By Kevin Carson, Center For A Stateless Society
The state, in legal theory, is the entity that claims the sole right to define what is lawful or criminal activity in a given territory.
Perhaps just coincidentally, the state tends to judge the actions of its official agents and favored clients by a less strict standard of criminality than the one it uses to judge the actions of its subjects. And it tends to hold those it regards as enemies to a much higher standard of legality than those it regards as friends — again, perhaps just a coincidence.
The state can undertake actions that, for you or me, would mean life behind bars or even a ride on Old Sparky. But when the state does them they're not really criminal, see, because they were done for — ahem — reasons of state.
In the famous words of Richard Nixon, in the David Frost interviews, "If the President does it, that means it's not illegal."
Consider, for example, recent revelations in a document released by Wikileaks that the Texas military contractor DynCorp was facilitating parties at which Afghan police officials placed bids on the sexual services of very young dancing boys.
Now, to the U.S. government, this was no big deal. In fact the State Department did its best to cover it up. But this is the kind of thing that, if it had been done by (say) a religious cult leader in Waco, would have been sufficient cause for burning a hundred people alive ("for the children"). Had it been done in Milosevic's Serbia or Saddam's Iraq, the news would have been trumpeted with indignation from White House and State Department briefing rooms every single day as a pretext for regime change.
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