Pro Libertate

Brotherhood of Plunder: Snapshots of America's Criminal Oligarchy

2009-11-19T08:40:00.000-08:00

"Twisted sense of entitlement": Police extortionist David M. Cohen (left), and his accessory, former Chief Manuel Cachopa (below, right).

David Cohen, a nebbishy, balding fellow from Stoughton, Massachusetts, seemed poorly cast as a loan shark.

Unlike Chili Palmer, the mob debt collector created by Elmore Leonard (and played on screen by John Travolta), Cohen couldn't pry open the bank accounts of recalcitrant debtors simply by fixing them with a steely gaze and hissing, "Look at me."

Cohen was dispatched by a friend named Peter Marinilli to collect $9,000 from a businessman named Timothy Hills. Frustrated when his demand didn't reduce Hills to a puddle of compliant jello, Cohen -- a sergeant in the Staughton Police Department -- tried a different approach: He placed Hills under arrest, handcuffed him, and detained him until the businessman signed a promissory note to Marinilli.

Hills had received $10,000 from Marinilli as an investment in a business deal, and he later admitted in court that he had taken the money under false pretenses. During the same trial, one of Hills' former employees described him as chronically dishonest and entirely unreliable -- in short, a terrible credit risk.

Given that history it seems odd that Cohen had Hills sign a promissory note, a document that most likely wouldn't have been necessary had the debt to Marinilli been legally enforceable. Cohen, a part-time attorney in addition to being a police sergeant, must have understood that the debt couldn't be collected without a legally valid contract.

What Cohen seems to have forgotten is that forcing a hostage to sign a contract at gunpoint is extortion.

Hills immediately filed a complaints against Cohen with the Staughton Police Department, the Board of Bar Overseers and the Massachusetts Attorney General.

This prompted an investigation of Cohen by Lt. Michael Blount of the department's internal affairs unit. Blount's inquiry didn't sit well with Manuel J. Cachopa, who at the time was Chief of the Staughton Police.

"Why are you trying to f**k this officer?" Cachopa asked Blount on one occasion.

Cachopa refused to cooperate with the investigation in any way, demanding that Blount simply "get rid" of it.

All of this took place between 2002 and 2004. During that period, Cachopa was demoted to Lieutenant after the town selectmen refused to renew his contract as Chief. Two of Cachopa's critics were removed in a recall election, and Cachopa was reinstated -- just in time to be hit with a felony indictment for being an accessory after the fact to Cohen's extortion attempt.

Up to this point, the damage done by this sordid business was limited to those directly involved in a dubious business venture and a handful of less-than-upright police officers. However, when Cachopa was indicted, the local taxpayers were cut in for a share of misery: Cachopa was placed on "administrative leave" from 2005 until his conviction in 2009, which means that he collected his full annual salary of $139,000 for doing nothing while another paid official carried out the duties of Police Chief.

Cohen was convicted on four criminal counts and sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison. Cachopa was found guilty of acting as an accessory to extortion and given three years' probation, in addition to 1,000 hours of community service. Cachopa could have received a seven-year prison sentence.

Despite their criminal convictions, Cohen and Cachopa insist that they are entitled to nearly three-quarters of a million dollars from the long-suffering taxpayers of Staughton, Massachusetts -- most of it going to pay the legal bills they ran up during their own criminal trials.

Through his attorney, David Cohen -- who was released from prison while appealing his conviction (a consideration not many convicted extortionists receive) -- has filed a demand for at least $113,000, a sum that includes "87 accrued vacation days, 125 unused sick days, 144 hours of compensation time accrued for not using sick time, 152 hours of supervisor comp time, 481 hours for court appearances related to his criminal case, 280 hours of overtime to prepare for his case, and least 61 percent education incentive pay for 2007, and 61 percent for accrued stipends and benefits," reports the Brockton, Massachusetts Enterprise-News.

Not content with collecting $600,000 in salary and benefits during his four-year "administrative leave," Cachopa is now demanding $549,000 to pay his legal bills, and $55,978 in vacation and sick pay. The Enterprise-News editorially lambasted Cachopa for his "twisted sense of entitlement" while pointing out that "the ill-considered contract language" agreed to by the City of Staughton "is loose enough to give his lawyers a fighting chance in court."

"This is a union contract that clearly and unequivocally states that if charged with a criminal offense or sued, the town indemnifies you," insists Kevin Reddington, a member of Cachopa's legal team.

A much better arrangement would have been to put Cachopa on unpaid leave and, in the event he was cleared of charges, "give him back pay and benefits," observed the Enterprise-News. "Instead, Cachopa was on extended vacation, able to collect his annual salary of $139,000 year after year while the town struggled to keep its financial head above water." Assuming that Cachopa and Cohen are able to force the town to make good on the terms of their union contracts, the resulting financial undertow may drag Staughton down for good.

The "twisted sense of entitlement" displayed by those corrupt officers is entirely typical of the "public servant" class nation-wide. Yes, this self-serving arrogance is particularly acute among police, firefighters and other "public safety" employees, who -- statistical evidence to the contrary notwithstanding -- describe their jobs as so fraught with peril and stress that they shorten the life expectancy of those who somehow manage to live until retirement. But similar self-exalting attitudes suffuse government employees in every field that is blighted by the state's influence.

As Steven Greenhut of the Orange County Register documents in his infuriating new book Plunder! How Public Employee Unions are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives, and Bankrupting the Nation, this pervasive sense of entitlement has been translated into financial burdens that are suffocating local economies.

During the past several decades, writes Greenhut, "politicians have been dramatically increasing the pay and especially the benefits for all categories of government workers [sic; I prefer the term "government employees" -- WNG]. The pay structure also has a sort of multiplier effect. Because they receive such generous pensions, public-safety workers are encouraged to retire at an early age, thus leading to `shortages' in law enforcement in particular. The taxpayer gets hammered twice, as he pays full freight for retired employees and then has to pay for a full-time replacement."

The coprophagous grin of an impenitent parasite: Meet Glenn Goss, the pension-spiking millionaire police chief of Highland Beach, Florida. Remember that smile next time you look at your 401(k).

Chief Cachopa's case, in which he received a full salary for four years after being suspended following his criminal indictment, is a particularly obnoxious variation on the familiar scheme described by Greenhut. Another version that involves what has to be considered criminal fraud is the case of Glenn Goss, the Police Chief in Highland Beach, Florida.

In 2005, the same year Cachopa began his all-expenses-paid vacation, Goss retired from his $90,000-a-year job as a police commander in Delray Beach. At the age of 42 he began drawing a $65,000 annual pension -- guaranteed for life, indexed to inflation, and including full health benefits. Goss draws that pension in spite of the fact that he immediately took a better-paying job as Chief of the Highland Beach Police Department.

At age 47, this "poor, honest cop" is now a tax-fed millionaire -- merely one of countless others, Greenhut points out. With increasing frequency, government employees "are made instant millionaires just for taking a job and sticking with it over their career," notes Greenhut. "This certainly is easier than taking the more traditional American route to becoming a millionaire, through risk-taking and entrepreneurship."

Government employment rewards creative deviousness, rather than risk-taking and productivity. Former Fullerton, California Mayor Mike Clesceri presents a splendid case study.

In addition to being mayor -- a part-time job -- Clesceri worked as an investigator for the district attorney. When he had a falling-out with his boss, Clesceri filed for a disability pension of $58,000 (complete with COLA), claiming that he was crippled by Barrett's Esophagus, a condition related to acid reflux.

While waiting for his disability pension to kick in, Clesceri "pursued a local police chief's job and remained on the job as mayor and ran a tough re-election campaign," recalls Greenhut. "He even had time to have his brother-in-law attorney send threatening letters to members of the community who commented on the absurdity of his disability pension."

"Pension-spiking" scams of this variety are plentiful in California, a state being driven into financial ruin by its rampant "public employee" unions. Thanks to the terms of their union-negotiated contracts, many firefighters and police (particularly in the upper echelons) are afflicted with "Chief's Disease" -- a mysterious malady that causes those who suffer from its multifarious symptoms to go on disability pay during their final year of employment.

As the Los Angeles Daily News pointed out, this means that the final year's salary is tax-free, which "creates an artificial boost in take-home pay, which is how the final pensions are tabulated. The [spurious] injury also paves the way for a disability retirement with half the income being tax-free. The bottom line is more money for firefighters [as well as police] during their lifetime pension at the expense of a public that will be lucky to retire on a paltry Social Security check."

Often several scams will operate in synergy, resulting in huge profits for tax-feeders and a much larger burden for the productive. For example: A lucrative new pension plan for Orange County deputy sheriffs resulted in a wave of early retirements. At the same time, the Sheriff's Office, in compliance with union demands, went to a three-day "work" week. The Orange County Register described the predictable results: "After enhanced pensions led to a large number of retirements, deputies with four days a week off were happy to fill up the empty shifts with overtime."

Cops as Robbers: Remember Fahrenheit 451, in which the "Firemen" were sent to start fires? Police in Detroit today serve a similar function, stealing cars and other assets in order to make up for tax "shortfalls."

Orange County employs more than one hundred deputy sheriffs. Nearly all of them make more than $100,000 a year, despite the fact that "culture and discipline problems" are rampant in the department.

Scams of this kind are more plentiful in California than in some other states, but as Greenhut demonstrates, few if any municipalities have been spared from the ravages of omnivorous public employee interest groups.

"At all levels, state and local government employment grew by 13 percent across the United States from 1994 to 2004," he writes. During the past half-century, the country's population has grown 115 percent. During the same period, the sub-population of tax-feeders increased by 492 percent. The federal government is now the nation's largest single employer.

"I fear that the nation has reached critical mass -- the number of government employees at every level has gotten so high that it is politically impossible to roll back the bureaucracy and rein in the costs," Greenhut observes. Be that as it may, he suggests several very sensible reforms, among them the quite sensible proposal that "public employee" unions be banned.

Summoning the political will to enact such measures will be difficult, however, in an electorate long inured to the repellent notion that it's proper to live at the expense of others. This suggests that the parasite class will continue to propagate itself until it entirely kills its host economy. And then -- what...?

Robbed by the Police: Detroit resident Jacque Sutton, who was never charged with a crime, had to pay $1,000 to recover his 1989 Ford Mustang after it was stolen ("forfeited") by the police. "It's like legalized stealing," he complains. No, it is "legalized" stealing.

Michigan offers a glimpse of what may become a common future. In 2006, Greenhut notes, total government employment in Michigan exceeded the number of manufacturing employees for the first time in recorded history. Already teetering on the edge of the economic abyss in 2006, Michigan -- particularly Detroit and its immediate environs -- is now plummeting rapidly into the bottomless pit of a depression.

In Detroit, municipal authorities, led by the local police, have dealt with the downturn by resorting to undisguised theft. The Detroit News reports: "Local law enforcement agencies are raising millions of dollars by seizing private property suspected in crimes, but often without charges being filed -- and sometimes even when authorities admit no offense was committed."

Between 2003 and 2007, Romulus, Michigan witnessed a 118 percent increase in forfeiture revenues (the theft, by police, of money and property from people not charged with criminal offenses) despite the fact that there has not been a corresponding increase in criminal activity. Well, make that unofficial criminal activity. One township, Novi, went from $12,278 in 2003 to $2.7 million in 2007. The Wayne County Sheriff's Office netted $8.69 million in 2007, four times the haul its banditti seized in 2001.

Sgt. Dave Schreiner, who is in charge of Canton Township's forfeiture unit -- which is to say that he's the kingpin of that community's most notorious criminal gang -- is astonishingly candid: "Police departments right now are looking for ways to generate revenue, and forfeiture is a way t offset the costs of doing business.... You'll find that departments are doing more forfeitures than they used to because they've got to -- they're running out of money and they've got to find it somewhere."

When it can afford to, the Brotherhood of Plunder prefers to shroud its criminality in the sanctimonious argot of "public service." That veil is being lifted, and the Robber State is revealing itself in the full malevolence of its criminal corruption.

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Leviathan's Orphans

2009-11-16T08:45:00.000-08:00

A mother first: Alexis Hutchinson with her 11-month-old son Kamani (left); below, Kamani with his grandmother, Angelique Hughes. (Oakland Tribune photos.)

Her son needs her at home. The Empire demands her services in its war on Afghanistan. Since nobody is able to provide the child with a suitable home while she's away, the mother quite sensibly decided that her first duty was to her child.

So Alexis Hutchinson of Oakland, California, an Army Specialist -- and, what's infinitely more important, a single mother to her11-month-old son, Kamani -- may wind up in prison. Her son, who was kidnapped and briefly detained by Child "Protective" Services -- may wind up in foster care.

Alexis, who (unfortunately) is not a Conscientious Objector and is willing to be deployed abroad, initially left her toddler with her mother Angelique, who was already tending to a sick mother and sister, and caring for a physically handicapped daughter. Thus it's not surprising that Angelique found it impossible to provide adequate care for Kamani as well. So Alexis was left, once again, with the choice of either abandoning her child, or going AWOL.

To her considerable credit, Alexis chose to defy her orders and look after her child.

As Lew Rockwell of the Ludwig von Mises Institute might put it: This is a dilemma only because soldiers in the U.S. Government's "professional" military, unlike employees in practically any other field of work, aren't permitted to change jobs at will.

It's also useful to remember that the employment contract signed by those who enlist in the imperial military is binding only to one party -- the employee -- and can be revised by the employer at will. Alexis' predicament resulted from a moment of bureaucratic whimsy: Initially told that she would be granted an extension to make suitable child care arrangements, she was told at the last moment that this decision had been rescinded and that she was to report for deployment irrespective of her child's needs.

In their demented drive to regiment the world, those at the helm of the all-devouring Leviathan State ruling our country aren't content merely to destroy families in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. In the service of their murderous designs they're more than willing to rip them apart here on the homefront as well.

Alexis Hutchinson is just one of many enlisted mothers -- most of whom joined the military out of economic desperation -- who have seen their families become collateral damage in the Empire's "Long War."

According to a report compiled by the group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, more than 30,000 single mothers have been deployed to those countries since 2001. In what it probably regards as a gesture of sacrificial generosity, the Army permits new mothers to spend four months with their newborn children before returning to the business of killing other peoples' children abroad.

Many enlisted mothers become single parents due to the Army: The divorce rate for female soldiers is triple that experienced by male enlistees. The pressures are particularly acute for those families in which both parents are in the military.

In 1990, shortly before the first phase of the endless Iraq War began, there were an estimated 65,000 single parents in the U.S. military, and -- according to Newsweek -- an even larger number of two-soldier families. By 1998, two-soldier "service couples" accounted for an estimated 140,000 active-duty military personnel.

Most of the two-soldier married couples appear to be part of the National Guard and Reserves, which are bearing the brunt of the prolonged deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. This wasn't the case in either Vietnam or the 1991 Gulf War.

What's really important: With her husband already deployed to Iraq, Army Spec. Simone Holcomb, mother of a blended family of seven children, refused a second tour because it would have meant the destruction of their family.

In late 2003, Army Spec. Simone Holcomb of Colorado Springs, who had already served a tour in Iraq, learned that she was to be deployed there again, this time with her husband Vaughn serving in the war zone as well.

This created an impossible situation for the couple's seven children, two of whom were the husband's by way of a previous marriage.

With both parents scheduled to be sent abroad, Vaughn Holcomb's ex-wife filed for custody of his children. If both Vaughn and Simone obeyed their deployment orders, they would lose not just those two children -- which would be bad enough, of course -- but all of their children, who would be declared wards of the state because of child abandonment.

As Simone's attorney Giorgio Ra'Shadd pointed out, "when mom gets on the plane [for Iraq], they'll be waving goodbye, turning around, and going into the hands of Colorado state troopers or Denver police because there's no one to care for them."

Accordingly, Holcomb -- in order to defend her children from be evil intentions of the government that employed her -- went AWOL. Owing chiefly to PR calculations, the Pentagon backed down, reassigning the medic to stateside duty at Ft. Carson.

Holcomb's dilemma was the product of a policy decision made more than a decade earlier.

In 1992, the first Bush administration, immediately after what it depicted as an unqualified victory, "appointed a commission to study the issue of deploying parents, especially mothers, to war zones," reported the March 9, 2005 Sacramento Bee. "The panel recommended that single parents with preschool-age children not be allowed to deploy in times of armed conflict, and that in two-soldier families, only one of the parents be allowed to go overseas."

That recommendation, notes the Bee, was defeated by the Bush 41 administration:

"In a letter to congressional leaders, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell said that barring single parents, or one parent in a military couple, from war zones would `weaken our combat capability by removing key personnel.... It's important for us to remember that what we are asked to do here in the Department of Defense is to defend the nation. The only reason we exist is to be prepared to fight and win wars. We're not a social welfare agency.'"

Actually, a good case can be made for the proposition that the U.S. military is the nation's largest social welfare agency.

A little more than a decade ago, Allan Carlson of the Howard Center on the Family, Religion, and Society pointed out that each day the military bureaucracy is responsible for the care of "some 200,000 children in some 800 centers, making the Pentagon the nation's largest child care provider."

In words that would thrill any totalitarian social engineer, Maj. Gen. John G. Meyer, Jr., former Commanding General of the U.S. Army's Community and Family Support Center, describes the transaction at the center of the military's child care philosophy: "Supporting the care and development of children is a responsibility the military readily assumes in exchange for the loyalty of their parents in uniform."

Appropriately, Meyer spoke those words in the presence of then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, perhaps the most famous exponent of the view that children are best raised by the State and only incidentally the concern of their parents. As Dr. Carlson points out, the "collectivist tone" of Pentagon rhetoric regarding child care is entirely appropriate:

"Since the first Army Family Action Plan, issued ominously in 1984, the focus has been on dissolving real, autonomous families in the DOD's employ and blending the human parts into `The Total Army Family.' This vaguely totalitarian notion actually assumes the primacy of post-family or non-family bonds. As one Army document explains: `We want soldiers, of all ranks, feeling they belong to a " family".... Building the "family" requires a professional sensitivity toward and caring for one another.'"

As is the case with any other collectivist welfare state, the Total Army Family -- with the State acting as both "breadwinner" and "caregiver" -- is designed to abet early marriage, early divorce, and illegitimacy. An estimated 40 percent of military pregnancies involve unmarried personnel; single mothers qualify for superior housing and medical benefits.

While "it is true that our military social engineers have not quite yet achieved the grand sweep of the Lebensborn program of National Socialist Germany, where state child-care workers tenderly raise the illegitimate offspring of SS troopers," they "have achieved something very close to the family policy goals of Swedish socialism," comments Dr. Carlson. The military has operated as an instrument of social change, "in particular ... eradicating belief in differences between the sexes, and building new family forms under complete control of the state."

Just ten years ago, social conservatives loudly declaimed against putting women into combat roles. Now little if any protest comes from that quarter as single mothers are dispatched to the front, and children are left without parents as "service couples" are sent on simultaneous deployments abroad.

Casualties of a needless war: Jessica Lynch (l.) stands next to single mother Lori Piestewa, who was killed in the ambush in which Lynch was injured and taken prisoner. Below, Piestewa's father Terry holds her daughter Carla (center of photo) while they, with her son Brandon (f.g.) take part in a 2004 memorial.

One of the first casualties of the current Iraq conflict was Private First Class Lori Piestewa, a single mother who was driving the Humvee that was ambushed by Iraqi troops.

Although nowhere near as famous as the woman sitting next to her at the time of the ambush -- Jessica Lynch -- Piestewa meant the world to Brandon and Carla, the two small children she left with their grandmother at Arizona's Hopi Indian reservation.

"Grandma, my mom has been in heaven too long," Carla, at the time three years of age, said a few weeks after her mother was killed. "It's time for her to come home."

With the possible exception of the Battle of Midway, nobody presently among the living can recall a U.S. military conflict that involved the actual defense of the united States. It's difficult to see how a government -- how a country -- capable of sending mothers into combat zones could be considered worthy of defense.

In May 1997, I spent the better part of a week at Ft. Bragg in the company of several friends who were active-duty Green Berets. During my first evening there I stayed up until an obscenely late hour listening as my friends commiserated with each other over the institutional insanity they dealt with every day. One of them made a passing reference to dealing with a female military bureaucrat "in a maternity BDU."

It was my misfortune to be drinking something when mention was made of a "maternity BDU," and the term induced an explosive spit-take.

The following morning I tagged along with one of my friends to an auditorium to attend an "Equal Opportunity" (read: affirmative action) lecture. Midway through that tedious event, a young woman about three rows in front of us wearing what appeared to be a standard-issue BDU stood up and left, apparently in search of the rest room. As she passed I noticed that she was visibly gravid -- easily six or seven months along -- and that her attire had been designed to accommodate the condition of impending motherhood.

Nonplussed, I turned to my friend.

"Is that a maternity BDU?" I asked, astonishment dripping from every syllable. After he wearily nodded in affirmation, I exclaimed, "I thought you made that up."

My friend assured me that his imagination wasn't sufficiently perverse to invent such a thing. And my imagination is inadequate to the task of devising an explanation for the fact that there are people in this country still willing to fight on behalf of the government that rules us.

Be sure to listen to Pro Libertate Radio each weeknight from 6:00-7:00 Mountain Time (7:00-8:00 Central) on the Liberty News Radio Network.

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Dum spiro, pugno!

Get Your Kids Fit For Slaughter!

2009-11-12T18:00:00.000-08:00

Although ancient Sparta was not without its virtues -- among them courage, loyalty, and discipline -- it wasn't a free society in any sense. It was said that Sparta was always either at war or preparing for war, and those preparations began at the earliest possible age.

The Spartan state made a proprietary claim on each child shortly after he was born. The infant would be given a physical examination for defects that would impair his ability to serve as a soldier. If such imperfections were found, Plutarch informs us, the child would be cast off a cliff to his death. If the child passed that inspection he would soon be bonded to an older warrior who would raise him as the state's child and prepare him to fight the state's wars.

While Sparta's virtues are difficult to find in contemporary America, some of its vices are well-represented. For instance, our ruling elite has arranged things in such a way that they are always sending Americans to war, or searching for new enemies to justify the permanent warfare state.

This requires a steady and growing supply of trigger-pullers and coffin-stuffers, and the people who preside over the bipartisan warfare state are worried that American kids simply aren't fit for slaughter.

Mission: Readiness -- Military Leaders for Kids, a new Pentagon-aligned pressure group, recently published a report entitled Ready, Willing, and Unable to Serve. That document invites us to be horrified by the Pentagon's claim that "75 percent of Americans 17 to 24-years-old are ineligible to serve in our military," generally because of "inadequate education, a criminal background, or excess weight."

That is to say: Our kids are supposedly too fat and stupid to serve as IED-bait on some distant battlefield.

Speaking on behalf of the warfare state, Mission: Readiness demands a dramatic enhancement of the welfare state in the form of expanded federal funding for "quality early childhood education" programs.

"We must invest now in the next generation to preserve our nation's security, freedom, and opportunity," the group insists in the boilerplate language of Beltway lobbyists. "We call on all policymakers to ensure America's national security by supporting interventions that will prepare young people for a life of military service and productive citizenship" --

Wait a minute. The objective here is to create a uniform national effort intended to "prepare young people for a life of military service"?

To these nostrils that phrase smells like an oblique warning that the Regime is preparing to re-impose military slavery (more commonly called the draft). That impression is buttressed by the Starship Troopers-style rhetoric equating government-mandated "service" with "citizenship."

***

***

It is toward the end of raising an improved quality of cannon fodder that Mission:Readiness is demanding a wraparound welfare state -- call it "Sparta Lite" -- in which the preparation for military service would begin in the cradle. And the retired military officials who compose the organization's membership -- a veritable stockyard of War Pigs -- are already drawing up plans for children not yet old enough to crawl.

"Our national security in the year 2030 is absolutely dependent upon what is going on in pre-kindergarten today," declares Rear Admiral James Barnett, U.S. Navy (Ret.). That remark contains a veiled by unmistakable proprietary claim on all American children, including mine.

Those of us who have children look on each of them as a unique blessing from God to be loved, taught, and protected. People like Barnett look on them as fungible "national security" assets to be squandered in whatever idiotic wars our rulers arrange. They also see parents as a potential obstacle to achievement of their "national security" objectives; this was demonstrated by a recent Pentagon recruiting campaign intended to overcome parental opposition to enlistment.

If we could see things as they really are, this is how we would perceive the results of successful military recruitment.

"If members of Congress, governors, and state legislators act now to ramp up both the quantity and quality of early education programs, they can count on strong support from the retired generals of Mission: Readiness," promises the group's report.

This most likely foreshadows a pressure campaign in which retired flag and star officers will be deployed nation-wide to act as lobbyists for the welfare bureaucracy and government education racket.

Aristotle famously warned that children raised by "society" are equally neglected by everybody. By collectivizing responsibility for the upbringing of children, the welfare state abets that kind of neglect.

It took trillions of dollars spent on the welfare system and government school establishment to bring about the dismal social conditions lamented by Mission: Readiness. Rather than recommending a radically different approach, the group demands that the government spend additional sums to expand the same policies that produced the disaster.

I'm cynical enough to believe that the people behind that campaign are very much aware that their policy prescriptions would exacerbate many of the problems they describe, and that they intend to capitalize on the resulting social damage. Where the needs of the military-industrial complex are concerned, that approach has worked very well.

Of the fighting men sent into Iraq in 2003, Evan Wright writes the following in his recent book Generation Kill:

"These young men represent what is more or less America's first generation of disposable children. More than half of the guys in the platoon [the second platoon of the Bravo Company of the Marine Corps' First Recon Battalion, with which Wright was embedded] come from broken homes and were raised by absentee, single, working parents. Many are on more intimate terms with video games, reality TV shows and Internet porn than they are with their own parents."

"We're like America's little pit bull," commented one Marine to Wright. "They beat it, starve it, mistreat it, and once in a while they let it out to attack somebody." Perhaps this is why the crop of warfighters harvested from our current culture displays far fewer compunctions about killing, even in a war most of them admit was begun for palpably false reasons.

"In World War II, when Marines hit the beaches, a surprisingly high percentage of them didn't fire their weapons, even when faced with direct enemy contact," one lieutenant informed Wright. "Not these guys. Did you see what they did to that town? They f*****g destroyed it. These guys have no problem with killing."

The military is the state's apparatus of murder and property destruction. The welfare state is an instrument of social demolition. They really are complimentary sides of the same debased coin.

Obiter Dicta

I've been traveling of late, which helps explain the week-long delay in publishing a new post. I appreciate your patience.

Yesterday (November 11), my family played host to a film crew from CNN International, which was conducting interviews and shooting footage for a story about the Christian Exodus movement, with which I'm peripherally involved. The piece should air sometime in January or February; I promise that I'll provide details as they become available.

On the subject of Sparta's despotic regime: One of the very first things done by Lycurgus, the founder of the proto-fascist Spartan state, was to criminalize the use of gold and silver and to issue worthless, brittle iron slugs for use as legal tender. Tyrants really are a predictable lot, aren't they?

Be sure to tune in for Pro Libertate Radio each weeknight from 6:00-7:00 Mountain Time (7:00-8:00 Central) on the Liberty News Radio Network.

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Dum spiro, pugno!

Why The Innocent Flee From The Police

2009-11-05T00:00:00.000-08:00

"Why did he run?" This question thrusts itself upon us every time an unarmed or otherwise harmless person is gunned down while fleeing from police.

Often that inquiry takes the form that assumes the guilt of the victim: "If he did nothing wrong, why did he run?" It's also common for that second version to contort itself into a nicely circular argument: "Well, he ran, and resisting arrest is a crime, so obviously he got what was coming to him."

For reasons unclear to a mind not enthralled by statist assumptions, most people simply assume that both reason and morality dictate an unqualified duty to surrender without cavil or complaint whenever armed, violence-prone strangers in peculiar government-issued garb seek to restrain one of us.

This is why police are trained to interpret any hesitation, reluctance to cooperate, inhospitable body language, or verbal expression of resentment as "resisting arrest" and thus a justification for the use of "pain compliance" -- or even lethal force. Police and their apologists likewise insist -- contrary to both law and judicial precedent -- that there is no right to resist even a clearly unwarranted or abusive arrest, or even for a citizen to take steps to protect himself when he's on the receiving end of unjustified physical violence from police.

Police are constantly catechized about the dangers they encounter when they conduct traffic stops or detain people on the street. Why, the random "civilian" they encounter might be armed, trained in the use of weapons, and prepared to use violence without warning! This is to say that this hypothetical "civilian" would be .... just like the typical police officer.

"Can we assault and brutalize innocent people with impunity? Yes We Can!"

"Officer safety" must be paramount in such encounters, we are told. If a policeman is just a bit too quick to fire up the Taser or pull the trigger, it's because he has a dangerous and stressful job.

Are we therefore to assume that encounters between police and mere "mundanes" aren't particularly dangerous and stressful to the latter?

Given that police claim the supposed authority to pre-empt potential violence in the name of "officer safety," we're entitled to ask: Why isn't "citizen safety" a legally effective defense for preemptive violence by law-abiding people to protect themselves against unjustified violence by police?

At present, the only form of "preemption" considered legally and morally acceptable is unqualified submission. People wrongfully on the receiving end of police violence are given the same advice that used to be given to potential rape victims: Don't resist, don't fight back -- it will only turn out much worse, and you may be killed.

Anyone who doesn't immediately submit to arrest, irrespective of the circumstances, is "going to lose and possibly hurt yourself and others in the process," insists retired Milwaukee Police Officer Mark Zupnik. "You do not have the right to resist."

"There are several more beneficial ways of pleading your case and challenging your arrest," Zupnik continues. "Get a lawyer, file a motion in court, go to pre-trial and plead your case. Make a formal complaint challenging your arrest to the proper authority, but don't resist or fight! It will add to your problems even if the arrest was a mistake. You don't have the right to resist a legal arrest and it's that simple. In most states, resisting arrest is an additional charge up to a felony, even for minor physical resistance."

No recourse: San Jose resident Scott Wright was beaten and Tased by police, suffering a broken arm. He was then charged with "resisting arrest." His "offense" was to reach into his vehicle to wash his dirty hands. (San Jose Mercury News photo.)

Zupnik, like others of an authoritarian cast of mind, embrace a tautological view of what constitutes a "legal" arrest: It's any arrest carried out by a police officer, who supposedly embodies the law. This is why he warns that resistance in any situation will result in a criminal charge which will be filed before "a usually unsympathetic judge" who will perceive you as someone who "fought the law" -- which is always on the side of the state's armed enforcers, from this perspective.

Except the rarest of cases, seeking redress for an unlawful arrest from the "proper authority" is a singularly useless exercise. In some jurisdictions -- such as San Jose, California, a city in which, on average, three people are arrested for "resisting arrest" every single day -- it is entirely pointless to file a complaint over unwarranted arrests, since they are never upheld.

An investigation by the San Jose Mercury News found that in of the 117 cases in which a complaint was filed with the police department's internal review board, not a single one was "sustained." That includes incidents such as the arrest of Scott Wright, who was beaten, tased, and had his arm broken by police before being charged with resisting arrest.

At the time his valiant protectors arrived at his home, Wright was working on an old Cadillac; he provoked the gang assault by reaching into his van to wash off his greasy hands, a gesture that caused the Heroes in Blue (tm) -- a timid, skittish lot, as easily frightened as a young doe -- to think that he was reaching for a weapon.

As is almost always the case in such episodes, Wright was charged with resisting arrest even though no weapon was found, and no other criminal act was alleged.

Sure, that spurious charge was dismissed -- after the victim had spent a great deal of money seeking treatment for the injuries inflicted on him, and another sum to pay the legal expenses incurred because the cops, in an effort to cover their tax-fattened asses, filed a "cover charge" against the innocent man. And of course, the police department cleared the assailants of any wrongdoing, because their criminal assault on Wright was in harmony with "department policy."

He was "protected and served": San Jose resident Joseph Ballard bleeds into the sidewalk outside a nightclub after being tased by the police, who say that his injury was the result of a "fall." (San Jose Mercury News photo)

"What happened to Wright is no isolated event," the Mercury News relates. "Hundreds of times a year interactions between San Jose police and residents where no serious crime has occurred escalate into violence."

"Many times the reason for the encounter is as innocuous as jaywalking, missing bike headlamps, or failing to signal a turn," continues the report. "But often, as incidents develop, police determine the suspect is uncooperative and potentially violent and strike the first blow."

Joseph Ballard was a victim of preemptive violence: Officer Justin Holliday shot him with a Taser outside a nightclub while Ballard was running to catch a ride home. As he bled into the sidewalk, Holliday confected a story about Ballard threatening to shoot a bouncer and running to the parking lot to get his gun.

As it happens, the victim had neither a gun nor a car, and the bouncer said that Ballard had done nothing wrong -- yet he was still charged with interfering with police and thrown in jail after he was released from the hospital.

After two police arrived at her home in August 2008, San Jose resident Ruth Mendiola earned an assault and a charge of "resisting arrest" when she asked to see a warrant the cops were supposedly there to deliver. She was on the phone with the police department trying to verify the identity of the officers when she was seized by one of them, who kneed her in the ribs and then threw her on a bed to handcuff her.

David Haflich -- a Caucasian with light brown hair -- was severely beaten by San Jose police when he was mistaken for a suspect in a child abduction -- a Latino with black hair. Ordered to hit the ground, Haflich froze in his tracks, an act of insubordination serious enough, supposedly, to justify a gang-tackle and beating by police, who charged him with "resisting arrest" even though he wasn't a criminal suspect.

In 206 court cases in which the most serious charge against the defendant was "resisting arrest," the paper documented that "145 -- 70 percent of the cases -- involved the use of force by officers," observes the Mercury News. It's as if a street gang were routinely committing acts of criminal violence against inoffensive pedestrians, motorists, and bicyclists ... which, come to think of it, is exactly what is going on.

This kind of officially sanctioned lawlessness is a general affliction.

In Ohio, police who showed up at a house fire to gawk and collect overtime tased and arrested a 19-year-old who had been helping friends and family escape the blaze. This happened after one of the torpid donut-devourers hurled profane invective at one of the residents of the burning house, a young woman, who had asked them why they were standing around in subsidized stupefaction while people were in danger.

Last May, Minneapolis resident Rolando Ruiz was stopped by a police officer, who instructed Ruiz to place his hands on the hood of the officer's car. Ruiz cooperated -- and was shot in the neck with a Taser anyway.

The Minneapolis PD's "use of force" policy permits such gratuitous use of potentially lethal violence, and neither the policy nor any particular case is subject to civilian review or oversight.

Last June, in Everett, Washington, a 51-year-old man was gunned down in his Corvette by a police officer who had grown weary of trying to talk the intoxicated driver out of his car. At the time, the drunken driver was boxed in -- parked cars on either side, a police cruiser blocking him from behind, a chain link fence in front.

The officer spent perhaps five minutes trying to reason with the driver before pulling out his Taser; the drunk reacted -- understandably, if tragically -- by trying, unsuccessfully, to pull out of the parking space. That provoked the officer to pull his firearm and murder the driver, firing eight shots into the car while exclaiming "Enough is enough -- time to end this!"

Every death of a police officer "in the line of duty" is solemnly memorialized and carefully tabulated. However, there is no official record kept of civilians who are unjustly killed or otherwise brutalized by police.

Each encounter between the police and innocent civilians is a potentially deadly experience for the latter. Thus the real question is not "Why do innocent people flee from the police?" but rather, "What rational person would submit to the police if he had any reasonable hope of eluding or resisting them?"

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Blood On Their Hands

2009-11-02T08:19:00.000-08:00

The federal "hate crimes" measure recently signed into "law" by Barack Obama will do nothing to protect innocent people from criminal violence. But thanks to the cynical pressure group politics that led to passage of that measure, thousands of innocent people will certainly die.

Working with its congressional allies, the White House attached the hate crimes measure as an amendment to the most recent military spending measure, a $680 billion appropriation that contains at least $120 billion to fund the ongoing slaughter in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The brutally honest Chris Hedges describes how this arrangement managed to unite advocates of tyrannical "tolerance" on the home front with those who promote the mass murder of harmless foreigners abroad:

"It was a clever piece of marketing. It blunted debate about new funding for war. And behind the closed doors of the caucus rooms, the Democratic leadership told Blue Dog Democrats, who are squeamish about defending gays or lesbians from hate crimes, that they could justify the vote as support for the war. They told liberal Democrats, who are squeamish about unlimited funding for war, that they could defend the vote as a step forward in the battle for civil rights. Gender equality groups, by selfishly narrowing their concern to themselves, participated in the dirty game."

The price of "tolerance": An Afghan child displays the burns inflicted by a NATO bombing (left); other "liberated" Afghans and Iraqis are seen below. Hundreds or thousands of additional victims will die thanks to the political deal that brought about the new hate crimes law.

Granted, it isn't likely that the Pentagon appropriation, including the war funding, would have been defeated.

The difference between this measure and its predecessors is this: The leading elements of the "hate industry" -- those sanctimonious scolds who make a handsome living tutoring the rest of us in the ways of "tolerance" -- are now directly implicated in the avoidable mass murder of innocent people in the Near East.

For the squalid collection of pressure groups that promoted passage of the hate crimes measure, -- the so-called Anti-Defamation League, the self-styled Human Rights Campaign, the fraudulently named Southern Poverty Law Center, et. al. -- this is an entirely acceptable arrangement. Their fund-raising will prosper; their stature in Washington will continue to grow; their influence over law enforcement will expand; most importantly, the power of the state to persecute their political enemies will be significantly enhanced.

Oh, sure -- the political trade-off behind this "victory" means that poor brown people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq will suffer violent death in their homes, streets, and houses of worship, cultivating understandable anti-American hatred that will yield a bloody harvest of terrorism and unending war.

But, hey, aren't we talking about religion-obsessed, hetero-patriarchal homophobes, anyway? Wouldn't the world be better off if we were to be rid of such intolerant people?

Through its involvement in the political deal that led to passage of the hate crimes bill, the Hate Industry (aka the Tolerance Lobby) took an ownership interest in the regime's wars of aggression abroad.

Those running that Lobby are certainly smart enough to have realized this. The moral calculus behind that trade-off must be similar to the self-serving calculations of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment: Since there is a certain sacrificial "percentage" of people who are fated to die each year to serve society's "greater" interests, why scruple over the death of a single unpleasant, greedy old woman -- or several thousand innocent Afghans, Pakistanis, or Iraqis? And wouldn't there be something redemptive in using that horrible war to do something to advance the cause of "tolerance" here?

The hate crimes legislation signed by Obama on October 28 bore the names of James Byrd and Matthew Shephard, murder victims whose assailants were found, prosecuted, and punished very efficiently without the dubious benefit of a federal "hate crimes" statute. There is no shortage of laws dealing with criminal violence against innocent people. But purposes served by "hate crimes" laws have nothing to do with protecting the innocent.

"Hate crimes" statutes invert the priorities described by Justice Felix Frankfurter (in a moment of atypical wisdom): "Law is concerned with external behavior and not the inner life of man." By enhancing the penalty for criminal acts either provably or putatively rooted in certain proscribed attitudes, "hate crimes" statutes impermissibly assert the government's jurisdiction over the inner life of individuals. This is, in principle, an assertion of totalitarian power.

The newly enacted hate crimes measure also expands the assault on what remains of federalism. During that brief and fondly remembered period during which the U.S. Constitution was recognized as the "law of the land," it was understood that whatever police powers could properly be exercised were (with very few specific exceptions) entirely within the purview of the individual states.

Briefly indulging the winsome fantasy that the Constitution is in some way relevant to the actions of the government ruling us, we dust off Federalist #45 in which Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, explained that the "few and defined" powers of the federal government do not include a general police power (as the Lopez ruling reminded us a few years ago).

"Did you take offense over an opinion, an unfriendly look, a politically incorrect bumper sticker or t-shirt inscription? Give us a call!"

By way of contrast, the "numerous and indefinite" powers reserved to the states "extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people" as well as matters of "internal order" -- that is, police power dealing with the protection of life, limb, and property.

There are myriad sound reasons why states shouldn't enact hate crimes laws, but they're constitutionally free to do so. The newly enacted federal measure, on the other hand, is facially incompatible with the assignment of powers described by Madison and required by the 10th Amendment precisely because it would permit federal intervention in criminal matters that fall entirely within the innate jurisdiction of the states.

That jurisdictional arrangement can be changed, of course -- through a constitutional amendment. That not being the case here, there are ample legitimate grounds for state governments to nullify the new federal hate crimes measure. Ironically, one of the arguments used by the measure's supporters actually amounts to what could be called "nullification in reverse."

The new hate crimes "law" provides for an end-run around the Constitution's prohibition of double jeopardy, thereby encouraging federal prosecution of people either acquitted by local courts, or charged with offenses other than "hate crimes."

Defenders of this approach insist that this is "necessary" because some local jurisdictions are fetid pools of bigotry, thereby creating the prospect of jury nullification on the basis of racial or other prejudice. They say that this approach is constitutionally appropriate because of the "dual sovereignty" relationship between states and the federal government.

Bear in mind that this argument comes from the lips and keyboards of left-collectivists who ordinarily regard any reference, however oblique, to state "sovereignty" as covert code for segregation or other offenses against "tolerance."

Tearing away the gauze of sophistry in which they've been swaddled, "dual sovereignty" prosecutions are substantively indistinguishable from double jeopardy. They also tend to be dictated by considerations extraneous to individual justice -- such as race-based interest group politics.

To understand how the "dual sovereignty" doctrine operates in practice, consider this contrast: After being acquitted of criminal charges by a local jury, the four police officers who beat Rodney King were subjected to a federal "civil rights" trial for the same offense, based on the same facts; two of them were convicted. However, when O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder in what many regarded as a race-based act of jury nullification, he was not subjected to a "dual sovereignty" civil rights or hate crime prosecution.

But this sort of thing is to be expected of a system in which "justice" is a function of belonging to a government-protected collective. That's the vision being inflicted on our society through the new "hate crimes" law, a progressive victory purchased for the paltry cost of $120 billion to kill helpless foreigners.

Such a deal!

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Obama and the "Predator Left"

2009-10-29T08:00:00.000-07:00

Dear Leader: The 2009 version.

Many ancient societies were ruled by a figure regarded as a divine emperor-king, a transcendent figure whose goodness and power not only protected his subjects from harm, but also made the rains descend, the fields fertile, and the kingdom prosperous.

Modern Americans are too sophisticated for such primitive nonsense. Rather than a divine emperor-king, they have a "Commander-in-Chief" who holds the teeming terrorist masses at bay, labors to "heal the planet," and dispenses wealth in great compassionate abundance on desperate, otherwise hopeless people.

See? Those are two completely different concepts.

Dear Leader: The 2003 version.

Whatever the powers attributed to him by his minions and worshipers, Barack Obama is the first politician to be seriously recognized as the "President of Planet Earth." In any case, that's the title given to him by Howard Fineman in a Newsweek column that was less a work of opinion journalism than the printed equivalent of a prolonged fit of public rectal osculation.

"Obama isn't going to be sworn in as planetary president. But it doesn't matter; in his mind, he already is," grovels Fineman, who -- it must be clear -- offered that view approvingly. "In office for a mere nine months, Obama is now a full-blown `ism.'"

As defined by Fineman, "Obamaism" is " the idea that there must be shared global responsibility for virtually every problem we face." By his reckoning, the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Obama was less an individual commendation as it was a ratification of the "ism" Obama supposedly embodies.

Dear Leader: The 1940 version.

A more rational definition of "Obamaism" would describe it as a pathology, rather than an ideology. It is an alloy of impervious credulity and militant leader-worship that reveals itself in the tendency to invest one's hopes in a figure who supposedly embodies hope and change.

Obama isn't the first ruler coughed up by a dying imperial power to be embraced as this kind of transcendent global figure: That distinction goes to a previous Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mikhail Gorbachev.

As part of a "press gaggle" that interviewed Gorbachev prior to a speech at the Appleton, Wisconsin Performing Arts Center several years ago, I was struck by what an utterly unremarkable individual he is. That apparently wasn't a majority opinion. As he introduced Gorbachev prior to his long, tedious, and forgettable address, Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle -- an Irish Catholic-- gushed that meeting Gorbachev was a greater honor than being presented to the Pope.

The lasting impression I took away was that Gorby had all the charisma and eloquence of a minor municipal bureaucrat -- or, perhaps, an otherwise insignificant foundation-funded "community organizer" deprived of his teleprompter and the trappings of "institutionalized awe."

It's worth remembering that when Gorbachev was first embraced as a species of savior by the international bien-pensant class, he -- like Obama -- was presiding over a brutal and senseless military occupation of Afghanistan.

Rather than pulling Soviet troops out of Afghanistan, the Soviet regime under Gorbachev actually escalated the conflict, to the point (some believe) of assassinating the leader of neighboring Pakistan, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, who had collaborated with the CIA in arming and supporting the Afghan rebels. By delaying Soviet withdrawal until January 1989, Gorbachev's government managed to kill tens of thousands of people -- Afghan and Pakistani, as well as Russians and troops provided as part of Moscow's "coalition of the willing" -- in what amounts to nothing more than a futile attempt to save face.

The oligarchy fronted by Obama is pursuing a similar course in a much bloodier fashion. After Obama inherited the imperial purple last January, Washington radically expanded the use of unmanned Predator drones to attack suspected terrorists in Pakistan.

Jane Meyer of The New Yorker magazine, who recently published an account of Washington's "remote-control war" in Pakistan, cheerfully reports that those strikes, carried out on Obama's instructions, have "killed more than half of the twenty most wanted Al Qaeda terrorist suspects"; that's the "good news." The bad news is that this escalation has "also killed hundreds of civilians" -- a remarkably high level of "collateral damage" in exchange for perhaps a dozen successful strikes against suspected terrorists, who (let's not forget) were themselves the subject of execution by presidential decree.

Despite her talents as a reporter, Meyer is unmistakably a product of the imperial capital's journalistic culture. Thus while she expresses sympathy for the battle trauma suffered by button-pushing executioners who kill people in Pakistan from the comfort of an office in Langley, Virginia, she spares little sympathy for the victims. Her only candidly expressed worry is that the deaths of innocent Pakistanis might present a strategic complication for imperial war-planners.

"What is astonishing about [Meyer's remarks]," comments the indispensable Chris Floyd, is the absence of anything resembling "a roar of outrage from Mayer and her interviewer: `They've killed hundreds of civilians!' Hundreds of Pakistani civilians, men, women and children with no involvement whatsoever in war or terrorism; just ordinary people living their lives as best they can -- just like your neighbor, just like your mother, just like you...or just like the people killed on September 11, whose deaths are used as an eternal justification for war and bloodshed on a global scale by the American state."

"But these drone-murdered Pakistanis -- these human beings, these fathers and mothers, these grandparents, these toddlers, these brothers and sisters -- their lives are just statistics to be coldly weighed in the calibrations of imperial policy," summarizes Floyd. "The `bad news' about their deaths is not that they were murdered, not that these utterly defenseless men, women and children were blown to shreds without warning, without the slightest chance of escape, by flying robots controlled by unseen hands a world away; no, the `bad news' is that these that these killing might possibly hamper America's "counterinsurgency program...."

Nor is this the only way that Obama the Blessed is escalating the war.

The CIA is not the only agency being permitted to liquidate "terrorist suspects" with extreme prejudice; the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Agency's diseased sibling, has gotten into the act as well.

Some fifty "nexus figures" described as Afghan drug traffickers are among the 367 people on the regime's "kill or capture list," reports the New York Times. This probably explains why three DEA agents were among the casualties when a U.S. helicopter went down following a firefight in a village in Afghanistan's Qadis district.

So, as Obama and his handlers escalate the war(s) in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where is the putatively anti-war Left?

Well, many of them can be found hurling jingoistic invective at those who dare criticize the "Commander-in-Chief" during a "time of war."

For its part, the nationalist Right is desperately clinging to the fiction that Obama is a "pacifist" of some variety, and that there's nothing wrong with the war(s) in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and elsewhere that a military putsch at home couldn't cure. Accordingly, we can expect to see Obama's supporters defending everything he does -- no matter how bellicose or bloody -- as a tactical necessity to protect him from the militaristic "hardliners" who seek to depose him.

Such are the quasi-Soviet politics of the American Imperium as it approaches its terminal phase.

A useful reminder: The bold and principled Dr. Katherine Albrecht, a full-spectrum freedom activist, brings up a much-neglected fact during a peace protest just prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Russian-born Canadian citizen Nikolai Lanine, who served in Afghanista, can see tragic continuities between the Soviet Empire's futile occupation of that country and the one undertaken by Imperial Washington. Canadians are well-represented among the victims of Washington's war in Afghanistan, and Lanine can't help but be reminded of his own experiences in Moscow's "noble" war to "liberate" the Afghans.

"I went to Afghanistan believing in `fighting terrorism' and 'liberating Afghans,'" wrote Lanine in the Toronto Globe and Mail a couple of years ago. "In my mind, our presence was `helping Afghans,' particularly with educating women and children. My combat unit participated in `humanitarian aid' -- accompanying doctors and delivering food, fuel, clothing, and school and other supplies to Afghan villages. It was only later that I began to wonder: Did that aid justify our aggression?"

Lanine recalls how Moscow's servants, like those sent on Washington's killing errand, dehumanized the victims of military aggression:

"It is hard to kill people without demonizing them. In 1988, my unit accidentally hit an Afghan wedding party. My friend, whose mortar shell had killed innocent people, was shocked when he learned of it. Some soldiers, however, were indifferent. `That village supports the resistance, anyway,' they said. Like NATO now, we didn't count `their' casualties. As another friend, Alexander, would later write: `We thought that all of them -- old and young -- were insurgents.'"

By the time the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the implosion of Moscow's empire was underway. Freed from the distraction of a pointless war, the Soviet nomenklatura focused on a more important task: Setting itself up as the permanent economic ruling class. By the time the Hammer and Sickle was furled in December 1991, everything of value in Russia and its "near abroad" was firmly in the hands of the oligarchs.

Scenes from Obama's America: Riot police at the Pittsburgh G-20 summit deploy the Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), a crowd-control weapon first used as part of the Iraq occupation.

Exactly the same process is underway here in the united State.

Appropriately enough, the consolidation of economic power in the hands of our ruling oligarchy began with a March 2008 meeting in Moscow between Commissar Hank Paulson and the Goldman Sachs board of directors. Shortly thereafter, the controlled demolition of the financial sector began, with secretive and powerful interests deliberately clearing the way for an unprecedented consolidation of political and economic power -- and profiting handsomely from the carnage.

Winsome and appealing as many find him, Obama is the willing and witting figurehead of this insatiable oligarchy -- a ruling elite at least as depraved and bloody-handed as its Soviet predecessors. He is indecently eager to do its bidding, whether that entails murdering hundreds of innocent Pakistanis through Predator strikes, or unleashing paramilitary violence against peaceful demonstrators (and pedestrians) in Pittsburgh during the recent G-20 summit.

Among the few principled commentators on the left who see Obama for what he is can be found former war correspondent Chris Hedges, who has consistently condemned the warfare state under both Republican and Democratic management.

"The right-wing accusations against Barack Obama are true," writes Hedges. "He is a socialist, although he practices socialism for corporations. He is squandering the country’s future with deficits that can never be repaid. He has retained and even bolstered our surveillance state to spy on Americans. He is forcing us to buy into a health care system that will enrich corporations and expand the abuse of our for-profit medical care. He will not stanch unemployment. He will not end our wars. He will not rebuild the nation. He is a tool of the corporate state." (Emphasis added.)

Yes, they can use them at home, too: Bush the Dumber inspects a Predator Drone -- the same robot aircraft used to kill suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- used by the Department of Homeland Security to patrol the U.S. border.

Another honorable voice of opposition comes from commentator/cartoonist Ted Rall, who points out that Obama has not repudiated the central tenet of the Bush-Cheney doctrine of executive power -- namely, the claim that a president can order the detention, torture, or summary execution of anyone, anywhere, for any reason.

"Obama has ramped up the assassination of political opponents of the U.S. and the U.S.-aligned authoritarian regime in Pakistan, deploying more Predator drone attacks than Bush," Rall points out to the Dear Leader's leftist worshipers. "But that's just for now. Obama could still personally order a government agency to murder you. Which is weird. But not nearly as weird as the fact that you probably don't care enough to do something about it."

Actually, Obama's constituency -- call it the "Predator Left" -- is delighted that its Dear Leader controls the machinery of arbitrary mass murder. After all, there are "reactionary" eggs to be cracked and progressive omelets to be made, and how can that be done unless the world's largest egg-beater is firmly held by politically correct hands?

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End the Occupation: A Mission for the Oath-Keepers

2009-10-23T10:00:00.000-07:00

One Nation, under Occupation: Police departments nation-wide are acting as if this were a conquered country, and as if citizens were "enemy combatants."

A thin blanket of early evening darkness had draped itself across Alex Locklear's home in Maxton, North Carolina when the armed intruders arrived.

Brandishing firearms, the invaders forced several people -- including wheelchair-bound Nicholas Locklear and a pregnant woman -- to the ground and then barged in through the rear door, threatening to "blow the brains" out of anyone who put up a struggle. One woman was so terrified that she fled, tripped over an unseen obstruction, and broke her arm.

The arrival of an unmarked police car with its blue running lights flashing must have provided the victims of the home invasion with a moment's relief. But that relief would have quickly turned to a different flavor of alarm when the victims realized that their assailants were the police.

Under the pretext of a drug search, the five-man robbery crew ransacked the Locklear home in search of large amounts of cash that could be "forfeited" -- that is, stolen -- as alleged drug proceeds. The robbers had to be content with the $200 they found in Alex Locklear's bedroom, which is all they could put their hands on before piling into the police car and pulling away with such reckless haste that the vehicle shed one of its front hubcaps.

Locklear, who returned shortly after the robbery, reported the crime to the Robeson County Sheriff's Office, giving descriptions of the assailants and their vehicle. Not surprisingly, the Sheriff didn't follow up on that solid lead, because the robbery had been spearheaded by Robeson County Deputy Sheriff Vincent Sinclair, a member of the department's drug enforcement unit.

The March 14, 2004 robbery most likely came about because the Sheriff's Department discovered that Locklear had cashed a large check to pay workers on his 400-acre farm before heading for a motorcycle rally in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. And that assault differed only in detail from similar outrages taking place every single day in the purported Land of the Free.

The chances are pretty good that as you read these words, paramilitary attacks -- commonly described as "no-knock raids" -- are either being planned or executed somewhere in the U.S. Typically carried out by the military units called SWAT or tactical teams, those raids are generally triggered by a tip from a "confidential informant" -- a paid snitch -- and subsidized with federal funds, often through the "Justice" Department's Byrne Grant program.

Ironically, those on the receiving end of such "authorized" assaults are often treated even worse than the victims of the raid on the Locklear home.

No recourse: Last August, a SWAT team in Anderson, Indiana destroyed Barbara Williams' home in a mistaken armed raid. According to the city attorney, since the assault was "legal," the city is not liable for the damages, and the now-homeless Mrs. Williams is just S.O.L.

When property is damaged or innocent people are injured or killed in the course of an "authorized" home invasion, police can generally expect to be held blameless, since any action they perceive as a potential threat supposedly justifies the use of deadly force.

Witness the case of 22-year-old Houston resident Pedro Oregon Navarro, who was murdered by police who invaded his family's home in a mistaken "no-knock" raid. Navarro, who had armed himself with a handgun to deal with belligerent intruders he didn't know were police, was shot twelve times.

According to Harris County District Attorney John B. Holmes, Jr., the violent death of Navarro at the hands of the police was not a crime, because "the law does not allow anyone to resist arrest, even an illegal one" -- and that therefore Navarro's murderers "had a right to use deadly force ... if he threatened them."

A common scene in an occupied land: Just your friendly neighborhood JBT, chillin' outside a really tricked-out armored vehicle.

Holmes is a prosecutor, so it's not surprising that he lied about the right to resist an illegal arrest. But his assumption that police have the "right" to kill anyone who resists is almost universally shared within both law enforcement and the "Justice" system.

Apparently, Deputy Sinclair and his gang didn't realize the extent of their official impunity: Had they known that they had the "right" to kill anyone who resisted their illegal invasion, it's likely that someone would have died at the Locklear home.

Like many corrupt police in such circumstances, however, the raiders left a relatively light footprint, most likely out of concern that leaving a corpse or two behind would lead to compromising questions. If their paperwork had been in order, they wouldn't have had to display such restraint.

The attack on Alex Locklear's home was just one of scores or hundreds of violent crimes committed by police in Robeson County, North Carolina committed over nearly a decade beginning in 1995. A federal investigation calling itself "Operation Tarnished Badge" eventually produced the conviction of some 22 police officers and Sheriff's Department personnel, including former Sheriff Glenn Maynor.

Deputies assigned to narcotics duty committed a string of crimes, some of them acts of state-sponsored terrorism -- such as fire-bombing homes of suspected drug dealers, or hiring arsonists to burn down the homes of personal enemies. On one occasion, a deputy doused a recalcitrant suspect with lighter fluid and set him on fire. Drug dealers who cooperated were protected from prosecution; one was even given a gun and a police uniform and permitted to take part in a raid.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars were stolen from people under the pretext of drug asset "forfeiture," with much of it skimmed away for personal use without being reported. District Attorney Johnson Britt noticed a bloc of deputies who were living beyond what he assumed to be their means: They bought boats or other expensive recreational vehicles, took cruise ship vacations together, even went in as a group for Lasik eye surgery.

What really rankled Britt, however, was having hundreds of drug cases dismissed because of the incompetence and corruption of drug enforcement officers in Robeson County. After all, how could a prosecutor make a name for himself if his drug cases -- the bread-and-butter of his profession -- kept being dismissed?

Britt contacted the Feds, and soon enough the Feds discovered that the Robeson drug cops were skimming from the profits of the local forfeiture racket. Presumably, if the cops had been faithfully reporting their haul and content with the kickback the Feds provided, or even if their corruption had been contained and relatively modest, the Feds wouldn't have intervened. As it happens, however, dozens of Robeson cops and deputies were put on trial for stealing "federal funds" -- meaning the cash that was seized at gunpoint from people suspected, but not convicted, of drug-related offenses.

What happened in Robeson County in the years between 1995 and 2002 (when "Operation Tarnished Badge" began) was hardly exceptional. There are many other jurisdictions in which, thanks to the federal "War on Drugs," local Police and Sheriff's Departments have mutated into robber gangs.

For several years, Brian Gilbert, Sheriff of Iowa's Dallas County, ran a very lucrative theft ring. Dallas County sits astride a very well-traveled stretch of I-80, the country's major east-west interstate. Gilbert and his deputies preyed heavily on people driving late-model SUVs with out-of-state license plates -- particularly drivers who appeared to be of Latino extraction.

Stopped for alleged traffic infractions, the drivers would be threatened with prosecution for drug-related offenses -- such as "money laundering" -- if they were found to be in possession of significant amounts of cash. That trouble could be avoided if the drivers simply surrendered their vehicles and money to the county.

This little scam netted millions of dollars, and might still be in operation today had Gilbert not gotten a bit too greedy: He was caught taking home several paper sacks filled with money that had been stolen during a traffic stop. For this act of felonious grand larceny, Gilbert lost his job and was given a suspended ten-year prison sentence, along with five years' probation.

Police in Kingsville, Texas have been more disciplined than Gilbert and his gang in Iowa. Because that tiny town is located along Highway 77, a route often used by suspected drug couriers, police have been able to confiscate millions in putative drug proceeds, with eighty percent of what they steal going directly into the city budget. This is why the exceptionally well-paid police in that town of 25,000 have tricked-out high-performance cop cars and all the latest digital toys.

It's important to italicize the fact that the people from whom this money is stolen have not been convicted of crimes -- or even, in most cases, formally accused of crimes. All that is required is the presence of a large amount of cash coupled with an assertion by self-interested law enforcement officers that there is a suspected "nexus" to drug activity of some kind.

A recent federal court decision (entitled -- I'm not kidding -- United States of America v. $124,700, in U.S. Currency) held, in effect, that traveling with a large amount of currency offers sufficient probable cause to justify a narcotics-related forfeiture. Once the proper incantations are uttered and the requisite paperwork is filled out in the typical tax-feeder's sub-literate scrawl, the money itself is found "guilty" and taken into government custody.

Police and prosecutors in Tenaha, Texas -- a town in Shelby County bordering Louisiana -- have added some innovative wrinkles to the familiar forfeiture racket. A current federal lawsuit describes how Tenaha police have refined to a science the practice of targeting motorists -- generally "racial and ethnic minorities, and those in their company" -- for unjustified traffic stops, during which they are questioned as to "whether they have money or valuables" and then subjected to illegal searches.

Should money or items of value be found, the motorist and passengers are then placed under arrest for "money laundering" or drug-related charges, and then given an ultimatum: Sign away their property or face prosecution. This form of extortion-robbery is particularly effective when the victim is carrying an abnormal but relatively small amount of cash -- say, less than $5,000 -- that wouldn't be enough to compensate for the hassle and expense of mounting a legal defense.

In one of the cases described in the lawsuit, an individual named Danny Green who works as an investigator for the Shelby County Prosecutor's Office threatened to kidnap a couple's children if they didn't sign a document surrendering about $6,000 in cash.

Den of thieves:

The Tenaha, Texas City Hall.

George Bowers, the superannuated mayor of Tenaha, insists that the seizures are justified not because of a compelling law enforcement need, but because his municipal government needs the money.

Oh. Well, then -- why not?

Why bother trying to cultivate a local economy when there are innocent motorists to shake down?

To understand the depth of cynical corruption that exists in Shelby County, consider the reaction of District Attorney Lynda Russell to the lawsuit: She sought official permission to use forfeited funds to defend herself from charges that she had illegally confiscated those same funds.

Nope, that isn't David Allen Coe: This vision of feminine refinement is Shelby County District Attorney Lynda Russell (a Republican, natch), a Queenpin (as it were) of the county's forfeiture mob.

If this kind of thing were taking place only in isolated, one-stoplight, speed-trap towns like Tenaha -- places where the local government is the malodorous residue at the bottom of a very shallow gene pool -- it would be disgusting, but avoidable.

But this kind of outright larceny under color of "law" is underway wherever the Feds have fomented an official crime spree in the name of the "war on drugs."

We really shouldn't perceive the "war on drugs" in metaphorical terms. This is an actual war, albeit one that targets individual liberties, rather than illicit commerce.

Thanks to this war, innocent people are frequently terrorized by military assaults on their homes, and injured or even killed without legal consequence. It's because of this war that travelers have a fully justified fear of being illegally detained and robbed at gunpoint by people in government-issued costumes.

That homefront war inspired "exceptions" to the posse comitatus law to permit the hands-on involvement of the military in domestic law enforcement. Even more alarming is the fact that it led directly to the federalization and militarization of law enforcement -- which means that the police themselves are, in effect, an army of occupation right now.

This state of affairs suggests a vitally important mission for the movement called "Oath Keepers" -- an association of retired and active-duty law enforcement and military personnel who define their allegiance in terms of fidelity to the Constitution, rather than loyalty or obedience to political officials.

As men committed to the Constitution, Oath Keepers have made it clear that there are at least ten specific kinds of orders they will not obey -- orders to disarm American civilians, conduct warrantless searches, blockade or interdict American cities, invade and subjugate states that assert their reserved powers and constitutional sovereignty, subject citizens to military tribunals, enforce martial law decrees, or otherwise undermine or infringe upon the constitutionally guaranteed individual rights of Americans.

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes explains that Oath Keepers will stand down rather than carry out such illegal orders, and be prepared to defend law-abiding citizens against the aggression of a lawless government. Predictably, Oath Keepers has been identified as a domestic enemy by Morris Dees' for-profit Stasi, the so-called Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

SPLC Commissar Mark Potok (whose name, appropriately, is very similar to a Klingon epithet describing a sleazy, cowardly wretch).

According to the SPLC and its allies in the government-aligned media, the principled refusal of Oath Keepers to carry out criminal violence against innocent citizens is a variety of terrorism, or at least something akin to terrorism.

During a recent installment of Chris Matthews' cable television program, Matthews and SPLC apparatchik Mark Potok did their level best to contort comments made by Oath Keepers founder Rhodes into an endorsement of insurrectionary violence.

Matthews, who appears to be bucking for a Daytime Emmy, theatrically feigned incredulity that any responsible person could believe it possible that concentration camps could be erected on American soil -- ignoring such trivial matters as the WWII-era detention of Japanese-Americans and the hideous treatment of American Indians during the 19th Century. For his part, Potok insisted that Oath Keepers were cultivating terrorism by spreading alarmist rhetoric about the possibility of martial law.

Bear in mind that the SPLC's core fund-raising activity consists of hitting up elderly donors with appeal letters that traffic in alarmist rhetoric that treats the tiny, inconsequential white supremacist movement as nothing less than the Fourth Reich on the March.

To judge from the SPLC's standard spiel, the most significant threat to individual rights comes from toothless cretins in Klan regalia and socially inept Nazi wanna-bes with man-boobs. Meanwhile, black Americans, Latinos, and other people for whom the SPLC displays such supposed solicitude are being terrorized by armed government officials who are carrying out a very literal war within our borders.

This presents Oath Keepers with a splendid PR opportunity that should become one of its most important ongoing campaigns: Why doesn't that organization reach out to another estimable group, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, in demanding an end to the "war on drugs"?

Most of the unconscionable acts and policies the Oath Keepers oppose -- wholesale violation of individual rights, detentions, confiscations, civilian disarmament, militarization of domestic law enforcement -- are not a vague future possibility, but rather a tangible reality right now because of the "war on drugs."

Most, but by no means all, of the victims of that war are non-white Americans. It would be entertaining to watching the SPLC try to explain how Oath Keepers could qualify as a "hate group" even as they took up the cause of black and Hispanic Americans suffering official abuse by way of the "war on drugs."

Valuable as it is for Oath Keepers to inoculate police and military personnel against the prospect of wholesale martial law, the group should be urging such personnel to stand down right now when it comes to carrying out manifestly unconstitutional and anti-American drug war policies.

The Oath Keepers should urge police and Sheriff's Departments to reject counter-narcotics grants and federal subsidies of any kind, including equipment transfers and other material support from the Pentagon. They should find the honest and principled law enforcement personnel who are mortified by the transformation of so many police and Sheriff's departments into criminal syndicates through the practice of "asset forfeiture." And they should take the point in reining in the ever-expanding use of SWAT teams (as a prelude to abolishing them outright, of course).

We're constantly reminded that "most" law enforcement officers are decent, public-spirited men who are disgusted and alarmed by corruption and the abuse of power. By urging that law enforcement stand down from the "war on drugs," Oath Keepers could help us learn whether this is actually the case.

(My thanks to several contributors in the comments thread who corrected an error in an earlier version of this essay: I had mistakenly referred to I-85, rather than I-80, as a major east-west interstate highway.)

Be sure to tune in for Pro Libertate Radio each weeknight from 6:00-7:00 Mountain Time (7:00-8:00 Central) on the Liberty News Radio Network.

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Dum spiro, pugno!

Interlude: A Merry Depression Sing-Along (Updated, 10/20)

2009-10-18T14:14:00.000-07:00

The Last "Worst Hard Time": Rural farms in the Great Plains come under assault by a dust storm. The economic clouds gathering over our heads are pregnant with even greater devastation -- so, hey, how about a nice little musical interlude to cheer us up while the collapse accelerates?

C'mon -- you know the melody:

Chorus:

Super-complex col-lat-er-al-ized debt obligations

Can be seen dis-int-eg-rating all across the nation!

And now the suf-fring middle class confronts annihilation --

Super-complex col-lat-er-al-ized debt obligations!

Hum-diddle-liddle-liddle, hum-diddle-LIE,

Hum-diddle-liddle-liddle, hum-diddle-FRAUD....

First Verse

Because the local sports mogul who owns the football team

Demanded a new stadium, or else he'd up and leave

We formed a sports authority to collect subsidies,

And now the bursting debt bubble has brought us to our knees (repeat chorus)

Second Verse

The town fathers of Hardin said, "Hey, let's go build a jail,

to boost our sick economy" -- but 'twas an epic fail.

In waltzed a Serbian con-man who said he'd run the place;

But "Captain Michael's" scheme exploded right in Hardin's face. (repeat chorus)

Third Verse

For ninety years the Fed has told us debt's as good as cash,

Thanks to the jerks in Washington, the U.S. dollar's trash.

The "public sector" grows apace, while capital depletes,

We'll watch our wealth evaporate while grass grows in our streets. (repeat chorus)

Third Verse

The Beast from Jekyll Island makes a profit from our woes;

Its assets and expenditures -- secrets it won't disclose.

The Banksters live in luxury while workers drown in Red;

Our kids will live as feudal serfs unless we End the Fed! (repeat chorus)

(My apologies to Robert and Richard Sherman, and anybody who -- like myself -- doesn't really care for show tunes. I had an idea for an original tune, but unfortunately "Dancing in the Ruins" was already taken.)

Be sure to tune in for Pro Libertate Radio each weeknight from 6:00-7:00 Mountain Time (7:00-8:00 Central)on the Liberty News Radio Network -- and no, you won't hear me sing. Promise.

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Dum spiro, pugno!

How "Justice" Operates Under A Criminal Regime

2009-10-17T15:00:00.000-07:00

Thieves for their robbery have authority when judges steal themselves. --

Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act II, scene 2

It's time to play that time-honored children's game, "One of These Things is Not Like the Others." In this case we're going to examine three case histories of people accused of a supposed offense called "tax evasion."

"It's all in the wrist": Treasury Secretary and Goldman-Sachs bagman Timothy Geithner demonstrates his technique for picking the taxpayer's pocket.

Our first example involves Mr. Timothy Geithner, who refused to pay Medicare and Social Security taxes for several years -- despite the fact that his employer would have reimbursed him for the tax expenditures. A 2006 audit revealed other irregularities in Mr. Geithner's tax history, including dubious dependent-child deductions.

Despite these, ah, irregularities, Geithner was confirmed by the Senate as the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, which collects tax revenues for -- among other things -- redistribution to Geithner's colleagues and former co-workers on Wall Street.

Sure, tax revenues are spent on other purposes, such as interest payments on the federal debt and killing harmless foreigners. But since the Congress made the Treasury Secretary the de facto economic dictator a year ago, servicing politically connected Wall Street criminals has become that department's primary mission, one that has devoured trillions of dollars in wealth.

*Burp* Taxes are for other people: Tax-feeder Charles Rangel briefly lifts his snout from the congressional trough to pose for a photo.

Next, we turn to the case of Mr. Charles Rangel, a resident of New York, who refused to pay taxes on $75,000 in rental income from properties he owns in the Caribbean.

Rangel's first impulse was to share -- no, to give outright -- most of the blame for his tax evasion to his wife, Alma, who manages the family finances.

With equal generosity he tried to cut in the Spanish-speaking tenants of the property for a slice of the blame as well: "Every time I thought I was getting somewhere, they'd start speaking Spanish," he insisted.

Rangel's problems continued to accumulate when it was pointed out that his tax evasion was undertaken in order to facilitate other forms of fraud: He couldn't accurately report his Caribbean income and qualify for "hardship"-case rent controls on properties he maintained in New York City, or the special "homestead" tax exemption he claimed on his property in Washington, D.C.

Despite those infractions, and others involving congressional financial disclosure rules, Rangel has retained his job as a New York Congressman and, more importantly, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which is where tax laws that govern other people are written.

The third case we'll examine is that of New Hampshire residents Ed and Elaine Brown. Convicted of "tax evasion" and "resisting arrest," Mrs. Brown, 68, has been sentenced to thirtyfive years in federal prison -- an effective life sentence.

Her husband's sentencing has been deferred until he has undergone a "psychiatric evaluation": As was the case with political prisoners in the former Soviet Union, Mr. Brown is suspected by state authorities of being clinically deranged because of his eccentric political views. Chances are pretty good that if he avoids prison, Ed Brown may be institutionalized for the rest of his life.

Obviously, the case of Ed and Elaine Brown is different from those of Geithner and Rangel, since they're not part of that sanctified stratum of society entitled to live at the expense of the rest of us. They, like most of us, belong to that class of people whom the law fails to protect, rather than the class that the law fails to restrain.

Unlike Timothy Geithner, the Browns aren't involved in stealing huge sums of money. Unlike Charlie Rangel, they're not involving in imposing "laws" that justify the pilferage of privately earned wealth.

The Browns stole from nobody, inflicted no harm on anybody, and spent most of their lives (with the exception of one matter discussed below) providing honest services to other people in mutually beneficial transactions. None of this is true of the likes of Geithner and Rangel, for whom plunder has proven to be a lucrative and respectable career.

Like Geithner and Rangel, Ed Brown -- as a very young man -- once tried to enrich himself through theft, only to be caught, tried, and imprisoned for that crime. In 1976, Brown was given an unqualified pardon for that crime, which he committed as an 18-year-old. He then built a business as an exterminator.

For her part, Elaine built a large and successful practice as a dentist. Neither one of them lived at the expense of other people; they were producers, not parasites. In 1996, the Browns decided that they wouldn't permit the likes of Geithner and Rangel to continue stealing from them in order to enrich political favored cronies and constituents. So, like Geithner and Rangel, the Browns stopped paying their taxes.

Armed robbery: "Law enforcement" agents steal Elaine Brown's dental practice, June 7, 2007.

In January 2007, the Browns were "convicted" of the supposed crime of tax evasion and invited to turn themselves in for imprisonment. They impudently scorned that generous invitation, choosing instead to barricade themselves inside the home the Feds planned to steal from them and letting it be known that they would use lethal force to defend themselves against any federal aggression.

The Browns' Plainfield, New Hampshire home -- invariably referred to as a "compound," the preferred description of any dwelling in which live people the government intends to kill -- was surrounded by paramilitary troops from the U.S. Marshals Service.

In short order the home also became a focal point for armed private citizens who intended to support the Browns in the event of an armed assault and, more importantly, to be on-scene witnesses to help deter any potentially murderous aggression by the Feds.

While the Browns were occupied at their home, a small army of heavily armed federal agents seized Elaine Brown's dental office -- an act of felonious armed robbery. Unfortunately -- albeit predictably -- the throng of Brown supporters was seeded with paid federal informants, two of whom, posing as supporters, gained access to the home and arrested the middle-aged couple without incident.

Put on trial for eleven felony weapons and "conspiracy" charges, the Browns were found "guilty." That is to say, the court demonstrated that the Browns threatened to use the same means to defend their lives and property that were to be employed by those seeking to deprive them of the same.

The Browns had assembled an enviable arsenal of firearms, ammunition, bullet-resistant clothing, and homemade explosives (or, as the federal prosecution insisted on describing the pipe bombs, "improvised explosive devices" -- a term intended to evoke the image of "terrorists" detonating hidden weapons while fighting U.S. troops in Iraq).

Assistant U.S. Attorney Arnold Huftalen, who presided over the prosecution, initially sought a prison sentence of up to 44 years for the Browns. Holding aloft one of Elaine's handguns, Huftalen simpered that "This was not a small, dainty, self-defense handgun," describing it instead as a heavy weapon "designed to kill 17 people without reloading."

Given the indignation with which Huftalen invested every lisping syllable of his presentation, one might think that the weapons possessed by the armed federal agents surrounding the Brown home were designed to tickle people. But Huftalen, as a servant of a criminal regime, assumes that only the state has the right to use or threaten lethal force, and that its victims commit some variety of terrorism when they arm themselves with implements of self-defense more effective than Q-tips or Nerf balls.

"Mr. and Mrs. Brown did not engage in a principled dissent against laws they felt to be unjust," pronounced federal Judge George Singal as he imposed the sentence. "Let us not be fooled. The conduct engaged in by Mrs. Brown was purely criminal."

To be "criminal," conduct has to inflict demonstrable harm against an identifiable victim.
Neither Huftalen nor Singal can describe a single instance of palpable harm that resulted from the refusal of the Browns to pay income taxes, or from their acquisition of the means to defend themselves and their home from the criminal syndicate bent on stealing their property and, if necessary, murdering them.

Even if we were to accept the premise that tax "evaders" injure the "public good" by withholding their wealth from the public fisc, how can it possibly be a greater crime for the Browns to deprive the Feds of a couple of hundred thousand dollars, while the unpunished tax "evader" Timothy Geithner shovels out hundreds of billions of dollars to con artists on Wall Street?

Yes, the Browns threatened to shoot or otherwise kill anybody who tried to harm them. This, coupled with the presence of a large number of witnesses, is probably the only thing that saved their lives.

Thus it is of some interest that Huftalen (as reported by the Nashua Telegraph) chose to seek a life sentence for Elaine Brown -- despite the fact that she had never harmed a living soul, and despite the fact that there was no physical evidence linking her to the explosives in the Brown household -- "in order to deter Brown supporters [and, presumably, other Americans] from engaging in similar conduct."

It's worth remembering that tax evasion, far from being a crime of any sort, is among our nation's oldest and most sacred political traditions. The War for American independence from Great Britain was carried out by people who engaged in exactly the same kind of "criminal" conduct for which Elaine Brown will spend the rest of her life in prison, and for which her husband may end his days in the American equivalent of the Soviet psihuska.

Sure, the government ruling us -- the same one that not only countenances, but promotes, the monumental criminality of Geithner, Rangel, and their ilk -- calls tax evasion a "crime" when it is carried out by people outside of the privileged caste.

Real crimes involve some variety of force and fraud to deprive someone of something to which he is entitled. Nobody is entitled to take the property of another through taxation, even if such pilferage is "authorized" by a majority of 300,000,000 to 1. The course pursued by Ed and Elaine Brown may have been unwise, but it neither picked my pocket nor broke my leg.

Pocket-picking and leg-breaking are the veritable job descriptions of those who seized the Browns' property, kidnapped them, and are preparing to detain them for the rest of their lives. This is how "justice" operates under the Robber State that afflicts us.

Don't forget to listen to Pro Libertate Radio each weeknight from 6:00-7:00 Mountain Time (7:00-8:00 Central) on the Liberty News Radio Network.

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Dum spiro, pugno!

Support Your Global Police?

2009-10-12T13:15:00.000-07:00

Oh, joy: The UN wants to build a global police force. It's really difficult to think of a worse idea.

When last we checked in with Ronald K. Noble, he was enjoying a lucrative career as a reward for helping cover up a crime against humanity in which he was deeply implicated.

Interpol's genocidal secretary-general, former U.S. Treasury official Ronald K. Noble.

In 1994, Noble was appointed undersecretary of the Treasury Department, a position that appears to have been created especially for him by then-Attorney General Janet Reno.

A year earlier, both Reno and Noble had been involved in the decision-making process leading to the April 19 holocaust at Mt. Carmel, in which scores of people were immolated as a result of what at very best could be called the depraved indifference of presiding federal officials.

During the hours leading up to that atrocity, FBI-operated tanks filled the Branch Davidian sanctuary (a combination worship space and living area invariably referred to as a "compound" once it came under federal assault on February 28) with a highly combustible variant of CS gas that was banned for battlefield use by an international treaty.

Around noon, something -- an upended Coleman lantern, a badly thrown Molotov cocktail, one of hundreds of "ferret" rounds fired by FBI commandos -- ignited a small fire that was quickly propagated into a blaze by the arid Texas prairie wind. Much of the world watched in horror on live television as the sanctuary burned to the ground, bringing to an agonizing end the lives of scores of people trapped within.

The victims had already endured fifty days of torment and ridicule by a government that had attacked their home without legal cause, killing several of their friends in the process. Firemen and other emergency personnel were prevented from reaching the site before the flames had consummated their awful work. This was supposedly done to protect the emergency workers from attack by the people who were being consumed by the fire.

A more plausible explanation is that the people who had arranged that holocaust were trying to keep independent witnesses away from the scene of their crime. Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) footage of the event provides damning evidence that FBI commandos (and, reportedly, at least a few Delta Force operators) directed automatic weapons fire into the burning sanctuary, cutting off escape routes and cutting down anyone who attempted to flee.

This can't be good.

A wrongful death lawsuit filed on behalf of Davidian survivors and the estates of the victims listed Noble among the "U.S. Treasury officials" who "planned, organized, and or led" the original February 28 assault against Mt. Carmel, despite knowledge that the warrants were obtained "without probable cause and with defects that rendered them illegal."

Those same officials, continued the complaint, permitted the assault to proceed "even though they knew that the Davidians were expecting an assault by law enforcement and, thus, were in a state of mortal terror," and "were so reckless in their preparation for and planning of this assault, that they did not even have a written plan in place prior to conducting the attack."

Noble was thus deeply involved in the decisions that led to the avoidable deaths of six members of the Branch Davidian sect, and four ATF stormtroopers, on February 28. His involvement in the planning and execution of the siege and the final April 19 assault isn't as significant. But he played the definitive role in covering up those crimes by serving as the "lead investigator" in the Clinton administration's internal "inquiry" into the federal atrocities at Waco.

So patently fraudulent was Noble's "investigation" that a second bogus inquiry was necessary: In 2000, Attorney General Reno chose former Missouri Senator John Danforth to preside over an "independent" investigation that was mounted in what proved to be a successful effort to derail the wrongful death lawsuit cited above.

By that time, however, Noble -- who had been given the Alexander Hamilton Award by the Treasury Department, as if anything named after that individual could be construed as an honor -- had been given another coveted post with Reno's help: He was nominated to serve as secretary-general of Interpol, a position he occupies to the present day.

Hey, wait a minute: Where have I seen that same sword-through-the-globe motif before?....

On October 12, Noble's agency announced that it would be collaborating with the United Nations by providing technical support -- including access to voluminous, detailed databases -- to UN "peacekeeping" personnel, including those that belong to the world body's police force, UNPOL.

Noble himself said that his organization is pursuing a "visionary model," an "alliance of all nations" under a "global police doctrine." This would, in effect, create the first genuinely planetary police force in human history.

In an address before justice and law enforcement officials from more than 60 nations who had assembled in Singapore, Noble elaborated on that "visionary model": "In the framework of our partnership with the UN, INTERPOL will provide deployed police peacekeepers with access to the world's only secure global police communications system; global police databases including names of criminals, fingerprints, DNA profiles, stolen passports, and stolen vehicles; and specialized investigative support in key crime areas, including fugitives, drugs, terrorism, trafficking in human beings, and corruption."

....oh, yeah: That's essentially the same symbol used by the totalitarian "Terran Empire" in Star Trek's "Mirror Universe."

Apart from some very serious issues of jurisdiction and sovereignty, the most troubling aspect of INTERPOL's "visionary model" is its potential to help create a UN-directed global panopticon -- a "Your Papers, Please" system of world-wide scope.

It would certainly be of great use to the UN's International Criminal Court, a pseudo-judicial body that claims global jurisdiction.

Significantly, one of the "core" offenses recognized in the ICC Statute is genocide, as that offense is defined in the UN's Genocide Convention. Article II of that instrument describes the offense of genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical [sic], racial or religious group":

"(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part...."

Some very serious and sober people contend that this definition is over-broad. No serious person of a constitutionalist bent considers the UN or its treaties a legitimate source of law.

However, it would be expected that Noble, as someone working to provide that body with a rudimentary global constabulary, would be among those who accept the legitimacy of its treaties. But to do so would put Noble in a completely untenable position: He is directly implicated in an assault that resulted in the near-destruction of an entire religious community, which -- by the UN's definition -- qualifies as a form of attempted genocide.

At the very least, he is an accessory after the fact to genocide (once again, as defined by the UN). Given the UN's history, however, that line on Nobel's resume might actually be counted on the asset side of the ledger.

Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who headed the organization's "peacekeeping" division before being appointed to the top post, was censured in the so-called Carlsson Report on the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which claimed as many as a million lives.

Annan had received detailed advance intelligence about the impending massacres of the Tutsis from both the on-scene UN commander, Canadian Colonel Romeo Dallaire,* and various informants within the Hutu-led government. He nonetheless continued with the program to disarm the Rwandan civilians and ordered Dallaire to burn his own sources by sharing his intelligence with the same regime that was planning the slaughter.

After the report came out in 1999, a group of Rwandan survivors, working with Australian attorney (and former UN investigator) Michael Hourigan, attempted to file a lawsuit against Annan and others implicated in the Rwandan genocide. But, drat the luck, wouldn't you just know that UN officials are clothed in official immunity for such trivial offenses as aiding and abetting genocide, as long as this is done in an "official capacity."

So rather than being sued or prosecuted, Annan had to settle for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. That was the most offensive selection ever made by the Nobel Committee. Well, at least until this year.

Thanks to the near-ubiquity of inconspicuous digital cameras and the technological blessing of internet file-sharing sites, Americans are just now coming to realize how commonplace criminal abuse by the police has become -- and how difficult it is to hold an abusive police officer accountable for crimes against innocent people. But this is the square root of the problem we would confront in the event that the UN actually created the global police force the foundation of which is being laid by Noble and his comrades.

It's entirely typical of the UN that its secretary general was implicated in what has been called "the first indisputable genocide since the UN Charter was signed," and that a key architect of its "crime-fighting" agenda was involved in planning and covering up a quasi-genocidal massacre here in the United States. This is a useful illustration of the fact that even though abolishing the UN wouldn't solve all or even most of our problems, it's a badly overdue step in the direction of restoring moral sanity.

___
*Despite the fact that Col. Dallaire tried to prevent the genocide, he blamed himself for the tragedy, which included the death of many men under his command. He returned to Canada where he descended into alcoholism and suicidal depression, even as Annan was elevated to the post of secretary general. I interviewed Dallaire by telephone several years ago and discovered, to my amazement, that he still believes in the principle of "collective security," even if he is understandably jaded about the UN as the vessel of that vision.

Be sure to tune in for Pro Libertate Radio, broadcast live each weekday from 6:00-7:00 Mountain Time (7:00-8:00 Central) on the Liberty News Radio Network.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Have a Nice Apocalypse!

2009-10-08T21:33:00.000-07:00

Detroit, Riot City: In scenes better suited to a Third World country (above, and below right), tens of thousands of desperate people assemble outside Detroit's Cobo Center in the hope of receiving $3,500 emergency welfare aid disbursements. Unemployment in Detroit is nearly 29 percent.

An individual in the habit of passing bad checks can't complain that he's the victim of a criminal conspiracy if local merchants compare notes and decide not to take any more of his bank drafts. Such coordinated action isn't a "plot" or a "scheme" -- it's a form of cooperative self-defense by people who have been victimized by fraud.

The same principle applies to the alleged "conspiracy" against the U.S. dollar reported earlier this week by Robert Fisk of the London Independent:

"In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar."

As Fisk pointed out in a follow-up report, the "de-dollarization" of the oil market -- a process Iran has already begun, which helps explain Washington's bellicosity toward Tehran -- "reflects a growing resentment in the Middle East, Europe and China at America's decades-long political as well as economic world dominance."

After unpacking that observation a little bit we should understand that the resentment has as much to do with the method Washington has employed to maintain its dominance, as with the fact of that dominance itself: Since the dollar was entirely de-coupled from gold in August 1971, Washington has essentially been running an empire on money borrowed from the same people it seeks to push around.

During the most hubristic phase of the Bush-Cheney regime, Pentagon "futurist" Thomas P.M. Barnett explained that in the global division of labor, countries like China make things, earn money, and lend that money to the U.S. Government. Washington, for its part, provides "security" in the form of wars, occupations, and other acts of mass destruction.

Barnett wrote an entire book -- The Pentagon's New Map -- based on that the assumption that this arrangement would define world affairs for at least the next several decades. The news that America's creditors aren't going to permit Washington to continue with its oddly impecunious imperialism was no more surprising than the revelation that Barnett is a crack-pot rather than an oracle.

Officials in all of the relevant countries hastily disavowed Fisk's report. This didn't prevent a flight to gold. In fact, the frantic efforts to sustain the fiction that the dollar is in any sense a store of value probably amplified the rush to gold, in the same sense that subjects of the Soviet state didn't believe tales of official corruption and abuse until they had been officially denied.

Washington's courtiers in the "respectable" media characterized the developments described by Fisk as a "plot" against the dollar, or a "sneak attack" against Washington's economic hegemony.

Oh, those damned Arabs -- how dare they want something of actual value in exchange for the world's most coveted commodity! Those devious Chinese -- by what right would they stop underwriting Washington's debt?

Strangely enough, none of those assailing the Arabs and Chinese for backing away from the dollar have seen fit to condemn the individual who actually recommended this course of action roughly a year and a half ago: Alan "Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse" Greenspan.

As I noted at the time (see "Our Money's No Good Here," February 25, 2008), during a conference of the Gulf Cooperation Council in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, Greenspan -- the indispensable architect of the ongoing global depression -- urged the Arabs and their allies to abandon the dollar whose value Greenspan had done so much to destroy.

Since the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, the dollar has lost 96 percent of its purchasing power. The fact that the dollar can be used to purchase anything of value is an abiding testimony to the power of official myths to contort the thinking process of human beings en masse.

There is nothing behind the dollar apart from the "full faith and credit" of the world's most powerful criminal syndicate -- well, that, and the willingness of oil-producing states to accept the dollar in exchange for petroleum. Cut that last lifeline, and there is nothing to impede the dollar's immediate fall into utter uselessness.

I find myself reminded of the old joke about an astrophysicist who is accosted after a public lecture by a crusty old man of decidedly pre-Copernican views of the universe.

"You seem like a very bright young fellow," the old man begins, seasoning his words with condescension he wasn't entitled to express, "but you've got it all wrong. You see, the earth is actually carried on the back of a giant turtle. That's the simple truth."

"But what supports that turtle?" inquires the astrophysicist with a mixture of amusement and annoyance."

"Why, another turtle, of course!" ripostes the old man.

"And what --" begins the increasingly irritated scholar, before being cut off.

"You're a clever fellow, but it won't work!" exclaims the old man. "It's turtles all the way down!"

Commissar Bernanke and other guardians of official monetary superstition are committed to preserving the delusion that prosperity can be sustained on the back of a currency that is backed by nothing but itself. It's dollars all the way down -- an infinite regression into worthlessness. And, pace the plans of the anti-dollar coalition described by Fisk, the descent shouldn't take nine years.

The term "apocalypse" refers to an unveiling, a revelation, a dramatic disclosure. We're in the early stages of a dollar apocalypse -- a process that will expose the Greenback as a fraud. Already we're seeing portents of what America will look like as the unveiling continues.

Detroit, once the paradigm of America's industrial power, has become an economic moonscape. More than half the population lives below the poverty level; unemployment is nearing 29 percent, and grass is literally growing in the streets of some neighborhoods. Unburied bodies are accumulating in the county morgue because nobody has sufficient funds for interment or cremation.

A few days ago, tens of thousands of desperate Detroit residents besieged the Cobo Center in the hope of receiving housing assistance vouchers provided by the federal government. Within less than three minutes, 25,000 applications were filled out for 3,500 available vouchers.

***

***

Amid the scuffles, tramplings, death threats, and other incidental violence, a telling example of the self-replicating fraud of our monetary system could be seen. The Detroit News reports:

"After the applications ran out, some scam artists were selling photocopies of the originals for $20 each. They were doing a brisk business, even though the white original forms state clearly on the bottom: `Do not duplicate -- Must Submit Original Application.' Volunteers from the city of Detroit Planning and Development Department eventually handed out yellow photocopies themselves."

Coercion and redistribution: Detroit residents fill out welfare voucher applications on the hood of a police car.

Here we can see the terminally corrupt financial system in tragic microcosm.

The Feds, through the miracle of deficit spending financed through inflation, issue vouchers to substitute for the regime's worthless legal tender.

Some local scam artists exploit the desperation of the destitute by producing worthless counterfeits of the vouchers and charging for them.

Rather than punishing the criminals who created and sold those worthless documents -- call them voucher "derivatives" -- government officials simply make that scam official policy on the assumption that other people somewhere will absorb the costs. This is the same mechanism used to bail out the corporatist welfare whores of Wall Street, just on a much more limited scale. The biggest difference, of course, is that while most of the welfare applicants in Detroit were left with worthless applications, the welfare whores on Wall Street were spared such disappointment.

It's fiat "money" and criminal fraud all the way down. How far does "down" go? We're going to find out.

Be sure to listen to Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network every weekday from 6:00-7:00 PM Mountain Time (7:00-8:00 PM Central).

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Hardin Saga: Waiting for the Punchline

2009-10-04T21:00:00.001-07:00

(All Hardin photos by Scott Watson, except where noted.)

A lovely town, a nasty predicament: Thanks to the less-than-visionary "leadership" of its municipal government, the friendly residents of the beautiful town of Hardin, Montana are burdened with $27 million in debt for a huge, empty prison and a business deal with a shadowy mercenary group fronted by a convicted felon.

Hardin, Montana -- In his memoir Against All Hope, former Cuban political prisoner Armando Valladares tells the story of a Cuban ruler who built a huge prison, a structure several times larger than necessary to incarcerate the island's criminal population.

When he was chastised by an adviser for spending a considerable sum on a prison too big to use, the dictator smiled and replied: Don't worry, someday a ruler will come along who will fill it up.

The "someone" predicted by that ruler was Fidel Castro.

Just inside the city limits of Hardin, Montana (pop. 3,500), next to an IGA grocery store and not far from a sugar plant, there sits a huge, empty "jail" -- actually, a small prison -- that cost $27 million to construct. Driven to desperation as its construction bonds went into default, the city government, acting through its economic development arm, the Two Rivers Authority (TRA), offered last March to accept prisoners from the Gitmo detention camp.

Who's going to fill it up? The empty Two Rivers Detention Facility in Hardin, which became a minor tourist attraction last week.

That offer piqued the interest of some yet-unnamed people in California, who chartered a security pseudo-firm calling itself the American Police Force (APF).

The figurehead of that ersatz mercenary outfit is a diminutive Montenegrin Serb known by several aliases, most recently "Captain" Michael Hilton.

Although he originally claimed to have extensive military experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, "Captain" Hilton -- a convicted felon and veteran scam artist -- eventually admitted that he had no military experience; this means he's a "captain" in roughly the same sense that Captain Crunch is worthy of the honorific.

Last summer Hardin's TRA reportedly entered into an agreement with APF to operate the jail for a fee of $2.6 million annually. TRA also promised to spend even larger sums to expand the detention center; they also announced plans to build an international training center for law enforcement and military personnel, as well as to construct housing for the personnel who would soon supposedly besiege the economically depressed town. The company also promised to provide a bounty of other civic assets, including a homeless shelter -- despite the fact that Hardin is a small town with no homeless population.

While discussions over management of the jail (more aptly called a prison) were going on, a second and possibly related process was nearing its conclusion.

Two views of "Captain" Hilton: Here he poses as head of the APF...

(Billings Gazette photo)

Since 1976, Hardin has had a contract with the Big Horn County Sheriff's Office (which is headquartered in the town) to provide law enforcement coverage.

In recent years, the sheriff's office has complained that the city government wasn't providing sufficient resources to provide services for Hardin while simultaneously covering a very large territory.

Accordingly, the city and sheriff's office have been negotiating a "deconsolidation" agreement, under which the contract with the sheriff's office would be terminated, and Hardin would provide its own police force.

... and here's the "Captain" in a 2003 booking photo taken by the Huntington Beach Police Department.

(Via the Billings Gazette.)

Just as the "deconsolidation" negotiations were nearly finished, "Captain" Hilton and another APF personality styling himself "Sergeant" Martin came rolling into town in two black Mercedes SUVs sporting magnetic decals advertising themselves as the "City of Hardin Police Department."

This naturally led to speculation, both locally and -- via the internet -- nationally and beyond, that the APF, a mercenary outfit led by an odd little man with a thick Slavic accent, was taking over law enforcement in Hardin.

In an interview with Pro Libertate, Big Horn County Undersheriff Rondell Davis -- a candid and thoroughly professional young man who arrived in Hardin about a year and a half ago -- pointed out that the APF had violated both the Montana State Code and state constitution by depicting themselves as Hardin's new police force.

Davis described the convergence of APF's arrival and the soon-to-be-completed deconsolidation talks as a "coincidence." "If Hardin wants to set up its own police force, and can find the resources to fund it," he said, "that's fine." The APF, however, obviously wasn't suitable for the job.

"If this outfit had been legitimate, the first thing they did when they came to town would have been to have a town meeting to introduce themselves, explain who they were and what they were going to do, and take questions," Davis observed. Instead, the group -- which, as far as anybody knows, includes only "Captain" Hilton and "Sergeant" Martin -- emitted a dense fog of extravagant promises while being cryptic and disingenuous in dealing with questions about its parent company, activities, personnel, assets, and qualifications, if any.

Interestingly, Undersheriff Davis described Hardin as a town with little-to-no violent crime. The most persistent problem, he pointed out, was dealing with people who have a bit too much to drink -- an assessment validated by a quick glance at the arrest reports published in the town's weekly newspaper, the Big Horn County News.

A welcome Throwback: He's a young man, but Big Horn County Undersheriff Rondell Davis is a candid, personable, low-key peace officer of the Old School. On the desk in front of him, incidentally, could be found materials provided to him by the Oath Keepers.

When he spoke with Pro Libertate, Davis was preparing for a Friday night during which he would provide backup for the single deputy assigned to patrol the entire county.

During a long walk late that evening in which I explored the length and breadth of the town, I saw nothing to indicate that there was a crime problem of any kind in Hardin.

The only sign of potential trouble I encountered was a small knot of visibly drunken young people -- several Indian youth from the local Crow Reservation in the company of a few local non-Indians -- outside a local convenience store. The "ringleader" of the group, a tall kid who appeared to be about 22 years old, reacted to the arrival of a stranger by offering me a friendly fist-bump.

What's up with this? Your correspondent at the entrance of the much-discussed Two Rivers Detention Facility.

During that nocturnal excursion, as well as a second one undertaken the following morning, I also failed to find any evidence that Hardin was being turned into a garrison state.

Contrary to reports given wide cyber-circulation, there was no portcullis being constructed at either end of the town.

Armed commandos said to be patrolling the streets failed to materialize. Nor was there any indication that people were being disarmed by foreign troops, or rounded up for incarceration and compelled injections of the legitimately dreadful H1N1 vaccine. As was the case with many others, the situation in Hardin came to my attention by way of an anonymous e-mail account that portrayed the town as an open-air prison quite similar to the totalitarian community described in Out of the Gray Zone, the terrific recent novel written by the estimable team of Claire Wolfe and Aaron Zelman.

My reaction, which I shared with those who listen to my weekday radio broadcast, was to suggest that there might be a nucleus of disturbing truth inside the accretions of alarmist speculation and apocalyptic embellishment. That much is certainly true, as I'll discuss anon.

I want to emphasize that some of the speculation was, up to a point, entirely justified, given the grandiose claims made by the APF and the clinically demented credulity of the Hardin municipal government:

Where did people get the idea that the group calling itself the "American Police Force" was going to be patrolling the mean street(s) of Hardin?

This idea came directly from the mouth of "Captain" Hilton himself.

As quoted in the September 17 Big Horn County News, Hilton (we'll use that surname for the sake of convenience) boasted of his group's purported manpower, assets, and experience in providing security for cruise ships, airliners, and convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hilton then asserted that the group could draw on the services of "contractors" from around the world to provide Hardin with a security force. "Hardin will be the safest place in the United States to live, and in six months the best place to live," Hilton insisted.

If I may be forgiven for employing the cliche, Hilton was carrying coals to Newcastle: Hardin already is an exceptionally safe place to live, in large measure because that town, like most others in Montana, is populated by people who own and know how to use firearms.

Of particular interest in this connection is the fact that Hilton's proposal to use APF as a city police force was repeated at face value, and with considerable enthusiasm, by Jim Eshleman, a reporter and photographer for the Big Horn County News, in a September 24 column assailing APF's local critics and defending the organization's compulsive secrecy.

"Having spoken with a representative from the American Police Force I was told on a number of occasions that Hardin will be the safest town in the United States and in six months will be the best place to live in the United States," regurgitated Eshleman.

Besides, who could complain about turning over control of the town to a secretive, unaccountable paramilitary group as long as their checks clear?

"As far as I'm concerned, if a little secrecy means good, high-paying jobs and an economic boost to the city, then I say go for it," insisted Eshleman. "There is no reason to do anything that might put the project into jeopardy.... [I]n spite of the secrecy, it's in the best interests of the community that we partner with the American Police Force and work together for the economic good of not only Hardin, but of Big Horn County and the Crow Reservation."

Charming.

If Hardin were faced with the prospect of conquest by a sentient race of alien space ants, Eshleman would likely publish a column welcoming the town's new insect overlords and reminding them that, as a trusted local media personality, he could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.

Given that Hilton's claim was given wide circulation, and prominently endorsed by a local representative of the "respectable" media, it isn't surprising that rumors began to proliferate that Hardin was either preparing to give APF the run of the town, or that APF had already dispatched battle-hardened paramilitary operators to police the streets.

How did the notion arise that the APF had brought foreign troops to Hardin?

Again, the fons et origo of this rumor was none other than the illustrious "Captain" Hilton.

"APF is going to be bringing in high-level military and police to train," claimed Hilton, as reported in the September 24 Big Horn County News. "Twenty-five percent from America and seventy-five percent international top military leaders from around the world."

Also noteworthy was Hilton's bogus boast that APF had been "running international detention facilities since it was incorporated in 1984." This statement, though entirely false, probably contributed to speculation about foreign prison guards being imported to staff the Two Rivers Detention Facility. And that speculation was fortified by Hilton's claim that the cost of maintaining the military/police training facility would be paid either by "the international community ... or the U.S. government."

How on earth did people come to the conclusion that Hardin residents would be rounded up and compelled to undergo flu vaccinations?

An October 1 Associated Press report quoted Hilton as promising to "dispatch security to patrol Hardin's streets" and also that he had offered "free health care to city residents out of the jail's clinic." This seems to be the acorn that grew into a mighty oak of misinformation regarding round-ups of recalcitrant residents for compelled injections.

It's worth remembering that all of these claims were made at a time when the Hardin city government was talking about creating its own police force -- and the APF rolled into town advertising itself as the "City of Hardin Police Department." Add a large dose of impenetrable secrecy, stir lightly, and the result is a casserole of rumors and innuendo lightly seasoned with fact.

The Hardin city government fled the scene once media attention was focused on its deal with the Goniff Michael Hilton. When Pro Libertate visited Hardin municipal offices on October 2, we were told by a very nice woman working as a cashier at the utilities office that the City Council were in "meetings." If those meetings took place, they occurred somewhere other than City Hall, which was locked down tight at 3:28 PM on a Friday afternoon.

Mayor Ron Adams was nowhere to be found. Greg Smith, executive director of the TRA, and his wife, mayoral candidate Kerri Smith, had likewise disappeared.

"Captain" Hilton headed back to California on October 1, promising to return a few days later to preside over a "job fair."

Becky Shay, the former Billings Gazette reporter hired as a spokesperson for APF, likewise left town. The only people connected in any way to the APF or the prison with whom I was able to speak were two people hired to clean the facility. When I spoke with them just outside the prison's front gate they seemed eager to be finished with the job and anxious regarding the question of whether their check would clear.

During a press conference in Billings, after deflecting several questions and making the robustly implausible claim that APF "welcomed" a fraud investigation by the Montana Attorney General, Shay broke down in tears claiming that she feared that her life was imperiled -- not by the felon running the fraudulent company she was hired to front, but by that company's critics.

On Saturday morning (October 3), the Gazette reported that Allied Defense Systems, an authentic military contractor that had supposedly agreed to provide uniforms for APF prison guards, announced that it had sent a letter to Hilton threatening a lawsuit over the use of the company's name.

Maziar Mafi, the Santa Ana attorney who acted as "legal affairs director" for APF, was suspending his involvement with the group. This he did despite the fact that Michael Hilton generously conferred on Mafi the rank of "captain" in the APF, which appears to consist entirely of two "captains" and a "sergeant."

Mafi's sudden disenchantment with the group may have something to do with the fact that APF had missed the first payment on the black SUVs it had used to make its grand entrance into Hardin. Mafi was the one who had co-signed the loan to buy the vehicles. Becky Shay, who has already suffered a great deal in exchange for a promised $60,000 annual salary, an APF-provided black Mercedes SUV, and a new, APF-provided home, most likely will receive a visit from a repo man in the near future.

With Hilton's scam falling apart as quickly as a Ritz cracker in hydrogen peroxide, it's likely that Hardin's taxpayers will end up being fed some substantial portion of the $27 million in rotten bonds issued to pay for the construction of the Two Rivers prison. But somebody will end up owning that huge, empty prison.

This brings me to a couple of important questions that have yet to be answered. First, who provided the money behind Hilton's little con game? Second, what was Hilton or his sponsor going to get out of conning the Hardin city government?

The point of a con, of course, is to get something, rather than to give something. Hilton promised a great deal, but unless he received as-yet undisclosed cash payments or other blandishments from the TRA, it's difficult to see how he would profit from his deception. This wouldn't be the case, however, if he was working on behalf of somebody with an interest other than financial enrichment.

There remains a possibility that somebody acting with malign intentions wanted to acquire that prison -- and it's also possible that the same individual or group could run a more competent version of this scam in some other economically depressed town that turns to incarceration as a new source of revenue.

"We're just a big joke," complained a sad-eyed but sweet middle-aged waitress the morning of our departure from Hardin. No, it's your municipal government that's made itself look ludicrous, I insisted.

The chief unanswered question is this: If the APF affair is a joke, then what's the punchline? Who is going to fill up Hardin's empty prison?

For additional coverage of the Hardin controversy, go here for my first radio program on the subject, and here for my live report from Hardin. And watch for a video report that will be available soon.
___

(My sincere thanks to my good friend Scott Watson for his invaluable help on this story.)

Be sure to tune in weekdays from 6:00-7:00 Mountain Time for Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Martial Law Is Their Business, And Business Sure Is Swell (SPECIAL UPDATE, 10/2)

2009-09-29T10:29:00.001-07:00

The "dream" realized: The Two Rivers Detention Facility, the proudest achievement of Hardin, Montana's political class. Sure, it's empty now, but I'm sure those nice men in the black SUVs can do something about that....

UPDATE, October 2

Hardin, Montana -- For an on-the-scene report on developments in the Hardin scandal, please go to LibertyNewsRadio.com and listen to this evening's program. I'll have a more detailed report here on Pro Libertate as soon as feasible.

If you build it, they will come.

That would appear to be the business plan of an enigmatic California company called American Police Force (APF), which appears to be effectively taking over the town of Hardin, Montana.

The "it" in question is a large jail facility outside Hardin, Montana, that was built several years ago but thus far remains unused. "They" refers to prisoners to fill said jail -- a 114,000 square foot, 464-bed facility. APF has yet to become firmly established in Hardin (pop. 3,400), but the company's representatives are confident "the place [meaning the jail] would start filling up by 2010."

At present, the firm is said to be doing "market research," an ominous prospect, given that it's in the business of detention. And it has even spoken about the possibility of expanding the jail within a few years.

Say, that is good news -- at least for the people on AFP's payroll. Since last Thursday, when company personnel rolled into town in a convoy of black Mercedes SUVs embossed with seals advertising a non-existent "City of Hardin Police Department,"the company's payroll has increased by at least one, and possibly two, key local figures.

The first to be snapped up was Becky Shay, a former Billings Gazette reporter whose beat included the Hardin jail. Within a day of AFP's arrival, she was hired away from the paper to serve as a $60,000-a-year spokesperson for the company (a pretty hefty salary increase for a local reporter in Montana). So quickly and slickly was this career change made that Shay's editor didn't even know she had talked with AFP about the position.

Yes, that logo just screams "America!" to me: There's nothing like the combination of a crown and a double-headed imperial eagle to summon the memory of the Revolutionary War patriots who fought to free themselves from an imperial monarch. Hey, wait a minute....

Also in "discussions" with AFP is Kerri Smith, a finalist in Hardin's mayoral race and wife of Greg Smith, Executive Director of the Two Rivers Authority (TRA). The TRA is Hardin's economic development agency, which issued $27 million in bonds to build the jail as a public works project.

In what must be the most ill-conceived piece of civic boosterism ever to assault my senses, the TRA's webpage presents the Hardin jail -- that's a structure intended to deprive people of their freedom, remember -- as the poetic expression of a cherished dream: A YouTube video proudly displays slides of the jail set to the unbearable strains of Russell Watson's wretched ballad "Faith of the Heart" (the musical accompaniment is heard on the TRA's "Detention Center" webpage):

*** ***

Yes, there's nothing quite like an effeminate power ballad to capture the pure aesthetic grace of a detention camp ringed by barbed wire.

Apparently, the "long road" to building that jail didn't end in prosperity. Since the finished jail has remained empty, the bonds have gone into default. At one point, Hardin's city government indicated it would accept relocated detainees from Gitmo; this prompted a legal battle between the city and the Montana state government.

Yeah, these guys look legit: What could possibly go wrong here?

Last March, AFP was incorporated in California. Shortly thereafter it began talks with Hardin city officials and the TRA.

City officials eventually announced an agreement with the mysterious firm that would bring in $2.6 million for use of the jail, in addition to an "investment" of $23 million to build a new training facility for military and police (which are assumed to be part of one integrated coercive apparatus, of course) on the same TRA-owned property.

The deal -- which was publicly announced although the specifics were never publicly disclosed -- is supposedly a cornucopia of civic benefits: New computers for the schools; a homeless shelter; a fleet of Mercedes patrol cars for the envisioned city police force; donations to the local food pantry; an animal shelter; gold-plated fixtures for the Mayor's executive washroom. OK, I made that last one up. I think.

Have you seen this man? Greg Smith, Executive Director of Hardin's Two Rivers Authority, negotiated a deal to turn over his town to what appeared to be a Blackwater front group, then made himself scarce.

TRA Executive Director Greg Smith, whose wife is in discussions for a position with AFP, helped negotiate the deal. Immediately after it was finished, he was put on "administrative leave," and went to ground. (Calls from Pro Libertate to Mr. Smith's number at the TRA were not returned.)

What appears to be happening here -- and until relevant details are pried out of the prehensile grip of the people running things, we can't know for sure -- is nothing less than a corporatist-style military coup: the takeover of a small town in Montana by a politically connected, federally subsidized paramilitary organization.

They're talking, but saying nothing: APF spokeswoman Becky Shay (left) and corporate official "Captain" Michael Hilton.

At a press conference a few days ago, Becky Shay grandly announced that "The decision is the name of the parent company will not be released."

Suspicions were immediately aroused that APF is a tentacle of the corporatist mercenary company formerly known as Blackwater, but now doing business under the odd name Xe (pronounced "Zee"). However, a press spokeswoman for Xe informed Pro Libertate that "We have no connection to that company, and had never heard of it" prior to recent developments in Montana.

Hardin may well be the first of many economically devastated communities to be given a lifeline by the burgeoning military-homeland security-prison-industrial complex. Lifelines of that kind can quickly become nooses.

(Watch this space for more details as they become available....)

UPDATE: Is the Balloon Going Up -- or is the Curtain Rising on a Farce?

My first reaction when I read a write-up of recent events in Hardin was that it was a retread of every "Blue Scare" story I had dealt with more than a decade and a half ago as a researcher at The New American magazine. (Here's a link to the radio program I did on Monday in which I first addressed the developments in Hardin.)

Right up until the OKC bombing there was a steady stream of alarmist rumors -- many of them provoked by events at Waco and Ruby Ridge -- of various paramilitary forces gathering in obscure, distant locations to wreak havoc on innocent people. Often the accounts would include vague but insistent references to the involvement of foreign troops wearing UN insignia (hence the expression "Blue Scare" as a generic description).

What made those stories credible at all was the fact that the government ruling us had displayed an uncanny ability to exceed our lowest expectations. There's certainly an element of that at work regarding the Hardin story: The militarization of law enforcement is a documentable menace, as is the increasing impunity with which police inflict lethal or near-lethal violence on innocent citizens. The preparations for outright military rule are likewise very real, and disturbing.

Still, there is something utterly surreal about the Hardin case; it's as if some kind of martial law melodrama were being played out as an enhanced "reality" program -- something like Red Dawn meets Jericho with a touch of the Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" broadcast added for good measure.

As much as it would pain me to have been played in this fashion, I'm hoping that's what we're dealing with here. In any case, I intend to visit Hardin, find out what I can, and publish what I learn. Perhaps by then this whole thing will have proven to be an elaborate version of "Punk'd." We'll soon see....

One last thought.

Shortly before the brilliant and principled people* running The New American decided they'd be better off without my services, I wrote a piece in which I made the following prediction:

"[E]ver-mounting debt, the impending collapse of the dollar, and the unfolding garrison state--could lead to some exceptionally unpleasant outcomes. For instance: it is possible that someday in the not too distant future a foreign interest like China, Russia, or Saudi Arabia could be in charge of our prison system....

Foreign lenders are preparing to buy our country out from underneath us, taking advantage of the dollar's decline and the desperation of cash-strapped state and local governments. Notes a recent USA Today front page story: "States and local governments across the USA are preparing to cash in valuable public assets for one-time windfalls that could reap tens of billions of dollars. The deals would let governments collect billions of extra dollars without raising taxes but would reduce their future revenue."

Highways, airports, state student-loan portfolios, sewer systems, state-run lotteries--all of these are being put up for sale. Could jails and prisons be put on the auction block, as well--as post-9/11 America takes an ominous turn in the direction of a police state? With more than two million residing behind bars in the United States, and states and municipalities increasingly turning to private, for-profit entities to run these facilities, the possibility really can't be dismissed outright. Beijing, Moscow, and Riyadh all have large dollar reserves and a lot of experience in the field of incarceration. This scenario is just one of several ugly possibilities arising from our present circumstances. "

("21st Century Feudalism," TNA, August 7, 2006; don't look for it on the magazine's website, since the folks in charge are busy scrubbing it of any evidence that someone named William Norman Grigg once wrote for that publication).

Assuming that the American Police Force isn't some kind of farcical reality theater road troupe, there's reason to believe its parent company has connections with some interesting people in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Once again, I'll keep looking, so please keep reading.

Second Update: Should We Call Him "Captain" Harold Hill?

Here's a significant piece of background info on "Captain Michael Hilton," the Montenegrin Mountebank running AFP:

[...] [W]hen Hilton came to town last week — wearing a military-style uniform and offering three Mercedes SUVs for use by local law enforcement — he was greeted with hugs by some grateful residents. The promise of more than 200 new jobs for a community struggling long before the recession hit had won them over.

But public documents and interviews with Hilton's associates and legal adversaries offer a different picture, that of a convicted felon with a number of aliases, a string of legal judgments against him, two bankruptcies and a decades-long reputation for deals gone bad.

American Police Force is the company Hilton formed in March to take over the Hardin jail.

"Such schemes you cannot believe," said Joseph Carella, an Orange County, Calif. doctor and co-defendant with Hilton in a real estate fraud case that resulted in a civil judgment against Hilton and several others.

"The guy's brilliant. If he had been able to do honest work, he probably would have been a gazillionaire," Carella said.

Court documents show Hilton has outstanding judgments against him in three civil cases totaling more than $1.1 million.

As for Hilton's military expertise, including his claim to have advised forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, those interviewed knew of no such feats. Instead, Hilton was described alternately by those who know him as an arts dealer, cook, restaurant owner, land developer, loan broker and car salesman — always with a moneymaking scheme in the works.

Hilton did not return several calls seeking comment. American Police Force attorney Maziar Mafi referred questions to company spokeswoman Becky Shay.

When asked about court records detailing Hilton's past, Shay replied, "The documents speak for themselves. If anyone has found public documents, the documents are what they are."

Shay declined comment on Hilton's military experience....

Hilton, 55, uses the title "captain" when introducing himself and on his business cards. But he acknowledged it was not a military rank.

He said he is naturalized U.S. citizen and native of Montenegro. Aliases for Hilton that appear in court documents include Miodrag Dokovich, Michael Hamilton, Hristian Djokich and Michael Djokovich.

One attorney who dealt with Hilton in a fraud lawsuit referred to him as a "chameleon" and he has a reputation for winning people over with his charm.

His criminal record goes back to at least 1988, when Hilton was arrested in Santa Ana, Calif. for writing bad checks.

Beginning in 1993, Hilton spent six years in prison in California on a dozen counts of grand theft and other charges including illegal diversion of construction funds.

The charges included stealing $20,000 in a real estate swindle in which Hilton convinced an associate to give him a deed on property in Long Beach, Calif., ostensibly as collateral on a loan. Hilton turned around and sold the property to another party but was caught when the buyer contacted the original owner.

After his release, he got entangled in at least three civil lawsuits alleging fraud or misrepresentation. Those included luring investors to sink money into gold and silver collectible coins; posing as a fine arts dealer in Utah in order to convince a co uple to give him a $100,000 silver statue; and, in the case involving co-defendant Carella, seeking investors for an assisted living complex in Southern California that was never built.

Carella said he was duped into becoming a partner in the development project and that Hilton used Carella's status as a physician to lure others into the scheme. He was described in court testimony as a "pawn" used by Hilton to lure investors.

Those involved with Hilton say he is an accomplished cook with a flair for the extravagant — wining and dining potential partners, showing up at the Utah couple's house to negotiate for the silver statue in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes.

"This is the way we got taken," said Carolyn Call of Provo, Utah, who said she gave Hilton her family's silver statue to sell on the open market.

According to court documents, Hilton turned around and gave the statue to an attorney to pay for his services.

Two California attorneys said Wednesday that after learning of Hilton's latest activities they planned to follow him to Montana to seek payment on the outstanding judgments against him.

"Once I know that there is an asset or some sort of funds to go after, we'll go after it," said Call's attorney, Roger Naghash.

This doesn't answer everything, but it does suggest that we can stand down from General Quarters -- even though we should still keep our powder dry, as it were.

I think it's appropriate, once again, to refer to my radio program from Monday night in which I first dealt with the news out of Hardin.

(Thanks to "piglipstick" for the link.)

---
*Need I say that I was being sarcastic?

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Dum spiro, pugno!

A Lighter Damnation: "Clemency" for Veronica Rodriguez and Daryl Buck

2009-09-28T21:26:00.000-07:00

Out of prison, but still not free: Putative sex criminal Veronica Rodriguez, who served a year behind bars for hugging a 13-year-old boy.

In the 1984 HBO movie "Sakharov," the eponymous Soviet physicist and human rights campaigner is seen addressing a small gathering of human rights activists outside what appears to a courtroom.

With a sense of grateful accomplishment, Sakharov announces that the death sentences originally imposed on three Russian dissidents had been reduced to twenty years in a labor camp. This news is greeted with enthusiastic cheers.

When I first watched the film a quarter-century ago this struck me as a bitter "victory": The activists had done nothing that reasonable people would consider a crime, and thus had no business being in prison -- yet the "good" news was that they would spent the next twenty years, or conceivably the balance of their lives, at hard labor in some frozen concentration camp.

I wondered what it would be like to live in a society in which such a resounding injustice would be seen as a triumph of clemency. I wonder no longer, thanks to a recent Oregon State Supreme Court ruling dealing with the cases of Veronica Rodriguez and Daryl Buck, two innocent people who served time in prison and will likely spend the rest of their lives as registered sex offenders.

Veronica Rodriguez and Daryl Buck were both residents of Oregon when they were convicted of first-degree sexual assault on a child younger than 14 years of age. Neither case involved coercion, seduction, or nudity. In fact, neither case involved actual skin-to-skin contact of any kind, or behavior that could be reasonably construed as lascivious.

Miss Rodriguez, at the age of 25, supposedly "assaulted" a 13-year-old boy by hugging him in such a way that the back of his head came into contact with her shirt. Most news accounts of the case mislead the public by saying that she had pressed the boy's head to her "breasts," as if she had not been wearing a shirt.

Mr. Buck purportedly "assaulted" a 13-year-old girl during a fishing trip. The back of his hand came into contact with the seat of her pants when she cast a fishing line; the incidental contact occurred because Buck didn't move his hand. Shortly thereafter, Buck compounded that alleged offense by brushing some dirt from her pants.

The Rodriguez trial was heard by a jury that convicted her of criminal hugging while deadlocking on a more serious charge involving allegations of more overtly sexual behavior. Buck waived a jury trial but was found guilty by a judge. In each case, the trial judge set aside the mandatory minimum sentence -- 75 months in prison -- choosing instead to inflict a sentence of sixteen months (less time off for good behavior), in addition to a life sentence as registered sex offenders.

Here we behold the righteous works done by the progenitors of the folks who brought you Oregon's Measure 11.

These acts of relative leniency -- to the extent sending people to prison for non-criminal behavior can ever be considered "lenient" -- infuriated the prosecutors who won the conviction.

Displaying a vindictive tenacity that might have struck Ahab as just a bit much, they appealed the sentences, insisting that under Proposition 11, a ballot measure enacted in 1994, trial judges had no discretionary power to waive the mandatory minimum, and that Rodriguez and Buck had to serve six years and three months in prison.

The Oregon State Supreme Court, by a 4-3 margin, ruled that the comparatively lenient sentences were appropriate -- while also upholding the convictions for sexual assault. So while Rodriguez and Buck are spared a descent into one of the lower realms described by Dante, they are to remain confined in one of the upper circles of hell for the rest of their lives.

In 2005, Miss Rodriguez, whose case I have written about before, was a youth counselor at a the Boys and Girls Club in Hillsboro, Oregon. She and her family became quite close to a very troubled 13-year-old boy. Some people at the club -- both staffers and members -- became concerned that the young adult woman was taking too personal an interest in the young boy. On several occasions Rodriguez reportedly spent time with the boy alone, and took him on overnight trips to visit family and friends.

By any reasonable measure, Rodriguez's conduct was inappropriate and should have led to administrative action -- including, if necessary, termination. It would also have been a good idea for her father to take her aside and give her some pointed advice. But the first action taken by the club to intervene occurred after the hugging incident, which took place in a room occupied by scores of other people (hardly the ideal setting for a sexual predator to work his or her wiles on a helpless victim).

Two staffers at the club, a husband and wife, played the role of spitzel* by running to the local police and accusing Rodriquez of "assaulting" the boy, swaddling their accusation in a tissue of speculative innuendo. At the time, the administration of the Hillsboro Police Department was resentful over the club's decision to "downsize" the department's presence therein; it's difficult to see how this could not have influenced the investigation.

In an amicus brief filed during Rodriguez's appeal, the Boys & Girls Club of Portland complained that it is improper to permit a jury to infer sexual intent from non-sexual conduct. As paraphrased by the Oregon State Supreme Court, that brief argued that "permitting such inferences subjects those who work with children to the constant threat that an unhappy coworker may report them for sex abuse -- as apparently happened [to Rodriguez] -- leading to a criminal investigation and possible trial and conviction."

In its majority ruling the Oregon High Court observes that the contacts between Rodriguez and her alleged victim "were brief, if not momentary. There is no evidence of force or threats of any kind. The `sexual' or `intimate' body parts that were touched were clothed. There was no skin-to-skin contact ... no bodily injury or physical harm."

What this means, of course, is that there was no "sexual" contact, let alone "assault" of any variety -- and that therefore no crime had been committed. Yet the Court, for purely positivist reasons, insists that the contact in question was "unlawful" because a prosecutor described them as such and gulled a jury into ratifying that demented description.

Daryl Buck's case is quite similar. Once he was accused of "unlawful touching," several people suddenly remembered that he had said "inappropriate" things to the 13-year-old and her older sister. Like Rodriguez, Buck had no previous criminal record at the time he was accused of assaulting the girl.

If he had previously done or said things that gave the impression that he was a sexual predator, Buck shouldn't have been allowed anywhere near the girls in the first place. In any case, his reported conduct was not criminal in se; it was only construed as such when wrapped in vague but insistent allegations of other non-criminal behavior.

In its ruling, the Oregon Supreme Court notes that under the Measure 11-mandated sentencing guidelines, "Rodriguez and Buck would have received the same sentences if they had engaged in sexual intercourse with the children that they briefly touched." (Emphasis in original.) In addition to being deliriously disproportionate, this actually creates a perverse incentive for actual perverts; after all, if they would face the same punishment for a "bad touch" that they would receive for assault rape, why shouldn't they simply indulge themselves?

It's doubtful that the Oregon voters intended Measure 11 to dictate 75-month prison terms for people guilty of nothing more serious than a suspect hug or dusting off a youngster's jeans. The sentiment propelling that referendum was outrage inspired by the perception that judges were abetting violent crime by handing down criminally trivial sentences.

The referendum was chiefly the work of Kevin Mannix, a one-time McGovern Democrat who by 1994 had reconfigured himself as a Newt Gingrich Republican. The money behind Mannix was provided by former Oregon businessman Loren Parks, who moved to Henderson, Nevada a number of years ago but remains deeply involved in Oregon state politics.

C'mon, ladies, face it -- someday you're gonna have to deal with all this: Self-described sexual virtuoso Loren Parks, the money behind Oregon's Measure 11 and much of its conservative movement.

Parks became a multi-millionaire on the strength of his medical technology company, which manufactures various devices for measuring blood pressure and other vital functions. Its most notorious product is a device called a "Penile Plethysmograph," which supposedly measures sexual arousal by registering the degree of blood engorgement in the sex organ. That device is frequently used on accused sex offenders, often -- as Parks observes -- in the context of electro-aversion treatment.

Sexual deviance is a field in which Parks has some personal expertise. A number of years ago he was compelled to settle a lawsuit filed on behalf of a woman who was described as mildly retarded -- a child in mind, if not in chronological age. He settled the suit while admitting that he had been sexually involved with the handicapped woman.

More recently, Parks was sued for sexual harassment by Maria Guerin, a former employee to whom he had sent e-mails containing various kinds of pornography, including images of bestiality. One typically sedate and decorous message demanded that the employee, a native of Spain, wear a bra that could be unhooked from the front, since their "relationship" was dependent on his "acceso a tus tetas" -- having access to her breasts. Prior to a trip abroad, Parks used his leverage as an employer to compel the woman to sign a document described as a "contract to have sex."

Although he's a bald, nebbishy man in his early 80s, Parks claims to possess superhuman sexual prowess. He also claims the ability to cure various kinds of behavioral problems through hypnosis, which he practices as a self-styled "lay therapist."

Although he has given nearly $11 million to conservative causes in Oregon, Parks -- a humanist who disparages belief in God -- is also a supporter of Planned Parenthood and a defender of Oregon's right-to-die policy. But he had a special affinity for the Measure 11 campaign; his commitment to that cause was reportedly born out of resentment toward judges and lawyers as a result of the lawsuits filed against him.

Mannix, who hoped in vain to ride the anti-crime wave into the Oregon Governor's Mansion, frets that the state supreme court's decision regarding Rodriquez and Buck will lead to a gusher of litigation by defense attorneys challenging the draconian mandatory minimums. If the treatment inflicted on Rodriguez and Buck is typical of the "justice" delivered via Measure 11, Mannix's prediction might come true -- and this would be a much-needed correction.

It would also be a welcome career boost for Mannix, who appears to be a canny opportunist -- one of many --- looking for ways to coopt that portion of the electorate that is susceptible to the appeal of punitive populism. Someone cynical enough to take an aging sex deviant as a partner in a puritanical anti-crime crusade has just the right combination of gifts to exploit the state supreme court's decision.

While Mannix plots his political strategy, Veronica Rodriguez and Daryl Buck, will continue their unjustified internal exile as registered sex offenders. But hey, what typical political career hasn't been built on at least a couple of ruined lives?

---
*"Spitzel" was the term used in East Germany to describe an informant.

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Dum spiro, pugno!

"Contempt of Cop"

2009-09-21T11:35:00.000-07:00

(Click to enlarge)

(Please note corrections below.)

"The police are to the government as the edge is to the knife," insists sociologist David Bayley, who apparently couldn't explain why the typical tax-feeder isn't the sharpest blade in the cutlery drawer.

One suitable example is the specimen who ruined what was an otherwise pleasant drive to northern Idaho last Friday night (September 18) -- a fellow whose finely honed sense of unearned privilege coexisted with an intellect whose acuity was roughly the same as that of a rusty butter knife.

North Idaho vista: One view of the countryside near Lapwai, Idaho.

I was part of a small group traveling to the tiny but beautiful village of Potlatch, where I was to give the keynote address at the Liberty Roundup, a forum featuring candidates for state and congressional offices.

My friend Scott Watson was behind the wheel, my wife Korrin and our seven-month-old son in the backseat. We had just passed through Lapwai when we caught the dreaded sight of running lights in our rear-view mirror.

Scott pulled to the side of the road onto a shoulder that proved too narrow to accommodate the donut-burner as he went through the familiar shakedown ritual. Thus instead of approaching the driver-side window, the officer -- a member of the Nez Perce Tribal Police Department -- tapped insistently on the window next to me.

Yeah, I'll bet that this is going to go really well, I thought grimly to myself as I rolled down the window.

"What's your hurry?" began the officer, reciting directly from the big book of police cliches in a voice heavy with affected heartiness.

"I'm not in a hurry," Scott said in a composed but slightly annoyed voice, reflecting his commendable dislike of being patronized.

"Well, I have you going 72 in a 55," the officer continued in the same contrived tone. (This was untrue; we were in a 65 MPH zone, as the GPS on Scott's dashboard demonstrated.) He then asked where we were headed, then paused while Scott busied himself procuring the required documents. The officer then cast a glance around the interior.

"Oh, and I'll need to see ID for the passengers as well," he said casually.

Here we go, I thought.

"Why is that necessary?" I inquired in a level, formal tone.

"Because I told you so," the officer said with a slight edge to his voice, as if that settled the matter.

It didn't.

"I'm going to need a better reason than that," I explained in the same tone I had previously used.

During the pause that followed, I saw the officer's lips compress in frustration and color begin to flood the part of his face that was visible.

"The Idaho State Code requires that citizens present identification when ordered to by a law enforcement officer!" he hissed. "If you'd like, I'll bring the Code book and show you!"

"Yes, that would be nice," I said blithely, handing him Korrin's driver's license and my official state ID card (but not my license).

The officer (who made a point of keeping his badge, and thus his own identification, out of view) collected the paperwork.

"You just helped your friend get a ticket," he grunted in my direction as he turned toward his
vehicle.

A few minutes later the officer's voice was heard behind Scott's car:

"Mr. Watson, would you step out of your vehicle? I want to speak with you for a minute."

Scott -- an exceptionally level-headed fellow -- shook his head and let out an exasperated sigh as he exited the car.

"What is he doing with Scott?" Korrin asked me.

"He's back there playing some kind of alpha-male game," I replied, predicting that he'd find some way to do Scott a "favor" in expectation of Scott's submissive gratitude.

To Scott's considerable credit, he remained utterly stolid in the face of the armed stranger's posturing. When he came back to the car, he was even more disgusted than he had been when he left -- even though he brought the welcome news that he was not getting a ticket. As he handed our ID cards back to Korrin and me, Scott related the conversation to us.

"The first thing he asked me was, `How do you know William Grigg?'" Scott reported. "I told him, `Will is a friend of mine.' Then he said, `Well, you tell him that next time he encounters law enforcement, he'd better cool it!' Then he said that I wasn't going to get a ticket because I had been `cooperative,' but warned that there were two state troopers between here and Lewiston and that they'd stop me if I went as much as three miles over the speed limit, so I'd better be careful."

The old train station in Potlatch, Idaho, scene of the post-Roundup barbecue.

Of course, the officer lied when he promised to show me the section of the Idaho State Code supposedly requiring passengers to produce identification, as I expected him to.

I didn't press the matter as forcefully as I could have because, after all, I wasn't the driver; I was willing to push back hard enough to make a point, but didn't want to cause further trouble for Scott.

The officer also lied when he said that his demand was backed by statutory authority. There is no section of the Idaho State Code that authorizes law enforcement to demand identification from a passenger in a vehicle, or the typical citizen on the street.

"A peace officer can require a person to display ID in a bar, or from someone who is driving a motor vehicle," explained Sgt. Clarence Costner of the Payette County Sheriff's Office in reply to my inquiry. "Officers can also check ID when there is probable cause of some kind that leads to an investigation of a crime -- for instance, there's been a burglary in a neighborhood, and someone might fit a suspect description. And of course, they can check ID on a consensual basis, the same way they can carry out a search."

However, Sgt. Costner emphasized, "there is no physical law that says people have to display ID on demand unless they're driving a vehicle."

"What about a passenger riding in an automobile?" I specified.

"No -- you don't have to display ID as a passenger; only as a driver," repeated Sgt. Costner.

Locke defines tyranny as power exercised beyond right. The officer who demanded my ID was acting as a petty tyrant. Had he threatened me with arrest for refusing to produce it, he would have committed a crime specifically defined in the Idaho State Code: Title 18, section 703
provides that "Every public officer ... who, under the pretense or color of any process or other legal authority, arrests any person or detains him against his will ... without a regular process or other lawful authority therefor, is guilty of a misdemeanor."

The presumptuous intrusiveness of the officer who stopped us reflects a martial law mindset: Like most law enforcement officers, he sees himself as a caste apart from, and set above, the "civilian" population, and thus empowered to command submission from us.

More to the point: He sees himself as possessing innate authority, rather than authority derived from the law. He is the law, at least in the theater of his small and otherwise uncluttered mind. Note how his idea of a legal warrant is the phrase, "Because I told you to."

My polite but pointed rejoinder was based on the tacit but clearly understood question, quo warranto? -- By what authority are you making this demand? This dispelled the officer's pretense that he is somebody to whom reflexive obedience is due, as opposed to someone whose authority -- such as it is -- must be considered derivative, limited, and conditional.

Sure, the officer succeeded in securing cooperation through a lie. But the frustration-inspired threat of collective punishment -- "You just helped your friend get a ticket!" -- and the impotent warning, delivered from a safe distance by way of my friend Scott ("tell your friend he'd better cool it!") give some indication, I suspect, of how deeply this encounter injured the officer's unearned sense of self-regard. Most acts of lawless police violence are committed in the service of that self-image, which is endlessly reinforced through training and peer socialization.

In 1992, amid a growing scandal provoked by a wave of criminal violence committed by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, an investigation was conducted under the leadership of James G. Kolts, a conservative Republican retired L.A. County Superior Court Judge who had been appointed by Ronald Reagan.

The resulting 358-page "Kolts Report" described a department that behaved in a manner largely indistinguishable from the conduct of a Third World death squad: Beatings, extra-judicial killings, planting evidence, robberies, and other undisguised criminal actions were commonplace; they almost always went unpunished, and were often rewarded.

One particularly notorious deputy, Paul Archambault, was a serial killer with a badge; in two different instances he gunned down unarmed and harmless people, the first time actually stopping to reload before commenting, "he's still moving" and unleashing a second volley.

On one occasion, as sheriff's deputies pumped round after round into a man named Hyong Po Lee following a pursuit, one San Jose police officer who witnessed the event commented to another: "We just observed the sheriffs execute someone." In the year prior to the formation of the Kolts Commission, there were several instances in which deputies back-shot unarmed people; none of the shooters was ever disciplined in any way, let alone prosecuted.

Summary execution was not the only distinguishing activity of the LASO's under Sheriff Sherman Block. In April 1989, a man named Demetrio Carillo was seized and beaten after he rebuked deputies for driving on the sidewalk near his home -- one of many to face summary "street justice" for "mouthing off." Deputies were taught by Field Training Officers how to falsify official reports to justify an arrest after the fact when the real purpose of the arrest was to punish anyone who refused to display the required deference.

"This is the worst aspect of police culture, where the worst crime of all is `contempt of cop,'" observed the Kolts Report. "The deputy cannot let pass the slightest challenge or failure immediately to comply. It is here that excessive force starts and needs to be stopped."

The endless parade of abuses inflicted by police on citizens who fail to display the required docility testifies that this " aspect of police culture" has replicated itself nation-wide. In the company of my wife, our infant child, and a close friend, I encountered it just north of Lapwai, Idaho last Friday night. Things could have turned out much worse. Next time, they probably will.

-------
In the original version of the article, I mistakenly identified the officer who figured so prominently in this story as a deputy in theNez Perce County Sheriff's Department. I'm grateful to Violet Harris for her help in following up on this story.

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Dum spiro, pugno!

Idaho's Criminal Injustice System

2009-09-17T21:00:00.000-07:00

(Second in an occasional series. )

His name is Gilligan, but he's nobody's "little buddy." Employed as a prison guard at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution in 2007, Timothy Ryan Gilligan, by his own admission, repeatedly had sexual relations with an inmate.

Earlier this month (September 2009), Gilligan was arraigned on a charge of felonious sexual misconduct. Thanks to the inexplicable leniency of the prosecution and the unwonted generosity of the Idaho Sex Offender Classification Board, Gilligan will not have to register as a sex offender. Nor will he face prosecution on the sex charge.

In fact, there's a very good chance he won't serve any prison time. This is because the Ada County Prosecutor's office, in collaboration with4th District Judge Ronald Wilper, arranged an agreement in which Gilligan was permitted to plead guilty to a charge of burglary -- despite the fact that t he only thing the offender may have taken by force was a captive woman's self-respect.

The Sex Offender Classification Board helped out by relieving Gilligan of the prospect of being a registered sex offender, or even a violent sexual predator (VSP). This decision was supposedly made on account of the results of a "psycho-sexual evaluation" carried out by SANE Solutions, a quasi-private psychological counseling service that provides such evaluations and supervises treatment of convicted sex offenders.

Gilligan, who worked as a "psychiatric technician" in the prison system subsequent to his admitted offenses, may have known how to game that system. Then again, it's obvious that Gilligan's erstwhile colleagues in the criminal "justice" system have extended every conceivable professional courtesy in the effort to avoid ruining his life by forcing him to register as a sex offender. In sex abuse cases not involving employees of the state criminal "justice" system, the Ada County prosecutor's office has distinguished itself for its zeal, at considerable expense to due process.

One splendid example among many that could be cited to illustrate that tendency was the bizarre trial of David Dutt, who was convicted of sexual misconduct with a child based solely on the self-contradictory account of the adolescent accuser -- and despite physical evidence (the existence of an intact hymeneal membrane in the purported victim) that was sufficient not only to provide reasonable doubt, but to prove the innocence of the accused.

Somehow, the Ada County Prosecutor's office managed to convince a criminally credulous jury that the "victim" in the Dutt Case possessed a uniquely resilient anatomy, one that permitted her to regenerate her traumatized and violated hymen in much the same way that certain lizards can re-grow severed tails. That, coupled with the theatrical, tearful summation of prosecutor Jean Fisher (who suggested that the jury would be party to the little girl's abuse if they didn't believe her allegations), was enough to convict an innocent man and send him to prison for up to 30 years.

The Dutt Case illustrates how the Ada County Prosecutor's office can arrange a sex offense conviction in the absence of evidence. Thus it's astonishing to see the same office refuse to prosecute Gilligan for sex crimes to which he has admitted guilt.

To understand the role played by the Idaho Sex Offender Classification Board in the Gilligan case, one must first understand that its rulings are entirely capricious. This was entirely by design, a fact that was admitted on the record during a May 19, 2006 meeting of the Board.

"The statutory vagueness regarding VSP [Violent Sexual Predator] designations was intended to provide for the board to use its discretion in considering cases," reports the official minutes of that meeting. "A designation criteria checklist is not feasible due to the wide variation of sexual offense/offender behavior. As such, each case is different and considered on its own merits."

Gilligan's conduct -- using his position of power over a captive and (apparently) unwilling woman to force her into sex -- is difficult to describe as anything other than that of a violent sexual predator. Yet the Board didn't see the "merit" in applying that designation to Gilligan, despite his admissions.

One is tempted to think that this validates a comment made not long ago on Idaho Public Television by Idaho state senator Denton Darrington: "I'm concerned ... that we don't get pranksters on the Sex Offender registry, but that we do get those who are deviant on the Sex Offender registry. In other words we don't want the fraternity kid on the football team who's doing a prank to go on the registry."

Forgive me -- I neglected to mention that before he found employment with the Idaho Department of Corrections (IDOC), Timothy Gilligan was a starting wide receiver with the Boise State Broncos.

Granted, it would be difficult to prove that Gilligan's acts were non-consensual. But they were professional compromising and at the very least suggestive of a derangement in his character that made him a potential danger to others.

Whether this is sufficient to warrant prosecution is a matter about which reasonable people can disagree. But this much is incontestable: Given that there are people (such as David Dutt) in prison and on the sex offender rolls in Idaho whose guilt was not reasonably established, the solicitude displayed toward Gilligan screams and reeks of official corruption.

Gilligan admitted to acts recognized as sex offenses under the law, and won't be prosecuted for them. Mark Wicklund, an attorney who transplanted himself to Idaho from the Midwest, was compelled to plead guilty to alleged sex offenses despite the absence of either an alleged victim or a witness. He was sentenced to seven years of probation under the supervision of the above-mentioned SANE Solutions.

On April 24, 2008, despite the fact that Wicklund had committed no additional act to justify such treatment, he was designated a Violent Sexual Predator by the Sex Offender Classification Board. That designation came close on the heels of a probation violation filed against Wicklund for maintaining an internet-based consulting business, which was described, incorrectly, as impermissible under the terms of his probation. As a result, his probation was extended an additional three years.

Wicklund contends, quite plausibly, that both of those actions were retaliation for his refusal to obey a warning he was given by Fourth District Judge Thomas Neville: "Stay away from the Dutt Case."

Judge Neville presided over both the Dutt Case and Wicklund's case.

A few years ago, Wicklund agreed to devote his considerable legal talents to organizing the evidence for David Dutt's post-conviction appeal. His work product lays out a deeply documented, multi-faceted case for overturning Dutt's conviction on numerous grounds -- including, but not limited to, ineffective representation of counsel, several instances of prosecutorial misconduct, and abuse of discretion by the trial judge -- that is, the same Judge Neville who later threatened Wicklund.

As Wicklund related his experience to me, his work on the David Dutt's post-conviction appeal triggered all kinds of punitive mistreatment from people connected to the Ada County prosecutor's office through SANE, the IDOC, the department of probation and parole, and other government and quasi-government entities.

Granted, Wicklund could be dismissed by some as an ax-grinding sex offender (one thus designated, recall, without either a victim or a witness). However, he has documented his allegations, and key elements are confirmed by officials in the state government's employ. Wicklund alleges that the probation violation and VSP designation caused both his mental and physical health to deteriorate rapidly.

This is confirmed by Dave Ferguson, a state-employed counselor assigned to Wicklund, who testified in an affidavit (see page one here, page two here) that he not only suffered from anxiety and depression, but that "his physical health also appeared to deteriorate.... [H]e had to call me from the hospital on at least two occasions after he had been admitted, to indicate that he would have to miss his meetings with me."

Wicklund suffers from congestive heart failure, and Ferguson recalled that following the probation extension and VSP designation Wicklund's weight increased "dramatically" as a result of edema related to his heart condition. Open sores and a staph infection developed in his legs owing to circulatory problems. "The ongoing legal problems, the isolation, probation extension, and the stigma of the VSP designation" all detracted from Wicklund's mental and physical health, concluded Ferguson.

Parole Officer Sutherland: His Facebook page jocularly lists "S&M, chains, whips" among his "interests." Sure, it's a joke (I guess), but if he didn't work for the state as someone in charge of supervising sexual deviants, he'd probably be in trouble of some kind.

Another complication arose when Wicklund was taken to jail following his alleged probation violation.

For several years, Wicklund has taken a strong prescription narcotic called Norco to palliate chronic pain in his knees.

When he was taken to jail by Parole and Probation Officer Brandon Sutherland, the Officer denied Wicklund access to Norco; this led to an involuntary "de-tox from the drug without the benefit of medical supervision. After three days of compelled de-toxification in jail, Wicklund was rousted by Officer Sutherland and taken to undergo a polygraph examination -- paid for with an IDOC voucher -- to answer questions about his purported probation violation.

The exam was administered by Jim Page, at the time a partner with Chip Morgan in a state-contracted firm called Polygraph Associates.

When Morgan, caught a glimpse of Wicklund's condition, he urged Page not to administer the test. According to Morgan, Page dismissed Morgan's concerns -- which were dictated by the ethics of his profession -- with a shrug and the statement, "I really need the money." (Wicklund's original, four-page December 12, 2008 complaint can be seen here, here, here, and here.)
here.)

That comment so alarmed Morgan that he dissolved the partnership immediately and started his own polygraph service.

"I observed that Mark Wicklund appeared physically ill," recalled Morgan in an affidavit. (See here, here, and here.) "He had sweated his jail-issued jumpsuit completely through, was visibly sweating all over his face, was panting heavily and was pasty white in complexion. He also appeared to be `in and out' of tracking with the conversation."

He obviously was in no condition to serve as the subject of a polygraph. Yet Page performed one anyway, and the results were used to uphold Wicklund's probation violation. This prompted Morgan to dissolve his partnership with Page and open his own shop, Morgan Polygraph. Jim Page continues to perform polygraph examinations on sex offenders, despite a patent conflict of interest: His wife, Tess Buttram, is a Deputy Prosecuting Attorney who works on sex crime prosecutions for the Ada County Prosecutor's Office.

Shortly after that incident, Wicklund was summoned to the Fourth District probation office for a meeting he described to me as being akin to "the Spanish Inquisition." In that meeting, Wicklund insists, he was told to "stand down" from his investigation of misconduct by the Ada County Prosecutor's Office and the misbehavior of Jim Page -- which seemed to share a pattern of abuses similar to those committed in the prosecution of David Dutt. If he didn't comply, Wicklund was warned, he would be jailed on "discretionary time," which would mean an open-ended jail term.

Wicklund didn't relent, and neither did his enemies. Earlier this year, his attorney filed a motion for early release from probation; that motion contained two supporting affidavits. According to Wicklund, "Individuals in the Ada County Prosecuting Attorney's Office ... gained access to the court file and removed the two supporting affidavits from the file and destroyed them. Further, individuals from the Ada County Prosecuting Attorney's Office gained access to the official register of court actions for [my] case and deleted the entry documenting the submission of the [two] affidavits."

At present, Judge Neville refuses to review any of the relevant evidence -- which, if Wicklund is correct in describing the judge's threats, isn't surprising.

All of this, once again, was allegedly done in retaliation for Wicklund's work dealing with David Dutt's post-conviction appeal. The Dutt Case appears to be a very sore spot for Judge Neville and the Ada County Prosecutor's Office, and for good reason: That case displays, in very compelling fashion, what critics of the Idaho "criminal justice" system perceive to be institutionalized corruption in the prosecution of sex crimes. How much of this can Wicklund prove? We're likely to find out quite soon.

On August 12 he filed a "Notice of Tort Claim" (available here, here, and here) giving ninety days' notice of his intent to file a lawsuit. He names as defendants the Ada County Prosecuting Attorney's Officer, the Idaho Department of Corrections, Ada County, and the State of Idaho.

By filing his suit Wicklund is taking a large club to an immense, over-stuffed pinata filled with dirty diapers and dead cats. The fallout, while exceptionally unpleasant, will be quite revealing.

Watch this space for additional developments....

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Dum spiro, pugno!

Helot on Wheels

2009-09-14T11:29:00.000-07:00

What an unalloyed blessing it is to live under a government describing itself as a constitutional republic!

Unlike undisguised tyrannies of various flavors, the government ruling us often -- but not always -- briefly pretends to defer to the written document from which it derives a set of limited, revocable powers, before its enforcement and judicial personnel dispense with those limitations altogether and inflict whatever atrocities they choose on the rest of us.

Sure, the outcome isn't materially different from what we'd experience if we lived under an absolute monarchy, or any of a number of dictatorships. But ours is the singular privilege of knowing the specific constitutionally protected "unalienable" rights that are being violated by the government that blights our society.

Cue Lee Greenwood: "I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free" -- a phrase that must qualify as one of the most puerile, "clap for Tinkerbell"-style acts of self-delusion ever recorded.

The U.S. Constitution and the constitutions of the various states purportedly offer ironclad, black-letter protection against unreasonable searches and compelled self-incrimination. Yet any American who operates an automobile may be stopped at any time by a uniformed tax-feeder and compelled to undergo a blood test -- if the donut-grazer in question affects to believe that the driver is intoxicated, whether or not there is evidence to support that belief.

Witness the case of Jamie Lockard, a 53-year-old resident of Lawrenceburg, Indiana, who was stopped last March on suspicion of driving while intoxicated (DWI). A roadside Breathalyzer test determined that Lockard's blood alcohol was under the legal limit.

Since incriminating Breathalyzer results are regarded as infallibly conclusive for the purpose of securing a conviction, a negative result offers immediate exoneration -- correct?

One would think so. And one would be wrong.

You see, Officer Brian Miller, being not only a hero (they're all heroes, don't you know) but something of an oracle, just knew Lockard was drunk, despite the reading on his otherwise infallible device. So Miller obtained a "warrant" from a complaisant judge (a warrant being a permission slip from one government agent to another authorizing the violation of a citizen's rights) that authorized the kidnapping of Lockard for the purpose of forcibly extracting bodily fluids -- blood and urine. The former was drawn by a needle. The latter was siphoned from Lockard's body through the forced insertion of a catheter.

Those tests both confirmed what the initial roadside test had demonstrated: Lockard was, for purposes of the law, as sober as Carrie Nation. So the matter ended here -- correct?

Of course it didn't. Because Lockard had, in some unspecified and ineffective way, protested Officer Miller's actions, the uniformed pest vindictively charged him with "obstruction of justice" -- meaning that Lockard had the temerity to be legally sober and to maintain his innocence while undergoing the criminal indignities inflicted on him by Miller and his partners in official crime.

"He [Miller] took it too far," complained Lockard after filing a lawsuit in protest of his treatment. "He thought he could do whatever to me... that he wanted to."

Unfortunately, under what our rulers are pleased to call the "law," Miller is objectively right, even if the Constitution says otherwise. The prevailing assumption, as recently expressed in a Washington state supreme court ruling, is that by obtaining a driver's license an individual gives "implied consent" to searches of both his vehicle and person, and that refusal to do so constitutes revocation of the "privilege" of driving.

A year and a half ago, Dallas-area police announced that the Memorial Day and Independence Day holidays would be "no refusal weekends," during which officers would deal with "a suspect who is arrested on suspicion of drunk driving does not voluntarily submit to a breathalyzer or blood test" by asking a county judge "to immediately approve a search warrant to draw blood...."

Texas state law supposedly prohibits police from forcibly extracting a blood sample except in cases where an accident has occurred involving serious bodily injury. However, the most recent Texas state appeals court ruling on this subject pronounces, with the smug, hypocritical piety of a philandering priest, that this provision doesn't really recognize the right of an individual to refuse a blood sample.

This is because the implied consent law actually permits the taking of blood without a warrant or explicit consent, because this is "another method of conducting a constitutionally valid search.... It gives officers an additional weapon in their investigative arsenal, enabling them to draw blood in certain limited circumstances even without a search warrant." In substance, that statement means that any invasion of an individual's person is "constitutionally valid" if the government says so.

Naturally, a search warrant nullifies the protests of the victim of a compelled blood test, since it would be issued based "on `the informed and deliberate determinations' of a neutral and detached magistrate'" -- for instance, the officious gavel-fondlers who rubber-stamp every warrant request, sight unseen, made by a cop during a "no refusal weekend."

All of this is the noxious fruit of a diseased tree -- namely, the whole system of licensure governing the "privilege" of operating a motor vehicle. This is among the nastiest versions of the familiar trick in which government redefines a right -- in this case, freedom to travel, which is recognized in Anglo-Saxon Common Law at least as far back as Runnymede -- into a revocable "privilege."

What this means in practice is that traffic police are distant but unmistakable kindred to the Krypteia, a cadre of bully-boy secret police who were authorized to lurk at roadside to prey on the enslaved Helots, plundering and killing them at will.

Accordingly, the moment any of us steers a car onto a public street or highway, he becomes a Helot on Wheels, as it were.

An increasing number of police are permitted to draw blood themselves, rather than suborning competent medical professionals into criminal assaults on citizens under clinical conditions. With the support of money extracted at the gas pump, the federal government is actively abetting this practice -- which began in Arizona and Texas about a decade and a half ago -- through a special program training policemen to act as "officer phlebotomists."

Nampa, Idaho, an otherwise pleasant and attractive community of about 80,000 people, is afflicted with a federally subsidized pilot program in which ten officers have been authorized to draw blood from motorists who refuse a breath test. Not surprisingly, this program -- through which several dozen people have been assaulted so far -- is abetting unhealthy appetites on the part of the "elite" officers who have gone through the training.

When he pulls up alongside a driver, Officer Daryll Dowell admitted, he finds himself "looking at people's arms and hands, thinking, `I could draw from that.'"

The advertised purpose of the phleboto-officer program is to induce unwilling people to submit to breathalyzer tests -- which, as we've noted, are not considered definitive if they provide an exculpatory result. And as with every other policy that involves the violent imposition of force by police on citizens, the primary concern here is officer safety, not the well-being of the victim.

According to Nicole Watson, an instructor from the College of Western Idaho who trained Nampa's "officer phlebotomists," police "will draw blood of any suspected drunk driver who refuses a breath test. They'll use force if they have to, such as getting help from another officer to pin down a suspect and potentially strap them down...."

A helot displays the Krypteia's handiwork: Arizona resident Brian Sewell, who resisted when ordered to undergo a roadside blood test, displays some of the injuries he received when the police assaulted him with a Taser.

If all else fails to subdue an individual who refuses to permit this bodily violation, police can always deploy their preferred implement of punitive torture, the Portable Electro-Shock Torture device (PEST, more commonly called a Taser). That's what happened to Arizona resident Brian Sewell in May 2007. Officers demanded a blood draw after the motorist failed a field sobriety test. They didn't even deign to offer Sewell the option of a breath or urine test. When Sewell, who has a deathly fear of needles, refused to cooperate, he was repeatedly shot with a Taser, leaving scars that were visible weeks after the attack.

James Green, a resident of Pinal County, Arizona, was forced to undergo a needle stick by an inept Sheriff's deputy despite the fact that the traffic stop occurred within walking distance of a hospital. Two maladroitly administered needle sticks later, the officer had claimed his sample -- and left Green with an infection that lasted for months, causing him to miss work.

"Protected"? Nope -- infected: James Green, who fell into the hands of a particularly inept and sadistic cop, displays the infection he received from a needless roadside blood test.

This isn't surprising: Traffic enforcement officers are not medical personnel. While they are given rudimentary first aid training, they are not competent to conduct blood exams and aren't bound by Hippocratic ethics.

In fact, their primary mission is not to protect the public, but rather to extract revenue from it: Police-generated revenue is how, in the words of one prominent law enforcement contractor, the governments that hire police officers get a "return on investment."

After many decades of metaphorically bleeding the public, police are now permitted to do so literally. At some point, one can hope, the public is going to start returning the favor.

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"You Can't Do This to People": Robin McDermott's Resistance

2009-09-09T12:39:00.000-07:00

Battle-weary but resolute, American freedom fighter Robin McDermott stands in front of the Springfield, Missouri City Hall, the redoubt of a criminal clique she has been fighting for roughly a dozen years.

It is incredible how soon as a people becomes subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is led to say ... that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement. --

Etienne de la Boetie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude

As a 45-year-old single mother of two who cared for a crippled brother, Robin McDermott was well-acquainted with adversity. When Robin's brother woke her up early in the morning on January 23, 1998 to tell her that her older son, Morgan Smith, was being arrested on a DUI charge, she knew things were about to get just a touch worse.

The resident of Springfield, Missouri most likely did not anticipate being needlessly attacked by a police dog, hauled off to jail, and spending the next decade in a lengthy legal struggle with a corrupt and abusive municipal government -- simply because she failed to demonstrate the cringing, reflexive submission expected from those of us who don't wear government-issued costumes.

Bleary-eyed from lack of rest, clad in slippers and a nightshirt, Robin turned on the porch light and stepped outside to learn what was going on. She asked the officer who had conducted a field sobriety test if Morgan could briefly speak with her inside the house; she wanted to satisfy herself that her son had indeed been driving while intoxicated.

"He said, `Well, it's a little late for that. He's going to jail,'" Robin recalled in an interview with the Springfield News-Leader, mimicking Officer Tom Royal's smug, officious tone.

Understandably offended by the dismissive tax-feeder (or, to use her preferred description, "donut-burner") in her driveway, Robin found her mood worsening as the police deployed a drug-sniffing dog named Caesar to search Morgan's vehicle. She went into her house, put on some jeans, made a 911 call to protest the officers' behavior, and then went back out to her porch to confront them again.

As a student of constitutional law who was well acquainted with police tactics, Robin was justifiably suspicious that the officers -- five in all -- were looking for a pretext to forfeit the pickup truck and anything else on which they could put their hands. Her suspicion was sharpened when the police allowed the dog off its leash to roam freely around the property -- a violation of the city's "dog at large" ordinance.

Knowing that it was possible to tow the pickup truck to another location to continue the search, Robin ordered the police off her property. The officers refused, despite the fact -- confirmed in subsequent legal proceedings -- that they had already summoned a tow truck and had thus had no reason at all to conduct the search in the driveway.

By this time, Robin's fuses were thoroughly blown, a fact reflected in the increasingly salty language she used to demand explanations from the police -- particularly regarding the large, potentially violent dog that they were permitting to run loose in her front yard.

Robin never budged from her front porch -- meaning that she was more than thirty feet away from the scene of the search. As a federal court would observe later: "At no point did she offer any force or violence, or threat thereof, nor did she seek to close the distance between herself and police."

Nonetheless, Robin was thrown face-down on the ground by Officer Royal, handcuffed, and arrested under a city ordinance forbidding citizens to "resist or obstruct a city officer making an arrest or serving any legal writ, warrant or process or attempting to execute any other duty imposed on him by law."

No, not that Springfield -- although Springfield, Missouri's municipal, while just as inept as the one depicted in The Simpsons, is much more corrupt.

Robin's "resistance" or "obstruction" consisted of heckling a knot of self-important armed bureaucrats who were acting as petty tyrants by seeking a pretext to expand their DUI-related search.

Her "crime" was to display insufficient docility in the face of armed aggression by agents of the state. As she commented in a telephone interview with Pro Libertate, "I wasn't cordial enough for their tastes when they invaded my property."

"You would beat up an old grandma?" Robin protested as Royal rudely cuffed her wrists.

"If you're a grandma, why don't you act like one?" Royal reportedly replied.

While Royal assaulted and taunted her, Robin endured an even greater violation of her person: Caesar, who had been permitted to run free, vaulted onto the porch and bit Robin several times in the thigh and buttocks, leaving her with severe puncture wounds. She was shuttled to a local hospital and then to jail in a police wagon the interior of which was drenched in urine; this helps explain why the wounds inflicted by Caesar (and, indirectly, by his criminally negligent handler) would become infected and fester for weeks.

Released from jail the following morning, Robin's inchoate anger had been catalyzed into resolve.

"I went to bed that night thinking I was at least secure in my own bedroom, my own property," she recalled to Pro Libertate. "The next thing I know there are police -- armed men -- strutting across my property and arrogantly dismissing my rights. They just can't treat people that way."

As is the case with all ordinances of its kind, Springfield's edict against "resisting and obstructing" a police officer was designed to give cops a bludgeon to harass, intimidate, and punish people who annoy them without committing an actual crime.

Representing herself, with a public defender in an advisory role, Robin requested a jury trial -- which was heard in a county court, rather than by a Springfield municipal judge. She won acquittal on the charge of obstructing an officer and a second charge of third-degree assault (arising from an uncorroborated allegation that she bit one of the arresting officers while in the hospital, which, if true, would have required that Robin receive treatment for rabies).

Exonerated of any "criminal" behavior, Robin proceeded to give the city of Springfield unshirted hell.

With the benefit of a smattering of legal education and a full, foamy head of righteous rage, Robin filed a civil rights lawsuit against Springfield, Police Chief Lynn Rowe, several officers, and the assistant city prosecutor. This began a legal war of attrition that would last nine years, cost Springfield an estimated $11,587.16, exhaust the services of six city attorneys, and -- more importantly -- claim countless hours of Robin's life that she could have put to much better use had she not been needlessly assaulted on her own front porch that chilly January morning.

A wonderful creature perverted into a weapon of terror and repression: Police abuse of dogs both at home (left) and abroad (below, right).

On two occasions, Robin's suit was dismissed by U.S. District Court Judge Dean Whipple, who ruled that she had been properly arrested.

Referring to Judge Whipple, Robin commented to Pro Libertate: "He's the onriest, most willful old cuss -- he's just as stubborn as I am. In spite of everything, I just adore him, because he was fair. He understood that I'm not an attorney, and he was willing to help me understand many of the difficult legal issues, but he didn't give me any latitude; he forced me to make my case. I think it would be fun to play a round of golf with him, or maybe spend some time shooting pool."

After each dismissal, Robin -- displaying the tenacity of a Pitbull -- filed another appeal. On her third attempt she succeeded in getting a jury trial. In an odd turn of events, the same Judge Whipple who had twice dismissed Robin's case ruled that the Springfield anti-obstruction statute -- Ordinance 26-17 -- improperly allowed the police to criminalize constitutionally protected speech. This resulted in a judicial order that Springfield pay Robin $25,000 as punishment for violating her rights.

Displaying a dishonest child's gift for depraved creativity and a pathological indifference to truth, the Springfield municipal government had restructured its ordinance code; by the time Judge Whipple ruled against Springfield, the measure in question was not listed as Ordinance 26-17, but rather 78-32(1). This supposedly meant that the ruling didn't apply to the current law.

(The city government had earlier played a similar trick with the municipal "dog at large" ordinance, quietly revising it subsequent to Robin's arrest to provide an exception for the police.)

Not only did Judge Whipple not buy that argument, he was offended that Springfield was trying to sell it: On August 13 he issued an order barring enforcement of the ordinance, by whatever designation the city chose for it.

And yet, Springfield continues in its dilatory tactics.

"They haven't paid a cent," Robin reported to Pro Libertate. "They're trying to get me to sign a settlement document that would hold them `harmless,' and refusing to release the money to me until I do. They've gone so far as to send me a scanned copy of the check for $25,000 and said that all I have to do is get it is to sign a document dismissing any further claims against the city `with prejudice.'"

Robin is smart enough to understand that the officials making that offer are not negotiating from a position of strength, where the legal issues are concerned.

"I've filed a motion for civil contempt," she explains. "I'm requesting that the court impose a continuing penalty of $1,000 a day until they pay me what they owe me." Regrettably, those costs will be passed along to the productive residents of Springfield, rather than being extracted from the representatives of the parasite class responsible for the violation of Robin McDermott's rights -- but she isn't responsible for that fact.

Robin's long-sought and hard-won triumph shouldn't engender unrealistic hopes that we can beat the statist system by using that system; her happy outcome is a blessed anomaly. Had the same incident occurred in 2008, rather than 1998, it's entirely possible that some overgrown adolescent in uniform would have shot or tasered Robin to death.

During the decade that Robin battled for her rights in court, overkill has become institutionalized -- a fact of which she is painfully aware. "Our local Sheriff just applied for a grant to buy a grenade launcher with drug forfeiture funds," she complained to me. "Just what on earth does the Sheriff need with a grenade launcher?"

Robin McDermott, a small woman with burdens that would have daunted Atlas, is a "real American" -- an individual who, in the words of former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper, is willing to meet the police "at the threshold at home and [say], `no, you can't come in. Show me your warrant.'"

In this age of collectivist conformity, real Americans are tragically thin on the ground. One of them lives in Springfield, Missouri.

Video Extra

The Praetorian Presumption in full, malignant flower: "We're not on the same level. I'm up here, you're down there":

A note of thanks --

It is impossible for me to give adequate expression to the gratitude I feel, on behalf of my family, to all of you who have offered prayers, kind words, and many very generous gifts to us during our recent month from hell. I earnestly hope that I will be able to express thanks in a more personalized way.

My health is improving (I'm at about 80 percent right now -- not ready for a cage fight, certainly, but at least I'm no longer bleeding to death) and we've found a suitable new home at literally the last minute. With those concerns taken care of, our other problems will become tractable. Thank you, once again, for helping us in our time of dire need. -- Will

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Dum spiro, pugno!