I often make reference to “the War Party” in this space: it’s a convenient shorthand, one that evokes an image of something sinister, even Satanic, and this serves my rhetorical purposes well. But if we unpack the concept, and look for examples in real life, what we find is a little more prosaic than Satan with a sword.
Speaking of real life, I’ve been on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Freedom Watch show twice, of late (the second show has yet to be aired), and in both cases I was matched up with someone we might reasonably describe as a charter member of the War Party.
The first was Wayne Simmons, who argued that WikiLeaks is a “terrorist organization,” that only “our leaders” have the right to information about the war in Afghanistan – or any other war – and that the legal ruling that freed Daniel Ellsberg from the clutches of the federal government was a “bad decision.” Simmons is a former CIA analyst whose heroics supposedly include “fighting cyberterrorists” and “narco-terrorists,” and whose biography [.pdf] includes a stint as “President and CEO of WSS International, Ltd, a Maryland company formed to arrange loans for multinational companies in Europe, Hong Kong, and Macau. He was also involved in working with American Fortune 500 companies and providing introductions to the various foreign ministers of Kazakhstan.”
In short, Senor Simmons is using his government connections to profit from “introductions” to the kleptocrats of Kazakhstan, an oil-rich Central Asian country where the Absolute Ruler, Nursultan Nazarbayev, presides over one of the most repressive and corrupt regimes in the world. In Nazarbayev, Simmons – who claims waterboarding isn’t torture – has found a kindred soul.
These men and women are the enemies of our republic: they pose a deadly danger to the survival of the republican tradition. When I heard Simmons state – without emotion – that only “our leaders” have the right to know what WikiLeaks has revealed about the Afghan conflict, I shuddered from head to foot, as if hearing the death knell of all that America was, and, to some extent, still is.
