What every American HAS TO KNOW- the illegal stalking and wiretapping

[kathleen]

To: Spin...@yahoogroups.com, kshe...@calea.org, fit...@gmail.com,
patrick.f...@usdoj.gov, model...@sbcglobal.net,
jdr...@nejm.org, let...@courant.com, Jgerb...@cdc.gov,
len...@courant.com, michae...@po.state.ct.us,
con...@po.state.ct.us, executiv...@nytimes.com, managing-
edi...@nytimes.com, news...@nytimes.com, the-...@nytimes.com,
biz...@nytimes.com, for...@nytimes.com, me...@nytimes.com,
nati...@nytimes.com, dv...@cdc.gov, brigidc...@optonline.net,
tr...@hotmail.com, ubi...@courant.com, ma...@concentric.net,
camp...@courant.com, jhorn...@fff.org, thomas...@usdoj.gov,
thoma...@po.state.ct.us, kur...@washpost.com,
georg...@washpost.com, hor...@courant.com,
commissi...@po.state.ct.us, cohen...@aol.com,
FalN...@aol.com, brans...@comcast.net, vts...@comcast.net,
o...@po.state.ct.us, da...@davila-dilzer.com,
scott....@po.state.ct.us, govern...@po.state.ct.us,
attorney...@po.state.ct.us, randall...@usdoj.gov
Cc: fra...@ucia.gov, dr-ahma...@president.ir,
eugener...@washpost.com, hor...@courant.com,
bmi...@newstimes.com, tr...@hotmail.com, rast...@aol.com,
billc...@gmail.com, thomas...@usdoj.gov, amcg...@rms-law.com,
rjmu...@aol.com, paulcrai...@yahoo.com,
sidney_b...@yahoo.com, criminal...@usdoj.gov,
karla.d...@usdoj.gov, christophe...@usdoj.gov

Subject: What every American HAS TO KNOW- the illegal stalking and
wiretapping

Date: Dec 26, 2007 6:30 AM

I'll repost this to the newsgroups with all the names I sent it to,
attached,
so we can all look back and see who did nothing when it was their job
to do something
- *act* on these complaints (and not by falsely arresting me) - like
usual.

It means the DCF-wiretapping is as illegal as hell.


Kathleen M. Dickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
(I always sign my name since I am not a male and therefore not a
coward.)
---------------------------------------
http://www.reason.com/news/show/36528.html


Reason: I hate to harp on cases involving Italians, Judge, especially
since my mother's
maiden name was Guida. But let's talk about the Philly mobster Little
Nicky
Scarfo.

Napolitano: The government devised a way to insert software into
Little Nicky's
laptop computer that would record every keystroke he made. Generally,
if the government
is interested in some document in that computer that it believes is
evidence of
a crime, it can go to a federal judge, present its evidence--we call
it "probable
cause"--and get a search warrant. That wasn't good enough for the
government.
The government wanted to capture every one of Nicky's thoughts on
everything,
every single keystroke. So the government persuaded a federal
magistrate to issue
a warrant for that. Then it devised this software and persuaded the
judge to allow
the government to break into his home and make it look like a robbery.
They break
in. They put the software in his laptop. He comes home. He calls the
local police.
The FBI has not told the local police, so everybody thinks it's a
break-in.

Ultimately, of course, it develops that they have recorded all of his
keystrokes.
They now say to him, "Look at what we've got on you. Spill the beans
or
we'll spill all of this." Nicky had some pretty bright lawyers that
said,
"Hmmm, how'd you get that information? We'll spill the beans on this
new software." The government recoiled and said you can't reveal the
software
because of "national security." He eventually pleaded guilty to a low-
level
crime. It was a deal that the government cut. They didn't realize that
by doing
this to Nicky they would expose this means of law enforcement--
burglary and seizing
a lot more than any search warrant constitutionally could offer.

���� The idea of the government capturing every thought of a person,
no matter how
nefarious, is specifically condemned by the Fourth Amendment, which
says you've
got to ask for a specific item. There is no statute or case law or
constitutional
principle that would contemplate or authorize what the government did
here. And
let me tell you, if they did it to Little Nicky Scarfo, they could do
it to Little
Nicky Gillespie.

- - - - - - -

The Born-Again Individualist

Fox News Channel's Judge Andrew Napolitano on lying cops, out-of-
control government,
and his bestselling new book, Constitutional Chaos.

Nick Gillespie | March 2005 Print Edition

As the highly rated home to the likes of Abu Ghraib apologist Sean
Hannity and the
document-shredding constitutional scholar Oliver North, the Fox News
Channel is
about the last place you think of when it comes to quaint values such
as due process,
defendants' rights, and restrained government. Yet Fox is home to
television's
fiercest defender of civil liberties, Judge Andrew Napolitano, the
network's
senior judicial analyst and a regular on The Big Story With John
Gibson, Fox and
Friends, The O'Reilly Factor, and other programs. The 54-year-old
Napolitano,
the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in New Jersey history,
is an eloquent
and outspoken critic of government abuse of power, whether the topic
is widespread
"testilying" by cops, eminent domain abuse by local and state
officials,
or the unilateral detention of suspects at Guantanamo Bay.

To get a sense of the judge's commitment to principle, consider this
representative
exchange between Napolitano and Fox's Tony Snow on a December
installment of
The O'Reilly Factor.� The topic: the State Department's restrictions
on
the Hezbollah-owned Al-Manar TV.

Snow: Even Supreme Court cases that try to protect the right to say
controversial
things say that if there's direct incitement [to violence], there can
be reason
[to ban speech].

If you say to somebody, "Go kill him," and there's an anticipation
that somebody's going to do it, that's not legal.

Napolitano: This is speech, pure and simple...Here's the law. Here's
what
is legal. All�� speech is absolutely protected, no matter what it
says, when there
is time for more speech to rebut it. The First Amendment presumes that
we rational
adults, Americans, will decide what we want to watch on television and
read and
listen to.

Napolitano's introduction to political power run amok occurred in high
school,
when he worked as a summer page for Rep. Peter Rodino (D-N.J.), who
gained national
fame for his work in bringing Richard Nixon to account during
Watergate. Educated
at Princeton University and Notre Dame Law School (where he took a
particular interest
in natural law theory), the never-married Napolitano has taught at
Seton Hall, practiced
law, and served as vice president and general counsel of Hackensack
University Medical
Center. After working with Fox President Roger Ailes at CNBC, he went
over to his
current network in 1998.

He is the author of the new book Constitutional Chaos: What Happens
When the Government
Breaks Its Own Laws (Nelson Books), currently perched near the top of
Amazon's
ratings. It is a sweeping, relentless, and eminently readable
indictment of the
reckless disregard for individual rights exhibited by law enforcement,
elected officials,
and the nation's courts. As compelling, it describes Napolitano's
personal
odyssey from his days of supporting Richard Nixon to becoming a "born-
again
individualist" after eight years on the Garden State bench, which he
left in
1995. Dedicated to Thomas More, the great patron of speaking truth to
power, it
should be required reading in post-9/11 America.

A frequent presence on the nation's op-ed pages (and an occasional
contributor
to Reason Online) and an even more dynamic, animated presence in
person than on
the small screen, Napolitano sat down to talk with Editor-in-Chief
Nick Gillespie
in December at Fox News' Washington, D.C., offices.

Reason: Your book is called Constitutional Chaos. What do you mean by
that term?

Andrew P. Napolitano: The full title is Constitutional Chaos: What
Happens When
the Government Breaks Its Own Laws. We are in a fit of constitutional
chaos when
the government views constitutional guarantees as discretionary. As
Americans, we
order our lives on the belief that we have extraordinary freedoms. We
believe those
freedoms don't come from the government. They come from our humanity.
The government
doesn't give freedom; the government under the Constitution is
restrained from
interfering with it. I can basically say whatever I want about the
government. I
can basically travel wherever I want to go. I can basically worship
however I see
fit. If the government comes to the view that those freedoms are
discretionary,
no matter how noble the stated [reason to restrict them] may be, then
we're
in a state of constitutional chaos. We will not be able to order our
lives based
on freedom. We won't know who will be prosecuted or who'll just be
swept
away.

Reason: So where's the trouble?

Napolitano: Chaos in our criminal justice system comes about when the
government
acts as if it is entitled to a free pass on enforcing the laws. When
people who
work for the government, whether they're traffic cops or FBI agents,
prosecutors
or bureaucrats, act with the self-confidence that they are not obliged
to obey the
law--

Reason: Give me a quick example of that.

Napolitano: I am walking out of Mass one day in Washington Square Park
in lower
Manhattan, and a scruffy guy with some others like him comes up to me
and offers
me marijuana. I tell him to take a hike. He turns over the collar of
his jacket
and shows me his New York Police Department detective badge and says,
"Have
a nice day, Your Honor," so obviously he [and his fellow undercover
cops knew
who I was]. What were they doing? Selling drugs. Now, there's no
exception in
the statute. They wanted me to buy drugs (which don't tempt me at all,
even
though I believe that they should be legal). Their chances of hitting
on me were
none and none. They just recognized me coming out of Mass, but they
were committing
a crime in an effort to enforce the law. Selling drugs and attempting
to sell drugs
in the presence of children, mind you. When the government breaks the
law in order
to enforce the law, it perverts the process. It becomes a law unto
itself. It encourages
others to become a law unto themselves, and it becomes a precedent for
the government
to do that again and again and again.

The government routinely bribes witnesses by giving them something of
value in order
to influence the witness's testimony. It could be paying the witness's
bills--alimony,
rent, or mortgage. It could be a direct cash payment to the witness.
It could be,
and this is the most typical way, forgiving the witness a crime he has
committed.
When the government does that, it perverts the intellectual integrity
of the trial
process. It no longer becomes a search for truth. This tactic is of a
post�World
War II vintage. It is now taught in law schools as well as specialized
schools for
prosecutors that the government runs.

The government does that for two reasons. One, I think it honestly
believes, and
there's a lot of data to support this, that if you cut the head off
[of a criminal
enterprise], you're going to destroy the organization. The second is
that a
lot of prosecutors are interested in victory, not truth, and they're
interested
in a high-profile victory because it enhances their own careers and
their own standing
in the law enforcement community.

One of the most extreme examples involves Sammy "The Bull" Gravano. He
testifies against mobster John Gotti. Sammy admits to 19 murders.
Nineteen! Gotti
is charged with conspiracy to commit one. The government forgives 19
of Sammy's
in order to get him to say what the government wants him to say about
Gotti. How
do we know that he was telling the truth? His incentive to please
those who are
bribing him is an absolutely irresistible temptation to be forgiven 19
murders and
to wipe the slate clean.

Reason: That story has a really happy ending, too, right?

Napolitano: Gotti's convicted, and he dies in jail. Gravano enters and
then
leaves the witness relocation program and goes back to a life of
crime. He imports
Ecstasy from the Middle East, and he's now serving 20 years. He
couldn't
take freedom.

Reason: I hate to harp on cases involving Italians, Judge, especially
since my mother's
maiden name was Guida. But let's talk about the Philly mobster Little
Nicky
Scarfo.

Napolitano: The government devised a way to insert software into
Little Nicky's
laptop computer that would record every keystroke he made. Generally,
if the government
is interested in some document in that computer that it believes is
evidence of
a crime, it can go to a federal judge, present its evidence--we call
it "probable
cause"--and get a search warrant. That wasn't good enough for the
government.
The government wanted to capture every one of Nicky's thoughts on
everything,
every single keystroke. So the government persuaded a federal
magistrate to issue
a warrant for that. Then it devised this software and persuaded the
judge to allow
the government to break into his home and make it look like a robbery.
They break
in. They put the software in his laptop. He comes home. He calls the
local police.
The FBI has not told the local police, so everybody thinks it's a
break-in.

Ultimately, of course, it develops that they have recorded all of his
keystrokes.
They now say to him, "Look at what we've got on you. Spill the beans
or
we'll spill all of this." Nicky had some pretty bright lawyers that
said,
"Hmmm, how'd you get that information? We'll spill the beans on this
new software." The government recoiled and said you can't reveal the
software
because of "national security." He eventually pleaded guilty to a low-
level
crime. It was a deal that the government cut. They didn't realize that
by doing
this to Nicky they would expose this means of law enforcement--
burglary and seizing
a lot more than any search warrant constitutionally could offer.

���� The idea of the government capturing every thought of a person,
no matter how
nefarious, is specifically condemned by the Fourth Amendment, which
says you've
got to ask for a specific item. There is no statute or case law or
constitutional
principle that would contemplate or authorize what the government did
here. And
let me tell you, if they did it to Little Nicky Scarfo, they could do
it to Little
Nicky Gillespie.

Reason: What's your case against the USA PATRIOT Act?

Napolitano: Let's put aside all of the procedural problems with
enacting it.
Forget about the fact that there was no debate. Forget about the fact
that most
members of Congress didn't even have an opportunity to read it. It is
a direct
assault on at least three amendments to the Constitution: the First
Amendment, the
Fourth Amendment, and the Fifth Amendment. The PATRIOT Act legitimates
the notion
that if we give up certain freedoms, the government will keep us
safer. I reject
that notion from a moral and legal point of view. I also reject it
from a practical
point of view. It doesn't work. The government doesn't need our
freedoms
to keep us safer. No one--no lawyer, judge, or historian--can point to
a single
incident in American history where national security was impaired
because someone
insisted on their right to free speech or their right to privacy or
their right
to due process.

The PATRIOT Act encourages what the government calls "national
security letters"--basically,
self-written search warrants. It violates the Fourth Amendment, which
prohibits
self-written search warrants. The PATRIOT Act and two of its
predecessors, the Foreign
Intelligence Security Act of 1977 [FISA] and the Electronic Privacy
Act of 1986,
authorized the government to obtain search warrants by bypassing
[longstanding tradition
in] the courts. Today an FBI agent investigating a person need only
satisfy her
or himself that the person under investigation is a threat to national
security.
The agent doesn't have to demonstrate evidence to a judge.

FISA began the notion of search warrants on less than probable cause.
Prior to that,
if the government wanted to search a place and look for a person or a
thing, it
had to go to a judge and persuade the judge that the thing sought is
evidence of
a crime, and the person who put the thing there, whether it's a
document or
contraband, more likely than not was involved in criminal activity.
The fancy word
for this is probable cause. There's judicial intervention moderating
and tempering
the government's desire. That's specifically laid out in the Fourth
Amendment
because of the Framers' revulsion at the king's soldiers going into
their
barns and through their papers and things with what were effectively
self-written
search warrants.

FISA did not authorize self-written search warrants, but it [created
special courts
that] authorized search warrants on less than probable cause. The
theory was the
people being searched for in these cases are foreign agents. If we
find them, we
won't prosecute them because we didn't have probable cause to get the
warrant,
but we'll kick them out of the country because they're a danger to us.
Constitutionally,
that made some sense. It actually respected the rights of those
foreign agents and
anybody else who might innocently have been caught up in the
surveillance.

The '86 law took that one step further and said it's too easy for
people
electronically to transfer funds from one account to another. It's too
easy
for them to learn that we're on their trail, so we want to give the
FBI the
power to get financial information without going to the courts first.
The '86
act authorized national security letters. They were limited to
financial institutions,
and the target had to be a foreigner. Not a foreign agent anymore, but
anyone who
was foreign or anyone involved in any organized criminal activity--mob-
related activity,
drug-related activity, or some involvement with a foreign country.

Reason: And the national security letter merely says that I'm
investigating
this person on suspicion of criminal activity or that I want the
records of this
person. And because of national security reasons, you have to give me
x, y, and
z.

Napolitano: Correct. You simply serve this on the financial
institution. The financial
institution knows that they have to preserve the requested record.
Under the Electronic
Privacy Act, though, the financial institution could call the person
whose bank
account was being investigated and say: "We've got a subpoena, but
it's
unlike any subpoena we've ever seen before because it's not signed by
a
judge. We're going to honor it in 10 days. If you want to challenge
it, challenge
it." And you could still go to a judge and challenge it. It wouldn't
be
the judge who issued it because it wasn't issued by a judge, but you
could go
before a federal judge, and the government would have to justify the
so-called national
security letter.

Now comes the PATRIOT Act and the following additions: The recipient
of the request
cannot tell anyone about it, so the financial institution can't tell
you it
got this request. It must turn the information over immediately, and
the FBI is
not required any longer to demonstrate even in its own notes that the
person that
it's going after is a foreigner. It's anyone the FBI thinks may
provide
information about terrorism. The government is now permitted to
violate the Fourth
Amendment by writing its own search warrants. It is permitted to
silence the recipient
of the search warrant, which violates the First Amendment. And by this
silence,
it de facto violates the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees you due
process because
due process means you can't have anything taken from you--a document,
your wealth,
or your freedom--without a trial.

It gets worse: Two-and-a-half years after the PATRIOT Act was signed,
the Intelligence
Authorization Act of 2004 is signed. It redefines the term financial
institution.
Under the rubric of "financial institution," it has included a
tremendous
number of [businesses] that are not financial institutions, upon which
the government
can now serve self-written search warrants. These include hotels,
casinos, car dealers,
jewelry stores, real estate offices, insurance agents, lawyers,
bodegas, kiosks
in a mall where you would buy a magazine or where you would wire
money, and the
post office.

Reason: Is there any reason to believe the PATRIOT Act has helped keep
us safe from
terrorism?

Napolitano: We have not been attacked since 9/11. Who knows why? We
wiped them out
of Afghanistan. We inflicted enormous setbacks on them in Iraq. The
government can
take all the credit that it wants on the basis of the PATRIOT Act, but
the government
cannot point to a single successful prosecution for terrorist activity
where the
evidence obtained was under the PATRIOT Act--at least a successful
prosecution that
wasn't overturned eventually. The PATRIOT Act creates one new
independent crime,
the crime of speaking. The rest of the PATRIOT Act does not create
substantive crimes.
It gives tools, unconstitutional tools, to law enforcers. They have
used those tools,
but they haven't gotten a single prosecution for terrorist acts on the
basis
of it. They've gotten five prosecutions having to do with political
corruption
and drugs. One of the things that John Ashcroft gave to Congress in
return for no
debate was the sunset clause. The other was that the PATRIOT Act would
only be used
in the war on terror.

Both of those promises have been violated. We know from newspaper
accounts that
the PATRIOT Act was used to gather information on political corruption
in Las Vegas
and against drug dealers elsewhere. The Intelligence Reform Act of '04
gets
rid of one of the sunset clauses.

Reason: Let's talk about the evolution of your views. During your
college years
in the late '60s, you wore a "Bomb Hanoi" T-shirt and supported
Richard
Nixon's law and order campaign. You write that eight years on the
bench as a
superior court judge in New Jersey turned you into a "born-again
individualist,"
and Fox News Channel viewers can see you regularly argue in favor of
restrictions
on cops and law enforcement more generally. How did serving on the
bench change
you?

Napolitano: I had a realization that many [law enforcement agents]
were lying. Some
of them would acknowledge, not to the extent that I would have them
charged with
perjury, but in the wink and the nod in a conversation with them
afterwards, "Well,
we almost don't care if you found out that we kicked in the
taillight."
"We knew," they'd suggest, "from the profile--Mercedes Benz,
New York plates, African-American driver, coming off the George
Washington Bridge--it
was more likely than not that drugs were in there, and we don't even
care."
They took an oath to uphold the Constitution, and they're violating
that oath
when they violate the rights of the driver of that car.

I've always considered myself a Barry Goldwater Republican. I want the
Democrats
out of my pocketbook, and I want the Republicans out of my bedroom. I
believe that
the Constitution and the natural law mandate that the individual is
greater than
the state and that individual rights are the whole reason for our
success in the
Western world. Our cultural successes, our enjoyment of freedom, our
financial successes,
are all due to unleashing individual initiative and guarding and
protecting individual
liberty.

On many issues, I agree with conservative thought. It's not society
that causes
crimes; individuals cause crimes. I believe abortion is murder. I
believe the Second
Amendment protects an absolute right to keep and bear arms. I believe
affirmative
action based on race is an absolutely unconstitutional as well as
immoral policy.
I also believe that government is best which governs least and that
the Constitution
only gives 18 specific enumerated delegated powers to the federal
government.

I believe that Congress and the president and the Supreme Court have
grown to an
unrecognizable point, where we now have members of Congress that think
they can
solve every problem under the sun. So Sen. John McCain [R-Ariz.], for
whom I have
a lot of respect, said to [New York Yankees owner] George
Steinbrenner, "Don't
you dare pay Jason Giambi, because we heard a rumor in a newspaper
that he told
a grand jury that he once used steroids, and if you do, we're going to
make
sure you can't." What are they going to outlaw next? The speed of
Roger
Clemens' fastball because it might hurt the batters' wrists? I mean,
this
is an attitude of Potomac fever that the government thinks we can
legislate about
and solve every crime and every problem.

Reason: Let's talk about natural law and positivism. Sketch the two
camps and
why you believe what you do.

Napolitano: Scholars and lawyers and jurists and people interested in
this have
always debated what is the source of our rights. There are many, many
schools of
thought, but they basically fall into two categories. One says that
our rights come
by virtue of our humanity because we are created in God's image and
likeness.
Because God is perfectly free, he has instilled in us all the
yearnings for freedom
that we have: freedom of thought, freedom to develop one's
personality, freedom
to express oneself, freedom of movement, freedom of religion, freedom
of association,
etc. That school of thought is known as the natural law. Thomas
Jefferson, who wrote
the Declaration; James Madison, who wrote the Constitution; and
virtually all the
Founding Fathers, even though some were deists and some were atheists,
they were
to a person believers in the natural law.

�The other school of thought is sometimes called positivism, sometimes
called legal
realism. It basically says that the law is whatever the lawgiver says
it is. As
long as the lawgiver follows its own rules, whatever it says is the
law. So positivism
would say the majority in a democracy always rules. There are no
minority rights
because there are no brakes on the majority will. If the majority
wants to get rid
of the First Amendment, the majority rules; there is no First
Amendment. Therefore,
there's no protection for freedom of speech. If the majority wants to
take property
belonging to person A and give it to person B because the majority
rules, the majority
can do that because, again, there are no natural rights that would
allow person
A to keep his property against the will of the government.

The attraction to positivism is it is pure democracy. The majority
literally always
rules. Or whoever is in power always rules. Positivism didn't rear its
head
successfully, in my view, until the administration of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt,
when we took a decided step toward a centralization of power in
Washington and ultimately
toward many socialistic programs that we now have because FDR was the
ultimate positivist
who believed whatever law he signed was a good law and there were no
brakes on that.

[The FDR era] began, in my view, the dark part of American history
where the federal
government believed that it could solve any problem that was national
in scope,
irrespective of whether it was a federal problem. A federal problem is
one arising
under the 18 specific enumerated powers given to the federal
government under the
Constitution. A national problem is something that exists in New
Jersey and California
and Texas and Illinois. But just because it's national doesn't mean
it's
federal and therefore can be addressed by the federal government.

Reason: You contrast natural law with positivism, which you defined as
pure democracy,
and you said the Constitution reflects a natural law mind-set. Yet
under the Constitution,
we can repeal the First Amendment. As a natural law advocate, you
would not feel
compelled to follow that law, would you?

Napolitano: Correct.

Reason: So this helps to explain why you dedicate your book to Thomas
More.

Napolitano: I dedicate the book to St. Thomas More and cite the most
frequently
quoted passage from A Man for All Seasons. More is basically saying
everyone is
entitled to due process, rights are not discretionary; and his son-in-
law challenges
him, saying, what about the rights of the devil? And More says, I
would give the
devil his due because when they come after me, I want them to give me
my due. Every
human is entitled to the protection of the law.

Reason: You said we entered a dark period in American history.

Napolitano: We did in 1932.

Reason: But wouldn't you agree that if we're talking about freedom of
expression,
people are much freer to express themselves now than they were in
1932? With or
without the PATRIOT Act. For cultural and technological reasons, you
can say whatever
you want in a wider variety of contexts. You can disseminate
information and points
of view today that were unimaginable in 1932, a year in which you
couldn't even
legally publish Ulysses or Lady Chatterley's Lover. Something similar
goes for
lifestyle, too, and other parts of society.

Napolitano: In terms of the government control of our lives, in terms
of the percentage
of our income that the government takes from us, in terms of the types
and the areas
of human behavior we let the government regulate, we are infinitely
less free. And
as Jefferson once said, it is in the natural order of things that the
government
should be greater and human
liberty lesser.

Women have much more freedom. African Americans have much more
freedom. Gays have
much more freedom. The discrimination that was rampant, and often
caused by the
government, 40 or 50 or 60 years ago--there's been progress in those
areas.
But the destruction of federalism, the centralization of power in
Washington, the
belief that Washington can regulate all aspects of our lives will, if
not checked,
lead us to a totalitarian form of government. Freedom is the power and
ability to
obey your own free will and conscience rather than the free wills and
consciences
of others.

Reason: You said abortion is murder. Should it be regulated by the
state or should
it be prohibited by the state?

Napolitano: Absolutely it should be prohibited, just the way all
unjust killings
are prohibited.

Reason: Should doctors go to prison as murderers?

Napolitano: Yes.

Reason: First-degree murder?

Napolitano: Yes.

Reason: Should they get the death penalty--

Napolitano: I don't believe that the state has the moral authority to
execute,
so I don't believe in the death penalty.

Reason: But you do think that doctors who perform abortions should be
put in jail
as murderers? Every bit as much as Scott Peterson?

Napolitano: Yes. By a state government, not by the federal government,
because the
Constitution doesn't authorize the federal government to prosecute
murderers.
Roe v. Wade is wrong because there's isn't a scintilla in the
Constitution
or its history to justify federal legislation on abortion. It would
then be up to
the state of Kansas to allow it and Pennsylvania not to allow it.

Reason: How do you feel about Bush's likely appointments to the
Supreme Court?

Napolitano: I am optimistic about President Bush's appointments
because I agree
with some of the deep libertarian strains of his favorite justice,
Justice Scalia.
When the government told the court earlier this year that the
president could lock
up an American and throw away the key, that the military could take
people to Guantanamo
Bay and do what it wanted with them there because the Constitution
didn't apply,
the Court rejected those notions by a vote of 8 to 1. The strongest
pro-liberty
argument, the strongest argument against this extraconstitutional
behavior, was
written by the most conservative justice, Antonin Scalia. So there is
hope, I think,
that people of like mind [will be appointed to] the Court.

Reason: Who would you like to see on the Supreme Court?

Napolitano: I would like to see people who believe that the
Constitution means what
it says and take rights seriously. Jay Michael Luttig is a judge in
the United States
Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, a former clerk for Justice
Scalia. He believes
the Fourth Amendment means what it says; the First Amendment means
what it says.

Reason: How do you feel about Alberto Gonzales as attorney general?

Napolitano: He will be the first attorney general in American history,
publicly,
to be in favor of torture. The others may have been in favor of it
privately, but
Al Gonzales is in favor of it publicly. This is an untenable position
to take.

Reason: What's your wish list for ending constitutional chaos?

Napolitano: First thing we should do is abolish the 16th Amendment.
That would make
the income tax unconstitutional, which is what it was until we enacted
the 16th
Amendment (even though we had two income taxes before then). That of
course would
starve much of the federal government out of existence.

Reason: Well, that's not going to happen.

Napolitano: Not in your lifetime or mine, but it's on my wish list. I
would
change the third word of the Constitution from people to states
because it was the
states, not the people, who enacted the Constitution. And I would put
the word expressly
back in the 10th Amendment [before delegated], which is where it was
until it was
removed by a political maneuver before the final document was sent to
the states
for ratification. I would define the word regulate in the Interstate
Commerce Clause
in its true meaning, which is "to make regular," not to control every
aspect of interstate commerce. In my world, the federal government
would be dependent
upon the states and excise taxes for its financial wherewithal. It
would be limited
in its scope to the 18 powers given to it by the Constitution. The
states would
legislate for the health, safety, welfare, and morality of the people.
All government
would be required to respect the natural rights of everyone.

Reason: Besides Thomas More, who are your heroes?

Napolitano: I am a great admirer of the work of [Austrian economist]
Ludwig von
Mises. He was a true believer that the engine of freedom will make us
safer, happier,
more culturally admirable, and ultimately give us the freedom to go to
heaven. I
am a greater admirer of St. Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, the founder
of Opus Dei.
He taught that any human being by his personal behavior can aspire to
sainthood.

Reason: What's the connection between your Catholicism and your
politics? The
church contributed hugely to the development of natural law theory.
But historically,
the church has also often been an extremely repressive, anti-
democratic, anti-individualistic
organization.

Napolitano: The Catholic Church teaches that every human life is of
potentially
infinite value, that it can be saved up to the moment of death, and
that each soul
could present everlasting and eternal glory to God, no matter how evil
the person
appears. That's about as strong a statement of the primacy of the
individual
over the state as you could imagine.�
Send this article to:

* Del.icio.us
* Digg
* Reddit