have ended the matter. However, a standoff ensued, and the police escalated the incident by calling in a SWAT team. Eventually police forced their way into Stuckey’s home.

According to an eyewitness, the troubled woman, now made frantic by this invasion, was armed with a broomstick. This is why, according to the police commander, the officers were “forced” to shoot her.

The official story is that this pathetic, emotionally disturbed middle-aged woman armed with a broom somehow threatened more than a dozen armed police officers. The grim truth is that it’s never a good idea to ask armed government agents for “help.”

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

 Download

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 14, 2010

VA physicians have determined that Iraq veteran Chuck Luther is 80 percent disabled as a result of a mortar attack.

Prior to being discharged, however, Luther was tortured into signing a document permitting the military to deny him combat-related disability benefits.

After Luther requested medical aid, he was confined in an isolation room scarcely larger than a cot. Bright lights, loud heavy metal music, and constant profane abuse were used to enforce sleep deprivation. When Luther rebelled against this treatment, he was forcibly injected with an anti-psychotic drug.

All of this was done to force him to sign a document claiming that he suffered from “personality disorder,” a pre-existing condition that would nullify his benefits. Luther was also told that he would have to repay $1,500 from his re-enlistment bonus or face wage garnishment.

While more than 20,000 other combat vets have been spuriously diagnosed with “personality disorder,” Luther’s is the only known case in which the victim was tortured into signing away his benefits.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

 Download

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 13, 2010

Most of the time, a crisis provides an unwelcome opportunity for government growth. In Ohio’s Ashtabula County – the largest in the state -- the ongoing economic collapse may lead to exactly the opposite result.

The Ashtabula County Sheriff’s Office has reduced its force from 112 to 49 deputies. The jail population, which has been as high as 140 prisoners, has been cut to 30 because of a reduction in the number of available guards.

Asked how residents should deal with the cutbacks, Judge Alfred Mackey of the County Court of Common Pleas replied: “Arm themselves. Be very careful, be vigilant, get in touch with your neighbors, because we’re going to have to look for each other.”

Since law enforcement officers have no enforceable legal or civil responsibility to protect an individual citizen, residents of Ashtabula County – like the rest of us – have always been responsible for their own defense. In this, as in so much else, the economic crisis is providing a painful but useful reality check.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

 Download

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 12, 2010

Arizona resident Ted Mink paid a traffic ticket in Ohio on November 29, 2006. Owing to a bureaucratic error, Arizona’s DMV suspended Mink’s driver’s license for supposed non-payment of that citation.

Three years later, Mink was stopped by police officers in Arizona. A computer check by one officer turned up the unjustified suspension.

The officers wrote Mink a total of four citations and seized his car, leaving the driver – who had just visited the podiatrist and could walk only with painful difficulty – no way to get home. Adding gratuitous insult to their official assault, one policeman warned Mink that hitchhiking would result in his arrest.

After much trouble and expense, Mink was able to recover his vehicle and restore what are called “driving privileges.” A lawsuit he filed is working its way through the courts. Whatever the outcome, Mink’s experience reminds us that the greatest danger faced by motorists is discretionary abuse at the hands of armed strangers in government-issued costumes.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 9, 2010

Lawrence Wilkerson, who was a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, has testified under oath that the Bush administration knew that most of those held at Guantanamo Bay were innocent men and children. Yes, children: The detainees included boys as young as 12.

Most of those sent to Gitmo were scooped up by Afghan and Pakistani bounty-hunters. Yet they were described as the “worst of the worst,” detained indefinitely, and often tortured -- for purely political reasons. Releasing the innocent would have undermined the Bush administration’s credibility in carrying out the needless war in Iraq.

When the captors of Idaho native Bowe Bergdahl Idaho native Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier who has been held by the Taliban for nearly a year, released a video in which he pleads for the war to end, a NATO spokesman denounced it as a “deplorable” act of propaganda. Yet it was in the service of war propaganda that the Bush administration imprisoned and abused people it knew to be innocent.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free – and may God grant us peace.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 8, 2010

A few days after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Police Officer Michael Hunter and another officer, Sgt. Kenneth Bowen, encountered a group of unarmed residents crossing the Danziger Bridge.

After Hunter fired what he described as “warning shots,” the group scattered. Bowen grabbed an assault rifle and shot at the terrified citizens.

It quickly became apparent that the men were injured and unarmed. Yet Bowen shot the wounded as they were bleeding on the ground. When he encountered a civilian who had fled, Bowen shot him in the back with a shotgun, then kicked and stomped the man as he bled to death.

In court documents outlining these events, Hunter – who served as a police officer until he was charged on March 30 – describes a police conspiracy to cover up the murders.

Federal Judge Sarah Vance described herself as “sickened” by the “raw brutality of the shooting and craven lawlessness of the cover-up.” But this is how government operates when those in power are free to behave as they wish.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 7, 2010

Scooped up in a three-state federal raid, the members of Michigan’s Hutaree militia stand accused of “seditious conspiracy” for allegedly plotting to kill a police officer and then ambush other law enforcement personnel at the murdered man’s funeral.

The indictment against the militia offers no substantive evidence that anybody in that group did more than engage in wrong-headed, ill-considered speculative talk.

Federal authorities have admitted that the individual who offered to build bombs on behalf of the group was a federal agent. This underscores the strong possibility that the Hutaree militia – like many previous groups – was deliberately goaded by a federal provocateur into saying or doing something that could be described as a federal offense, or a conspiracy to commit the same.

Tens of thousands of informants and provocateurs are kept on the federal payroll. Their services are employed so frequently that we’re justified in the suspicion that any violent political group is a public-private partnership created for propaganda purposes by the Feds.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 5, 2010

After lying about the matter for nearly two months, the U.S. military command in Afghanistan has grudgingly admitted that U.S. Special Forces slaughtered five Afghan civilians – including two pregnant women and a teenage girl – in a February 12 nighttime raid.

The original story disseminated by officials of NATO – the UN affiliate directing the Afghan occupation – was that the women had been found “tied up, gagged and killed.”

This wasn’t true. In fact, the home was hosting a gathering of relatives to celebrate the naming of a newborn child. Among the guests who were killed in the raid were a local police chief and a prosecutor who had cooperated with the US-led occupation.

The survivors were forced to stand barefoot and unprotected in the cold for several hours while bullets were dug from the bodies of victims and other steps taken to cover up the crime.

This atrocity and cover-up provoked widespread – and understandable – hostility toward foreign troops who weren’t invited into Afghanistan and are not welcome there. Would we react any differently?

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

 Download

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 2, 2010

During the debate over the recently enacted health care legislation, media elites and other partisans of unlimited government lambasted critics who insisted that the measure would lead to rationing by way of a federal “death panel.”

At least some of those who took up that derisive chorus are now extolling the same death panel – the Independent Medicare Advisory Board – for its supposed cost-saving benefits.

New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman is enchanted with the Advisory Board, which he says “has the ability to make more or less binding judgments on saying this particular treatment doesn’t do any good medically and so we are not going to pay for it. That is actually going to save a lot of money.”

What this means, of course, is that critical care decisions would be made by bureaucrats, rather than doctors and patients – and that people will die because of those decisions, just as critics of “Obamacare” warned all along.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

 Download

Will Grigg’s Liberty Minute

April 1, 2010

The Book of Isaiah condemns those who make a person “an offender for a word.” Thanks to hate crimes laws and other spurious enactments, what Isaiah condemned is public policy.

A roadside sign near Acampo, California refers to President Obama as “niggardly,” an adjective referring to stinginess. The critical expression is unmistakably a play on a very offensive epithet, but is not itself a term of racial abuse. In this case, the sign – which contained another word play involving a vulgar expression -- criticized the Obama administration’s economic policies as inimical to small business.

The sign was taken down after it was criticized by the owner of the property on which it was displayed. According to a local news account,A “San Joaquin County Sheriff’s investigators documented the scene … and said they would be contacting federal authorities to determine whether a crime was committed.”

This would not only make someone an offender for a word, it would punish him for something he didn’t say.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.