Tehran’s much-discussed nuclear program and its supposed threat to Israel and the U.S. are pretexts for a war against Iran intended to precipitate regime change and punish the country for threatening the “petrodollar”-based economy — and that threat, in turn, is exacerbated by the growing likelihood of war.

­“Economic sanctions, spearheaded by the US and, less willingly, the EU could have a disastrous effect on both of their respective economies,” notes RT News. “If Iran cannot sell their oil to Europe, there are plenty of customers waiting in the wings, and if they come bearing not petrodollars, but gold and sovereign currencies, then all the better for Iran.  These sanctions, if enforced, will in effect place a serious dent in the power of the petrodollar. Any rhetoric regarding Iran’s nuclear program and the insistence on crippling it is nothing more than a US attempt to force regime change for one more receptive to maintaining the hegemony of the petrodollar.”

In February 2008, Tehran opened the Iranian Oil Bourse (IOB), which – in the words of  Dr. Krassimir Petrov of the American University in Bulgaria – is a petroleum commodity market “based on a euro-oil-trading mechanism that naturally implies payment for oil in euro,” rather than in dollars.

In August 1971, the Nixon administration severed the last remaining link between the dollar and gold. From that point, “the United Sates had to force the world to continue to accept fiat dollars in exchange for economic goods and to have the world hold more and more of those depreciating dollars. It had to give the world an economic reason to hold them, and that reason was oil.” That link between the dollar and oil, Petrov asserts, resulted from “an iron-clad arrangement with Saudi Arabia to support the House of Saud in exchange for accepting only US Dollars for its oil.”

F. William Engdahl, author or A Century of War: Anlgo-American Politics and the New World Order, describes the U.S.-Saudi pact in detail:

By their firm agreement with Saudi Arabia, as the largest OPEC oil producer,… Washington guaranteed that the world’s largest commodity, oil, essential for every nation’s economy, the basis of all transport and much of the industrial economy,… could only be purchased in world markets in dollars. The deal [was] fixed in June 1974 by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, establishing the US-Saudi Arabian Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation. The US Treasury and the New York Federal Reserve would “allow” the Saudi central bank, SAMA, to buy US Treasury bonds with Saudi petrodollars. In 1975, OPEC officially agreed to sell its oil only for dollars. A secret US military agreement to arm Saudi Arabia was the quid pro quo.

“The economic essence of this arrangement,” points out Dr. Petrov, “was that the dollar was now backed by oil.” The emergence of an alternative petroleum market setting the price in a different currency, such as the euro, would cause a rapid flight from the greenback. Should the IOB go into operation, Petrov predicted in 2004, “it will eagerly be embraced by major economic powers and will precipitate the demise of the dollar.”
Petrov, Engdahl, and other analysts point out that in 2000, Saddam Hussein began to demand euros, rather than dollars, for his oil exports; once Saddam was deposed, Iraq’s oil exports were once again sold in dollars. This illustrates that the war in Iraq “was not about Saddam’s nuclear capabilities, about defending human rights, about spreading democracy or even about seizing oil fields; it was about defending the dollar,” Petrov concludes.
Other analysts weren’t convinced that the decision to attack Iraq was prompted by Saddam’s threat to the petrodollar.
“While the international prices of record for crude oil may be denominated in dollars, there is nothing stopping buyers and sellers from making any kind of contract arrangements they want in whatever currencies they want — euros, zlotys, rubles, yuan, bolivars, gold dinars, whatever,” commented Charles Featherstone, former assistant editor of Oil Daily. “Even barter is possible. There are no laws or international regulations that require oil be bought and paid in Euros, Saddam’s demand was small fry — few nations were going to follow his lead into Euroland. I doubt it was a serious motivation for the 2003 invasion.”

While skeptical that Saddam’s potential threat to the petrodollar accord prompted the 2003 war, Featherstone didn’t discount the role of the IOB in the long-simmering conflict between Tehran and Washington.

Iran’s independent, non-dollar-dependent oil commodity market helped decrease “demand for dollars [and helped] create an alternative banking system that flows through something other than New York. One that could not be policed, sanctioned or shut down by the US government.”

Thus despite the fact that Iran faces a prohibitive military disadvantage relative to either Israel or the U.S., Tehran does pose a threat to the petrodollar hegemony.

“Iran is breaking the back of the petrodollar,” asserts RT News. “Others have tried, but Iran is succeeding.”

According to persistent but unverified reports, “India, which imports 12% of their oil from Iran, has agreed to purchase oil for gold. Energy trade with China, importing 15% of its oil and natural gas from Iran may be settled in gold, yuan, and rial. South Korea plans to buy 10% of their oil from Iran in 2012, and unless Seoul sides with American and European sanctions, it is likely to use gold or their sovereign currency to pay for it. Also, Iran is already dumping the dollar in its trade with Russia in favor of rials and rubles.”

This is why, as Featherstone predicted years ago, the strategic objective of a war with Iran would not necessarily be to cripple its nuclear program, but rather to “bomb the bourse out of business.”

Read more here.

“They say the culture of an organization is a reflection of its top executive and today’s deplorable behavior against Ron Paul supporter Eddie Dillard in Florida reflects very poorly on Congressman Gingrich,” declared Paul Campaign spokesman Jesse Benton. “I call on Congressman Gingrich to publicly apologize to Mr. Dillard… In addition, we ask that those Gingrich campaign staff directly involved in the episode be immediately terminated. There is simply no excuse for the type of violent, boorish and abusive behavior demonstrated by Mr. Gingrich’s campaign. We hope Mr. Gingrich understands this.”

After voting in the Florida Republican primary at Orlando’s Windermere Baptist Church, Dillard – wearing a “Ron Paul Rocks America” t-shirt and carrying a “Ron Paul 2012” sign – joined a small group of demonstrators outside the polling area. Shortly thereafter, Newt Gingrich showed up for a public appearance.

“When Gingrich’s bus pulled up, Dillard (who was wearing casual attire, including flip-flops) stood silently hoding his sign and watched the news media horde swamp the candidate,” recounted Yahoo News reporter Chris Moody. “Gingrich stepped down from the bus and made a beeline for Dillard. He stopped in front of Dillard and his sign and parked himself for a round of handshaking and pictures with voters. The placement couldn’t have been worse. There was Gingrich, standing with his wife Callista at their first event of the day, and a giant Ron Paul sign floated inches from their crowns.”

This didn’t sit well with Gingrich’s security goons, one of whom stepped in front of him and tried to shoulder him aside. When Dillard didn’t move – he had been there first, after all, and had no cause to relocate – the agent “lifted his heeled shoe over Dillar’s bare foot and dug the back of it into his skin, twisting it side-to-side like he was stomping out a cigarette,” continues Moody’s account. “Shocked, Dillard kept his ground and took a picture of the agent with his phone, which was quickly knocked out of his hand. Dillard slipped off his flip-flop to pick up the phone with his foot, and a Gingrich supporter kicked the sandal away.”

“Don’t kick me!” Dillard demanded of his assailant. That prompted several more of Gingrich’s hired thugs to swarm the victim.

“Just block him!” yelled a campaign aide. “Everyone step on his toes!”

As Gingrich waddled away from the scene, another campaign aide took the opportunity to rebuke the victim – as if he had done something vicious to them.

“If we did this to you, you guys would be furious,” ranted the aide. As he stomped off, the aide was overheard muttering to himself, “They have no class. No class.”

By this point, Dillard noticed that “A bruise was forming, and there was a cut mark where the security agent had dug in his heel,” observes Moody.

This was an unambiguous act of criminal assault and gang violence. By refusing to condemn it and punish those responsible, Gingrich and his campaign organization assumed moral culpability for it. They may also be legally and civilly liable for it, as well.

Legal commentator Jonathan Turley offers the pertinent details:

The description raises a straightforward case of assault and battery. The question is whether such tortious conduct would extend to the campaign and Gingrich. In addition to a claim of vicarious liability through respondeat superior, there is also the possible claim or negligent hiring or training…. Like other states, an employer in Florida is liable “if the wrongful act is done while the employee is acting within the apparent scope of his authority as such employee to serve the interests of the employer, . . . unless the wrongful act of the employee was done to accomplish his own purposes, and not to serve the interests of the employer.”…

Often intentional torts or crimes are ruled as falling outside of the scope of employment. However, there are exceptions, particularly when security staff are involved.

Assuming that these were campaign aides or staff, the question would become whether they were engaged in a “frolic or detour.” This act, if proven, was committed as part of a campaign event to facilitate the campaign activity. This would appear to fit the model of a respondeat superior case. That could add a new dimension to Gingrich’s promises for “tort reform.”

An axiom of common wisdom informs us that “What we permit, we promote.” Newt Gingrich didn’t order the assault on Eddie Dillard – which took place in his presence — but neither did he condemn it after the fact. His behavior contrasts sharply with that of Dr. Paul in a broadly similar situation: During a press availability in Iowa, Dr. Paul quietly but firmly called out a CBS cameraman who was attempting to shove aside a female reporter.

“That’s rude,” Dr. Paul said. “You shouldn’t push her like that. That isn’t nice.”

Even days after the assault on Dillard, Newt Gingrich didn’t have the character to offer even a perfunctory rebuke to his own campaign employees.

The difference between those reactions — “Step on his toes” versus “You shouldn’t push her like that” — eloquently summarizes the differences between the Gingrich and Paul campaigns, and the character of the individuals leading them.

Read more here.

Last August, the FDA filed a motion for summary judgment in a federal court battle with Regenerative Sciences, LLC, a Colorado health clinic offering a non-surgical treatment for people suffering from joint pain. The procedure uses samples of bone marrow or synovial fluid extracted from the client, from which adult stem cells – undifferentiated, highly adaptable cells – are cultured. The cells, along with a medium composed of various nutrients, are then injected into ailing joints to repair damaged tissue. Many mainstream health care professionals and professional athletes have come to regard this approach as a safe, minimally invasive alternative to surgery.

As the Alliance for Natural Health points out, the FDA’s central claim in the motion for summary judgment is that an individual’s stem cells “are drugs and therefore fall within their jurisdiction.” In addition, the agency claims that use of any product shipped across state lines (such as plastic syringes or laboratory flasks) by the clinic, or the involvement of customers from outside the state of Colorado, implicates the procedure in “interstate commerce.”

Most remarkably, the FDA “just nakedly says in court documents that the agency wants to protect the market for FDA-approved drugs,” points out the Alliance for Natural Health. “No more beating around the bush…. This appears to be a novel interpretation of the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act (FD&C), as evidenced by the government’s failure to cite any judicial precedent for their argument.”

“The implication of the FDA’s interpretation of the law, if upheld by the court, would mean that all food, drugs, devices, and biologic or cosmetic products would be subject to FDA jurisdiction,” the group continues. “The FDA is expanding its reach even to commerce within the state …. in order to protect drug company profits.”

The FDA has never been diffident in making novel jurisdictional claims, and for decades its institutional default setting has been “overkill.” Two decades ago, under the reign of uber-zealot David Kessler – a humorless bureaucratic scold who combined priggish, pharisaical self-righteousness with the executive disposition of a Soviet-era secret police chief – the FDA dispatched armed raiding parties to terrorize grocery stores, chiropractors, nutritionists, and others who were demonized as threats to “public safety.”

In 1991, an FDA strike team invaded a Florida orange juice producer, destroying 24,000 half-gallon containers of Citrus Hill “fresh choice” juice because Kessler and his fellow commissars regarded the label to be misleading. The following year, the FDA conducted a guns-drawn raid on a medical clinic in Tahoma, Washington because the presiding physician emphasized a nutrition-centered approach to some forms of conventional medical treatment.

Two years ago, the FDA dispatched a threatening letter to Michael J. Mendes, CEO of the Diamond Foods company, warning him that advertisements describing the long-documented health benefits of walnuts meant that they would be regulated as drugs:

“The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has reviewed the label for your `Diamond of California Shelled Walnuts’ products…. Based on our review, we have concluded that your walnut products are in violation of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act…. Based on claims made on your firm’s website, we have determined that your walnut products are promoted for conditions that cause them to be drugs because these products are intended for use in the prevention, mitigation, and treatment of disease.”

The FDA has also made itself notorious for its escalating jihad against the sale and consumption of raw milk – a campaign involving SWAT raids against Amish dairy farmers in Pennsylvania and rural dairy farmers in Wisconsin, as well as the use of undercover informants and provocateurs deployed against food clubs across the country.

All of this is an outgrowth of the collectivist assumption that the government has the authority to regulate what individuals choose to consume, which means that each individual’s body is in some sense State property – right down to our stem cells.

Read more here.

Shannon Jones, an attorney and former judge in Tennessee’s Crockett County who pleaded guilty last fall to federal meth charges, was given the most lenient sentence imaginable – six months in prison, three years of supervised release, a $100 assessment fee, and $3,300 in restitution to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

When he was arraigned roughly a year ago, Jones was charged with manufacturing/delivery/sale of methamphetamine. Had he been an ordinary citizen – a mere “Mundane” – as opposed to a member of the local elite, the 41-year-old attorney would most likely spend the rest of his life in a cage.

Jones, a former Crockett County General Sessions Judge, was well-acquainted with the state criminal code. Under Tennessee’s drug laws, any act construed as “promoting” meth manufacture – such as possession of “any ingredient, chemical, drug or apparatus” that can be used to synthesize the drug — is a Class D felony punishable by 2-12 years in prison, as well as fines and “forfeiture” (that is, government theft of any property deemed to have a “nexus” to the offense). Possession of any amount of methamphetamine is a Class C felony that can result in prison sentences of 3-15 years and fines up to $100,000. Possession of more than .5 grams is a Class B felony that can result in a prison term of up to 30 years.

During his tenure as judge, Jones was hit with an ethics citation by the Tennessee Court of the Judiciary, which slapped him for a conflict of interest.

“Jones is a part-time judge who accepted employment to represent a litigant who then had a matter pending before the court over which he presides, contrary to the rights of the opposing party,” ruled the court. “His actions also constituted an allowance of an attorney/client relationship to adversely influence his conduct. Jones was given written notice of his charges and is given the opportunity to answer the charges.”

No public record is available of the outcome of that proceeding. Jones left the trial bench and opened a practice as an attorney. He also became, by his own account, a serious meth addict.

During his January 26 sentencing hearing, Jones described himself as a victim of his addiction who considered it a “relief” when his activities were discovered.

“I was ready to quit all the lying,” Jones said in court. “It was a relief…. I was using pretty heavily.” Following his February 2011 arrest, Jones immediately contacted the Tennessee Lawyers Assistance Program and enrolled in a Middle Tennessee treatment program that involves third-party monitoring and random drug screenings. His “strict compliance” with the treatment program, coupled with the intervention of “numerous experts and supporters,” persuaded Federal Judge J. Daniel Breen to dismiss all charges but a single count of “conspiracy.”

Of course, if Shannon Jones had been a truck driver, a fry cook, a farmer, or someone not wired in to the political class’s legal affiliate, he would be treated as a criminal menace to society, rather than someone whose problem should be dealt with through medical intervention.

Read more about this remarkable specimen of unalloyed hypocrisy here.

A January 29 dispute over a recently imposed leash requirement ended with an unidentified park ranger shooting Montara, California resident Gary Hesterberg with a taser in Rancho Corral de Tierra, which was recently subsumed by the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

“I heard what I thought was a pistol shot,” recalls eyewitness John Barlett, who was walking his dog nearby. “[Hesterberg] let out a cry of agony as he fell on his back.” The attack, although painful, wasn’t fatal.

Last December, the National Park Service took control of the dog-walking area and imposed a leash requirement. When Hesterberg, who wasn’t carrying identification, was accosted by the ranger, he demanded to see her credentials. The ranger refused that authentically lawful order, according to witnesses. Apparently Hesterberg assumed that since the ranger wouldn’t identify herself, he didn’t have to either, so he gave her a phony name. He also demanded several times that the bureaucrat either issue a citation or release him.

Growing weary of the needless detention, Hesterberg finally walked away. Witnesses report that the ranger shot him in the back with her Taser – a weapon that can only be legally employed in situations justifying the use of lethal force.

When Sheriff’s Deputies arrived a few minutes later, they arrested the victim. Hesterberg was charged with the spurious offenses of failing to obey a supposedly lawful order, having his dogs off-leash, and providing false information.

This is not the first instance in which a Taser has been used by an eco-enforcement ranger in California.

Two years ago, Chico, California resident Jeff Newman, a former National Forest Service employee, was threatened with a Taser on his own property by  ark Ranger Paul Zohovetz, who had materialized on Newman’s doorstep in full battle array. Zohovetz had traveled more than fifty miles to threaten Newman with a citation for posting a commercial flier on a bulletin board in the Lassen National Forest.

Newman commanded the armed intruder to leave his property. Zohovetz, who had already committed criminal trespass, compounded the offense by committing felonious assault with a deadly weapon by pointing his Taser at the man’s face and neck. Newman retreated inside his house and called a friend; after trying and failing to kick in the front door, Zohovetz called for backup from the local police department.

Once his friend had arrived, Newman emerged from the house, only to be handcuffed and dragged away. Newman, a diabetic, had not taken insulin, and went into convulsions. Satisfied that he’d made whatever point he sought to make, Zohovetz released Newman and told him that he was only issuing a “warning” regarding the flier. He also issued a citation for “threatening an officer,” a charge that carried a six month jail sentence and a $5,000 fine.

When the case went to trial in March 2011, U.S. District Court Magistrate Craig M. Kellison ruled that Zohovetz “had no right to remain on Newman’s property once he had been ordered to leave.” He also cited a Supreme Court precedent acknowledging that the “freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state.”

Forest Service spokesman John Heil had insisted that Zohovetz behaved appropriately by driving 50 miles to issue a “warning” and then needlessly escalating a trivial matter into a life-threatening confrontation. In similar fashion, National Park Service spokesman Howard Levitt maintained that the still-unidentified ranger who attacked Hesterberg with a deadly weapon conducted herself appropriately as part of an effort to “educate residents” about the new dog leash requirement, reported the San Francisco Chronicle.

The day is coming when bureaucrats who presume to “educate” inoffensive, law-abiding citizens through electro-shock abuse are going to be taught a few unpleasant lessons of their own.

Read more about this outrage here.

Crime victims who call 911 often discover that while the police can’t offer help, they can always make the situation significantly worse – as a single mother from Milwaukee learned when she was raped by one of the cops who responded to her call, then arrested for “assaulting an officer.”

Police Officer Ladmarald Cates was one of two Milwaukee cops who responded to a 911 call from the anxious single mother after someone had pitched a brick through her bathroom window.  He arranged to be alone with the woman, then raped her.

As recounted by the Daily Beast:

One [police officer] took her 15-year-old brother outside to speak to him. The other cop, Police Officer Ladmarald Cates, gave her boyfriend $10 and told him to go the store and get some water. She told him that he was welcome to chilled water from her refrigerator.

“I only drink bottled water,” Cates said.

Her boyfriend has a pronounced limp and set off with no promise of returning soon.  Cates asked to see the broken window and she led him down a narrow hallway to a bathroom in the back….

She now stood on a floor littered with broken glass and pointed to the brick. The cop she had summoned to protect her instead chose this moment to grab the back of her head by her hair and sodomize her. Then he raped her.

Her revulsion in the aftermath was so visceral that she vomited as she ran outside. The cop’s partner had become concerned when he did not immediately see Cates and called for back-up. Other cops began arriving and saw a woman screaming incoherently about being raped.

Cates, the rapist, hurried out of the house and grabbed the victim by the waist, causing her feet to strike his partner. This gave the officers an excuse to arrest the battered and traumatized woman for “assaulting an officer.” She was taken to jail and held for 12 hours before receiving medical aid. After the hospital visit, she was sent back to jail for four days before being released without charges.

Although the victim’s accusation was substantiated by medical evidence, the DA refused to prosecute. The department’s Internal Affairs section confronted Cates – a repeat offender – with DNA evidence, and arranged to fire him for “idling and loafing” on duty. If the victim hadn’t persisted long enough to see Cates convicted on civil rights charges, he would have found employment in another police department.

It’s important to remember that, in the words of L. Carey Unkelbach, legal counsel to the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado, “Law enforcement generally does not have a federal constitutional duty to protect one private person from another. For example, if a drunk driver injures a pedestrian or a drug dealer beats up an informant, agencies and their officers usually would not be liable for those injuries because there was no duty to protect.”

That view has been vindicated in literally dozens of cases by the U.S. Supreme Court and other federal courts. In the 1989 case DeShaney v. Winnebago County Dept. of Social Services, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled: “Nothing in the language of the Due Process Clause itself requires the State to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens against invasion by private actors.”

What this means is that any time a woman calls for police “assistance,” she is inviting the intervention of armed strangers who have no duty to help, and practically unqualified license to harm her.

Read more here.

During an elk hunting trip last November 26 with her husband, Bill, Tammie McCutcheon of Roundup, Montana – a mother of 18-month-old twins — was sexually assaulted by U.S. Forest Service Officer Shawn Tripp.

“My first thought was … that she was about to get raped,” recalled Bill, describing his reaction to the sight of his terrified wife sprawled over the tailgate beneath a stranger who had thrust his hands inside her clothing.

Tammie, along with her 12-year-old daughter and the twins, had pulled over to the side of the road while Bill and the couple’s teenage son gone into the nearby forest. Tripp, who was patrolling on a four-wheeler, approached the truck from behind. Tammi told the Billings Gazette that Tripp, who was wearing a jacket with no insignia suggesting he was a federal officer (not that this would have justified his subsequent actions), “refused to identify himself and demanded that she get out of the truck.”

Things got dramatically worse from there, the Gazette recounts:

The encounter quickly became heated, Tammie McCutcheon said, as Tripp refused to identify himself and demanded that she get out of the truck. He began questioning her about whether they had driven past the “road closed” sign, she said.

Tammie McCutcheon said she was worried about her twins alone in the truck but was trying to respond to Tripp’s questions.

The encounter escalated, Tammie McCutcheon said, when Tripp tried to remove a hunting tag from the antlers of a deer in the back of the couple’s truck. Tammie McCutcheon said she believed Tripp had no authority to remove the tag, and she grabbed it from his hand, bumping against him as she reached for the tag.

Tripp threw her up against the truck, she said, and placed her in handcuffs behind her back. Tripp then wrestled her to the back of the truck, the woman said, bent her forward over the open tailgate with one hand and reached into her shirt with his other hand.

Tammie McCutcheon said she began screaming for help.

“I thought I was going to get raped,” she said.

Bill McCutcheon said he heard a commotion coming from the direction of the truck and began walking that way. Carrying his hunting rifle, McCutcheon reached the top of a small hill above the truck and saw, from about 100 yards away, a man on top of his wife as she screamed for help.

Hurrying down the hill, McCutcheon ordered the assailant to leave his wife alone. As Tripp later admitted on the record, the properly infuriated husband never pointed his rifle at him – even though he would have been well within his legal and moral rights to use lethal force to stop the assault. Tripp, however, drew his pistol and pointed it at Bill, ordering him to drop his rifle. At one point, according to Tammi, the “unstable” and “muttering” Forest Service enforcer pointed his sidearm at the couple’s 12-year-old daughter.

A call for assistance issued by Tripp was answered by Wheatland County Sheriff Jim Rosenberg, who was hunting nearby. The Sheriff arrested Bill, who was held in jail for five days before being released. Significantly, in an interview with an investigator hired by the McCutcheons’ attorney, Sheriff Rosenberg was told by Tripp that Bill never pointed the rifle at him.

Nonetheless, Bill and Tammie were indicted in federal court on January 26 on charges that they “forcefully assaulted, resisted, opposed, impeded, intimidated, and interfered” with Tripp. Bill McCutcheon faces 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine; Tammie – whose “crime” consisted of protecting herself from a sexual assault, could be sentenced to 8 years in prison and a $100,000 fine.

During a dispute over the Forest Service’s actions in closing down a road in Nevada’s Elko County a decade ago, the Jarbidge Shovel Brigade, a local citizen’s group ran a radio ad describing the agency’s personnel as “armed and dangerous.”

“The Forest Service has a new policy of issuing citations for the following offense: Operating any vehicle off road in a manner which damages or unreasonably disturbs the land, wildlife or vegetative resources,” observed the radio spot. “If apprehended by Forest Service personnel, consider them armed and dangerous and cooperate with them to the fullest. Then contact the Jarbidge Shovel Brigade for assistance.”

That prompted a petulant complaint from the agency that the ads were “inflammatory” and tended to promote “ill will” toward the agency. The incident last November 26 in Montana’s Little Belt Mountains underscores the essential truth of the characterization offered by the Shovel Brigade – and the wisdom of having the means to defend one’s self and one’s family in the event one encounters a predatory Fed in the wilderness.
Read more about this outrageous story here.

Four East Haven, Connecticut police officers characterized as “bullies with badges” were arrested by the FBI as part of an investigation into what oddly alliterative federal officials described as a “cancerous cadre” within the department and the local police union.

Sgt. John Miller and Officers Dennis Spaulding, David Carl, and Jason Zullo were accused of dozens of criminal acts through which they violated the constitutionally protected rights of local residents “not to be arrested and detained without probable cause .…  the right not to be arrested and detained based upon false and misleading evidence … and the right to be free from the use of unreasonable force by law enforcement officers,” alleges an indictment filed by U.S. Attorney David B. Fein.

“It was further part of the conspiracy to ostracize, harass and intimidate individuals, including victims, victims’ advocates, witnesses, fellow officers, Police Commissioners and outside investigators, who attempted to investigate or report misconduct or abuse committed by the defendants,” continues the indictment. “The defendants and their co-conspirators committed these acts of harassment and intimidation in an effort to prevent further investigation or scrutiny of the defendants’ conduct, and thereby conceal the defendants’ abuse from others.” Many of those actions were reportedly undertaken by an individual referred to in the indictment only as “Co-conspirator 1,” who has been identified by Board of Police Commissioners Chairman Fred Brow as the city’s Police Chief, Leonard Gallo.

The New York Times offers a capsule summary of the criminal conspiracy outlined by the federal investigation:

They were known as Miller’s Boys, police officers who worked the 4-to-midnight shift, patrolling the largely working-class town of East Haven, Conn., including the small but growing Hispanic community that has spread out in recent years from New Haven.

The officers were more than well known in that community; according to residents and federal authorities, they were feared. They stopped and detained people, particularly immigrants, without reason … sometimes slapping, hitting or kicking them when they were handcuffed, and once smashing a man’s head into a wall. They followed and arrested residents, including a local priest, who tried to document their behavior.

They rooted through stores looking for damning security videotapes of how they had treated some of their targets, described by one of them on a police radio as having `drifted to this country on rafts made of chicken wings.

And after it became known that the Justice Department was investigating the [New Haven Police Department] … a picture of a rat appeared on a police union bulletin board, and in the locker room, an ominous note: “You know what we do with snitches?”

The potency of that threat is demonstrated by the fact that Sgt. Miller, the ringleader of the marauding unit, is president of the local police union.

Among the most egregious offenses committed by the “cancerous cadre” was the February 2009 arrest of Father James Manship, a Roman Catholic priest who was making a video record of Miller’s goons harassing local Hispanics at a local business called My Country Store. The official report of the arrest, which wasn’t released until thirteen days after the incident, contained a blatantly perjured account of the episode: Officer David Cari claimed that he saw an “unknown shiny silver object” that the priest had “cupped” in his hands, thereby leading the bold and valiant officer to “fear for [my] safety.”

Video footage subsequently provided by Fr. Manship clearly documented that Cari had identified the object as a camera.

“Sir, what are you doing?” the officer said to the priest prior to the arrest. “Is there a reason that you have a camera on me?”

“I’m taking a video of what’s going on here,” the priest replied.

“Well, I’ll tell you what, what I’m going to do with that camera,” just prior to arresting the priest, who was composed, cooperative, and non-threatening.

At a press conference held shortly after Fr. Manship’s arrest, Marcia Chacon, owner of My Country Store,  described how Miller’s squad would lurk outside the store waiting for Hispanic customers to leave, and then pull them over without cause. The day after that press conference, “my husband and I saw police cars waiting outside of the store in the middle of the night,” she later recounted. As they pulled out of their parking lot, they were pulled over immediately and confronted by police, who accused Chacon’s husband of driving with a suspended license.

Chacon described this incident as “retaliation” for speaking out: “We were both terrified. My husband was afraid he would be arrested for no reason.” In a separate incident, two bricks were thrown through the windows on the front door of the couple’s home. Chief Gallo later paid a personal visit to My Country Store for the stated purpose of discussing the couple’s “concerns” – but given his alleged role in covering up the rampage by “Miller’s Boys,” it’s likely that this gesture was intended as nothing better than damage control.

Read the indictment against the “Miller’s Boys” police gang here.

Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the son of GOP presidential contender Rep. Ron Paul and an outspoken civil liberties advocate, was detained after refusing an invasive pat-down by TSA functionaries at the Nashville Airport.

“My son @SenRandPaul being detained by TSA for refusing full body pat-down after anomaly in body scanner in Nashville. More details coming,” wrote Rep. Paul by way of his Twitter account. The TSA insisted that Senator Paul had been “detained.” However, an agency spokesman admitted that he was not free to move at will and was “escorted out of the screening area by local law enforcement.” To anybody not using a TSA lexicon, this episode clearly qualifies as “detention.”

The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, in tandem with Seminole County Sheriff’s deputies, conducted a full-force raid on the Lake Mary, Florida residence of a family accused of association with the “Sovereign Citizens” tax-protest movement, reports Orlando NBC affiliate WESH-TV.

Neighbor Evelyn Briggs told WESH that the raiding party “even had robots out there, almost like a movie.” Evelyn’s husband Robert told the local Fox affiliate that the strike force consisted of “about a dozen FBI agents and SWAT people.”

“It’s not something you see here in Lake Mary on an everyday basis,” agreed fellow neighbor Jim Famiglietti,” who appeared not to understand how the quiet and unremarkable couple could wind up being the target of such a draconian enforcement action. “It’s kind of shocking, actually. People make mistakes, but you just don’t know….Maybe some tax protesting and that kind of thing. People protest all the time in this country, and it’s your right. I don’t think the FBI would come in with that kind of fire power,” said Famiglietti.

Dutifully carrying out its assigned task of  providing stenography for government agencies, WESH explained that “the FBI listed Sovereign Citizens among the nation’s top domestic terror threats. By some estimates, there are as many as 300,000 of the anti-government extremists in the country.” Despite the fact that nobody in the neighborhood expressed concerns about the family who had been targeted by the Feds, WESH concluded its report by saying: “Neighbors hope the raid will put their fears to rest” — an observation that makes sense only if it’s understood that the fear was a result of the Stasi-style raid, rather than the presence of political non-conformists in the community.

The JTTF mounted a paramilitary raid despite the fact that the couple has yet to be charged with an offense of any kind, and the “evidence” removed from the home reportedly consisted entirely of computers and documents. The invaders also took the opportunity to go through the garage and the couple’s automobiles.

Just one day before the federal raid against suspected “domestic extremists” took place near Orlando, Florida, the White House convened a secretive meeting with scores of top-ranking state and local law enforcement officials to discuss the purported threat of “homegrown terrorism.” This category includes not only Islamic “radicalism” and “white supremacist beliefs,” but also what is described as “anti-government extremism” generally. The event, which was closed to the public, examined 62 case studies as part of a program devoted to “identifying and preventing violent extremism and homegrown terrorism.”

Recounts the Washington Post:

In the 62 cases reviewed, the subjects increasingly spoke out against the government, blamed the government for perceived problems and did so in a way that caught the attention of other people in their communities, according to the senior counterterrorism official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private White House event. Subjects became active on the Internet to espouse extremist views. And in some cases, the subjects purchased weapons, ammunition or explosive materials.

It’s important to point out that none of what is described above — condemning government policies (or even denying its legitimacy entirely, as the Declaration of Independence recognizes), expressing those views on the Internet, or buying weapons — is a crime. Federal and local law enforcement, however, have been indoctrinated since the Oklahoma City Bombing to think in terms of pre-emptive war against individuals and groups suspected of harboring anti-government sentiments.

“I see the formation of a curious crusading mentality among certain law enforcement agencies to stamp out what they see as a threat to government generally,” complained law enforcement consultant Tony Cooper, who taught negotiation methods, in 1995. “It’s an exaggerated concern that they are facing a nationwide conspiracy and that somehow this will get out of control unless it is stamped out at a very early stage.”

Post-9/11, that “crusading mentality” was focused primarily on suspected Islamic militants. However, during the last few years, the Obama-era Department of Homeland Security — continuing a trend that had actually begun in the last year of the George W. Bush administration — redirected its focus toward “Sovereign Citizens” and other purported domestic “threats.” The raid in Lake Mary is the second recent instance in which a high-tech paramilitary operation has been mounted against people suspected of harboring such “illicit” views: Last June, two Predator drones were employed in an effort to arrest the unarmed sons of North Dakota farmer Rodney Brossart, who was involved in a dispute over stray cattle. This extraordinary measure was supposedly justified by the local sheriff’s suspicions that Brossart had some distant and unspecified connection to the “Sovereign Citizen” movement.

For more about the raid in Lake Mary, go here.

When Israel’s government under Benjamin Netanyahu says “all options” are available in dealing with the supposed threat post by Iran, this includes sending Mossad operatives to assassinate President Obama, contends Andrew Adler, publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times.

In an essay that was quickly pulled from the web (but is archived here), Adler discussed what he called “Kobayashi Maru options” for dealing with what he considers an existential threat to Israel’s survival. The name is drawn from Star Trek, describing a training scenario used to test officer cadets at Starfleet Academy: The cadet is placed in a hopeless battle situation in which defeat seems certain. Although the training simulation was originally designed as a test of character — to determine how well a potential starship commander can continue to exercise command authority in the face of inevitable defeat and certain death — one renegade cadet named James Tiberius Kirk recognized that the exercise itself was a “cheat” and re-wrote it to “change the conditions” of the test. By changing the rules, he was able to carry out the rescue the stranded ship at the heart of the scenario and beat the test.

Adler’s essay assumes that Israel –a nuclear-armed power that enjoys prohibitive military superiority over any of its potential regional rivals — confronts a mortal threat from Iran, and a no-win scenario in preserving its security. That assessment is not shared by the current head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, who has said explicitly that Iran is “not an existential threat.” Nonetheless, Adler encourages his readers to contemplate a “Kobyashi Maru”-type scenario in which radical, outside-the-box thinking is necessary “to preserve Israel’s existence.”

There are “essentially only three options available to Israel,” Adler concludes: 1. attack Hezbollah and Hamas; 2. “order the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities at all costs”; 3. assassinate Obama.

In the third scenario, Adler writes, Israel’s Prime Minister would “give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current Vice President to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States. policy includes its helping the Jewish State obliterate its enemies.”

“If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?” asks Adler, who appears determined to live down to every conceivable anti-Jewish caricature and stereotype. The image of a Jewish cabal manipulating American politics — promoting politicians seen as suitably servile, while destroying the reputations of some seen to be intransigent, and even arranging the assassination of particularly troublesome figures — is regarded, and routinely described, as a staple of anti-Semitic propaganda. Adler, who displays no evidence of being a “self-hating Jew,” apparently considers that depiction to be materially true, or at least plausible.

So far it appears that Adler’s endorsement of a presidential assassination by agents of a foreign power has not been resulted in a knock on the door by the U.S. Secret Service — even though far less pointed threats, such as a UFC fighter’s statement that he wanted to “knock some sense” into Obama, have resulted in visits by Secret Service agents.
“I very much regret it, I wish I hadn’t made reference to it at all,” Andrew Adler told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

For more about this story, go here.

Newt and the most recent future ex-Mrs. Gingrich

Bill Clinton cheated, stayed married, and wagged a finger at his critics as he was impeached; Newt cheated, ruined two marriages, demanded an “open marriage” from his second wife (who had been a mistress), waggled his jowls at CNN correspondent John King – thereby, according to Fox News analyst Keith Ablow, displaying a set of traits best described as “presidential.”

Assessing “what Mr. Gingrich’s personal history actually means for those of us who want to right the economy, see our neighbors and friends go back to work, promote freedom here and abroad and defeat the growing threat posed by Iran and other evil regimes,” Dr. Ablow, a psychiatrist who works as a commentator for Fox News, offered this snarky (but apparently serious) analysis:

 1) Three women have met Mr. Gingrich and been so moved by his emotional energy and intellect that they decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with him.

2) Two of these women felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married.

3 ) One of them felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married for the second time, was not exactly her equal in the looks department and had a wife (Marianne) who wanted to make his life without her as painful as possible.

Conclusion: When three women want to sign on for life with a man who is now running for president, I worry more about whether we’ll be clamoring for a third Gingrich term, not whether we’ll want to let him go after one.

4) Two women—Mr. Gingrich’s first two wives—have sat down with him while he delivered to them incredibly painful truths: that he no longer loved them as he did before, that he had fallen in love with other women and that he needed to follow his heart, despite the great price he would pay financially and the risk he would be taking with his reputation.

Conclusion: I can only hope Mr. Gingrich will be as direct and unsparing with the Congress, the American people and our allies. If this nation must now move with conviction in the direction of its heart, Newt Gingrich is obviously no stranger to that journey.

All of this is derived from subjective speculation regarding the motives of people Dr. Ablow has never met and with whom he has never spoken. Significantly, Ablow was willing to ignore a critically important objective fact regarding an immensely important matter of public policy. He insists that “Mr. Gingrich’s married life, including his history of infidelity does not mean … that Mr. Gingrich would be unfaithful to the United States of America or the Constitution of the United States.”

In fact, Gingrich has demonstrated himself incapable of obeying the terms of a solemn oath. That behavior can only be described in terms of a clinical compulsion – yet Dr. Ablow – whose professional credibility is apparently on a par with that of Dr. Nick Riviera from The Simpsons – wants to assure the Fox News audience that they can trust the largely unaccountable power of the modern presidency to a compulsive oath-breaker.

Fox News’s charlatan psychiatrist was hardly the first to depict Gingrich’s adulteries – in which he treated his wife of the moment with sociopathic cruelty and dismissiveness – as “a mark of character.”

During his January 19 broadcast, the oft-married Rush Limbaugh offered this reaction:

Now, there’s an accusation out there that Newt wanted an open marriage, just like Bill and Hillary.  And, in fact, Newt even had the politeness to ask permission for it.  Do you think Bill ever did that?… I got a great note from a friend of mine.  “So Newt wanted an open marriage.  BFD. At least he asked his wife for permission instead of cheating on her.  That’s a mark of character, in my book.  Newt’s a victim.  We all are.  Ours is the horniest generation.  We were soldiers in the sex revolution.…. Newt’s slogan ought to be, ‘Hell, yes, I wanted it.’”

Clinton’s adulterous behavior in the Oval Office led to impeachment (a sanction that should have been imposed for any of a dozen of his serious crimes against the Constitution). Gingrich, on the other hand, has paid no price of any kind for his behavior, and has granted himself absolution on the most generous terms imaginable – beginning with the fact that he refuses even to name the offense for what it was.

“There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate,” he said in a 2011 Christian Broadcasting Network interview.

On this construction, Newt’s shameless extra-marital sexual exploits – which began early in his first marriage, and included a repulsive episode in which he visited his ailing first wife in the hospital to press divorce terms while she was recovering from exploratory cancer surgery – were things that “happened” to him because he was just working too hard on behalf of the country he loves so dearly.

This sense of victimhood and entitlement was displayed in Gingrich’s theatrical outburst of “righteous” indignation toward John King during the CNN debate – and that moment of Clintonian sanctimony earned a raucous ovation from most of the pious Republicans in the audience, and plaudits from pundits across the political spectrum.
Read more, if you can stand to, here.

A joint effort by the Pentagon and NYPD to deploy Terahertz Imagining Detection body scanners on the streets of the Big Apple is a significant step toward completion of a “Panopticon”-style prison society.

Reports RT News:

The head of the New York Police Department is working with the Pentagon to secure body scanners to be used throughout the Big Apple.

If Kelly gets his wish, the city will be receiving a whole slew of Terahertz Imagining Detection scanners, a high-tech radiation detector that measures the energy that is emitted from a persons’ body. As CBS News reports, “It measures the energy radiating from a body up to 16 feet away, and can detect anything blocking it, like a gun.”

What it can also do, however, is allow the NYPD to conduct illegal searches by means of scanning anyone walking the streets of New York. Any object on your person could be privy to the eyes of the detector, and any suspicious screens can prompt police officers to search someone on suspicion of having a gun, or anything else under their clothes.

According to Commissioner Kelly, the scanners would only be used in “reasonably suspicious circumstances,” but what constitutes “suspicious” in the eyes of the NYPD could greatly differ from what the 8 million residents of the five boroughs have in mind.

In practice, “suspicious” behavior for the NYPD consists of anything done by a young black or Hispanic male. In a New York Times op-ed, 23-year-old New York City resident Nicholas Peart describes being repeatedly detained, searched, and even thrown to the ground at gunpoint by police officers while carrying on such “suspicious” activities as attending a friend’s birthday party or going to the gym.

In 2010, Peart observes “the N.Y.P.D. recorded more than 600,000 stops; 84 percent of those stopped were blacks or Latinos. Police are far more likely to use force when stopping blacks or Latinos than whites. In half the stops police cite the vague `furtive movements’ as the reason for the stop. Maybe black and brown people just look more furtive, whatever that means.”

One reason for the proliferation of stop-and-frisk detentions is a rigid but officially disavowed quota system. Two years ago, NYPD Officer Adil Polanco exposed that system in an interview with ABC News.

“Our primary job is not to help anybody, our primary job is not to assist anybody, our primary job is to get those numbers and come back with them,” Officer Polanco lamented. Each night he and other officers were expected to make at least one arrest and issue at least twenty summonses. To document that claim, Polanco provided an audio recording of a roll call briefing at the NYPD’s 41^st precinct.

“If you think 1 and 20 is breaking your balls, guess what you’re going to be doing. You’re going to be doing a lot more, a lot more than what they’re saying,” declared the Patrol Supervisor. On another occasion, the supervisor escalated the pressure, unambiguously coupling quota-based performance expectations with job security: “Next week, 25  [summonses] and one [arrest], thirty-five and one and until you decide to quit this job to go to work at a Pizza Hut, this is what you’re going to be doing till then. Do you understand?”

As a result of these arrest and citation requirements, Polanco complained, “We are stopping kids walking upstairs to their house, stopping kids going to the store, young adults. In order to keep the quota.”

In addition to eviscerating the Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments, and deepening the constitutionally impermissible relationship between the Pentagon and the New York Police Department, the mobile scanner scheme will inevitably lead to a spike in unnecessary police violence against innocent pedestrians triggered by “suspicious” scanner readings. The passive radiation generated by the scanners can be blocked by any opaque object – not only a gun, but also such things as cellphones or soft drink containers. This is illustrated by the case of Jordan Miles, an honor student severely beaten by Pittsburgh police who mistook a soft drink bottle for a weapon.

Two years ago, a wolf pack of police officers assigned to an undercover street unit in Pittsburgh surrounded  Miles while he was walking to his grandmother’s house. Thinking they were common criminals, rather than the more dangerous government-employed variety, Miles tried to leave. He ran three steps before slipping and falling to the sidewalk, whereupon the officers attacked him with a stun gun and beat him with fists, knees, and a branch — and tore out a huge chunk of hair for good measure. (See photos of the beating victim here.)

In a criminal report the assailants claimed that the 5’6″, 150-pound viola player looked “suspicious” and appeared to be armed with a “heavy object”; the weapon in question proved to be a bottle of Mountain Dew, an admittedly deadly concoction but one that is dangerous only to those who consume the beverage. The odds are pretty good that incidents of this kind  will become commonplace when the quota-driven NYPD is provided with technology that can transform any solid object into grounds for a supposedly legal detention.

Read more here.

Insisting that “Ron Paul needs to shhhhh on foreign policy,” Glenn Beck told Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly that the Republican presidential candidate sounded “a little like Osama Bin Laden at times” when he offered a Golden Rule-based critique of U.S. foreign policy.

During the January 16 GOP presidential debate in South Carolina, Dr. Paul provoked a chorus of booing from the audience – most of whom are proudly pious Christian church-goers – for insisting that the United States government was bound by the Golden Rule in its treatment of other countries.

The Glenn Beck Radio Program’s website offered this artlessly dishonest summary of the incident:  “Ron Paul got a strong whiff of reality today when real conservative voters in South Carolina booed him while Paul blamed America for terrorism. To Paul’s credit, he didn’t back down from his left of Obama foreign policy and tried to explain his America creates terrorism logic to the audience.”

Beck, who has appointed himself a leader of what he calls a spiritual “revival” of American culture, either didn’t recognize the central moral tenet of the Christian faith he professes to share, doesn’t believe that it applies to the conduct of government, or doesn’t think it’s a sin to bear false witness where political matters are concerned. Dr. Paul’s non-interventionist foreign policy does differ dramatically from that of any of the other Republican contenders and the Democratic incumbent – all of whom have embraced a doctrine of perpetual foreign intervention that is an outgrowth of the same Marxist “Progressivism” Glenn Beck claims to despise.

Beck, who affects a professorial mien (despite being a college drop-out) and likes to offer reading assignments to his audience, should read an indispensable book by Richard Gamble entitled The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation. Gamble’s book demonstrates that at the turn of the 20^th Century, theologically and political conservative Christians opposed foreign wars and other imperial entanglements. It was the “Progressive” clergy, who mingled scripture with the teachings of Hegel, Kant, Darwin, and Marx, who promoted militarism. This appetite for war was of a piece with the “Progressive” belief that the Christian Church had to justify its existence by playing a “positive” role in the expansion of the State as an instrument of redemption in human affairs – and for them, nothing was as redemptive as bloodshed.

Rather than playing the biblically mandated role of peacemakers, the progressive clergy eagerly supported World War I “as transforming event in the life of the church,” observes Gamble. Many of them applauded the Wilson administration’s war aims as a form of Christian “altruism,” one that promised temporal redemption “at the sacrifice, if need be, of five millions of men and billions of wealth,” as an effusive Literary Digest editorial put it.

This righteous campaign to re-make the world through state coercion would continue even after the altruistic mass murder came to an end. Writes Gamble: “The progressives longed for, and expected, the war for righteousness to continue after the guns in Europe fell silent.”

The “Progressive” gospel of the Total State, as translated into the idiom of American Christianity, has rarely if ever been stated as bluntly as it was by William P. Merrill in this couplet published in the April 26, 1917 issue of Christian Century (just weeks after war was declared on Germany):

The strength of the State we’ll lavish on more, Than making of wealth and making of war; We are learning at last, though the lesson comes late, That the making of man is the task of the State.

Beck routinely execrates Woodrow Wilson, who richly deserves such treatment. He likewise castigates the Wilson-era Progressive Movement, another eminently worthy target. Yet he embraces militarism without qualification, and he promotes an idolatrous vision of the U.S. government as blameless in its foreign policy – thereby revealing himself to be squarely in the Progressive camp in his views of discretionary killing by the State. Also of a piece with Progressivism is Beck’s reflexive insistence that the U.S. Government and the American people are indistinguishable.

During his appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s program, Beck insisted that terrorism is “not America’s fault, and I don’t think Ron Paul gets that.” Dr. Paul has been careful to draw a distinction between the criminal acts of the U.S. Government and the people in whose name those crimes are committed. His view is that the American people suffer the inevitable terrorist “blowback” generated by the Government’s criminal policies.

Rather than allowing the same Government to steal what remains of our liberty and prosperity on the pretext of protecting us from the consequences of its actions, Dr. Paul maintains, we should change our foreign policy to bring it into alignment with the non-interventionist principles of Washington and Jefferson, as well as the foundational moral law of human society, the Golden Rule.  There is one sense in which the American people are to blame for this: The anti-American terrorist backlash is a predictable consequence of allowing ourselves to be ruled by a government that promiscuously breaks the Golden Rule.

Beck’s claim that this position “sounds like Bin Laden” means that he’s either handicapped with an incurable tin ear, or has carefully cultivated a lying tongue.

Read more here.

Rick Santorum, the butt of one of the Web’s most notorious cyber-jokes, served up a frothy cocktail of collectivist rhetoric defending the infamous SOPA Internet censorship bill – and in doing so he embraced one of Bill Clinton’s favorite themes in promoting gun control, namely the need to limit freedom when it’s being “abused” by irresponsible people.

“My general feeling is that we have a free market, and the free market should work,” Santorum began during a campaign stop Q-and-A exchange captured on video and posted to YouTube.  “But like any freedom, there has to be regulation. You’re not unlimited in any right, even rights that we have in our Constitution; they’re not unlimited rights. There is, and can be, limitations on that. Freedom of speech – there are things you can’t say. You can’t cry `Fire!’ in a crowded theater. There are limitations to all freedom. They’re not absolute rights. They are rights that have responsibilities that come with them. And if you abuse those rights – piracy – you have a consequence of abusing those rights.”

Although Mr. Santorum has claimed to have a “firm grasp of the Constitution,” he clearly doesn’t understand its function. The Constitution doesn’t list individual rights; it assigns limited and revocable powers to the general (or federal) government. The purpose of the Bill of Rights is to forbid government interference in a small selection of the numerous and indefinite rights that inhere in individuals as a function of our humanity. The Bill of Rights, which provides what have been called “auxiliary protections” to liberty, was never intended as a comprehensive roster of individual rights.

Furthermore, it is impossible to “abuse” a right. All abusive behavior involves the use of force or fraud to commit aggression against the rights of another. The weary metaphor invoked by Santorum of crying “Fire!” in a crowded theater, interestingly, was coined by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes to justify prosecution and imprisonment of an anti-draft pamphleteer during World War I. In other words, it was devised to justify suppression of peaceful rhetoric opposing the State’s aggressive violence against the most basic form of private property – ownership of one’s own person.

Santorum is one of the most conspicuous conservative proponents of the communitarian perspective on government. Communitarianism emphasizes the idea that individual rights are contingent on the fulfillment of government-enforced social “responsibilities,” and that government must employ coercion to create a “moral” society. Santorum knows practically nothing about the details of the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act), which would allow the federal government to seize and shut down websites on the flimsiest of pretexts. As a communitarian, however, Santorum’s default assumption is that government regulation of otherwise unrestricted freedom is a good thing.

While admitting that he wasn’t sufficiently familiar with SOPA to assess its supposed merits, Santorum observed during the Q-and-A that “I have, in the past, said that there are limits to the freedom on the Internet. The Internet is a powerful source for good, and as we all know it has been a powerful source for bad in this country.”

In addition to dealing with the theft of intellectual property, federal regulation of the Web should also suppress “pornography, or other areas where we are destroying the moral fabric of our country,” Santorum continued. Would this include political advocacy and activism he would find objectionable? Santorum has consistently promoted a pre-emptive war with Iran. Wwould a President Santorum decree that anti-war agitation online is the equivalent of “cry[ing] `Fire!’ in a crowded theater,” and employ SOPA to shut it down?

Irrespective of the merits of SOPA and PIPA, Santorum favors government regulation of the Internet as an innate good, if only because the spectacle of unrestricted freedom simply makes him uncomfortable. “The idea that we’re looking at that and saying, `Well, you can’t regulate here’ – I reject that,” Santorum stated at the campaign event. “I absolutely reject that.”

New York Times columnist Gail Collins recently described Santorum as “a right-wing, avenging angel version of Bill Clinton,” owing to their shared enthusiasm for the sound of their own interminable harangues. However, there is a deeper philosophical affinity between Santorum and Clinton regarding the supposed need for authoritarian restraints on individual liberty.

“When we got organized as a country, [and] wrote a fairly radical Constitution, with a radical Bill of Rights, giving radical amounts of freedom to Americans, it was assumed that Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly,” Bill Clinton declared during an April 19, 1994 forum televised by MTV.  “What’s happened in America today is too many people live where there’s no family structure, and no work structure. And so there’s a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there’s too much personal freedom.”

“When person freedom is being abused, you have to move to limit it,” Clinton continued, segueing to the subject of civilian disarmament — or, as it’s more commonly called, gun control. In the interest of limiting the threat posed by individual freedom, he explained, “we’re going to have weapons sweeps and more things like that to try to make people safer in their communities.”

For Clinton, making people “safer” meant a government assault on the liberty protected by the Second Amendment; Santorum, who likewise wants to protect us from the threat of unrestricted freedom, prefers to target the liberties guaranteed by the First.

To see the video of Santorum’s defense of SOPA, go here.

After video of that humiliating but instructive episode was released to the public, Paige filed a lawsuit against the agency. In 2010, a federal District Court ruled that Paige hadn’t provided any evidence regarding the identity of the individual who leaked the video to the public. On January 17, a federal appeals court ruled against Paige’s appeal.

“This is a Glock Forty,” explained DEA agent Lee Paige during a presentation to about fifty students and parents at the Orlando Minority Youth Golf Association.  After dry-firing the handgun – thereby loading a round — Paige informed the gathering, “I’m the only one I know professional enough to carry this Glock Forty.” An instant later Paige shot himself in the left foot.

Limping painfully on his wounded foot, Paige attempted to salvage some object lesson from his own culpable foolishness by emphasizing that if guns are dangerous in the hands of trained, professional Feds like himself, they must be absolutely deadly in the unhallowed hands of mere Mundanes (that is, kids and other common citizens).

“See how that accident happened?” exclaimed Paige. “It can happen to you, and you can be blown away. So guys, never play with guns.”

He then instructed an assistant to hand him another firearm  – which prompted the schoolchildren to plead with the dangerously inept government employee to put the weapon down.

The videotape of the April 2004 incident in Orlando was turned over to the DEA. Shortly thereafter it leaked onto the internet. It was also broadcast “on the Jay Leno Show, a Current Affair, Jimmy Kimbel Live [sic], CNN Headline News, CNN News, Fox News, and VH1: Show `Webjunk20’ (regarding `Volume 1 Stupid Cops’), complained Paige in his lawsuit against the agency.  He also reported that “White supremacy organizations have used the videotape to ridicule black Americans and general and Mr. Paige in particular,” an observation relating to the inconsequential fact that Paige – a muscular, dreadlock-wearing former pro football player – is black.

“As a result of the disclosure … by the DEA, Mr. Paige became and is the target of jokes, derision, ridicule and disparaging comments,” continued the lawsuit. In addition, owing to “the notoriety arising from the disclosure of the videotape, Mr. Paige is no longer permitted or able to give educational motivational speeches and presentations.”

Doubtless this comes as a considerable relief to parents whose children might otherwise find themselves confined in a room containing loaded weapons and a dangerously irresponsible federal agent.

While dismissing Paige’s lawsuit, the federal appeals court panel sniped at the DEA for permitting the public release of the video.

“The widespread circulation of the accidental discharge video demonstrates the need for every federal agency to safeguard video records with extreme diligence in this Internet age of iPhones and YouTube with their instantaneous and universal reach.”

From that perspective, the real scandal here is not the fact that an arrogant government employee discharged a weapon in a school – something that would be prosecuted as a federal crime if committed by someone other than a member of the exalted punitive caste – but rather that the public was allowed to know about this act of potentially lethal criminal irresponsibility.

Paige earned every syllable of ridicule he has experienced, and should never be allowed near firearms again. Then again, the same is true of most government employees.

Read more here.

If rogue judges are going to be arrested, as Newt Gingrich recently suggested, trial Judge Kenneth Post in Michigan’s Ottawa County – who jailed a defense attorney for asserting his client’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination — should be at the top of the list.There’s an element of irony at work here, since Post appears to be the kind of judge Gingrich would admire.

Post ruled that attorney Scott Millard was in contempt for invoking the Fifth Amendment, and then used the threat of a weekend in jail in an attempt to extort a promise that the attorney would waive the right against self-incrimination in future proceedings. That abuse of discretion earned a bracing rebuke from Michigan Circuit Court Judge Edward R. Post (no relation), who overturned the contempt conviction against attorney Millard and assigned the original case to a different judge.

During a December 2 arraignment, Post jailed attorney Scott G. Millard for the supposed offense of advising his client, a 20-year-old facing a charge of minor in possession of alcohol, not to answer self-incriminating questions. Post interrupted Millard no fewer than a dozen times. His manner was alternately abrasive and dismissive; he was insulting, sarcastic, patronizing, and openly contemptuous of the Constitution.

As Judge Edward Post noted in his opinion and order:

During the arraignment, [Judge Ken Post] questioned the client regarding illegal drug use so it could set an appropriate bond, specifically, whether he would `test dirty’ and when he had last used illegal drugs. [Millard] advised the court that his client would stand mute because he had a Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. After an exchange regarding the right and the Sixth Amendment right to counsel, [Post] advised [Millard], `One more word and I’m going to hold you in contempt.’ After [Post] again asked his client about drug use, [Millard] against stated that his client did not have to incriminate himself and was not on bond.

At this point Post abandoned any pretense of a judicial disposition, adopting the sneering demeanor of a schoolyard bully taunting an overmatched victim. He first imposed a $100 fine and then taunted Millard: “[I]f you want to keep going, you name it, because we’re going to do it by the days” – meaning days in jail.

Millard’s composure never faltered in the face of the abuse. He displayed respect that Post did not deserve or reciprocate. Post ordered a Bailiff to take Millard to jail, where he would have spent the weekend. While en route, the Bailiff was called back to the courtroom so that Post could offer Millard an opportunity to grovel by purchasing his freedom at the expense of his client’s constitutionally guaranteed rights.

“You have been held in contempt of court,” Post grandly announced. “And I am willing to set that [aside] and release you at this point if on Monday morning you’re willing to have your client come in and appear and answer the questions I put to him.”

Millard explained that as a temporary substitute for the client’s retained attorney, he wouldn’t be attending the hearing on Monday. This should have rendered the matter moot – but Post was determined to extract a pound of flesh. As the Circuit Court order recalls, Post “attempted to obtain appellant’s promise to allow future clients to answer the court’s questions, seemingly without regard to the clients’ constitutional rights.”

Post had no authority to make such a demand, and Millard had no inclination to accede to it. He replied that he would instruct his clients to answer “everything required by law”; this prompted Post to tell the Bailiff, “He’s yours.” Millard was taken to jail, and released a few hours later following an emergency appeal.

Note that Millard’s “contempt” consisted of expressing unqualified respect for the law, rather than unconditional deference to the robe-bedecked bully who afflicts the 58^th District Court in Ottawa County, Michigan.

Post has developed a reputation as a “hanging judge,” largely on the strength of his insistence on criminal sentences for first-time juvenile offenders found guilty of alcohol-related offenses. Michigan State Law permits first-time offenders the option of a “diversion” program, but Post – unique among trial judges in the state – adamantly refuses to grant diversion, thereby leaving young people who have committed no offense against person or property with an ineffaceable criminal conviction.

Another recent ruling by an appellate judge struck down a sentence imposed by Post on a teenager found guilty of shoplifting – a conviction for which a diversion option would have been appropriate. That decision pointedly instructed Post that in the future, when he refuses to grant the diversion option, he will “state [his] reasoning for the denial on the record.”

Post’s term as trial judge expires in 2016. Some long-suffering residents of Ottawa County who are eager to hurry things along have organized a Facebook-centered recall effort.

Read Judge Edward R. Post’s order overturning the contempt citation against Scott Millard here.

Ron Paul’s insurgent presidential campaign has been targeted by provocateurs carrying out “false flag” operations and other dirty tricks. This includes a scheme to seed Ron Paul campaign events with people attired in KKK regalia.

According to Katerina Nikolas of Digital Journal:

A Machiavellian plot to besmirch the reputation of Ron Paul has been hatched by anti-Paul campaigners. The dirty tactics were launched under a Facebook page called “Stop Ron Paul.” The plot involved plans for anti-Paul supporters to pose as members of the Ku Klux Klan, adorned in hoods and robes, and follow Paul around the campaign trial in South Carolina, ahead of the Primary…. Full details of the plot were exposed on All Voices, which revealed the intent was to have fake KKK members, holding support Ron Paul signs, attempt to appear in photographs with the GOP candidate, obviously to cash in on the newsletters that purported to depict Paul as a racist.

“If you live in South Carolina and want to have some real fun with these Paulbots here is what we do- go online and buy or make your very own KKK robe, complete with hood (hood is important),” wrote former Herman Cain supporter Jere Brower on his “Stop Ron Paul” Facebook page. “Then get some Ron Paul signs off the internet or make your own. Follow Paul around South Carolina and be sure to get photographed by the media. Again, hoods are important. All can be Klansmen for Paul. Black, white, Jewish, Asian- those Paulbots will sh*t a brick!”

Mr. Brown’s effort to traduce Dr. Paul as a covert bigot came hard on the heels of a similar effort by the now-defunct Jon Huntsman campaign. On the eve of the New Hampshire Primary, an anonymous figure posting under the nom de cyber “NHLiberty4Paul” posted a crude, amateurish YouTube video that depicted Huntsman, a Mandarin-speaking former ambassador to China with an adopted Chinese daughter, as a covert asset of Beijing.

The video attracted no attention until the Huntsman campaign demanded that the Paul campaign condemn it. That demand was echoed and amplified by media organs nation-wide. It was left to the “amateur” media to discover that the very first place that video was posted was to the Huntsman Campaign’s official website.

Dirty tricks of this kind have been commonplace throughout American political history. The Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), a non-government entity aligned with Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election effort, refined the practice to a science, employing forged letters, planted stooges at campaign events, and other dishonest tactics meant to embarrass and discredit the McGovern campaign.

Laird Wilcox, a historian who specializes in the study of political “extremism,” points out that self-appointed leftist “watchdog” groups such as the so-called Anti-Defamation League (ADL) have also made extensive use of this method. In some instances, this meant either infiltrating hate groups, or making them up from scratch.

“James Mitchell Rosenberg, a career infiltrator for the Anti-Defamation League, regularly attended and was a speaker at Ku Klux Klan rallies and meetings of the Mountain Church in Cohoctah, MI, considered a gathering place for neo-Nazis of all kinds,” writes Wilcox in his book The Watchdogs. For the benefit of television reporters, Rosenberg also posed as a leader of a para-military group called the “Christian Patriot’s Defense League,” which was the subject of a breathless exposé entitled “Armies of the Right.” In 1981, Rosenberg and an associate were arrested on a New York City rooftop and charged with carrying an unregistered rifle. “The two were posing as paramilitary extremists for a photographic fabrication exaggerating the threat from the far right,” explains Wilcox. “The charges were subsequently dropped at the request [of] the ADL’s Irwin Suall, Rosenberg’s direct supervisor.”

Ron Paul’s campaign, which focuses on dismantling Washington’s debt-fueled foreign empire abroad and dramatically reducing domestic government intervention, is difficult to characterize as appealing to the “far right.” Much of his support comes from young voters and activists who consider themselves to be political independents. One persistent criticism of Dr. Paul voiced by talk radio personalities such as Sean Hannity and Mark Levin is that the candidate’s non-interventionist foreign policy supposedly places him on the “far left.” In fact, the Paul campaign is actually creating a trans-partisan movement focused on individual liberty.

“Although many political pundits intransigently continue to perceive the political world as a dichotomy along a left-right political spectrum, Paul’s success appears to be largely owed to the many Americans who do not fit neatly along a socially/economically liberal vs. socially/economically conservative spectrum,” observes Emily Eakins of Reason magazine. “Instead, he attracts a diverse group, with many self-identifying as fiscally conservative and socially liberal. Despite Paul’s fiscally conservative base of support, these voters are not Republican stalwarts and may defect if the party fails to meet their demands.”

Read more at Digital Journal.

While Obama administration officials insist that the video of Marine snipers urinating on the bodies of dead Afghan fighters is an isolated outrage, some Afghan civilians claim that the corpse desecration incident is the sort of thing that “happens all the time.”

Reports the McClatchy News Service:

In the video, one Marine says, “Have a good day, buddy,” as he urinates on an Afghan. Another says, “Golden like a shower.”

In the past, there’ve been videos of U.S. helicopter pilots laughing as they shot at civilians who were carrying an injured man to a van in Baghdad. U.S. troops have photographed themselves smiling while posing next to dead Afghans and Iraqis.

Only recently has the military begun aggressively charging soldiers for such actions. The Army is investigating allegations of a “kill team” in Afghanistan composed of members of the 5th Stryker brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, that targeted unarmed Afghans and cut off their fingers as war trophies while deployed in southern Afghanistan in late 2009 and early 2010.

So far, 11 soldiers have been convicted in connection with the deaths of the Afghans.

According to Jamal Karimi, a shopkeeper from the city of Kandahar, “I know a lot of horrible things happen in the south and nobody but the locals know about it. Such things happen all the time, and people talk about it but media hardly report them.”

Interestingly, a similar assessment was provided in 2010 by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who at the time was the senior commander of both U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” Gen. McChrystal said during a videoconference.

Significantly, the general was speaking with reference to civilians killed at military checkpoints — a body count that was dwarfed by the number of civilians killed as “collateral damage” in airstrikes and nighttime raids by Special Forces units.

While the Obama administration has dealt with the most recent controversy by exhausting the thesaurus in search of suitable synonyms for “outrage,” some elements of the GOP-centered Right has either stoutly defended the Marines in the video – or actually celebrated the corpse desecration as a defiant gesture toward what it perceives as an all-encompassing enemy devoted to our complete destruction.

In comments published by The Weekly Standard, Florida Republican Congressman Allen West, a retired Army Lt. Colonel who was cashiered in disgrace for abusing a prisoner in a fashion that merited prosecution under Article 93 of the UCMJ – blamed the controversy on what he called “over-emotional pundits and armchair quarterbacks.”

“The Marines were wrong,” West concedes. “Give them a maximum punishment under field grade level Article 15 (non-judicial punishment), place a General Officer level letter of reprimand in their personnel file….  As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell.”

Nationally syndicated talk radio personality Michael Savage depicted the episode as a case of heroic Marines being targeted by a campaign orchestrated by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which he characterized as a “hate group.”

“Granted, it’s not civil palace etiquette or, more important, U.S. military doctrine to urinate on battle-killed enemy fighters – in this case, three dead Taliban in Afghanistan,” commented neo-conservative historian Diana West in an op-ed column for WorldNetDaily. “But could we just move on? That’ll be the day. Get set for Abu Ghraib 2, a national wallow in a wholly manufactured and inflated evil, the kind of masochistic frolic our extremely twisted elites, safe on their sound stages, find so extremely pleasurable. Get set for the exclusion of any and all context related to heat-of-battle conditions, battle fatigue or Taliban depredations.”

“I love these Marines,” gushed Pamela Geller, a prominent anti-Muslim agitator and West’s colleague as a columnist for WorldNetDaily. “Perhaps this is the infidel interpretation of the Islamic ritual of washing and preparing the body for burial.” Describing the dead Afghans as “murderous savages,” Geller insisted that “We are at war with an enemy that means to slaughter us and overthrow the United States of America.”

One persistent theme woven into much of the commentary provoked by this event is that the actions of the Marine snipers were atypical of the behavior of U.S. servicemen – that they were the unfortunate but understandable reaction of young men suffering from the stress of battle against a vicious and resilient enemy. Others who have defended the Marines have suggested that such actions, while repellent, are typical of wartime and thus entirely understandable.

Episodes of this kind are to be expected when “you are putting 18- and 19-year-olds in combat,” commented Captain Andrew Exum, U.S. Army (ret.) on the PBS program Newshour. “I think, in a lot of ways, it’s good for the American people to see these videos because most people don’t have an idea of what Afghanistan is like, what the war is like,” continued Exum, who served in Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, is now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “And, yet, yet it’s important that people see the way that soldiers can be dehumanized through the experience.”

It’s worth recalling that this is not the only recent story involving Americans in uniform urinating on someone they have subdued through force.

Just days ago, Republic reported on the story of Pennsylvania woman Derena Marie Madison, who was arrested for “disorderly conduct” and “public intoxication” during a traffic stop. Ms. Madison, who was the passenger of the car, rather than the driver, was handcuffed and shackled, and taken to a state police barracks, where she was repeatedly pepper-sprayed while still in restraints.

Blinded by the chemical agent, Madison begged for help. Several troopers dragged her behind the barracks, where she was doused with cold water and thrown into the snow. During the abuse, she briefly passed out. When she regained consciousness, Madison discovered that the officers had urinated on her.  In response of Madison’s lawsuit, the officers claimed that they were immune to civil liability under the doctrine of “sovereign immunity” – an argument rejected by U.S. District Judge Gary Lancaster, who is allowing Madison’s lawsuit to proceed.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that military veterans are disproportionately represented in the personnel pool from which domestic law enforcement officers are drawn. The abuses we authorize against foreign populations abroad will eventually become common practice here at home – particularly as the military assumes a greater role in domestic law enforcement.

Read more here.

Canton, Ohio Patrol Officer Daniel Harless, the snarling psychotic immortalized in a viral video showing him threatening to murder a terrified man during a traffic stop, has been fired.

Police union spokesman Bill Adams told the Canton Repository that Harless – who had racked up 18 internal affairs complaints since 2000 – was fired by Canton Safety Director Thomas Ream.

“It is quite clear that [Harless’] actions represented a pattern of behavior where inappropriate verbal abuse and threats of death or great bodily harm of the various complainants occurred,” explained Ream. With the union’s support, Harless is appealing that decision. In the meantime, Harless will join the large and expanding population of “gypsy cops” – cashiered police officers who remain free to seek employment in other jurisdictions. Like many others who fit that description, Harless should be on trial for serious crimes.

In a June 8, 2011 traffic stop that was captured on video, Harless repeatedly threatened to murder the driver, William E. Bartlett, for carrying a concealed handgun for which he had obtained a the appropriate permit. At the time, Bartlett was attempting to comply with an Ohio State ordinance by notifying Harless that he was carrying a weapon, and by displaying his concealed carry license. Bartlett was composed and deferential; Harless’s behavior was that of a borderline psychotic eagerly seeking an excuse to kill somebody.

“As soon as I felt your gun I should have took [sic] two steps back, pulled my Glock 40 and just put ten bullets in your ass and let you drop,” snarled Harless. “And I wouldn’t have lost any sleep.” Apparently Harless doesn’t buy into the police union propaganda that cops are afflicted with a bone-deep dread of pulling their firearms.

After threatening to “put lumps on” a witness to the incident, Harless told Bartlett, “I’m so close to caving in your f*****g head…. You’re just a stupid human being…. F*****g talking to me with a f*****g gun. You want me to pull mine and stick it to your head?” He later threatened to invent and excuse to stop Bartlett every time he saw him, and towing – that is, stealing – his car and taking him to jail.

This was not the first time Harless had threatened to kill a citizen during a traffic stop. After the video of his encounter with Bartlett went viral, records of two very similar episodes were churned to the surface. One of them involved a man named Stanley Pearson, a man with whom he had previously fought.

During the stop, Harless said, “I will be honest with you. I will not even dance with you. I’ll shoot you dead this time.” Pearson replied: “I understand.”

In an interview late last year, Canton PD Chief Dean McKimm insisted that despite 18 internal affairs complaints and a file 700 pages long, “there was no evidence Harless was a problem” until the videos were made public.

Until the video of the June 8 traffic stop emerged, Harless was considered one of “Canton’s Finest” – a bit rough around the edges, perhaps, but a stalwart and valuable officer nonetheless. Immediately after his behavior was exposed, however, Harless went on “sick leave” – that is, paid vacation. Other officers donated sick days when Harless expended his own. The police union rallied on his behalf by demanding an extension for the disciplinary hearing after the officer was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Obviously, it’s an unfortunate set of circumstances that transpired,” comments union rep Adams. “We feel that due to the fact that [Harless] has PTSD, that nobody realized it for eight-plus years, for it to come to light the way it did … this is not a way we wanted to play this out. PTSD is obviously a disease.”

That is true – and Harless’s rampages, as captured on video, were not symptoms of a disease, they were criminal acts.  Section 2903.21 of Ohio State Law defines Harless’s actions as a felony called “aggravated menacing” – “caus[ing] another to believe that the offender will cause serious physical harm to the person or property of the other person….”

Odd, is it not, that none of Harless’s colleagues, supervisors, or union buddies were aware of his untreated affliction – until after he was exposed, on camera, as a serial felon?

Read more here.

Ten years ago today, “the first prisoners from the Bush Administration’s `War on Terror’ were landed at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, a forty-five-square-mile enclave at the eastern end of Cuba that America secured in a 1903 treaty and has held ever since,” recalls international human rights attorney Scott Horton in Harper’s magazine. “In the intervening years, the prison population swelled, with a total of 779 prisoners having been held there at some point. Some 600 were released (mostly by the Bush Administration), and of the 171 still held there, a majority have actually been cleared for release. These eighty-nine men are something of a political ping-pong ball between Republicans, who continue to do everything in their power to keep Gitmo open and to block the prisoners’ release, and the Obama White House, which seems intent on keeping questions surrounding Gitmo out of the headlines.”

Although ritually demonized as the “worst of the worst,” many Gitmo inmates were hapless individuals – such as farmers, tourists, and aid workers – who were swept up by Pakistani bounty hunters eager for rewards offered by the CIA.  Among that number was Bosnian citizen Lakhdar Boumediene, a humanitarian worker with the Red Crescent (the Islamic equivalent of the Red Cross). In an anguished New York Times op-ed column, Boumediene recalls how he was seized by bounty hunters and delivered into U.S. custody. Separated from his wife and daughters, Boumediene was tortured through prolonged sleep deprivation and being forced to spend hours in painful stress positions.

German citizen Murnat Kurnaz, who spent nearly five years in Gitmo without being accused of a crime,   described his very similar experiences in a Times op-ed. While in U.S. custody at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, he was tortured by interrogators who “dunked my head under water and punched me in the stomach….” The mistreatment continued once he was sent to Gitmo: “At one point, I was chained to the ceiling of a building and hung by my hands for days…. There were more beatings, endless solitary confinement, freezing temperatures and extreme heat, days of forced sleeplessness.”

Kurnaz offer a more detained account in his memoir Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo. After being vended to the CIA for a $3,000 bounty, Kurnaz was designated an “unlawful combatant.” Any violation of the arbitrary — and ever-changing — rules of prisoner conduct provoked an attack by the Initial Reaction Force (IRF), a unit composed of “five to eight soldiers with plastic shields, breastplates, hard-plastic knee-, elbow-, and shoulder-protectors, helmets with plastic visors, gloves with hard-plastic knuckles, heavy boots, and billyclubs.”

Breaking a rule wasn’t a prerequisite for a visit from the IRF. The team would be summoned to inflict punishment for any act of defiance — an insult hurled at an abusive guard, for example, or even an attempt to exercise. Typically the IRF would soften up the target by infusing the cell with a liberal dose of weaponized capsaicin – that is, pepper spray. Once the prisoner had been left entirely incapacitated, the IRF would swarm him to deliver a beating.

Former military interrogator Erik Saar offers a description of the IRF in action in his memoir, Inside the Wire.

“The five IRF-team MPs lined up outside the cell door,” writes Saar. “Starting in the back, they each shouted `Ready!’ and one by one slapped the shoulder of the next soldier up. The first soldier opened the door and directed a good dose of pepper spray at the detainee, then started to back him into a corner with his shield. But the captive managed to swipe the shield away and tried to kick the second soldier in line. He landed a good blow to the shoulder, but before he could put his foot down the third soldier, thinking fast, grabbed it and jerked. The detainee’s body rose in the air and came crashing to the metal floor.”

“All five MPs swarmed over him,” continues Saar’s account. “One was responsible for securing his head, and the other four were supposed to take one limb each. The detainee was kicking and squirming, fueled by his hostility. Mo [an Army translator] was shouting to him in Arabic to stop resisting. One of the stronger soldiers who had a solid grip on one arm was punching him in the ribs….”

British citizen Omar Deghayes, who was imprisoned at Gitmo  after being kidnapped by bounty hunters in Pakistan, was left blinded and permanently disfigured in an unprovoked assault by the IRF. Bound in chains and suffocating beneath a scrum of armored guards, unable to flee or defend himself, Deghayes felt a pair of fingers probe into his eye sockets.

As the assailant tore and gouged at his eyes, Deghayes suppressed the scream that was gathering in his throat out of determination not to concede anything to his tormentors. Even as he suppressed the scream that gathered in his throat, Deghayes heard the IRF’s commander order the assailant to press harder. Today Deghayes, who lost the sight in his right eye, lives in England. The beast in human form who blinded him most likely has a job as a policeman or sheriff’s deputy.

Brandon Neeley, a former Army prison guard at Gitmo, has described how members of the IRT were indoctrinated to treat inmates as incorrigibly dangerous sub-humans unworthy of even rudimentary human decencies. To understand the depth of the indoctrination and the potency of the hatred instilled in the guards it’s useful to consider the case of Sean Baker, an Army Specialist who was nearly beaten to death by his comrades during an IRF training drill.

Baker, clad in the same orange jumpsuit worn by detainees, was dragged from the cell by an IRF “extraction team.” He had been given a “safety word” — “red” — to use if the drill became too intense. He desperately spat out that “safety word” as his head was repeatedly slammed against the stainless steel floor while one of his assailants tried to suffocate him.

Despite the fact that all “extractions” were videotaped, the record of this incident disappeared.

After it was finally established that Baker was one of “us” rather than “them,” Baker was flown to the Portsmouth Naval Medical Center in Virginia, where he was diagnosed with a severe concussion. For years after the experience, Baker suffered from seizures as a result of a beating he’d received at the hands of his colleagues.

The tactics used at Gitmo differ only in nuance from those used at “Camp Greyhound” in New Orleans, an improvised jail modeled after Gitmo and operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Among those imprisoned there was Syrian-American businessman Abdulrahman Zeitoun, who was seized in his own home by National Guardsmen, imprisoned on unspecified charges, and escaped with his life only because of the providential intervention of a Christian clergyman who happened to visit his cell after Zeitoun had been transferred to a state prison.

Zeitoun and the other prisoners at the FEMA facility were entirely at the mercy of sadistic, unaccountable guards who could exploit any excuse to inflict exemplary “discipline” on the detainees, most of whom had been arrested for violating curfew or similar petty matters.

“Always the procedure was the same,” recalled David Eggers in his book Zeitoun; “a prisoner would be removed from his cage and dragged to the ground nearby, in full view of the rest of the prisoners. His hands and feet would be tied, and then, sometimes with a guard’s knee on his back, he would be sprayed directly in the face” with pepper spray. “If the prisoner protested,” continued Eggers, “the knee would dig deeper into his back. The spraying would continue until his spirit was broken. Then he would be doused with [a] bucket and returned to his cage.”

The victims of this pointless and whimsical cruelty included one disturbed man with the intellectual and emotional capacity of a child who was “punished” because he displayed the irrepressible symptoms of mental illness.

Those acts of sadism, Eggers observes, were “born of a combination of opportunity, cruelty, ambivalence, and sport.” They were intended to torment the other prisoners, most of whom — like Zeitoun – were possessed of more decency than their captors and thus left sick with rage by the spectacle of helpless men being tortured.

“Under any normal circumstances [Zeitoun] would have leapt to the defense of a man victimized as that man had been,” observes Eggers. “But that he had to watch, helpless, knowing how depraved it was — this was punishment for the others, too. It diminished the humanity of them all.”

The same treatment continued once Zeitoun was transferred from the makeshift FEMA detention camp to a “regular” prison. For more than two weeks he and his cellmate were abused, insulted, humiliated, and treated to a visit from a Gitmo-style “Extreme Repression Force” (ERP). Swaddled in riot gear, wielding ballistic shields, batons, and other weapons, the ERP “burst in as if [Zeitoun] were in the process of committing murder,” writes Eggers. “Cursing at him, three men used their shields to push him to the wall. As they pressed his face against the cinderblock, they cuffed his arms and shackled his legs.”

FEMA’s “Camp Greyhound,” like Gitmo, was a laboratory for indefinite detention and institutionalized abuse. Thanks to the NDAA, the doctrines field-tested in those “temporary” prisons have become embedded in the warp and weave of America’s “Homeland Security” system.

For more about the legal, constitutional, and political ramifications of Gitmo, read Scott Horton’s Harper’s magazine essay here.

Offering the common-sense observation that repeatedly assaulting a handcuffed woman with pepper spray and urinating on her serves “no legitimate law enforcement purpose,” U.S. District Judge Gary L. Lancaster has rejected a claim of “sovereign immunity presented by three Pennsylvania State Troopers  accused of torturing Derena Marie Madison following a traffic stop roughly a year ago.

At about 2:30 a.m. on February 3, 2011, Pennsylvania State Troopers Chad Weaver and Michael Zampogna pulled over a vehicle driven by Jamie Cornell, who was arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated. After Cornell was taken into custody, the troopers threatened to have the vehicle towed. This prompted Cornell’s passenger, Derena Marie Madison, to exit the car in protest. In short order she was arrested for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct.

Shackled at the wrists and ankles, Madison was taken to a nearby State Police barracks. Judge Lancaster’s memorandum describes what reportedly happened next:

“Ms. Madison, with hands still restrained behind her back, was placed on a bench. Her feet were shackled to the bench. As she sat on the bench, Mr. Weaver twice sprayed Ms. Madison’s face, head and body with pepper spray, without justification. The other defendants saw the spraying, but took no action to prevent it. Ms. Madison alleges that the actions were for the purpose of torturing her.”

Still trussed with handcuffs and leg shackles, Madison was unable to wipe the pepper spray residue from her face. When she called for help, “several defendants carried her downstairs and outside the barracks,” continues Lancaster. The victim “was unable to identify the defendants who carried her, because she was blinded by the pepper spray” – which is why the lawsuit names two officer “Does” involved in the assault.

“Once outside, one or more of the defendants, whose identities are likewise unknown, doused her with large quantities of cold water,” the memorandum recounts. “Ms. Madison blacked out momentarily, and fell to her knees in the snow. When she regained consciousness, she felt and smelled urine on her head, face, neck, and person. She believes that while she was unconscious, one or more of the defendants urinated on her. Ms. Madison remained handcuffed and in leg manacles throughout this period.”

Taken back to inside the barracks, Madison was chained to the bench again and briefly held before being released without receiving medical attention. Eleven days later, she was formally charged with public drunkness and disorderly conduct, and eventually found guilty on both charges.

Responding to Miss Madison’s lawsuit, the State Troopers didn’t contest her account; instead, they claimed that their actions were taken pursuant to their duties, and therefore they were protected by “sovereign immunity”:

“Defendants claim sovereign immunity with respect to [Madison’s ] tort claims of intentional infliction of emotional distress and assault and battery…. [They] argue that subduing persons is one of the acts law enforcement officers are employed to perform [and that] officers are also permitted to use force, if necessary, in the commission of their duties.”

Although the State Troopers describe Madison as an “out-of-control person,” there is no evidence that she did anything other than express her displeasure over the prospect of being abandoned once Cornell’s vehicle had been towed away. Furthermore, as Judge Lancaster astringently observes, assaulting the shackled woman with pepper spray and urine are acts “not related to `subduing’ her”; instead, they “suggest personal motivation, rather than intent to serve the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

An AP story points out that Madison has a long arrest record for various kinds of disorderly conduct. Obviously, this wouldn’t justify the treatment she reportedly received – but it might suggest why the officers felt free to treat her with such concentrated disdain and casual cruelty, then justify that behavior as a routine part of their job.  A federal judge rejected that claim – but the fact it was made in the first place tells us volumes about the mindset of those who supposedly protect and serve us.

For the details of this case, see Judge Lancaster’s preliminary ruling here.

As former Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle tells the story, he sucker-punched 55-year-old Jesse Ventura in a bar in September 2006 and then ran away – but Ventura, an honorably discharged Vietnam veteran who completed SEAL training himself,* insists the criminal assault “never happened,” and he’s willing to clear Kyle’s name.

“If a former governor within the SEAL community had been knocked down and … assaulted, it would have traveled through the SEAL community like wildfire,” Ventura pointed out in a radio interview with broadcaster Alex Jones, underscoring the fact that the alleged incident was never heard of prior to Kyle’s recent media tour to promote his new book, American Sniper. “He never hit me; I don’t even know who he is…. I want to clear his name because he’s confessing to assaulting me, and it didn’t happen.”

Ventura, a former Minnesota Governor, long-time professional wrestling performer, and movie actor who has become an outspoken peace activist, was en route to Mexico when Kyle made the allegations during an interview on “The O’Reilly Factor” to plug American Sniper. At the time of his retirement in 2009, Kyle was considered the most lethal sniper in U.S. history, credited with 255 kills – all of them involving Iraqi insurgents who, it should be noted, were fighting on their home soil to expel a foreign army of occupation.

“It was my duty to shoot the enemy, and I don’t regret it,” Kyle, a native of Odessa, told the publication Texas Monthly. “My regrets are for the people I couldn’t save: Marines, soldiers, buddies. I’m not naive, and I don’t romanticize war. The worst moments of my life have come as a SEAL. But I can stand before God with a clear conscience about doing my job.”

According to Kyle’s account, the confrontation with Ventura occurred at McP’s Irish Pub, a popular SEAL hangout near the Naval Special Warfare Center, in September 2006. Although Ventura insists that he has no recollection of the incident, he says that he may have been at the bar – whose owner is one of Ventura’s former instructors – to attend a function at the SEAL facility.

In an interview with Sirius Radio personalities Opie and Anthony, Kyle claimed that Ventura, who made no secret of his opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and his support for anti-war Republican presidential contender Ron Paul), “was bad-mouthing the war, bad-mouthing Bush, bad-mouthing America…. He told us that we were killing innocent people over there, men women children [and] that we were murders … [and] then he said that we deserved to lose a few guys.”

Ventura supposedly made those remarks despite the presence of family members of slain SEAL Michael Monsoor, who died on September 29, 2006 in Ramadi, Iraq. Monsoor, who smothered a grenade with his body to save his colleagues, was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. As Kyle told the story on “The O’Reilly Factor,” Ventura was asked to tone down his comments, but simply became louder and increasingly disrespectful – so he slugged the 55-year-old man in the face.

“That happened? You knocked him out?” Bill O’Reilly asked.

“Well, I knocked him down,” Mr Kyle responded, explaining that rather than sticking around to see how Ventura would respond, he fled the scene – acting on the wisdom of a SEAL Master Chief who supposedly taught him to “Punch and run.” The story left self-styled tough guy O’Reilly was visibly giddy with admiration, despite the fact that what Kyle described was a cheap shot of the sort that would be taken by a bullying punk, rather than the heroic take-down of a marauder. This assumes, of course, that the incident ever happened.

As Ventura points out, “nobody goes to McP’s alone,” and if Kyle is telling the truth, there should be witnesses to his criminal assault. While the ex-Governor’s concern to clear Kyle’s name is most likely facetious, there is a serious question about his credibility. Only 160 of Kyle’s 255 claimed sniper kills have been confirmed; if he has invented the story of his less-than-valiant face-off with Jesse Ventura, or embellished it beyond recognition, how reliable are the war stories he is peddling in his new book?

More importantly Kyle isn’t merely a guy peddling a book: He’s also a major player in Craft International, a Homeland Security contractor involved in training domestic law enforcement agencies, where he will have ample opportunity to teach SWAT operators and other police personnel the same “Punch and run” ethic he claims to have displayed in his encounter with Jesse Ventura.

To hear Gov. Ventura’s interview with Alex Jones, go here.

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*The original version of this story described Ventura as a “retired SEAL”; as a commenter below observed, that description of his military career has been disputed, a fact acknowledged in the revised language above. Republic magazine appreciates the correction.

The University of Arizona in Tucson was the site of an event to commemorate the January 8 anniversary of  the hideous “Safeway Massacre,” during which Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head. Six people — including nine-year-old Christina Taylor-Green — were killed in the attack; seven others were wounded. In the immediate aftermath of the atrocity, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, speaking without a particle of evidence to support his claim, insisted that the atrocity reflected the supposed fact that Arizona had become “a Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

A few weeks later, the Sheriff’s Office over which Dupnik presides was involved in another fatal rampage a few months later — the May 5 murder of Jose Guerena, a 24-year-old Marine combat veteran who was slaughtered by the Pima County SWAT team while defending his family from what he believed — correctly, as it turned out — to be a home invasion robbery.

Guerena died in a fusillade of 71 shots fired within the space of a few seconds, twenty-two of which perforated his body. Contrary to initial reports, he never fired a shot; in fact, he never released the safety on his AR-15  rifle. Furthermore, his wounds were not immediately fatal. Had emergency medical aid been provided, Guerena may have survived. His terrified wife Vanessa, who took shelter in a closet with the couple’s 4-year-old son Joel, called 911 to report the assault; after the shooting, she begged the SWAT team to call for medical assistance. Instead, the assailants turned away paramedics who had arrived on the scene within minutes of the shooting. Despite the fact that one of the SWAT team was a fully qualified field medic, the team refused to provide medical aid. Over the next hour — while Jose Guerena’s lifeblood puddled on carpet of his living room floor — the armored SWAT operators dithered and equivocated, eventually sending in a remote-controlled robot to confirm that the victim was dead.

During that time, 4-year-old Joel, after being left alone with his bleeding and mortally wounded father, staggered tearfully through the front door. Vanessa, who was thrown roughly to the ground and injured by the SWAT team after leaving the house, was interrogated by Sheriff’s detectives, who wanted to know if there were drugs, drug proceeds, or illegal weapons on the premises — details they should have known before assaulting the home, if they had acted on a legitimate search warrant.

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution dictates that “no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized….” Michael Storie, the police union attorney representing the SWAT team members who murdered Guerena, has admitted that the warrant they were enforcing on May 5  “was not directed at any particular person, and Guerena’s home was not mentioned, but it was targeting whoever might be inside the residence” — which means that it was invalid, the raid was the legal and moral equivalent of a home invasion robbery, and the killing of Jose Guerena was criminal homicide at best, and capital murder at worst.

No contraband or evidence of a crime was ever discovered in the Guerena residence. The murderous raid on the Guerena home was one of three SWAT assaults carried out the morning of May 5 as part of what was described as a wide-ranging and urgent investigation into a marijuana smuggling ring. Yet more than nine months after that terrible morning, no criminal charges have been filed, no arrests have been made — and nobody has been held accountable for the act of criminal homicide that took place at the Guerena household.

Jose Guerena served multiple combat tours in Iraq, and has been described by fellow Marines as a solid and conscientious family man. He worked the graveyard shift at a local copper mine, which is not the sort of occupation that would leave time to be the kingpin of a drug smuggling operation — or the kind of work he would choose if he were soaking up hundreds of thousands of dollars by peddling weed. Apart from a rally organized by the Oath Keepers, a grassroots constitutionalist organization of active-duty and retired military and law enforcement personnel, there have been no memorials held on behalf of Jose and his traumatized family. It’s safe to predict that the May 5 anniversary of the killing won’t be the subject of a public event organized by Tucson’s civic elite.

Summarizing the January 8 memorial service in Tucson, the Los Angeles Times summarizes the January 8 provides an overview of Rep. Gifford’s remarkable recovery after being shot in the head by Loughner:

Giffords was nearly killed in the attack, and her public appearances have been rare since then. But wearing a red shawl and holding the hand of her husband, former astronaut Mark E. Kelly, she ventured on stage at the University of Arizona. There, she led the crowd of about 1,000 in the Pledge of Allegiance, giving extra emphasis to the conclusion, “with liberty and justice for all.” The crowd began cheering as soon as Giffords was seen coming from backstage and continued as she walked up the stairs. Giffords spoke the words of the pledge with Ron Barber, the three-term congresswoman’s district director, who was among those wounded in the Jan. 8, 2011, shooting. Barber, who was shot twice and seriously wounded, served as the master of ceremonies for the event. Giffords has been undergoing physical and speech rehabilitation in Houston, and has kept largely out of the public eye. But she has been seen walking, and she went to Washington last year to cast a key vote. She also gave ABC’s Diane Sawyer an interview in May.

Loughner was known to have psychological problems, and was diagnosed as a psychotic after the shooting. He has been indicted on 49 federal charges arising from the shooting. Those responsible for killing Jose Guerena, by way of contrast, face neither criminal charges nor administrative sanctions for carrying out an illegal paramilitary raid that ended in the murder of Jose Guerena.

(Check out the next issue of Republic magazine for an in-depth examination of the murder of Jose Guerena.)

Go to the Los Angeles Times for more on the Tucson memorial.

“All the kids I talk to are into Ron Paul,” Perry commented via Twitter on January 3. “They like his voting record. He’s not a smiling grinning talking head spewing party BS.” While Perry and his longtime partner in rock mayhem Steven Tyler are close friends of prominent Republican rocker Ted Nugent, the Hall of Fame rocker has never been conspicuously political – until now.

“Obama hasn’t done anything close to what he promised to do,” Perry complained in another post, noting that the incumbent “didn’t get my vote and I got a lotta grief” – presumably from Democratic-leaning comrades in the music and entertainment industry. “Well, my vote[’s] for Ron Paul…. [I’m] not saying who to vote for. Just have open mind and figure a sm[all] handful of people own very large [proportion] of tv, Internet, papers.”

Perry’s assessment of the media is shaped by decades of experience dealing with the self-appointed arbiters of popular opinion. He has seen how the media can make and break people according to the whims of those who control it – and he sees an orchestrated effort to destroy Paul’s insurgent campaign, which threatens the status quo.

“[The] Media is trying to crush Paul,” Perry warns. “It’s so transparent. They will smear him every chance. [B]eware! Get your news from lot of different sources.”
Joe Perry’s endorsement of Paul via Twitter came shortly after chart-topping pop chanteuse Kelly Clarkson, an “American Idol” alumnus, offered her own support for the libertarian-leaning Republic Congressman via the social media site. Although Fox News – which visibly and volubly opposes the Paul campaign – claimed that Clarkson’s support for Dr. Paul “alienated” her fan base, sales of her most recent album, “Stronger,” jumped by 442 percent in the days immediately following her endorsement.

Several other high-profile celebrities have spoken out in support of Dr. Paul’s quixotic presidential bid, among them “Fear Factor” host and UFC commentator Joe Rogan and actor Vince Vaughn (who introduced the candidate at a recent libertarian conference in Reno, Nevada). Although he has not embraced Ron Paul’s political agenda, noted film critic Roger Ebert has repeatedly expressed a measure of respect for the candidate.

“Leaving politics out of it, what sets Ron Paul aside from every other GOP candidate? He’s the only one who’s cool,” observed Ebert via his Twitter account on January 3.

Joe Perry and the rest of the band have been finishing up their still-untitled new album, which is due in May. This will be the band’s first studio recording since its 2004 all-covers album, “Honkin’ on Bobo,” and the first set of all-new originals since its 2001 disc “Just Push Play.” The band has reunited with producer Jack Douglass, who worked behind the mixing board on their legendary 1970s albums “Get Your Wings,” “Rocks,” and “Toys in the Attic,” which produced such enduring classic rock staples as “Same Old Song and Dance,” “Last Child,” and “Walk This Way.”

To be fair, Ron Paul isn’t the only Republican candidate with rock and roll cred. Fellow contender (assuming that word applies to a candidate polling in the low single digits) Jon Huntsman dropped out of High School to play keyboards in a prog-rock band called “Wizard.” Maybe Huntsman could get the band back together for a reunion gig playing at a Ron Paul inaugural ball – perhaps as the warm-up act on a bill featuring Aerosmith and Kelly Clarkson.

Alluding to the ongoing debate over the size, expense, and global mission of the U.S. military, one reporter commented:  “This is all getting’ interrupted when he’s, Ron Paul becomes president.”

“See this room?” another reporter stated, referring to the gaggle of military correspondents at the event. “Two-thirds of us [are] laid off when Ron Paul is president.”

In his January 1961 farewell speech, President Dwight Eisenhower introduced the American public to the expression “military-industrial complex,” which refers to the seamlessly integrated political, corporate, and bureaucratic apparatus that thrives on military spending and promotes permanent mobilization for war. Dr.Andrew J. Bacevich, a West Point graduate, Vietnam combat veteran, and Boston University history professor, points out that Eisenhower’s description of “the cozy relations between the military and corporate worlds understates the contemporary reality.”

C. Wright Mills, author of the seminal study The Power Elite, “came closer to the mark when he wrote of `a coalition of generals in the roles of corporation executives, of politicians masquerading as admirals, of corporation executives acting like politicians,’” comments Bacevich. “Add to that list the retired senior officers passing as pundits (often while simultaneously cashing the checks of weapons manufacturers), policy wonks pretending to be field marshals, and journalists eagerly competing to carry water for heroic field commanders. Throw in the former members of Congress who lobby their successors on behalf of defense contractors, and the serving members who vote in favor of any defense appropriations that send money to their districts, and one begins to get a sense of the true topog­raphy” of power relations in Washington.

This also helps explain why the Washington-centric media – not just the reliably bellicose “conservatives” at Fox News, but also the urbane pseudo-progressives at CNN and MSNBC – treat Ron Paul and the movement supporting his candidacy as a threat. The prospect of ending Washington’s imperial foreign policy threatens the livelihood of literally thousands of media personnel who work as publicists and propagandists for the Military-Industrial Complex.

Obama’s proposed strategic revisions – which would diminish the role of “boots on the ground” in favor of more spending on attack aircraft, remote-piloted unmanned drones, and other sophisticated war technology –has prompted predictable complaints that he is inflicting devastating cuts on the military, leaving the country weakened and vulnerable. Economist Veronique de Rugy, a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center, observes that the extravagantly over-fed Pentagon is overdue for a budget diet.

“The United States spent $728 billion on its military in 2010, about 45% of the world’s $1.6 trillion total,” she points out. “U.S. spending amounts to more than the next fourteen largest military spending countries combined…. In fact, the U.S. spends nearly 6 times more than the next largest military spender, China. In addition, most of the top-spending countries are American allies.”

“With or without the automatic cuts to defense from the Budget Control Act of 2011, the United States will remain the biggest player on the defense field,” Rugy concludes. (It should be pointed out that the term “defense” doesn’t accurately describe most of what the Pentagon does with its money.)

As of 2005 – seven years and literally trillions of dollars ago – the U.S. Marine Corps was fifty percent larger than the entire British Army, and it had more attack aircraft than the Royal Air Force. The U.S. Navy had an even larger air fleet, as did the U.S. Army – and, of course, the U.S. military had a separate branch called the U.S. Air Force. This is to say that the U.S. military, by itself, which devoured roughly half of the world’s aggregate military spending, also controlled the world’s four largest air forces. At present, the U.S. Navy boasts a total of thirteen carrier task forces. No other nation’s navy has as much as a single carrier task force.

Were the United States the commercial republic it was intended to be, it would not burn through a trillion dollars in total military-related expenditures each year. The grim truth is that, since 1947, the U.S. economy has become dangerously – perhaps fatally – addicted to “military Keynesianism,” a form of Big Government socialism that appeals to both the welfare state Left (which favors domestic government interventionism) and the militarist Right (which prefers military intervention abroad).

“Today, engagement in actual hostilities has become the new normal, exacting a steep price,” writes Dr. Bacevich in the Atlantic. “The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost at least $1 trillion—with the meter still running. Some observers estimate that total costs will eventually reach $2 trillion or even $3 trillion.”

“Furthermore, military Keynesianism has proved to be a bust,” he continues. “In contrast to the 1950s, military extravagance is depleting rather than adding to the nation’s wealth. In the Eisenhower era, the United States, a creditor nation, produced at home the essentials defining the American way of life—everything from oil to cars to televisions. Today, we import far more than we export, with ever-increasing debt as one result. Furthermore, in the 1950s, we were mostly at peace; today we are mostly at war—and, as a result, more of the resources provided to the military go abroad and stay there.”

This is patently unsustainable, of course:  “American soldiers traipse wearily from one conflict to the next while the nation as a whole suffers from acute economic distress.”

Ron Paul has repeatedly and unabashedly emphasized the fact that rescuing our economy will require an end to Washington’s imperial foreign policy, and the over-grown military establishment on which it rests. This is why his campaign has proven so attractive to active-duty military personnel – and so threatening to the well-fed, scandalously over-paid REMFs who profit on the misery, hardship, and needless death inflicted on the world by the Military-Industrial-Media Complex.

To see the press briefing video, go here.

Antonio Buehler, 34, a combat veteran of Kosovo and Iraq, West Point graduate, and middle school teacher, was serving as a designated driver shortly after midnight on January 1 when he saw a woman being abused by police outside a 7-11. The costumed assailants were members of the Austin PD, who were conducting what they called a DWI arrest. To Buehler and his friends, the spectacle looked more like a gang assault.

“We hear a loud scream, and we look over, and we see the cop violently yanking the female out of the car onto the ground,” Buehler told local ABC affiliate KVUE. “She is screaming. The other cop ran up and they both sort of grabbed her arms. Her hands were behind her back straight out and they lifted her up by her arms. It looked extremely painful.”

With the help of a friend, Buehler began to document this act of “street justice” with his cell phone. That prompted one of the assailants to peel away and confront Buehler, who was nowhere near the scene of the assault.

According to Buehler, the cop snarled, “What the hell are you taking pictures for?”

“My response was, `I am allowed to. Public official in a public place.’”

As he was trained to, the cop started to lie in an effort to devise a cover charge against Buehler. First he claimed that Buehler was somehow “interfering with the investigation,” which was patently untrue. Then the cop assaulted Buhler by pushing the unresisting man — who would have been more than a match for the donut-grazer, had he chosen to fight back — up against a truck.

“Once he had me pinned up against the back of the truck he kept leaning in,” Buehler continued. “He kept pushing me.”

Eventually the cop got so close that Buehler actually breathed on him — which gave him a pretext to accuse the witness of “spitting” on him. After finally wrestling Buehler (who offered only passive resistance) to the ground, being joined by one of his comrades, and threatening to shoot him with a Taser, the cop took him to a BAT van—- a patently unreliable mobile alcohol testing unit — in the hope of documenting that the witness was intoxicated, which he wasn’t. The cop finally settled on charging him with “harassing a public servant” — a third-degree felony — and “resisting arrest.”

Through Craig’s List, Buehler was able to obtain a second video of the event that corroborates key elements of his story. According to KVUE, “there was a female who witnessed the altercation and offered to give Beuhler’s friend her card,” but was prevented from doing so by the police.

“We need to keep the pressure on the City of Austin,” commented Beuhler in a post to his Facebook page. “There are two criminals on the loose: they are looking to get into fights, they wear blue, they are armed and they wear badges.”

“Second, thanks for words such as `hero,’” he continued. “I appreciate it. But the other heroes are those citizens who stood up, took photos and video, and are writing affidavits. Without them, I might be looking at serious jail time for a fraudulent charge from a crooked, evil, worthless cop.”

For more on this story, go to KVUE.com.

Corporal Jesse Thornsen, a veteran of two deployments to Afghanistan who is preparing for a third, voted for Ron Paul in the Iowa caucuses — and was cut off by a CNN “glitch” as he tried to explain to reporter Dana Bash why he, like so many other active-duty military personnel, support Dr. Paul’s non-interventionist foreign policy.

“I’m really excited about a lot of his ideas, especially when it comes to bringing the soldiers home,” Thorsen, a first-time caucus voter, explained. “I’ve been serving for 10 years now, and all ten of those have been in wartime. I’d like to see a little peacetime Army – and I think he has the right idea.”

Bash noted that Thornsen has a replica of the Twin Towers tattooed on his neck, and dutifully recited the Regime-approved platitude that Dr. Paul is considered “dangerous” because he would withdraw troops from their deployments overseas.

“Well, I think it would be even more dangerous to start nit-picking wars with other countries, like Iran,” Cpl. Thornsen replied. ” Israel is more than capable…”

Before Thornsen could finish expressing what was almost certainly the transgressive thought that Israel could provide for its own defense, the image suddenly froze, as if a digital video had been paused. The image didn’t dissolve in a burst of static, or break up; there was a brief glitch akin to a vertical hold malfunction on an old TV set, followed by the static image of a silent Cpl. Thornsen.

“We’ve just lost our tech connection, unfortunately,” interjected anchor Wolf Blitzer at CNN’s “Election Center” before quickly cutting away to Mitt Romney’s Iowa campaign headquarters.

Addressing his supporters after it became clear that he would finish in third place behind statistically deadlocked candidates Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, Dr. Paul graciously allowed Cpl. Thornsen an opportunity to finish the thought that had been cut off in mid-sentence by CNN’s serendipitously timed “glitch.” This prompted Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post — which has spent the past week tirelessly retailing accusations that Ron Paul is a covert bigot — to click his heels and play tattle-tale, accusing Cpl. Thorsen of violating “military protocol” by participating in the caucus while in uniform.

“That might have been easy to dismiss — until Thorsen appeared at the podium alongside Paul,” wrote Linkins. “Military protocol is clear on the subject of how soldier can participate in political activity. Matthew Tully at the Army Times addressed this matter back in 2008, and summarizes the military protocol thusly: `Active-duty members may register, vote and express their opinions on political candidates and issues — but not as a representative of the armed forces. In other words, you cannot appear at any kind of political forum in uniform and speak on behalf of a particular candidate.’”

Linkins noted that an individual who uploaded a YouTube clip of Thorsen’s interrupted interview suggested that the “glitch” may have been an act of military censorship. Given CNN’s history of collaboration in Pentagon disinformation campaigns, this possibility should not be dismissed outright.

In October 2004, CNN — working with the Pentagon  — broadcast a statement by Lt. Lyle Gilbert of the Marine Corps in which he announced the beginning of a military offensive in Fallouja, Iraq.

“In fact, the Fallouja offensive would not kick off for another three weeks,” observed the Los Angeles Times. “Gilbert’s carefully worded announcement was an elaborate psychological operation — or `psy-op’ — intended to dupe insurgents in Fallouja and allow U.S. commanders to see how guerrillas would react if they believed U.S. troops were entering the city, according to several Pentagon officials….Officials at the Pentagon and other U.S. national security agencies said the CNN incident was not an isolated feint — the type used throughout history by armies to deceive their enemies — but part of a broad effort underway within the Bush administration to use information to its advantage in the war on terrorism.”

Prior to 2002, psy-ops and disinformation campaigns of this sort were conducted through the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence (OSI). After that agency was closed down, “much of OSI’s mission — using information as a tool of war — has been assumed by other offices throughout the U.S. government,” the Times continued. “lthough most of the work remains classified, officials say that some of the ongoing efforts include having U.S. military spokesmen play a greater role in psychological operations in Iraq, as well as planting information with sources used by Arabic TV channels such as Al Jazeera to help influence the portrayal of the United States. Other specific examples were not known, although U.S. national security officials said an emphasis had been placed on influencing how foreign media depict the United States.”

The most important target of information management, of course, is the American public — which is why we shouldn’t summarily dismiss the possibility that the sudden interruption of Cpt. Thornsen’s remarks was the product of something other than technical incompetence on the part of CNN.

To see the truncated interview and suspiciously timed “glitch,” go to RTR.org.

"Protected" and slaughtered: 62-year-old Nicholas Christie after being murdered by police.

The image of 62-year-old Nicholas Christie after being pepper-sprayed by police looks like something out of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib Prison — but the assailants were Sheriff’s deputies in Lee County, Florida, who had taken the psychologically troubled man into “protective” custody at the request of his wife. Mr. Christie’s widow, having learned in the most tragic way that police are the last people from whom help should be sought, is now suing the department.

Reports Tampa Bay’s Fox News affiliate, WVTV:

The photo shows the Ohio man restrained inside the Lee County Jail with his body covered in pepper spray.

“This photo is a picture of a man who is strapped to a chair naked inside a jail for hours with a hood over his face. That evokes thoughts of being tortured,” says Cleveland-based lawyer Nick DiCello who represents the Christie family.

The photo, which was obtained by FOX 13′s investigative unit, was taken in the final hours of Christie’s life.

The District 21 Medical Examiner ruled his death was a homicide because he had been restrained and sprayed with pepper sprayed by law enforcement officers. But to this day, nobody has ever been charged with a crime, and the Lee County State Attorney cleared the sheriff’s office of any wrong doing.

It’s been more than two and a half years and his wife still can’t accept what happened.

Cleveland resident Joyce Christie was understandably concerned when her 62-year-old husband, Nick, who suffered from emotional problems, suddenly took off to visit his brother in Ft. Myers, Florida. Nick, who had recently been prescribed Lexapro, a potent anti-depressant, didn’t take the medication with him when he department for Ft. Myers.While the actual therapeutic value of high-potency pharmaceuticals is debatable, it was clear to Mr. Christie’s wife that in his unmedicated and unsupervised condition he was a danger to himself. When he arrived at his brother’s house his behavior became dangerously erratic.

Acting on the common and entirely misplaced assumption that police intervention is a good idea in situations of this kind, Joyce called the Lee County Sheriff’s Department to ask them to find Nick and get him the help he needed. Deputies soon arrested the retired boilermaker on trespassing charges. While in the County Jail over the next 43 hours, Nick was repeatedly shackled in a restraint chair, hooded, and attacked with military-grade pepper spray. The chemical assault was so intense that it left other inmates gagging on the fumes. Nick, who suffered from respiratory and heart disease, pleaded with deputies to remove the spit mask because he couldn’t breathe. One inmate described how Nick turned “purple and almost blue” as he suffocated.

When medical personnel arrived to check on Nick, they were overwhelmed by the pepper spray residue. The victim died of heart failure two days after his arrest. The death was ruled a homicide – but the State Attorney’s office insists that there is no evidence of criminal wrongdoing on the part of the deputies who tortured Nick Christie to death.

For more about this outrage, go to WVTV.

The manhunt for Washington resident Benjamin Colton Barnes, an Iraq War veteran discharged for “misconduct” issues, ended with the discovery of the shooting suspect’s frozen body in Paradise Creek. A SWAT team had been mobilized to apprehend Barnes, who was suspected of murdering Park Ranger Margaret Anderson, a 34-year-old mother of two, on New Year’s Day. Anderson was fatally shot as she set attempted to stop Barnes at a roadblock. The alleged shooter had previously refused to stop at a chain-up checkpoint in Washington’s Mount Rainer National Park.

The body of Barnes, who was described as having survival skills, was found partially submerged about a mile inside a forest. At the time of his death he was wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and a single shoe. A firearm described as an “assault-style rifle” was found upstream from Barnes’ body.

Although Barnes’ combat record was ambiguous, he had served for more than two years in the U.S. Army, including a deployment to Iraq. The mother of his infant daughter reported that Barnes had spoken of suicide and displayed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Summarizes the Seattle Times:

Barnes, who served in Iraq, had been a private first class. His military service ended in the fall of 2009. He received a misconduct discharge at Fort Lewis (now Joint Base Lewis-McChord) after he was charged with DUI and improper transport of a privately owned weapon. By then, he had served two years and seven months of active duty, according to Army Human Resources Command information cited by Maj. Chris Ophardt, a spokesman for Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Barnes served with the Fourth Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, a unit that deployed to Iraq in 2007 with 8-wheeled Stryker vehicles…. In Iraq, Barnes’ job involved helping to install, maintain and troubleshoot communications equipment, a duty that could involve heading out on patrols, but also might largely confine a soldier to a base, according to Ophardt. Army records indicate that Barnes was assigned to a headquarter’s unit.

He had struggled after returning from Iraq. In July, Nicole Santos, the mother of his 1-year-old daughter, obtained a protection order and curtailed his visits with his daughter because of angry, erratic and sometimes suicidal behavior, according to child-custody documents filed in Pierce County Superior Court.

On the other end of the continent, Norwood, Massachusetts residents Carlos Arrendondo and Victoria Foley are absorbing the loss of their son, Brian, who took his own life on December 19. Brian, 24, had been left inconsolable and incurably depressed by the death of his older brother, Alexander, a Marine who was killed in Iraq in 2004.

Alexander and Brian “were joined at the hip,” Victoria told the Boston Herald. “And ever since his brother died, he had a very hard time. He was tortured. Just tortured.”

Carlos Arrendondo, a native of Costa Rica, wasn’t even a citizen of the United States when he learned on August 25, 2004, that Alexander had been killed in Iraq. It was Carlos’s birthday. Rather than a phone call from Alex, however, Carlos — who at the time lived in Hollywood, Florida — received a visit from a Marine Corps “Casualty Assistance Team,” who informed him that his son — just twenty days after his own 20th birthday — had been killed fightin in Iraq.

On learning of this irrecoverable loss, Carlos suffered an epic breakdown.

“At that moment, not expect [sic] those words, my world tumbled and I felt my heart go down to the ground and rush up through my throat,” Carlos recalled later. Like many parents confronted with the news that their children had been killed in the service of the State, Carlos was seized with the desperate thought that if he could force the Marines to leave, his son would still be alive.

Momentarily deranged, Carlos went into his garage and grabbed a container of gasoline and a welding torch, which he used to set the Marine Casualty Assistance Team’s van on fire — igniting himself in the process. Although understandably startled by vehemence of Carlos’s reaction, the Marines acted quickly to save Carlos’s life, retrieving him from the burning van, suffocating the flames that threatened to kill him, and arranging for medical attention.

Three years later, as a naturalized U.S. citizen participating in an anti-war protest in Washington, D.C., Carlos was surrounded by pro-war counter-protesters, beaten, and kicked, after one of them had presumptuously seized a photograph of Alexander that Carlos had brought to illustrate his family’s loss in a stupid and senseless war.

That war is now officially “over” — but the killing and hardship it inflicts on American and Iraqi families will continue for years, or longer.

Go to the Seattle Times for more about the tragedy in Washington.

After spending 2011 expanding the power of the executive branch to wage war abroad and at home, Barack Obama celebrated New Year’s eve by signing the amended National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which effectively turned the United States into a military junta. The National Defense Authorization Act incorporates provisions mandating the military arrest and indefinite detention of anyone, including U.S. citizens, who is designated a terrorist suspect or enemy combatant. That measure also permits the rendition of detainees – including, once again, American citizens – to foreign countries for interrogation and torture.

Geopolitical affairs analyst Stephen Lendman limns the implications of the NDAA:

It gives presidents unchecked power to order military force arrests and indefinite detentions of US citizens, based solely on uncorroborated accusations of terrorist group associations.

Constitutional, statute and international law protections don’t apply. America’s military may snatch and grab anyone, throw them in torture prisons, and hold them indefinitely without charge or trial, based solely on suspicions, spurious allegations or none at all.

Earlier by Executive Order, Obama authorized indefinite detentions of anyone designated national security threats. Specifically intended for Guantanamo detainees, it’s now for everyone, including US citizens at home or abroad.

Moreover, CIA operatives and Special Forces death squads got presidential authorization to kill targeted US citizens abroad. As a result, they can be hunted down and murdered in cold blood for any reason or none at all.

As of December 31, anyone anywhere, including US citizens, can be called national security threats and judged guilty by accusation. Activists opposing America’s imperium risk arrest, permanent detention or assassination.

So do social justice protesters. Military dungeons or FEMA camps await them. Martial law may authorize it, claiming “catastrophic emergency” powers. The original Senate bill excluded US citizens. Obama demanded their inclusion.

Inviolable rights no longer apply. Protesting imperial lawlessness, social injustice, corporate crime, government corruption, or political Washington run of, by and for rich elites can be criminalized. So can free speech, assembly, religion, or anything challenging America’s right to kill, destroy and pillage with impunity.

It’s official. Tyranny arrived in America. The nation’s unsafe to live in. There’s no place to hide. They’re coming for anyone challenging injustice.

The deployment of fully militarized domestic law enforcement bodies became a familiar spectacle during the “Occupy” protests that erupted across the United States. A precedent-setting incident occurred in June when Predator drones belonging to the Department of Homeland Security were used to fly surveillance missions over a family farm in North Dakota; the drones were used to target the Brossart family, who have been involved in several disputes with the local Sheriff’s office. Although the Predators used in that incident were equipped with sensors rather than weapons, they can be retro-fitted with weapons, including missiles. Those ominous possibilities were pointed out by the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Conroe, Texas, which acquired its own unmanned aerial weapons platform last year.

The expansion of the militarized killing apparatus has also seen increased official reliance on quasi-private contractors, both at home and abroad.

The Los Angeles Times has reported that the Pentagon increasingly makes use of civilian advisers in the “kill chain” of lethal drone operations overseas. In some cases those analysts are given target selection authority over military personnel controlling the missile-laden UAVs. A broadly similar role was carried out by the so-called Southern Poverty Law Center in the case of the Broassart family in North Dakota: The SPLC had identified the family as “sovereign citizens,” a designation marking them as a species of domestic terrorists worthy of exceptional treatment.

Civilian interrogators are likewise given a prominent role in the new military order.

Investigative reporter Alexander Cockburn points out that a lawsuit making its way through the courts may result in an expansive new grant of immunity to civilian prison guards, including contractors employed by privately owned prisons. The plaintiffs are 72 Iraqis had been illegally held and tortured at Abu Ghraib prison. The abuses inflicted on them included rape, being forced to watch others – including relatives – being raped, beatings, mock executions, and other forms of torture. Much of this was done by private contractors employed by the U.S. military and the CIA. None of the victims was ever charged with a crime.

The corporate defendants have claimed absolute immunity under the doctrine of “military preemption,” despite the fact that the personnel were private contractors, rather than soldiers. Because the victims were designated “enemy aliens,” from this perspective, all of their rights are subject to “military pre-emption.”

The same may soon be true of American citizens considered potential troublemakers under the new military regime.

Go here for more on this story from Stephen Lendman.

With the U.S. and Israeli governments discussing “triggers” that would lead to an attack on Iranian nuclear sites, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the self-appointed arbiter of the foreign policy “consensus,” describes the prospect of war in the new year as the “least bad option” for dealing with Tehran.

“The truth is that a military strike intended to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, if managed carefully, could spare the region and the world a very real threat and dramatically improve the long-term national security of the United States,” declares the January/February issue of the CFR’s flagship journal Foreign Affairs in a piece bearing the unambiguous title “Time to Attack Iran.” While acknowledging concerns that a military strike on nuclear sites “would likely fail and, even if it succeeded, would spark a full-fledged war and a global economic crisis,” the CFR insists that a bombing raid can be carried out with surgical precision and lightning efficiency, decapitating a potential nuclear threat with few significant after-effects.

To bolster the case for what would be an aggressive war against Iran, the CFR alludes to the supposed Iranian conspiracy to murder the Saudi ambassador in Washington — a singularly implausible (and widely discredited) plot that bears an uncanny resemblance to dozens of false-flag operations staged by the FBI since 2002. Not mentioned in the CFR’s essay is the recent “judgment by default” rendered by U.S. District Court Judge George B. Daniels purporting to find the Iranian government responsible for the 9-11 attacks. It’s important to recognize that this ruling didn’t prove any of the claims made by the plaintiffs, who are survivors and relatives of people murdered in the attacks; it found in favor of the plaintiffs because none of the people or organizations listed as defendants responded to the lawsuit.

In practical terms, this ruling is about as authoritative as a similar unilateral ruling by an Iranian court holding U.S. government agencies and individual officials liable for alleged abuses inflicted on Iranian citizens. For those who lust for war with Iran, Judge Daniels’ decree will serve as a potent propaganda device — a supposedly tangible link between the war effort and the defining trauma of recent U.S. history. This would revive the twin themes used by the Bush administration in its 2002 campaign for war with Iraq: The supposed need to preempt development of weapons of mass destruction, and the mission to avenge the victims of 9-11.

With the CFR openly demanding war on Iran, Washington and Tel Aviv debating “red lines” and “triggers” that could justify bombing raids, and every Republican presidential contender except Ron Paul endorsing an attack, the Iranian military is warning that it could shut down the Straits of Hormuz, thereby choking off much of the world’s commercial oil supply. Given that Iran is surrounded by U.S. military outposts and dealing with overt threats of aggression, those warnings are probably intended as a form of deterrence — yet they are being depicted by Washington as an act of aggression.

Lt. Rebecca Rebarich, spokeswoman for the Bahrain-based  U.S. 5th Fleet, reacted to the warning from Iran by declaring that any move to close down the Straits “will not be tolerated” and that the U.S. is “always ready to counter malevolent actions to ensure freedom of navigation” — including, one supposes, malevolent actions undertaken in response to Washington’s aggressive behavior in the region.

Read more about this at the home page of the CFR’s Journal, Foreign Affairs.

Man of Peace: Ron Paul on the Campaign Trail

Brandishing a handful of inconsequential quotes from ancient newsletters, the opinion cartel is pretending that Ron Paul is a covert racist who secretly pines for a “race war” in the United States. In a week that witnessed the death of North Korea’s mass-murdering dictator, and the first tentative but unmistakable steps toward war in Iran, Huge amounts of bandwidth, broadcast time, and column inches have been devoted to affected outrage over the idea that Ron Paul once permitted “insensitive” things to be published in a newsletter bearing his name.

The coordinated assault on Dr. Paul began with Fox “News” media personality Sean Hannity, whose unabashed whorishness would bring down the moral tone of a Tijuana brothel. For several days following Dr. Paul’s emergence as front-runner in the Iowa caucus polls, Hannity – no doubt working from notes written in small words with big, crayon-inscribed letters – tirelessly flogged the supposedly scandalous Ron Paul newsletters on his radio program and TV show.

From there this reheated pseudo-scandal – a casserole of stale, leftover smears from the 2008 campaign – was taken up by the entire corporate media establishment, from the neo-Trotskyite Weekly Standard and the CIA-controlled National Review and CNN.

In apportioning moral outrage, the collectivist left employs a sliding scale. The late Ted Kennedy killed an innocent girl through depraved indifference and lived a life of impenitent debauchery, and yet was hailed as a moral titan because of his devotion to official plunder and regimentation. The same devotion to the holy cause of State-sanctified theft purchased Robert Byrd a plenary indulgence for his membership in the Ku Klux Klan as a young adult – a background he shared with more than a few Democratic Party luminaries.

President Obama is presently slaughtering innocent “people of color” in at least three countries. His administration continues to imprison young black and Hispanic men for drug “offenses.” This is done by way of a “Justice” system riddled with racial profiling and sentencing guidelines that result in wildly disproportionate sentences for black offenders – a system that has been denounced, in detail, by Dr. Paul, who has called for an end to the insane and terminally corrupt exercise called the “War on Drugs.”

Newsweek-affiliated blogger Andrew Sullivan, a self-described conservative who supported Obama in 2008, has been grudgingly impressed by Dr. Paul’s ethical and ideological consistency. Referring to the contrived controversy over the supposedly racist newsletters, Sullivan writes:  “[A]sk yourself: you’ve now heard this guy countless times; he’s been in three presidential campaigns; he’s not exactly known for self-editing. And nothing like this [the purportedly shocking quotes from the newsletters] has ever crossed his lips in public. You have to make a call on character. Compared with the rest on offer, compared with the money-grubbing lobbyist, Gingrich, or the say-anything Romney, or that hate-anyone Bachmann, I’ve made my call.”

Nelson Linder, president of the Austin, Texas chapter of the NAACP, has known Dr. Paul for decades. Speaking for himself on the basis of that long and close association, Linder emphatically denies that the mild and avuncular Congressman is a racist or bigot of any kind, and commends him for his repeated denunciation of police repression of black people.

Linder points out that Dr. Paul has made powerful enemies by his public opposition to the Federal Reserve System and its allied War Lobby.

“If you scare the folks that have the money, they’re going to attack you and they’re going to take [your statements] out of context,” Linder points out “What he’s saying is really really threatening the powers that be and that’s what they fear.”

While the collectivist Left is assailing Paul as a secret “racist,” the proto-Fascist Right continues to execrate him as an “appeaser.” Rep. Michelle Bachmann, who has endorsed pre-emptive war on Iran and publicly expressed support for a bizarre Islamo-Communist cult called the MEK – a terrorist group that seeks to seize power in Tehran – recently told a group of schoolchildren that Dr. Paul would permit them to be killed by non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons.

Political consultant and notorious foot fetishist Dick Morris, who made a lucrative living as an adviser to Bill Clinton and then a fortune condemning him on Fox News, insisted on Sean Hannity’s radio show that “no true patriot could be for Ron Paul.” Dorothy Rabbinowitz of the Wall Street Journal , offended by Dr. Paul’s campaign to end Washington’s deranged interventionist foreign policy, traduced the candidate as “the best-known of our homegrown propagandists for our chief enemies in the world.” That description wouldn’t be recognizable to the countless military personnel – both active-duty and veterans – who have donated to Dr. Paul’s presidential campaign. Ron Paul is the uncontested front-runner among military donors in the 2012 presidential election cycle.

“As of the last reporting date, at the end of September, Paul leads all candidates by far in donations from service members,” observed Tim Egan of the New York Times. “This trend has been in place since 2008, when Paul ran for president with a similar stance: calling nonsense at hawk squawk from both parties. This year, Paul has 10 times the individual donations – totaling $113,739 – from the military as does Mitt Romney. And he has a hundred times more than Newt Gingrich, who sat out the Vietnam War with college deferments and now promises he would strike foes at the slightest provocation.”

Bellicose blatherskites like Gingrich and Romney are indecently eager to propagate war and bloodshed. However, those “who actually fought in Iraq know better,” Egan observes.
“They can tell a phony warrior from a real one. And in Ron Paul, the veteran who served as a flight surgeon for the Air Force, the man some call crazy, they hear a voice of sanity – at least in the realm of war and peace.”

For decades, as a private citizen, activist, and elected representative, Ron Paul has espoused and lived by a philosophy of individual liberty protected by law. No public figure in recent memory has more consistently preached and practiced the non-aggression axiom – more properly called the Golden Rule – than Dr. Paul. In political terms, this means the categorical rejection of aggressive violence, including state-licensed coercion.

His fidelity to principle has entailed a considerable degree of personal sacrifice: As a private obstetrician, long before he was dragged reluctantly into politics, Paul refused to accept government subsidies through Medicare or Medicaid. He also refused to have anything to do with abortion – thereby displaying the same unqualified respect for the sanctity of human life that led him to become an outspoken opponent of war, and a proponent of abolishing the death penalty.

During the past two decades, those deemed to be “respectable” have supported more than a half-dozen foreign wars – two in Iraq, as well as one in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Libya, in addition to low-grade but bloody proxy conflicts in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Columbia, and Mexico – that have slaughtered millions of people. In 1996, at roughly the same time that Ron Paul’s supposedly intolerable newsletters were in circulation, Madeleine Albright, the Clinton administration’s UN representative, blithely said on 60 Minutes that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children through starvation and disease as a result of a U.S.-imposed embargo was “worth it.” Those words resonated in the Muslim world – and their deadly echoes were heard on the morning of 9-11.

Ron Paul, a guileless and principled man, has seen his reputation come under pitiless assault because he has adamantly refused to endorse genocide in Iraq, or aggressive war anywhere. According to the canons of collectivist piety, bombs and drones may break our bones, but only politically incorrect words can hurt us.

According to Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood, “it may be months before an investigation determines exactly what happened Friday night when a sheriff’s deputy hit and killed two pedestrians in Oildale.” Police who responded to the incident took the deputy to the hospital — and arrested grieving relatives on the scene.

Daniel Hiler ran out of gas during an evening motorcycle ride in Oildale, California on December 16. While walking his bike to a gas station, the twenty-year-old father of two ran into a family friend named Chrystal Jolley. The pair was crossing a street at a widely-recognized intersection when they were fatally blindsided by a vehicle traveling at a speed well in excess of the posted speed limit. Despite the fact that darkness had descended, the driver hadn’t turned on his headlights. The victims were killed instantly.

Within minutes, police swarmed the scene, and arrests were made — none of which involved the driver, Deputy John Swearengin of the Kern County Sheriff’s Office. The four people arrested were relatives of the victims, who got into what the Sheriff’s Office described as an “altercation” with California Highway Patrol officers when they attempted to identify the victims.

“I was at home on Friday night working on my car when someone came running over and told me that a deputy ran over my daughter in the street,” recalls Jimmy Clevenger, Jolley’s father. “I ran down here, I was very upset…. The next thing I know, they had me by the neck and threw me to the ground and said I resisted arrest. My daughter was dead in the street and it was their fault.”

The outraged relatives were taken to jail, and face criminal charges. Swearengin, the killer, was taken to the hospital and wasn’t compelled to undergo drug or alcohol screening

The posted local speed limit (for Mundanes, of course) is 45 miles per hour.  According to several on-scene accounts from horrified witnesses, Swearengin blew through the intersection at a speed of 75–90 miles per hour. Despite the fact that he was obviously in a hurry, Swearengin didn’t activate his siren or running lights — or, according to at least one eyewitness, his headlights.

Sheriff Donny Youngblood told the Bakersfield Californian that the deputy “was responding to a report of a stolen vehicle with a suspect still at the scene” when he struck his victims. This would mean that he was not involved in a high-speed pursuit. Furthermore, as some skeptical witnesses pointed out, the main office of the Sheriff’s Department is about a mile or two west of the intersection where Swearengin killed Hiler and Jolley — and he was headed that direction at the time of the incident. This suggests that the deputy wasn’t motivated by an urgent call from an isolated and over-matched comrade, but rather engaging in a favorite pastime of uniformed adolescents — “Kickin’ ass and drivin’ fast.”

Some residents of Oildale, a suburb of Bakersfield, describe the Kern County Sheriff’s Deputies as notorious for their habit of speeding through the town’s narrow streets, blithely ignoring speed limits without bothering to activate their lights or sirens.

“They have no consideration for the other public,” objects Michelle Cameron, a distant relative of Jolley. Her assessment is seconded by Forrest Faulkner, an 11-year resident of Oildale who claims to know and be on good terms with most of the department. “They’re great people,” Faulkner maintains, even as he criticizes the department’s habit of putting the public at risk by needlessly reckless driving. “I’ve seen sparks fly from the car’s undercarriage when they hit a dip,” Faulkner recounts.

According to Whittney Peaker, Hiler’s fiance, the night before he was killed the young man had complained about the habitual disregard of traffic safety rules displayed by the department: “The night before, we left McDonald’s and a sheriff pulled out right in front of us with no lights on and Daniel said ‘I freakin’ hate when they do that.’ The next day they freaking take his life because he didn’t have his lights on.”

“I just see them flying through the air I mean like rag dolls. It didn’t even look real. It sounded like an explosion, like a stick of dynamite went off. It was at least a half a block down the street where they landed. It was far,” said Chris Moody, who witnessed the accident.

Under section 192 [c][2] of California state law, the deaths of Hiler and Jolley resulted from an act of vehicular homicide — one involving “gross negligence,” and therefore a felony. No charges have been filed against Swearengin, and the deputy faces only an “administrative” inquiry, rather than a criminal investigation.  The outcome of the administrative procedure isn’t exactly shrouded in mystery.

“What gets me is we already know the outcome,” complained Anna Rodriguez, one of Hiler’s friends, to a local reporter. “The officer will go on paid suspension. Then they will say he didn’t do anything wrong. And that will be the end of it.”

For more on this story, go to KGET.com.

According to television personality Bill O’Reilly, Iran is a global menace akin to Nazi Germany, Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul is Neville Chamberlain revisited, and the Pentagon must be prepared for war to contain Tehran’s aggression at any cost. Appearing on NBC’s Today Show to flog his most recent ghost-written bestseller Killing Lincoln, O’Reilly sneered: “His foreign policy disqualifies him in my eyes as an American — not as a journalist. I don’t think we need another Neville Chamberlain with Iran. So, he wants to be friends with Iran, that’s swell.”

Citing a key Bush-era National Intelligence Estimate and subsequent CIA findings, Dr. Paul has consistently emphasized that the Iranian government — although domestically repressive — is not pursuing aggressive designs against the United States. For this reason, Iran — like Soviet Russia and Communist China before it — can be dealt with through conventional diplomacy, rather than through pre-emptive war, as every other Republican candidate insists.

O’Reilly, who is Fox News’s ambassador to the geriatric warmonger demographic, consistently displays an unfavorable ratio of certitude to knowledge. He appears to be unaware of a recent official Pentagon threat analysis of Iran which validates Dr. Paul’s assessment.

According to the Pentagon — which self-appointed super-patriot O’Reilly must consider a nest of appeasers — the Iranian military is not configured for apocalyptic warfare against the United States, Israel, or any other country:

To ensure regime survival, Iran’s security strategy is based first on deterring an attack…. At present Iran’s forces are sufficent to deter or defend against conventional threats from Iran’s weaker neighbors such as post-war Iraq, the GCC, Azerbaijan or Afghanistan but lack the air power and logistical ability to power much beyond Iran’s borders or to confront regional powers such as Turkey or Israel. (Emphasis added)

“Stated simply Iran wants to obtain the necessary weapons to defend itself in a bad neighborhood where it finds itself surrounded by a global superpower,” summarizes Shaun Booth of the political and economic affairs blog Milwaukee Story. “The hyping of the potential nuclear program in Iran is Washington’s attempt to establish a pretext that would garner public support for a strike/destabilization campaign on Iran. The obvious goal would be regime change. So the real reason the Pentagon sees a nuclear program in Iran as a threat is not because it would be used as a first strike weapon against Israel, but because it would make it more difficult for the US and its allies to take out the regime in Tehran.”

Every star is a US military base. (Courtesy of Juan Cole.)

Oddly enough, this perspective is shared by some of the most impassioned supporters of war with Iran, who are worried that a nuclear-armed Iranian regime might prove to be both reasonable and impossible for Washington to push around.

The American Enterprise Institute is one of the most prominent of the Washington-based think-tanks promoting preemptive war against Iran. Danielle Pletka, who heads the group’s foreign policy section, is an unabashed war hawk regarding Iran.

In a recent address, Ms. Pletka offered a revealing assessment of the real dangers posed by a nuclear Iran: “The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it; it’s Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it.” This would result in Iran being perceived as a “reasonable power,” rather than a rogue regime.

Thomas Donnelly, Pletka’s comrade at AEI, insists that war with Iran is necessary not to prevent nuclear genocide, but in order to preserve “the balance of power in the Persian Gulf and the greater Middle East.”

For years, the American public has been barraged with apocalyptic predictions that a nuclear-armed Iran would launch a genocidal attack on Israel. The AEI, which is one of the most hawkish neo-con think-tanks in Washington, appears to believe that if Iran is seeking a nuclear arsenal, it’s doing so for the purposes of deterrence, not aggression.

It should be noted as well that the current Iranian regime is not the first to pursue nuclear power — or a nuclear weapons capacity.

During the administration of Gerald Ford, the U.S. government supported Iran’s nuclear program. At the time, Iran was ruled by Shah Reza Pahlavi, a brutal militarist dictator whose regime was propped up by a spectacularly vicious secret police agency, and who maintained a military configured for regional adventurism. Despite concerns over nuclear proliferation, the Ford administration encouraged the Shah’s effort to develop nuclear energy as a hedge against declining oil production.

Today, the Islamic theocracy ruling the country insists that its nuclear program is a continuation of the Shah’s efforts – which were, once again, supported by Washington – to diversify its energy industry.

Where the Shah openly admitted in 1974 that his government was seeking to build nuclear weapons, the current regime insists that it has no intention of doing so. Yet Washington, which provided the Shah with a huge military establishment and supported his efforts to develop nuclear power, treats Iran’s current effort to develop nuclear power as a cause for war.

During the past sixty years, the U.S. has targeted Iran for a coup, propped up a vicious dictator, encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade that country, and threatened it with pre-emptive war. Given that none of this has worked, restoring diplomatic relations with Iran would hardly constitute appeasement — at least, to anybody not residing within the cartoon realm in which a blustering, self-satisfied ignoramus like Bill O’Reilly is regarded as a legitimate pundit.

Read more at the Milwaukee Story.

Detroit resident Maryanne Godboldo, whose handicapped teenage daughter was abducted at gunpoint by child “protection” officials and a SWAT team last March, won two critical courtroom victories on December 13 — yet vindictive prosecutors have signaled their intention to continue their official persecution of the homeschooling mother.

Reports the Detroit News:

Two judges in different Wayne County courtrooms sided Monday with a mother who resisted police forcing their way into her home last March to take her teenage daughter during a dispute with a Child Protective Services worker over medications.

A Family Court judge Monday afternoon accepted positive medical and education reports, and over the objections of an assistant state attorney general representing the Department of Health and Human Services, dismissed jurisdiction that had for nine months come between now 14-year-old Arianna Godboldo and her family.

Earlier Monday, a Wayne County Circuit judge refused to reinstate criminal charges, dismissed in August by a 36th District Court judge, that alleged the mother, Maryanne Godboldo, illegally resisted and assaulted police by allegedly firing a shot at them.

Godboldo’s daughter Ariana, who was 13 at the time she was kidnapped, suffers from a variety of physical handicaps and had been diagnosed with psychological problems. A psychiatrist ordered that she undergo injections of a dangerous psychotropic drug called Risperdal.

Godboldo, a professor at a local college, would not countenance the forcible drugging of her daughter. So the local child abduction agency – dishonestly called the Child Protective Services (CPS) – materialized on Godboldo’s doorstep, in the company of Sheriff’s deputies, to seize the child from her mother. To her eternal credit, Godboldo refused to surrender her daughter. At one point, Godboldo allegedly fired a single gunshot to ward off the intruders. A SWAT team – complete with automatic weapons and armored vehicles – was dispatched to surround the home. After ten hours, Goldboldo surrendered. She was incarcerated on $500,000 bond, and her daughter, in short order, was being forcibly drugged at the hands of her abductors.

The CPS gave itself permission to kidnap Ariana because of “medical neglect” — yet the agency discontinued the Risperdal injections shortly after seizing the girl from her mother, and no physical or emotional damage occurred on account of that supposed “neglect.” In other words, Godboldo’s home was invaded, and her life was threatened, because she had made exactly the same choice later made by the “experts” who had violently and illegally seized her child. None of this had anything to do with the welfare of Ariana; this exercise in state terrorism was intended to validate the supposed authority of functionaries to seize a child at whim.

In August, Detroit District Court Judge Ronald Giles acknowledged that Godboldo was morally and legally entitled to use deadly force in an attempt to prevent the illegal abduction of her mentally handicapped 13-year-old daughter by the child “protection” mafia. In testimony before Judge Giles, CPS officials admitted that the removal order was never signed by a judge; instead, it was rubber-stamped with a forged signature by a social worker with no legal training or judicial authority. Judge Giles ruled that the order was “ridiculous” and dismissed all charges against Godboldo.

Unfortunately, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy has promised “to make a third appeal to reinstate criminal charges,” observes the Detroit News. In addition,Family Court Judge Lynne Pierce “told Assistant Attorney General Deborah Carley, who complained it appears the girl has never received anything other than homeschooling her entire life, she is not barred from pursuing criminal truancy charges if she feels the parents are flouting state law that required the education of children.”

Read more at the Detroit News.

Click on the link below to listen to the interview:

Tales of the Predator State

Across the United States, police are being militarized, SWAT teams are running amok, and school children are terrorized by lockdown drills — often used to conceal warrantless searches of their personal belongings. Listen to a Pro Libertate Radio podcast featuring Republic magazine managing editor William Norman Grigg (click on the link below):

Garrison State America

Through the officially sanctioned plunder called “civil asset forfeiture,” police departments across the country have confiscated untold millions in cash and property – and now some of the robbers are squabbling over how to divide the loot.

Police officers in the town of Westminster, Maryland (population roughly 19,000) are accusing their superiors “of misspending money seized from drug suspects by buying iPads and iPhones for top commanders,” reports the Baltimore Sun. It’s important to understand that through civil asset forfeiture, cash or property can be confiscated – that is, stolen – from people who have never been formally accused of a criminal offense, let alone convicted of one. This is a different proposition from criminal asset forfeiture, which involves seizure of money or property from an individual who has actually been convicted of a crime.

Through their local union, the Carroll County Fraternal Order of Police, officers in Westminster have charged that “bosses are getting all the perks while the rank and file are left cleaning up the mess,” explains attorney and police union labor negotiator Gary McLhinney.

While dismissing the allegations as union posturing in the context of contract negotiations, police and city officials have yet to offer a substantive denial.

Reports the Sun:

“Clearly, someone disagrees with the manner in which some of the forfeiture funds have been spent,” said Westminster Police Chief Jeffrey Spaulding, declining to confirm, as the law firm alleges, that he and his top commanders — a major and three captains — have iPhones or iPads purchased with funds collected as part of criminal forfeitures.

The mayor refused to say how much money the city has gotten from the asset forfeiture program, or release an annual audit of the programs at participating police agencies in Carroll County.

“We’re not going to release anything from the city of Westminster until we have a chance to talk to our attorney,” Utz said. “Then we’ll be able to respond. I have nothing to hide.”

Expenditures from asset forfeiture programs must follow guidelines from the U.S. Department of Justice. McLhinney said he is not alleging that the spending was illegal but that it was inappropriate. The guidelines, for example, allow money to be spent on computers and communication equipment.

McLhinney said the money shouldn’t be spent on smartphones for commanders but for officers who could use them. For instance, Baltimore police officers have BlackBerrys that can access warrant information. “There are men and women risking their lives to make these seizures, what, so the boss can have an Apple iPhone?” he said.

The idea that police are “risking their lives” to confiscate money and property is self-serving and melodramatic. Even if it were true, however, this wouldn’t make their actions any more heroic than those of any other band of armed robbers.

The Fifth Amendment dictates that government may not deprive any individual of his property “without due process of law”; one has to be convicted of a crime before the state can impose a punishment. At least that’s how things were intended to operate in the old constitutional republic. The degenerate corporate state ruling us today operates in a fashion similar to that of feudal kleptocracies, in which robbers (sometimes called “tax farmers”) were permitted to keep a portion of whatever they stole from the public.

One early specimen of what is now called “forfeiture” was described by British historian Arthur Arnold after he visited 19th century feudal Iran. Arnold observed that government agents were “free to extort all that [they] can get, upon condition of making a certain annual payment to Tehran.” In this fashion, the subjects were “kept in perpetual disorder by the demands of armed men, who plunder under the pretense of [law], and who … are scarcely preferred to robbers.”

This is essentially the same arrangement that emerged from “forfeiture” reform efforts ten years ago. Amid a growing chorus of public outrage over the practice, Congress and various states enacted measures supposedly forbidding police to profit from forfeiture. The Justice Department, however, nullified those laws by permitting police to keep eighty percent of whatever they confiscate in joint operations with the Feds – thereby instituting a scheme remarkably similar to the 19^th Century Iranian feudal system described by Arnold.

While “civil asset forfeiture” is generally described as a valid law enforcement tool, in practice it is undisguised theft. In a detailed investigative series, the Detroit News reported a couple of years ago: “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.”

As Republic magazine recently noted (see “The Stasi State Expands,” October 21),
Between 2003 and 2007, Romulus, Michigan witnessed a 118 percent increase in forfeiture revenues despite the fact that there has not been a corresponding increase in criminal activity. Well, make that unofficial criminal activity.

On September 27, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy announced the arrest and indictment of former Romulus Police Chief Michael St. Andre, his wife, and five detectives, all of whom were accused of using forfeiture proceeds for their personal benefit.  St. Andre was accused of using forfeiture money to buy a tanning salon for his wife. Some of the money was allegedly used to procure the services of prostitutes. Some $40,000 was reportedly spent on alcohol and marijuana.

Police aren’t the only “public servants” who can live the high life thanks to the miracle of asset forfeiture. Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn, to cite one example, drives a customized high-end SUV confiscated from Charles Melvin Fox, who is accused of running a prostitution ring. Buckhorn selected his pimped-out ride from a “forfeiture fleet” – that is, a large collection of autos stolen by police from people either accused of crimes or associated with them – but not yet convicted in court.

Buckhorn insists that the SUV was seized from “someone engaged in criminal activity.” That may or may not be true of Charles Fox. It is unambiguously true of Buckhorn, who – as a politician – belongs to a class of criminals more loathsome than pimps or prostitutes.

Any vice – that is to say, a prohibited activity engaged in by consenting adults – can be turned into a potential revenue bonanza for the political class. This includes not only drug use and prostitution, but gambling, as well.

In 2009, Maryland’s Anne Arundel County Police Department set up a fraudulent account for “Linwood Payment Solutions” to process payments for online gambling. The funds were deposited directly into the federal government’s asset forfeiture fund. Earlier this year, the Feds seized the online domains and other assets of online gambling sites – and smugly instructed Americans who had participated in online gambling, none of whom committed a prosecutable offense, to contact the websites if they wanted to get their funds back.

Those funds, of course, had already been stolen by the Feds. For its role in the heist, the Anne Arundel County Police Department netted a cut of nearly a half-million dollars, which will be used to fund the SWAT teams employed to carry out smash-and-grab invasions under the rubric of the “War on Drugs.”

In addition to the obvious material benefits it provides for opportunistic police and civic officials, the practice of asset forfeiture provides an unaccountable pool of funds that can be used to cover up other forms of official corruption.

Nassau County, New York is burdened with one of the worst and most abusive criminal “justice” systems in the country. The County Police Department’s crime lab has been shut down because of incurable corruption. Thousands of criminal convictions may be tainted because of perjury and evidence tampering on the part of crime lab officials.

Nassau County DA Kathleen Rice has announced that thousands of forensic samples from the lab will have to be re-tested at a cost of nearly a half-million dollars. The expenses will be paid out of the police department’s forfeiture funds.

When asked how much money was in the forfeiture slush funds, Rice refused to answer. The police department – in a fashion typical of the risk-aversive plunderers who gravitate to that disreputable occupation – insists that a public accounting of the forfeiture funds would put officers “at risk.” It’s understandable that the thieves would try to avoid riling up the victims by describing the size of their haul.

No other criminal racket can compete with the one called “government” – and officially sanctioned robbery of this kind grows increasingly common as the productive economy dies.

Read more about this in the Baltimore Sun.

Yes, they're watching you: A "Reaper" drone operated by the DHS

The Predator Drones used to carry out CIA assassinations in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere are deployed over American skies – and they have “domestic extremists” in their targets.

During a conflict arising over stray cattle last June, Sheriff Kelly Janke of North Dakota’s Nelson County organized a multi-agency task force, including elements “from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances, and deputy sheriffs from three other counties,” reports the Los Angeles Times. “He also called in a Predator B drone.”

Continues the Times:

“As the unmanned aircraft circled 2 miles overhead the next morning, sophisticated sensors under the nose helped pinpoint the three suspects and showed they were unarmed. Police rushed in and made the first known arrests of U.S. citizens with help from a Predator, the spy drone that has helped revolutionize modern warfare.

But that was just the start. Local police say they have used two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force base to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since June. The FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration have used Predators for other domestic investigations….

`We don’t use [drones] on every call out,’ said Bill Macki, head of the police SWAT team in Grand Forks. `If we have something in town like an apartment complex, we don’t call them.’”

The Predator-aided SWAT assault in June targeted the family of a local farmer named Rodney Brossart, who live near the tiny village of Lakota, about 100 miles northwest of Fargo. A few days earlier, about a half-dozen stray cattle wandered onto Brossart’s property. The farmer reportedly believed that the cattle were unclaimed and thus belonged to him under a disputed interpretation of open-range law.

On June 23, after Brossart refused to surrender the livestock, a team of Sheriff’s deputies Tasered him and took him into custody. They also arrested Brossart’s wife when she attempted to defend her father, and his wife when she supposedly “misled” deputies who were searching for what were described as “illegal” weapons.

When deputies returned the following day, they were reportedly confronted by Brossart’s three sons, who were allegedly carrying rifles. This led Sheriff Janke to escalate the confrontation to a full-spectrum military response – including the local SWAT team and a Predator B drone supplied by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP), an affiliate of the Department of Homeland Security.

The CBP’s drone fleet, significantly, is described as a counter-terrorism asset. According to the so-called Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a self-appointed leftist watchdog group, Brossart’s family received special attention because Sheriff Janke “knew the Brossarts were followers of another Lakota resident, Roger Elvick, one of the original gurus of the bizarre but remarkably resilient sovereign citizens movement.”

For the past several years, the SPLC has been indoctrinating local law enforcement agencies in the belief that the sovereign citizens movement – and the “radical Right” in general, a label the SPLC applies to anyone more conservative than Hugo Chavez — has emerged as a fearsome “domestic terrorism” threat. That campaign has been assisted by the State and Local Anti-Terrorism Training (SLATT) program, which is funded through the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Assistance. National and regional law enforcement seminars have been used to cultivate alarm among police officers regarding the supposedly all-encompassing terrorist threat posed by domestic “extremists.”

The Predator-aided strike on the Brossart family might be a direct payoff of the SLPC’s indoctrination efforts.

During the June confrontation, Sheriff Janke actually took time to respond to an interview request from the SPLC’s Intelligence Report.

“We’re trying to reach out to the family to get them to surrender,” Janke told the publication. “It’s not common for people to brandish weapons against law enforcement, and to have them all be family members is unique. [It tells me] they’re up to something, they’re planning something, they have some different beliefs…. We’re meeting with a team of experts to find out the best possible way to resolve this.”

Those “experts,” of course, proved to be the people in charge of the vertically integrated, militarized Homeland Security State.

Read more on this story at the Los Angeles Times.

Almost twenty years to the day after the end of the Soviet Union, the Euro Summit to deal with the debt crisis produced a framework for what Mikhail Gorbachev called a “new European Soviet” encompassing nearly two dozen nations. Representatives of twenty-three European countries, including 17 member states of the European Union, approved an outline for what the European Council in Brussels daintily calls a “fiscal stability union” – a scheme for what it calls “deeper integration” and “enhanced governance” of economic policy in order to deal with the continent’s debt crisis.

In broad outline, the “reinforced architecture for Economic and Monetary Union” was a collaboration between German Chancellor Angela Merkel (a former Communist Party youth leader in East Germany) and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The result, notes the New York Times, is that “Berlin effectively united Europe under its control” — using a framework for continental integration that envisions an ambitious regulatory regime and a command-and-control economic model.

As summarized by the BBC:

The key proposal on the agenda of the gathering in the Belgian capital  … is how to enforce budgetary discipline with automatic penalties for those eurozone nations that overspend.

Germany and France are pushing for new European Union treaties, saying stricter fiscal rules should be enshrined there.

Mr Sarkozy said Europe was in much danger.

“Never has Europe been so necessary. Never has it been in so much danger,” he said.

The German-French plan is based on the following key provisions:

• the European Commission to have the power to impose penalties for nations that run excessive budget deficits
• all 17 eurozone nations should amend their national legislation to require balanced budgets
• the eurozone countries to have common corporation and financial transaction taxes
• any future bailouts would not require private investors to absorb part of the costs, as happened in the Greece case.

In material terms, notes economic analyst Michael S. Rozeff, the revisions to the European Union will mean “a stronger central government for those European states that agree to it. It advances toward a United States of Europe. There is zero in it that advances freedom, just the opposite. It maintains all the presumptions of our era: big governments, central banks, fiat money, macroeconomic control.”

British Prime Minister David Cameron, who had expressed significant reservations about the proposed revisions, vetoed the draft treaty. The Daily Mail of London described his misgivings:

 Key to [Cameron’s] demands was that any transfer of power from a national to an EU regulator on financial services could be vetoed by the UK. He wanted to prevent any EU action that would harm Britain’s ability to operate its own regime of regulation for financial services….

In particular, the Prime Minister wanted to avoid any move towards a financial transaction tax that would see London become less attractive as a destination to conduct business versus other jurisdictions such as New York or Hong Kong.

Additionally, he wanted measures that would prevent a block of eurozone countries demanding that euro-denominated transactions be conducted in Frankfurt or Paris, something that would reduce the amount of business being done in the City of London.

Cameron was also anxious that an EU-wide treaty change would see Britain paying for EU bureaucrats to draft and police regulations for the eurozone block of nations – which Britain is not part of – using EU resources and buildings that Britain was helping to pay for.

Cameron’s proposals were intended to protect precisely what the EU summit sought to undermine – national independence. This was made clear in a joint communique from Merkel and Sarkozy: “We need more binding and more ambitious rules and commitments for the Euro area Member States. They should reflect that sharing a single currency means sharing responsibility for the Euro area as a whole. The building blocks of the new Stability and Growth Union are: A strengthened institutional architecture. Euro area governance needs to be substantially reinforced.” (Emphasis added.)

Dan Murphy, a financial affairs analyst for the Christian Science Monitor, points out that the Merkel/Sarkozy framework calls for nothing less than an “end to sovereign control over European budgets” and an arrangement in which EU member states would definitively cede “national control to a supranational body” – that is, the Soviet-style mega-state described by Gorbachev more than a decade ago.

Read more at the Daily Mail.

Through Operation “Fast and Furious,” the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (still known by the acronym ATF)  “secretly encouraged gun dealers to sell to suspected traffickers for Mexican drug cartels to go after the `big fish,’” while using the illegal sales as a pretext for gun grab-favorable legislation, reports CBS News:

ATF officials didn’t intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called “Demand Letter 3″. That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or “long guns.” Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.

On July 14, 2010 after ATF headquarters in Washington D.C. received an update on Fast and Furious, ATF Field Ops Assistant Director Mark Chait emailed Bill Newell, ATF’s Phoenix Special Agent in Charge of Fast and Furious:

“Bill – can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks.”

Whistleblowers within the notorious corrupt federal agency (which has no constitutionally defensible reason to exist) have disclosed to Congress and the media that this practice of “gunwalking” made firearms available that “were used in violent crimes in Mexico. Two were found at the murder scene of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.”

In December 8 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee,  Attorney General Eric Holder, who has come under acute criticism for obstructing congressional probes into the affair, offered tardy, grudging, and qualified acknowledgement of the scandal, while maintaining that it somehow underscored the supposed need for tighter restrictions on gun sales: “As we work to identify where errors occurred and to ensure that these mistakes never happen again, we must not lose sight of the critical challenge this flawed operation has highlighted: the battle to stop the flow of guns to Mexico.”

Of course, it was the federal government that was promoting the flow of guns into the hands of Mexican crime cartels; now the same government seeks to capitalize on its corruption by expanding its power to regulate and persecute American gun dealers and gun owners. The legendary 19th Century French free market advocate Frederic Bastiat referred to this kind of thing as “creating the antidote and the poison in the same laboratory.”

This tendency is deeply woven into most federal policy, especially regarding such issues as terrorism, international organized crime, and the “war on drugs” — all of which are implicated in the “Fast and Furious” scandal.

From the Afghan opium fields that are guarded by U.S. troops, to the street-level drug retail networks that are honeycombed with informants and undercover police officers, the narcotics trade is a vertically integrated joint venture between international organized crime and the government agencies supposedly fighting it.

The most recent illustration of this evil symbiosis was provided by the December 3 New York Times, which describes how the federal Drug Enforcement Administration has “laundered or smuggled millions of dollars in drug proceeds” on behalf of Mexican narcotics cartels.

“American agents transport the cash on government flights to the United States, where it is deposited into traffickers’ accounts, and then wired to companies that provide goods and services to the cartel,” recounts the Times.

It’s quite likely that at least some of that money was used to purchase firearms through Operation Fast and Furious.

Things of this sort make perfect sense — once it’s understood that governments and criminal syndicates are in the same business.

Read more at CBSNews.com.

Government is the only human enterprise that profits through failure and thrives on human tragedy. This is why dates saturated with tragedy — such as September 11 and December 7 — are regarded as high holy days for those who worship government power. On those days, Americans are commanded to reflect on the bottomless malice of our foreign enemies, and to pledge even deeper resolve to support whatever our rulers decree is necessary in order to provide us with “security.” We are likewise urged to look with scorn and hostility at “isolationists,” who supposedly undermine our national unity.

In a speech observing the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor twenty years ago, then-President George H.W. Bush used to occasion to slander “isolationists” — American patriots who embraced the foreign policy of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Quincy Adams:

“Ironically, isolationists gathered together at what was known in those days as an ‘American [sic] First’ rally in Pittsburgh at precisely the moment the first Americans met early, violent deaths right here at Pearl Harbor. The isolationists failed to see that the seeds of Pearl Harbor were sown back in 1919, when a victorious America decided that in the absence of a threatening enemy abroad, we should turn all of our energies inward. That notion of isolationism flew escort for the very bombers that attacked our men 50 years ago.”

To the Power Elite, the belief that America should refrain from prowling the globe “in search of monsters to destroy” is a heresy. It is an even graver thoughtcrime  to consider the possibility that events such as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor or the terrorist assaults of 9/11 were anticipated and welcomed — or even facilitated — by the people who presume to rule us. Where Pearl Harbor is concerned, however, any honest reading of the relevant history leads inevitably to that conclusion.

Writing in The American Conservative, Patrick Buchanan summarizes the newly published “secret history” compiled by Herbert Hoover between 1943 and 1963, which provides the former President’s explanation “of what happened before, during and after the world war that may prove yet the death knell of the West”:

Edited by historian George Nash, Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath, is a searing indictment of FDR and the men around him as politicians who lied prodigiously about their desire to keep America out of war, even as they took one deliberate step after another to take us into war.

Yet the book is no polemic. The 50-page run-up to the war in the Pacific uses memoirs and documents from all sides to prove Hoover’s indictment. And perhaps the best way to show the power of this book is the way Hoover does it — chronologically, painstakingly, week by week.

Inside the Japanese government “was a powerful faction led by Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye that desperately did not want a war with the United States,” Buchanan recounts. The navy favored peace with the U.S. and Britain, while the more bellicose faction was led by en. Hideki Tojo and vehemently anti-American Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka. On July 18, Konoye replaced Matsuoka with Admiral Teijiro Toyoda, who wanted to avoid war with the U.S. A week later, as if to punish Japan’s conciliatory posture, Washington froze all Japanese assets in the U.S., cut off all trade, and imposed an oil embargo.

Puzzled but determined, Konoye continued to reach out to Washington, bringing the army to heel and requesting a meeting with FDR – on the U.S. side of the Pacific – to negotiate.  U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew, who mistakenly assumed that the FDR administration was seeking to avoid a war, rather than provoke one, begged Washington to respond to Konoye’s initiative. A month after Washington imposed economic sanctions on Tokyo, the Japanese ambassador in Washington presented FDR a personal letter from Konoye imploring him to meet.

That letter was leaked to the press on September 3. Three days later, Konoye met with Grew to tell him Japan “now agreed with the four principles the Americans were demanding as the basis for peace,” Buchanan continues – yet no response came.

“Konoye’s warship is ready waiting to take him to Honolulu, Alaska or anyplace designated by the president,” Ambassador Grew wrote in a desperate September 30 telegraph. Again, the response was stolid silence. About two weeks thereafter, Konoye’s government collapsed – but last-ditch peace initiatives continued for more than a month thereafter.

“In November, the U.S. intercepted two new offers from Tokyo: a Plan A for an end to the China war and occupation of Indochina and, if that were rejected, a Plan B, a modus vivendi where neither side would make any new move,” Buchanan notes. “When presented, these, too, were rejected out of hand.”

After all, as Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote following a November 25 meeting of FDR’s war council, the objective was not to avoid war with Japan, but rather to “maneuver them Japanese into … firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”

The revelations contained in Hoover’s “secret history” add to a mountainous collection of irrefutable evidence supporting the conclusion that it was FDR’s administration, not the Japanese, that coveted war — and that the administration was willing to sacrifice thousands of American servicemen in order to precipitate a war the American electorate did not want.

According to the June 1, 2001 Washington Times, former Justice Department official Daryl S. Borgquist, who has devoted great time and energy to independent research into Pearl Harbor, discovered that a major portion of the first draft of FDR’s “Day of Infamy” speech, prepared by a team headed by Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle, was composed on December 6th – several hours before the Japanese attack.  This was just one of many revelations Borgquist had pried loose through his diligent research.

In a 1999 article in Naval History magazine, Borgquist described the recollections of Helen E. Hamman, the daughter of Don C. Smith, who directed the War Service for the Red Cross before WWII. “Shortly before the attack in 1941,” recalled Hamman, “President Roosevelt called [my father] to the White House for a meeting concerning a top-secret matter. At this meeting, the president advised my father that his intelligence staff had informed him of a pending attack on Pearl Harbor. He anticipated many casualties and much loss; he instructed my father to send workers and supplies to a holding area. When he protested to the president …Roosevelt told him that the American people would never agree to enter the war in Europe unless they were attack[ed] within their own borders….”

Tragically, Roosevelt was right. The Japanese attack came, and independent, peaceful America quickly morphed into a war-making machine. Americans were told to “remember Pearl Harbor,” and they went on to avenge it. Japan was not the only enemy, however, and Nazi Germany soon felt the wrath of American interventionism as well. For post-War Americans, stopping the spread of Nazi evil was the most important justification of U.S. involvement in World War II, but the extent of that evil would not fully be known until after war’s end. And until recently it wasn’t known that FDR, who had stiff-armed every Japanese peace overture, had followed the same course with Germany prior to the war.

In the weeks leading up to Pearl Harbor, FDR’s administration perversely refused to respond to German officials seeking to overthrow Hitler and repudiate Germany’s territorial conquests in Europe. In his book The New Dealers’ War, noted historian Thomas Fleming describes a November 1941 meeting in Berlin between liberal American journalist Louis Lochner and 15 members of the Front der anstandiger Leute (“Front of Decent People”). Drawn from the Reichstag, the German military, the secret police, and the clergy, the Front “hoped to overthrow Hitler, renounce his conquests and his war on the Jews, and restore Germany as a peaceful member of the family of nations.”

Hitler’s German enemies were even willing to listen to American advice as to a suitable post-Hitler German government. However, before Lochner – who knew FDR well – could convey the Front’s message to Roosevelt, Pearl Harbor was attacked, with FDR’s connivance. Four days later, Hitler declared war on America, prompted by the December 6th leak of “Rainbow Five,” a classified American plan for war against Germany. (Fleming makes a persuasive case that FDR arranged for the leak for the specific purpose of provoking Hitler to declare war.)

Throughout the war, the Front – often acting through Wilhelm Canaris, head of the German Secret Service – sought to make contact with the American government, but was repeatedly rebuffed. A group of German anti-Nazi scholars, many of them Jewish refugees, employed by the Office of Strategic Studies (the forerunner to the CIA) “urged the Allied governments to make contact with the resisters to ‘give some substance to the hope,’” recalls Fleming. “Their advice was totally ignored.” When Lochner tried to file an AP report from Europe about the Front in 1944, the story was killed by Army censors. “He was told a special regulation was in force ‘From the President of the United States in his capacity as commander in chief, forbidding all mention of any German resistance.” Public recognition of the Front of Decent People was incompatible with FDR’s dogmatic insistence upon “unconditional surrender” – and that insistence made it impossible for Hitler’s domestic enemies to gain any traction.

Accordingly, the war ground on for years, devouring millions upon millions of lives, drawing the Soviets into Europe, and paving the way for the Communist conquest of China. FDR’s continued demand for unconditional surrender after D-Day cost as many as two million casualties, according to Fleming. “If we add to this toll the number of Jews who were killed in the last year of the war, the figure can easily be doubled,” he continues. (If the Front had been successful, Hitler’s regime might have been toppled before the 1942 Wannsee Conference, which organized the “Final Solution.”) “If we add all the dead and wounded since 1943, when unconditional surrender was promulgated, destroying the German resistance’s hope of overthrowing Hitler, that figure too could be doubled – to 8 million. Unquestionably, this ultimatum was written in blood.”

World War II was America’s introduction into the despicable practice of totalitarian war – not only from studying the demonic accomplishments of the Nazis, Soviets, and Imperial Japanese, but also under the guidance of our own totalitarian ruling class. Many critics of the detestable New Deal “Brain Trust” might flinch from using the term “totalitarian” to describe FDR’s administration. This wasn’t true of Lend- Lease chief (and Soviet agent) Harry Hopkins, who was hailed by Winston Churchill as FDR’s “Lord Root of the Matter” for his ability to reduce complex issues to their essence.

In April 1941 - eight months before Pearl Harbor – Hopkins composed a memorandum entitled “The New Deal of Roosevelt is the Designate and Invincible Adversary of the New Order of Hitler. “‘As Hopkins saw it,” Fleming in The New Dealers’ War, “the new order of Hitler ‘can never be defeated by the old order of democracy, which is the status quo. ‘There was only one way to beat Hitler: ‘By the new order of democracy, which is the New Deal universally extended and applied.”‘

Almost as daunting was Hopkins’s view of how to achieve this new world order continues Fleming. “Democracy ‘must wage total war against totalitarian war. It must exceed the Nazi in fury, ruthlessness, and efficiency.”‘

One measure of the “ruthlessness” championed by Stalin’s tool Harry Hopkins can be seen in FDR’s cynical sacrifice of thousands of American lives at Pearl Harbor — and down-payment on the costs that would ultimately be paid to build a the globe-straddling empire Hopkins and his comrades envisioned.

Read more at The American Conservative.

One self-appointed left-leaning “watchdog” group had something to say about the military detention measure – Media Matters for America, a group created with the help of Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, and other veterans of the Clinton administration. Rather than focusing on the substance of the NDAA, Media Matters criticized retired New Jersey Superior Court Judge Andrew Napolitano for inviting former Graham County, Arizona Sheriff Richard Mack on his program “Freedom Watch” to condemn the measure and to urge Sheriffs and other law enforcement personnel to interpose on behalf of the citizens living within their jurisdictions.

Since the organization of that name was founded a few years ago by U.S. Army Veteran and Yale Law School graduate Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers movement has been the subject of numerous sloppy and sophomoric smears, most of them repackaged from materials generated by the SPLC. An April 08, 2010 essay by Newsweek‘s Evan Thomas is typical of that genre of fact-starved pseudo-reporting:

Oath Keepers do not run around the woods on the weekend shooting weapons or threatening the violent overthrow of the government. Their oath is to uphold the Constitution and defend the American people from dictatorship.

But by conjuring up the specter of revolution—or counterrevolution—is Rhodes adding to the threat of real violence? Oath Keepers are “a particularly worrisome example of the ‘patriot’ revival,” according to Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors hate speech and extremist organizations. “Patriot” groups—described by the SPLC as outfits “that see the federal government as part of a plot to impose ‘one-world government’ on liberty-loving Americans”—are “roaring back” after years out of the limelight, according to Potok. Notorious in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the patriot groups seemed to fade away under the shadow of 9/11, but hard times and the nation’s first African-American president seem to have brought about a revival—from 149 groups in 2008 to 512 (127 of them militias) in 2009, according to the SPLC.

Potok didn’t explain what is “worrisome” about an organization of current and former law enforcement and military personnel who publicly resolve to defend the U.S. Constitution and — just as importantly — to refuse to carry out ten specifically enumerated unlawful orders, the third of which is “to detain American citizens as `unlawful enemy combatants’ or to subject them to military tribunal.”

According to Rhodes, the NDAA, which includes the military detention provision, is “a declaration of war against the American people, authorizing the Obama Administration and all future administrations to treat Americans the same as citizens of occupied Iraq or Afghanistan, subjecting us all to military jurisdiction and the jurisdiction of the international laws of war, rather than our Bill of Rights and our domestic criminal laws, upon the mere say so of Obama or one of his minions.”

A very similar assessment of the measure was offered in an interview on Antiwar Radio by Scott Horton, a much-lauded international human rights attorney who lectures at Columbia University. According to Horton, the measure effectively abolishes the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, demolishes what remained of the habeas corpus guarantee, and radically escalates the “militarization” of the criminal justice system.

There’s no record of the SPLC, ADL, or Media Matters assailing Horton as an “extremist” for expressing views on this matter that are practically indistinguishable from those of Stewart Rhodes and Richard Mack. For statists of a hyper-partisan bent, apparently, the chief question is not the substance of what is said, but rather the identity and affiliations of the individual saying it — and left-leaning “Watchdog” groups are too busy compiling rosters of internal enemies to consider the possibility that they may someday fall into the pit they’re digging for others.

Go here for more information on the threat of the NDAA’s military detention provision.

(An earlier version of this essay erroneously described Andrew Napolitano as a retired federal judge.)

On “Black Friday,” a record number of Americans purchased firearms. Just a few days later, the Senate enacted a measure that could eventually be used to imprison some of those citizens as terrorist suspects, or “unprivileged combatants.”

“Someone who has guns, someone who has ammunition that is weatherproofed, someone who has 7 days of food in their house” could be treated as a potential terrorist and be subject to indefinite military detention, warned freshman Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) in a detailed and impassioned speech to the Senate opposing S.1867, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Section 1031 of that measure allows the indefinite military detention of any individual – including a U.S. citizen – who is designated a suspected terrorist or “unlawful combatant.” As Senator Paul pointed out, existing laws and official policy guidelines are replete with open-ended definitions under which law-abiding U.S. citizens could be regarded as actual or potential terrorists.

While insisting that the measure was chiefly intended to deal with the amorphous threat posed by al-Qaeda, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the bill, admitted in a floor speech that Section 1031, “the statement of authority to detain, does apply to American citizens and it designates the world as the battlefield, including the homeland.”

In principle, this means nothing less than universal martial law, to the extent the U.S. military has the power to enforce it. On that assumption, U.S. citizens identified as “enemies” can be seized anywhere on the planet, including on American soil, and imprisoned under military jurisdiction either at home or abroad. Proposed amendments that would remove or modify that language were voted down by the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body.”

As summarized by Christopher Anders, senior legislative counsel for the ACLU, this measure “puts military detention authority on steroids and makes it permanent,” thereby putting U.C. citizens “at greater risk of being locked away by the military without charge or trial.”

Playing to that element of his constituency that still cares about civil liberties, President Obama has threatened to veto the measure – not because it annihilates whatever is left of the Anglo-Saxon guarantees of individual liberty, but rather because it intrudes on what he regards as plenary presidential authority to imprison or execute people at whim. In fact, proposed language exempting U.S. citizens from military detention was removed from the bill at the behest of the White House, as civil liberties activist David Kopel points out.

The Obama administration acknowledges the existence of a secretive “kill list” of citizens subject to summary execution – whether by way of a hit team, or a drone-fired missile. In recent weeks, the administration has carried out two executive-ordered “hits” in Yemen against alleged terrorism advocate Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son (who had gone to that country in a frantic effort to find his father).

A president claiming the authority to kill a citizen without even the most rudimentary form of due process certainly wouldn’t scruple to imprison citizens without trial or judicial review of any kind. The only dispute between the White House and the Senate involves the question of primacy – specifically, whether the president’s powers are supreme and illimitable, or whether they are subject to legislative restrictions of some kind. In either case, the NDAA would destroy whatever remains of habeas corpus, the foundational civil liberties guarantee in Anglo-Saxon legal tradition.

Habeas corpus (Latin for “present the body”) refers to the ancient requirement that an individual arrested for a crime must be immediately brought before an independent judge and either formally charged or set free. This is intended to prevent kings and other rulers from conducting arbitrary arrests and open-ended imprisonment, without trial, of people regarded as enemies of the State.

Article I, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution specifies that “the privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” This loophole-laden provision isn’t an ironclad guarantee against tyranny. However, it is indisputably clear that the United States presently confronts neither an invasion nor a rebellion that would meet the constitutional standard for the temporary suspension of habeas corpus – let alone the permanent abolition of that guarantee in the name of a universal war against unspecified enemies that will continue in perpetuity.

Abhorrent as it is, the NDAA is not a revolutionary development; instead, it fortifies and institutionalizes existing policies. Five years ago Congress passed the Military Commission Act, under which the president was given permission to imprison anyone he chooses to designate as an “unlawful enemy combatant.” Although then-Senator Barack Obama opposed the 2006 Military Commissions Act, he signed into law a virtually identical measure when it was folded into the 2010 Defense Authorization Bill.

The NDAA itself is the immediate outgrowth of the “Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010,” a measure proposed by Senators John McCain (R-Arizona) and Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut). One section of that bill dealing with “Detention without Trial of Unprivileged Enemy Belligerents” stated that suspects “may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.”

That provision, in slightly modified form, was incorporated into the NDAA. Those subject to military detention, according to the NDAA, include anyone “who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”  The carefully ambiguous language translates into a license to imprison practically anybody who is accused of providing unspecified “support” for any group the U.S. government doesn’t like.

Some Americans still cherish the notion that we are freer than people in such countries as Cuba, Iran, Syria, or Saudi Arabia. The brutal truth is that Americans — like Cubans, Iranians,  Syrians, and subjects of the House of Saud – exercise whatever freedoms will still enjoy only by grace of our master in the White House and his duly appointed agents. They may leave us alone entirely; they may disturb us with relatively slight impositions; they may suddenly descend on us in fury to deprive us of our homes, our families, and our lives. According to what our rulers are pleased to call the “law,” the choice is entirely theirs.

John Locke, who greatly influenced America’s Founders, pointed out that “slavery” consists of being “subject to the incessant, uncertain, arbitrary will of another man” and that “absolute arbitrary power” is the practice of “governing without settled standing laws.” The NDAA, like similar measures that preceded it, is designed to enslave Americans by leaving us at the mercy of those wielding arbitrary power.

“A nation of slaves is always prepared to applaud the clemency of their master, who, in the abuse of absolute power, does not proceed to the last extremes of injustice and oppression,” wrote British historian Edward Gibbon. At this point, the ability of our rulers to kill and imprison us is restrained only by the limits of their depraved imagination.

Rick Aleman: An innocent man with a conscience -- and, therefore, a police victim

Rick Aleman ran a day care facility in Hanover Park, Illinois. In September 2005, a woman named Danielle Schrik, whose 11-month-old son Joshua was enrolled in the day care, dropped off her son after telling Aleman that the child had been feverish and lethargic.

Shortly after Ms. Schrik left, Joshua collapsed. Aleman called 911 and began to administer CPR. Police took Aleman in for questioning. The officers pressed Aleman to sign a waiver of his Miranda rights against self-incrimination, and repeatedly deflected his requests for help from an attorney.  Video of the interrogation showed that when Aleman asked to consult with his lawyer he was told to “keep quiet,” and subjected to alternating promises and threats.

“You need to tell us something or you’re not going anywhere,” one officer told Aleman.

At one point Aleman was told that doctors had concluded that Joshua’s death was the result of shaken-baby syndrome ; this prompted the grief-stricken man to say that he must have been responsible.

“During the interrogation [Officer Joseph] Micci repeatedly told Aleman that he’d talked to three doctors and all had told him that Joshua had been shaken in such a way that he would have become unresponsive (unconscious) immediately, meaning that Aleman’s shaking must have caused Joshua’s injury,” recounted Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in a November 21 ruling. “This account of what the doctors had said was a lie, but it elicited from Aleman the statement that `I know in my heart that if the only way to cause [the injuries] is to shake that baby, then, when I shook that baby, I hurt that baby․ I admit it. I did shake the baby too hard.’ Yet intermittently throughout the protracted interrogation he continued to deny, and express disbelief, that he could have caused the injury.”

.Aleman was charged with murder when Joshua died a few days later.Following what Aleman’s wife Barbara described as “fourteen months of hell,” that charge was dismissed when it was revealed that Todd Carlson, one of the investigating officers, had lied about the doctors’ findings. He had also covered up the violent criminal history of Joshua’s mother, in whom he had a romantic interest.

“Carlson, who played the central role in screwing up the investigation … had been dispatched to the hospital immediately after Joshua was taken there on September 9, to interview Joshua’s family and the doctors who were caring for him,” explained Judge Posner in reviewing the facts of the case. “He asked Danielle whether she had ever struck Joshua and she said no, although she acknowledged that he’d had a fever in the days leading up to his collapse. This should have been a warning that his collapse on September 9 might have been caused by a blow or a shaking several days earlier that had first manifested itself in his fever and lethargy…. Nevertheless Carlson decided he would investigate Danielle Schrik no further. From his subsequent conduct in attempting to protect her from questioning by Booker and in holding her hand and sobbing with her at Joshua’s funeral, a reasonable jury might infer that he was sexually attracted to her and for that reason wanted to keep the investigation focused on Aleman.”

When child abuse investigator Michael Booker learned about Carlson’s actions, “he was disturbed and on September 13, the day of Joshua’s death, interviewed Danielle in Carlson’s presence, “continues Judge Posner’s account. “She acknowledged some of her criminal background, which included crimes of violence, but not all of it. According to statements by her mother and her boyfriend, Danielle had broken her mother’s jaw and threatened to kill her and Joshua; she had had physical fights with Joshua’s father and been arrested and charged with battery during one of those fights; and her mother had seen her shake Joshua frequently and the mother’s boyfriend had had to protect the child from Danielle.”

Carlson and his comrades had done everything they could to compel Aleman to testify against himself. His behavior toward his would-be paramour was strikingly different: “Carlson told Danielle not to speak to Booker or any other investigator, and when Booker repeatedly tried to call her after the initial interview there was never a response.”

It was Aleman’s providential good fortune that his case was reviewed by that rarest of things, a conscientious prosecutor, who concluded that the videotaped interrogation was “more exculpatory than inculpatory.” However, before the case was finally put to rest more than a year later, the Aleman family would lose practically everything they had worked for.

“To post $150,000 in cash, or 10 percent of his $1.5 million bond, the father of five sold his Hanover Park house and borrowed money,” reported the Chicago Daily Herald. Aleman also had to move his family out of the suburb out of fear for the safety of his children. Years later, the once-independent and financially secure businessman was still paying off loans and attorney fees.

“I had no house, no money and no job,” Aleman recalled after the case was dismissed. “I had to start over from scratch…. We’re living a different kind of life,” Aleman said. “We were comfortable before and now we’re struggling. It’s taken a major toll on us. Who’s responsible?”

Aleman filed a suit for wrongful arrest, malicious prosecution, and numerous civil rights violations. Carlson and his comrades, invoking the spurious doctrine of “qualified immunity,” sought to have the lawsuit dismissed. The November 21 federal appeals court ruling will permit the suit to proceed.

If Aleman had stolidly refused to cooperate with the police, he would most likely have been spared this ordeal. Like too many other Americans, Aleman assumes that police are trustworthy and motivated by a desire to learn and act on the truth. In fact, police are taught to lie – through both informal on-the-job training and formal instruction. They consider it a personal prerogative and an indispensable part of their professional skill set.

“Police lie. It’s part of their job. They lie to suspects and others in hopes of obtaining evidence.”

That assessment wasn’t offered by a criminal defense attorney. Those are the opening words of an essay by former prosecutor Val Van Brocklin in the “training” section of Officer.com. In fact, that essay is the first installment in a two-part series entitled “Training Cops to Lie,” in which Van Brocklin offers guidance to police officers regarding their supposed right to lie and deceive criminal suspects. Nowhere in her essay does Van Brocklin admit the harm done to innocent people by lying police. As a former prosecutor who now makes her living addressing law enforcement audiences, her sole intent is to teach police how to lie effectively, and protect themselves from negative consequences.

Never talk to the police. Always assume they are lying to you. They aren’t interested in the truth; they are trying to put you in jail. Don’t help them.

That’s the sort of line we’d hear if Gorbachev-era Russian comedian Yakov Smirnoff — who was consigned to internal exile in Branson, Missouri following the Soviet Union’s collapse — could update his schtick to reflect current realities. Since the October Revolution of 2008, the Federal Reserve and its comrades in the banking oligarchy have been siphoning away what remains of the country’s wealth. The purpose of the $17 trillion Fed bailout of the global banking system was not to stabilize the “world economy,” but rather to immune the politically protected banking class from the consequences of their corruption.

A breathtakingly vulgar example of those priorities was recently revealed by Bloomberg news service:

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson stepped off the elevator into the Third Avenue offices of hedge fund Eton Park Capital Management LP in Manhattan. It was July 21, 2008, and market fears were mounting. Four months earlier, Bear Stearns Cos. had sold itself for just $10 a share to JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Now, amid tumbling home prices and near-record foreclosures, attention was focused on a new source of contagion: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which together had more than $5 trillion in mortgage-backed securities and other debt outstanding….

Paulson had been pushing a plan in Congress to open lines of credit to the two struggling firms and to grant authority for the Treasury Department to buy equity in them. Yet he had told reporters on July 13 that the firms must remain shareholder owned and had testified at a Senate hearing two days later that giving the government new power to intervene made actual intervention improbable….

At the Eton Park meeting, he sent a different message, according to a fund manager who attended. Over sandwiches and pasta salad, he delivered that information to a group of men capable of profiting from any disclosure.

Around the conference room table were a dozen or so hedge- fund managers and other Wall Street executives — at least five of them alumni of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., of which Paulson was chief executive officer and chairman from 1999 to 2006…. After a perfunctory discussion of the market turmoil, the fund manager says, the discussion turned to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Paulson …. went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into “conservatorship” — a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets.

Paulson’s act, observed Janet Tavakoli, founder of Chicago-based financial consulting firm Tavakoli Structured Finance Inc., was a museum-quality specimen of “crony capitalism” — the unfathomably corrupt union of a large, unaccountable political and economic interests. Another name for this arrangement is corporatism. When it is further combined with foreign militarism and domestic regimentation, the proper description is “fascism.”

The plunderbund Paulson represented continues to raid what remains of America’s wealth in an effort to prop up its allies overseas.

Reports the AP:

Central banks will make it cheaper for commercial banks in their countries to borrow dollars, the dominant currency of trade. It was the most extraordinary coordinated effort by the central banks since they cut interest rates together in October 2008, at the depths of the financial crisis.

But while it should ease borrowing for banks, it does little to solve the underlying problem of mountains of government debt in Europe, leaving markets still waiting for a permanent fix. European leaders gather next week for a summit on the debt crisis.

The European Central Bank, which has been reluctant to intervene to stop the growing crisis on its own continent, was joined in the decision by the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the central banks of Canada, Japan and Switzerland.

This is a dilatory maneuver, of course. It may purchase a very brief delay in the full onset of the Eurozone’s debt contagion, which will inevitably propagate itself throughout the entire global economy. Those responsible for this latest bailout are simply draining the lifeblood from less privileged people while the elites make their preparations to deal with the unfolding financial apocalypse.

Make no mistake: This is a collapse that is already underway, not an impending one. This is illustrated in a telling anecdote shared by financial affairs analyst (and former Federal Reserve Board official) David Zervos, who attended an event about the “peripheral Eurozone” at the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank:

There was one other highlight from the conference worth noting purely for entertainment value. The presenter from Greece kept getting his bank card DK’ed [declined] at the ATM. In addition, he could not find anywhere to exchange his cash euros for dollars, so he was effectively broke in the US. Yes highly ironic! Being a good American (and ex FRB employee) I came to his rescue and swapped him some dollars for euros at a friendly rate!

Actually, Zervos’s generosity was atypical of the Federal Reserve Board’s behavior, since he bailed out the impecunious Greek with his own money, rather than stealing from others through currency debasement.

Gerald Celente, founder and director of the Trends Research Institute and one of the most perceptive and reliable economic and social forecasters, predicts that 2012 will witness an event he calls an “Economic 9/11,” followed by the imposition of “economic martial law.”

“In the New Year, they’re going to bring down the gavel on the system,” Celente predicted in an interview on the Lew Rockwell Show (hosted by the Chairman of the free market-promoting Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama). Following the Christmas holiday, he continued, we will see a “bank holiday in some form” in the first quarter of 2012. This will lead to scapegoating — and perhaps even Soviet-style show trials — of people who will be cast as economic “wreckers.”

“They’re going to blame commodities speculators — especially in gold — for bringing down the financial system as they’re `trying so hard to save it,’” Celente declared. The official line will be that “These evil speculators were doing these dirty deals to undermine confidence in the dollar and the integrity of the United States Government — and all the little sheeple will applaud.”

In addition to large-scale plunder by the banking oligarchy, Celente points out, petty crime by opportunistic predators is increasing. He noted that several buildings near his home in rural New York had been cannibalized by thieves who stripped out the copper to be sold as scrap.

Those who have some understanding of the escalating crisis should follow what Celente calls the “Three-G Survival Plan — Guns, Gold, and a Getaway Plan.”

"Don't say this out loud -- but I'm actually a New Age statist posing as a conservative!"

Republican presidential aspirant Newt Gingrich, the most recent contender embraced by the “Anybody-but-Mitt” constituency, received what many consider an ironic endorsement from former political antagonist Bill Clinton:

 “He’s articulate and he tries to think of a conservative version of an idea that will solve a legitimate problem, For example, I watched the national security debate … And Newt said two things that would make an independent voter say, ‘Well, I gotta consider that.’”

Gingrich and Clinton are much more compatible than many observers might suspect. In 1993, when then-First Lady Hillary Clinton was promoting a nationalized health care scheme, Gingrich (at the time a Republican Congressman from Georgia) publicly supported the idea of a federally enforced individual health insurance mandate – a much-despised mechanism incorporated into the “Obamacare” program. In a Meet the Press interview earlier this year, Gingrich expressed his support for a “variation” on the Obama-era health insurance mandate.

Under the reign of Bill Clinton – the first president to acknowledge youthful “experimentation” with narcotics, albeit in oddly qualified fashion – the federal War on Drugs escalated dramatically. Gingrich, who likewise spent some of his youth “frolicking in the autumn mist,” as it were, also offers unqualified support for the federal anti-drug jihad. As House Speaker in 1996, Gingrich introduced legislation to impose the death penalty on drug smugglers.

Asked about that proposal during a recent interview, Gingrich reiterated his support for capital punishment for drug offenses. He also insisted that “draconian” anti-drug policies imposed by Singapore and other authoritarian countries are compatible with  the “American” view of the citizen’s relationship with the government.

“You can either be in the Ron Paul tradition and say there’s nothing wrong with heroin and cocaine or you can be in the tradition that says, These kind of addictive drugs are terrible, they deprive you of full citizenship and they lead you to a dependency which is antithetical to being an American,” pontificated Gingrich. “If you’re serious about the latter view, then we need to think through a strategy that makes it radically less likely that we’re going to have drugs in this country.”

Gingrich, who has ruined two marriages through adulterous affairs and whose corpulent form is not the physique of someone who practices rigorous self-discipline, is eager to dispense potted homilies of that kind, most of which combine hypocrisy and dishonest history. Rep. Ron Paul, a long-time physician and ardent physical fitness buff who still rides a bicycle 20 miles a day at the age of 76, emphatically opposes drug abuse. He also understands that no government has the moral right or constitutional authority to regulate what adults choose to ingest.

What Gingrich breezily dismisses as “the Ron Paul tradition” – which rejects prohibition in all forms – was actually settled social policy in the United States until the early 20^th Century. Our pious, abstemious 19^th Century forebears lived in a country in which cocaine was available at the corner apothecary and advertised in family magazines as a topical analgesic for use in treating children’s dental pain. Gingrich’s authoritarian paternalism is much more in keeping with the “Progressive” movement, which promoted the use of federal power to remake society – through, among other things, the prohibition of alcohol.

Gingrich’s itch for social engineering isn’t limited to the domestic “War on Drugs.” He has long championed a Progressive-style interventionist foreign policy and its necessary coefficient, a domestic police state to deal with the terrorist “blowback” that is inevitably generated by military adventurism abroad.

During the late 1990s, Gingrich helped create the The United States Commission on National Security/21st Century – often referred to as the Hart-Rudman Commission because its co-chairmen were former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman. That Commission helped draft the proposals that were incorporated into the so-called PATRIOT Act; in fact, the blueprint for that legislation was on the president’s desk months before the 9-11 attack.  Gingrich’s role in creating that measure helps explain the asperity he displayed when it was criticized by Rep. Paul during the recent Republican National Security Debate in Washington, D.C.

Although Gingrich consistently supports radically expanded federal power to protect Americans from terrorism, he has actually suggested – in all seriousness – that the federal government needs to permit an occasional terrorist attack in order to maintain a public “psychology” that will support a more invasive government.

During a visit to a Long Island bookstore during a 2008 tour to promote his book “Days of Infamy,” Gingrich lamented that the Bush administration’s purported success in stopping terrorist threats (which are actually vanishingly rare) was among the “great tragedies” of recent history. “This means there’s less proof … that we’re in danger,” he claimed. “And it’s almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us.”

As his audience laughed, Gingrich made it clear that he intended for the shocking remark to be taken seriously:  “The more successful they’ve been at intercepting and stopping the bad guys, the less proof there is that we’re actually in danger. Think about the psychology.”

Gingrich’s influence-peddling on behalf of various corporate interests – from the Ethanol lobby to the unfathomably corrupt mortgage giant Freddie Mac – provoked George F. Will’s lacerating description of the former House Speaker as a “classic rental politician.” Devoid of conservative principles, hostile to individual liberty, utterly indifferent to the stench of his personal hypocrisy, and suffused with unearned self-regard, Gingrich isn’t likely to win the Republican nomination. The eagerness with which the pundit class has embraced him most likely reflects its anxiety to create a plausible contender to Romney – and its dogmatic insistence on pretending that Ron Paul doesn’t exist.

Jerald Newman, 54, bleeds into the floor after being assaulted by police.

If people can be driven into a mass frenzy over the prospect of buying two-dollar waffle makers and badly over-priced consumer ephemera, how will Americans behave if and when there is a full-scale economic meltdown — and necessities now taken for granted become inaccessible?

The fact that debt-plagued U.S. households have scanty disposable income this Christmas season didn’t mitigate the madness of the annual ritual of consumer excess called “Black Friday.” Noted an AP report:

A woman turned herself in to police after allegedly pepper-spraying 20 other customers at a Los Angeles-area Walmart on Thursday in what investigators said was an attempt to get at a crate of Xbox video game consoles. In Kinston, N.C. a security guard also pepper-sprayed customers seeking electronics before the start of a midnight sale.

In New York, crowds reportedly looted a clothing store in Soho. At a Walmart near Phoenix, a man was bloodied while being subdued by police officer on suspicion of shoplifting a video game. There was a shooting outside a store in San Leandro, Calif., shots fired at a mall in Fayetteville, N.C. and a stabbing outside a store in Sacramento, N.Y.

Betty Thomas, who witnessed the incident in the Phoenix-area WalMart, pointed out to the local FOX affiliate that while previous Black Friday shopping frenzies have been brutal, “The difference this year is that instead of a nice sweater you need a bullet proof vest and goggles.” Thomas was among several eyewitnesses who described the police assault on 54-year-old grandfather Jerald Newman as unprovoked and unnecessary.

Phoenix FOX affiliate KSAZ reports:

Witnesses told Fox 10 Friday morning that a grandfather was with his grandson and wife looking at video games. They said that people were tearing the box of games apart, trying to get to the videos, and a woman ended up getting punched.

“You literally would have thought there was a cure for cancer in this box, people were going insane,” said witness Skylar Stone, who saw the whole thing and called it ‘uncalled for.’

The grandson was trampled on in all the mayhem — even cutting his lip. His grandpa put the game in his waistband so that he could lift the boy out of the crowd, according to some witnesses.

Witnesses said that’s when a police officer grabbed the man and slammed him to the ground – possibly thinking he was stealing the game.

On a cell phone video taken at the Walmart, blood can be seen streaming from the grandfather’s face. But witnesses said police didn’t believe anything was wrong until they turned the man over.

“They grabbed the guy, body planted him into the ground — face shatters on concrete. That’s a hard concrete floor inside Walmart.

“All of a sudden, you see this little boy run up and wailing and yelling, ‘Grandpa, Grandpa,’ and crying his eyes out,” Stone said.

Witnesses said the man had about $600 worth of electronics that he was purchasing and wasn’t trying to steal anything. They said he was just trying to get his grandson out of harm’s way.

An account provided by RT News notes that the police assault, which began with a leg-sweep on the grandfather — which sent him face-first into the concrete floor — prompted several witnesses to deploy their cell phones.  “As he laid motionless and silent, cops mounted the man while a pool of blood began to spill out into the store,” observed the report. “`Get that on camera. See how fu***d up that is,’ a bystander is heard yelling at the cops.”

Police Brutality on Black Friday

A police spokesman insisted that Newman had “escalated” the confrontation and that the actions of the officers on-scene were justified, as they supposedly always are. The assailants’ version is disputed by several witnesses on the scene, including David Chadd, who told RT that police had already handcuffed Newman without incident and were walking him though the store when an officer “hooked the leg of the man and grabbed [him] by the shirt and slammed him face first into the ground…. The man was instantly knocked out and gushing blood.” Newman was unconscious for roughly ten minutes before he was taken to a hospital for medical care. He was later booked on charges of shoplifting and “resisting arrest” (which, although treated as an offense, is a common-law right, not a crime).

The incident in the Buckeye, Arizona WalMart is in some ways a microcosm and foreshadowing of what to expect in the future: Heedless, insensate mob panic leavened with officially sanctioned violence by law enforcement personnel who don’t care about protecting person or property but insist on immediate obedience — and will dispense summary punishment at the first tremor of resistance (or even less-than-enthusiastic cooperation).

“Preppers,” take note: Black Friday 2011 should be regarded as an overture to even greater ugliness to come.

http://news.yahoo.com/much-crazier-black-friday-221456950.html

Seeking to “cure” Michael of his rambunctiousness, the commissariat in charge of Rio Calaveras Elementary School arranged a meeting with Lt. Frank Gordo, a “resource officer” assigned to the district. The “scared straight” script called for Lt. Gordo – whose surname, so appropriate for a tax-feeder, is one of God’s little jokes – to waddle menacingly into the room, reducing young Michael displayed a precociously healthy disposition by being un-intimidated by the state functionary in full battle array.

At one point, according to Gordo’s account, he placed his hand on Michael. This was the very definition of a “bad touch,” and Michael quite sensibly rebelled. Gordo reported that the youngster “pushed my hand away in a batting motion, pushed papers off the table, and kicked me in the right knee” – a perfectly proportionate response to armed physical aggression by a much larger assailant (although I suspect Michael’s aim was a little low).

Rather than backing off and calming down, which is how a functioning adult would have behaved, Gordo escalated the assault and compounded it with armed abduction by hog-tying the five-year-old, zip-tying his hands and ankles and dragging him to the station, where he was charged with “battery on a police officer.” The child would remain trussed for at least two hours. During that time he was forced to undergo a psychiatric evaluation – since, as all dutiful subjects in the Soyuz understand, only someone clinically ill would display such hostility toward an agent of the State.

It wasn’t until two weeks later that the police and school district deigned to share the details of the incident with Michael’s mother, Thelma Gray. “I was led to believe that Michael saw and police officer and attacked a police officer on sight,” Gray told a news team from the local NBC affiliate KCRA.

Michael, whose parents are divorced, may have emotional problems. This much should be said: Whatever “affliction” inspired this youngster’s reflexive hostility toward a member of the State’s punitive priesthood is something I wish the rest of us would catch.

It’s worth noting that “resource officers” – the uniformed bullies who prowl the hallways of government schools looking for trouble –are taught to see themselves as an army of occupation whose mission is to overawe a hostile population.

In his keynote address to the 2007 National Association of School Resources Conference, held against the rugged and forbidding backdrop of Orlando’s Disney World, self-styled tactical and counter-terrorism  “expert” John Giduck opened a window into this mindset:

“You’ve got to be a one-man fighting force…. You’ve got to have enough guns, and ammunition and body armor to stay alive…. You should be walking around in schools every day in complete tactical equipment, with semi-automatic weapons…. You can no longer afford to think of yourselves as peace officers…. You must think of yourself [sic] as soldiers in a war because we’re going to ask you to act like soldiers.”

Perhaps the intrepid Lt. Gordo will receive the equivalent of the Purple Heart for the wounds of honor he received in hands-on combat with Michael Davis.
Read more: http://www.kcra.com/news/29847063/detail.html#ixzz1ejfhVfFu

The one-time auto dealership on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, North Carolina has been vacant for several years. A few weeks ago a small group of protesters calling themselves “Occupy Everywhere” took up residence in the building and announced grandiose plans to turn it into a free clinic, child care center, and dormitory. The “anti-capitalist” protesters admitted that they had broken the law by trespassing on the premises, which are owned by an out-of-town businessman.

On November 13, reports the Raleigh News & Observer,

“A police tactical team of more than 25 police officers arrested eight demonstrators Sunday afternoon and charged them with breaking and entering for occupying a vacant car dealership on Franklin Street. Officers brandishing guns and semi-automatic rifles rushed the building at about 4:30 p.m. They pointed weapons at those standing outside, and ordered them to put their faces on the ground. They surrounded the building and cleared out those who were inside. About 13 people, including a New & Observer staff writer covering the demonstration, were forced to the ground and hand-cuffed.”

The police treated the raid as a military operation, conducting detailed surveillance of the target, using squad cars to close off four downtown blocks, and then striking with overwhelming force. The supposed justification for the raid was the threat of property damage by protesters, who were suspected of setting “traps” and fortifying the occupied building. Yet this made-for-TV raid resulted in a handful of misdemeanor charges.

84-year-old police assault victim Dorli Rainey

Two days after the paramilitary operation in Chapel Hill, police in Seattle — a department that has become notorious for the gratuitous use of violence, including lethal force — conducted a pepper spray assault against protesters who had gathered to express “solidarity” with the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Among those incapacitated by the chemical attack was 84-year-old Dorli Rainey, who caught a full blast in the face.

The June 1998 investigation focused on an ll-year-old boy who was part of Sandusky’s “Second Mile” program. Identified as “Victim 6″ or “BK,” the child was allegedly fondled by Sandusky while the two of them were showering in the locker room at Penn State’s Holuba Hall. When the child was dropped off at his home, his mother noticed that his hair was wet. After learning about the showering incident, the understandably upset mother called the police. She also confronted Sandusky, who admitted that he had showered with other boys and that his “private parts” had “maybe” come into contact with the child’s intimate anatomy.

“I understand. I was wrong,” Sandusky told the mother in a conversation overheard by police investigators. “I wish I could get forgiveness. I know I won’t get it from you. I wish I were dead.”

Page 20 of the grand jury’s “presentment” against Sandusky reports:

“Jerry Lauro, an investigator with the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare, testified that during the 1998 investigation, Sandusky was interviewed on June 1, 1998 by Lauro and Detective Shreffler. Sandusky admitted to showering naked with Victim 6 [aka "B.K."], admitted to hugging Victim 6 while in the shower and admitted that it was wrong. Detective Schreffler advised Sandusky not to shower with any child again and Sandusky said that he would not.

The Grand Jury was unable to subpoena B.K. because he is in the military and is stationed outside the United States.”

As NBC’s Philadelphia affiliate points out, “It is strange that Centre County District Atorney Ray Gricar never prosecuted Jerry Sandusky on child-rape charges 13 years ago, some speculate, because Gricar was known for being fiercely independent and hard on crime. But it is even stranger that we cannot ask Gricar why Sandusky was not put behind bars, because the tough-as-nails district attorney disappeared in 2005. And though he was declared dead [in] July of this year, his body has never been found.”

According to his nephew, Gricar had a “bitter taste in his mouth for the [Penn State] program, and its coach.” On the day of his disappearance, Gricar told his girlfriend that he was going on a drive. His abandoned car was later found near an antique mall in Lewisburg; on the following day, his laptop computer — with its hard drive removed — was found in the Susquehanna River.

Pittsburgh radio host Mark Madden, who has followed the Sandusky case carefully, claims that others who have investigated the matter suspect that the former Penn State assistant football coach was “pimping” children from his Second Mile Foundation to wealthy university donors:

“I hear there’s a rumor that there will be a more shocking development from the Second Mile Foundation — and hold on to your stomachs, boys, this is gross, I will use the only language I can — that Jerry Sandusky and Second Mile were pimping out young boys to rich donors. That was being investigated by two prominent columnists even as I speak.”

The guilty connivance of Paterno and university officials in covering up Sandusky’s criminal predation has received a great deal of coverage — yet officials were aware of Sandusky’s actions no later than 1998, and no action was taken. The only individual who knows why that decision was made is, or was, Ray Gricar, who was apparently aware of at least some of the recently uncovered nastiness at least six years ago. Solving the mystery of Gricar’s disappearance would probably reveal the extent of the corruption, the depth of the official cover-up — and, perhaps, the truth about the rumors Mark Madden referred to.

Read the grand jury report about the Sandusky case here.

Cyndi Steele, the victim of the car-bombing plot, has long maintained her husband’s innocence.

“We have a great marriage,” Cyndi Steele told the U.S. District Judge Lynn Winmill, who presided at both the criminal trial and the sentencing hearing. “I am not a victim of my husband because my husband did nothing wrong. I am a victim of the government.”

“There is no justice today in America for the politically incorrect,” Steele declared during the hearing. “I am a political prisoner.”

Dutifully carrying out its role as propagator of the official line, the Associated Press used its account of the Edgar Steele sentence to focus on his political views and professional connection to the Aryan Nation:

Steele is well known in anti-Semitic and white supremacist circles as the attorney who defended Butler in a lawsuit brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The human rights group brought the case on behalf of two people who claimed they were attacked by Aryan Nations security guards; Steele lost the case, and the white supremacist group was bankrupted by the $6.3 million damages awarded to the victims.

Butler moved to northern Idaho in the 1970s and bought a 20-acre parcel that served as headquarters for Aryan Nations. He held annual gatherings that drew hundreds of supporters from around the country.

Butler’s group also held summertime marches through downtown Coeur d’Alene, and some of his followers fanned out to commit violent crimes across the country. A handful of people in the area continue to call themselves Aryan Nations members, but the group is largely inactive.

In the years since that case, Steele has made speeches at white supremacist events and launched the website ConspiracyPenPal.com, where he published his views. He also wrote a book titled “Defensive Racism: An Unapologetic Examination of Racial Differences.”

Typical of the coverage given to this story was the headline used by the Huffington Post news site, which described Steele’s supposed offense as the “murder” of his wife — who is alive and a forceful advocate of her husband’s innocence. Also of note is the claim in the AP story that Steele intended to “collect on an uninsured motorist insurance policy” — something that couldn’t be done in a single-vehicle fatality involving a pipe bomb. Cyndi Steele had no life insurance policy at the time of the supposed plot.

Lying headline: Edgar Steele's wife is alive, and defended him in court.

At the time of Steele’s arrest in June 2010, he was researching a book he planned to write about the worldwide sex trafficking trade. This included on-line conversations with women in the former Soviet Union who advertised themselves as mail-order brides. Federal prosecutors, led by U.S. Attorney Wendy Olson, claimed that Steele sought to murder his wife in order to clear the way for an affair with a woman from the Ukraine with whom he was supposedly  conducting a covert on-line affair. However, Mrs. Steele, the couple’s daughter, and family friends all testified that Steele’s research was well-known to them, and that he was not furtively carrying on a long-distance dalliance with a younger woman.

Larry Fairfax, the handyman from northern Idaho who supposedly plotted with Steele to murder Cyndi, tardily admitted to planting a pipe bomb on her SUV after the device was found during an oil change. Although his were the only fingerprints on the would-be murder weapon, and despite the fact that he said nothing about the bomb for weeks after he approached the FBI, Fairfax was sentenced to only 27 months in a low-security prison for a firearms violation.

The evidence connecting Steele to Fairfax’s crime was a third-generation copy of a digital recording of alleged conversations between the two men. Dr. George Papcun, perhaps the world’s leading expert on voice recognition and a consultant to several federal agencies, concluded that there was “a reasonable degree of scientific probability that [the recordings] do not represent a true and valid representation of reality and they are unreliable.” Judge Winmill, whose favortism toward the prosecution was extensive and undisguised, refused to allow Dr. Papcun to testify.

The cover story for the next issue of Republic magazine will be a detailed expose of the Soviet-style show trial of Edgar Steele.

Read more — if you can stand to — at the Huffington Post.

Operation Vigilant Shield 12, or VS 12, is a joint exercise supported by the Joint Coalition Warfare Center and conducted as a command post exercise with a supporting field training exercise in Key West, FL. The exercise is also linked to a Canada Command exercise called “Determined Dragon,” and runs concurrently with the Arizona’s “Vigilant Guard” exercise. It runs Nov. 1-10.

According to the Army, the overall exercise scenario for VS 12 is based on potential threats to the U.S. and Canada that require extensive military planning to support national objectives and provide multiple military options to the national leadership.

The exercise, which is taking place behind a barricade of buzzwords like “interoperability” and “integrated command,” is based on a scenario involving “enemy attacks” and similar incidents set in Florida, Coloroado, Arizona, and Washington, D.C. It envisions a coordinated effort involving everyone from local “first responders” — police, sheriffs, firefighters, and other emergency personnel — to NORAD and the Pentagon. It will most likely be coordinated with the unprecedented November 9 nation-wide emergency alert system test.

Northern Command is the first “Unified Combatant Command” established by the Army covering the United States itself as a potential battlefield, and the scope and detail of VS 12 illustrates the extent to which geographically local police agencies are considered appendages of the military — part of an occupying army, rather than “peace officers” accountable to the communities in which they live. In recent decades, owing to the so-called “War on Drugs,” police departments have received huge federal subsidies, as well as massive amounts of hardware and a great deal of specialized training from the military, particularly special forces operators. Every police department that participates in a federal/state narcotics “task force” will have a SWAT team that is equipped and trained to be used as a military assault force. Many of them recruit directly from the military — especially personnel with active duty experience involving nighttime raids in Iraq and Afghanistan that are similar to the increasingly familiar full-force raids conducted by SWAT teams domestically.

It’s worth recalling that  three years ago, the U.S. Army’s Northern Command announced that it would deploy a specialized, combat-tested unit as an “on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.” This “dwell-time” domestic deployment of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team would permit its soldiers to “use some of the [skills] they acquired in the war zone” to deal with “civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.”

The critical take-away from that announcement was that “homeland tours” are expected to become a routine part of the rotation of soldiers who are deployed overseas and whose mindset is entirely incompatible with civilian duty as “peace officers.”

The Framers of the U.S. Constitution sought desperately to prevent the creation of a standing army that would be used as an apparatus of repression. They would have no difficulty recognizing the militarized American “homeland” as precisely the nightmare they sought to avoid.

Read more at Government Security News.

At least to some people, the Awlakis were Americans only by accident of birth. Their political views made them suspect, and the fact that they had traveled abroad and (in the case of the father) criticized the U.S. government on foreign soil strongly intimated sympathy for terrorism. Besides, lethal sanctions of this kind only apply to people who live abroad – right?

Wrong.

For years, the same unmanned drones that have been used to conduct missile strikes abroad have been plying the skies over the United States. Now, for the first time, a supposedly civilian law enforcement department will deploy an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that can be upgraded into a fully realized weapons platform.

According to Click2Houston:

 A Houston area law enforcement agency is prepared to launch an unmanned drone that could someday carry weapons, Local 2 Investigates reported Friday.

The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Conroe paid $300,000 in federal homeland security grant money and Friday it received the ShadowHawk unmanned helicopter made by Vanguard Defense Industries of Spring.

A laptop computer is used to control the 50-pound unmanned chopper, and a game-like console is used to aim and zoom a powerful camera and infrared heat-seeking device mounted on the front.

“To be in on the ground floor of this is pretty exciting for us here in Montgomery County,” Sheriff Tommy Gage said.

He said the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) could be used in hunting criminals who are running from police or assessing a scene where SWAT team officers are facing an active shooter.

“Tapped to operate the Montgomery County Sheriff’s helicopter UAV are Sgt. Melvin Franklin, a licensed pilot, and Lt. Damon Hall, who heads the department’s crime lab and crime scene unit,” continues the report. Michael Buscher, chief executive officer of manufacturer Vanguard Defense Industries, observed that the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office is the first local law enforcement agency to buy one of his units, which he said are designed to carry weapons for local law enforcement. It will hardly be the last.

It’s reasonable to expect that, ere long, joystick-controlled missile platforms will become part of the standard SWAT arsenal. We should also anticipate learning that the term “bugsplat” has entered the law enforcement lexicon. That term, which was coined by Pentagon’s war planners prior to the Iraq war, was the name of a computer program intended to estimate the percentage of civilian casualties that would result in a given bombing raid.

The same lexicon of long-distance mass murder that gave us the term “bugsplat” offers another newly minted term to describe the terrified civilians who can be seen frantically running for cover: “Squirters.” The vaguely pornographic overtones of that expression are appropriate, given the ubiqtuity of what Dr. P.W. Singer of the Brookings Institution calls “predator porn” – footage of drone attacks proudly circulated by the purported heroes responsible for the carnage.

In a 2009 U.S. Naval Academy lecture, Singer described how “the ability to download a video clip of combat is turning war into a form of entertainment.” This repellent new genre includes a modern variety of snuff film: “A Hellfire missile drops, goes in, and hits the target, followed by an explosion and bodies tossed into the air.” Singer described one clip of that kind, sent to him by a joystick-wielding assassin, that “was set to music, the pop song `I Just Want to Fly’ by the band Sugar Ray.”

Within a few years, “predator porn” will become a regular feature of “reality TV” programs extolling the purported heroism of domestic police agencies.

For more on this story — including a video — go to Click 2 Houston.

Even more recently, however, Santorum endorsed assassination as an instrument of policy when employed by the U.S. government.

“On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead,” he explained, broadly intimating that the U.S. government was responsible. “I think that’s a wonderful thing, candidly…. I think we should send a very clear message that if you are scientist from Russia or North Korea or from Iran, and you are going to work on a nuclear program to develop a nuclear bomb for Iran, you are not safe.”

As Business Insider points out, Santorum’s comments could create diplomatic and strategic problems for Washington:

Santorum offers these comments while Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is in Pyongyang conducting diplomatic talks with North Korea. Panetta is trying to bring North Korea back to its former commitment to disarmament in exchange for foreign aid and the negotiation has been difficult.

Here is hoping that Rick Santorum’s comments don’t get Leon Panetta kidnapped.

Santorum, who frequently gives the impression that he’s an individual who doesn’t think things through, told those who doubt that the U.S. government would assassinate civilian scientists should take heed to the way it treats American citizens designated enemies of the State:

“When people say, `You can’t go out and assassinate people’ — well, tell that to al-Awlaki…. We’ve done it. We’ve done it to an American citizen.”

Actually, the Obama administration not only assassinated U.S.-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki — who was never charged with a crime of any kind, let alone convicted and sentenced by a court — but also al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Adbdulram al-Awlaki, who was killed by a drone strike in Yemen while he was having dinner with a cousin (who also perished).

16-year-old Abdulrahm al-Awlaki: Murdered by the U.S. Government

The Obama administration circulated the story that the 16-year-old was actually an adult “suspected” of being a “militant,” thereby redefining the killing as a strategic success. But the family was able to document that the youngster — who had gone to Yemen in a frantic search for his father, who was known to be on a U.S. assassination list — was born in Colorado in 1996.

If a president can murder anybody at whim, why can’t he invent a justification after the fact? And why can’t he simply order the death of any human being for any reason he considers suitable?

Behavior of this kind is generally associated with the likes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-Il. Proponents of an aggressive foreign policy often characterize the regimes ruling countries such as Iran, Syria, and North Korea as despotisms that routinely “murder their own citizens,” and thus pose a threat to the peace of the world. Yet Rick Santorum — who yields to nobody in his zeal to wage war against distant and relatively powerless regimes — openly celebrates the summary execution of U.S. citizens, and describes it as a model for similar “wet work” operations against citizens of other countries.

What Santorum is describing – and endorsing — is undisguised state terrorism.

 
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/rick-santorum-dead-north-korean-scientists-are-a-wonderful-thing-2011-10#ixzz1c6onVzte

Olsen, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, was shot in the head by a police projectile during a protest in Oakland, California organized by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Riot police armed with rubber bullets, tear gas, and other supposedly non-lethal weaponry had been deployed to clear the streets of protesters near City Hall.

While doctors prepared Olsen for brain surgery, protesters focused their frustration on Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, a former city council member who had been seen as a critic of corrupt and abusive elements within the police force before being elected to her present position.

Reports the Guardian of London:

One sign taped to a lamppost delivered this message to the police: “You’ve fuelled our fire.”

Speaker after speaker demanded the resignation or recall of the city’s mayor, Jean Quan, who had initially voiced her support of the protesters. “Mayor Quan you did more damage to Oakland in one evening than Occupy Oakland did in two weeks,” said one slogan scrawled near the entrance to her offices.

In an afternoon news conference Quan had struggled to explain the decision to clear the square in the early hours of Tuesday morning and again when protesters returned that evening.

She gave the impression she had been as blindsided as anyone by the decision to close down Occupy Oakland. She had been in Washington at the time and said that although she knew there were hygiene and public safety issues that needed to be addressed, she did not expect that to happen while she was on the other side of the country.

“I only asked the chief to do one thing: to do it when it was the safest for both the police and the demonstrators,” she said, pinning responsibility for the decision on her police chief and the top city administrator. When pressed for more details, Quan said: “I don’t know everything.”

According to protester Robin Vangiesen, “Quan let the [county] sheriffs in to do her dirty work and then said she didn’t know who was responsible for the decision. She’s got to go.” Vangiesen told the Guardian that was in the plaza when Olsen — who was standing between the combat-equipped riot police and the protesters — was struck in the face by a teargas canister: “He was out, man. Totally non-responsive. He had blood pouring out of his nose.”

A video circulated on the internet documents that the initial teargas volley was followed by another projectile — what appeared to be a potentially lethal “flash-bang” grenade — that was tossed by a police officer into a small group of people that had formed a protective barrier around the critically wounded veteran.

According to an AP report, Olsen “participated in the protest because he felt corporations and banks have too much influence on the government….” He had come to the same conclusion as his fellow Marine, Major General Smedley Butler – the most decorated combat veteran in U.S. history.

Eighty years ago, amid the last Great Depression, Butler published a slender book entitled “War is a Racket” in which he lamented the role he had played as an enforcement and collection agent of Wall Street and its allied political elite.

As a Marine Corps veteran, Scott Olsen is the kind of person who would be respected by the Republican-aligned Tea Party movement. His concerns about corporate socialism — the subsidy of corrupt financial institutions at the expense of the embattled middle class — should be shared by principled people of all political backgrounds. While Scott Olsen has become a martyr to “#Occupy” activists, he should be human link connecting the concerns behind both that left-leaning movement and the conservative/populist Tea Party — who should unite in a joint effort to dismantle corporate socialism.

Read more at the Guardian.

During a recent installment of a new current affairs program on MSNBC called “Up,” commentator David Sirota observed that honest discussion of public policy is impossible unless we admit that “our foreign policy has been a project of empire”:

Early Saturday morning [October 22], I spent two hours at 30 Rockefeller Plaza with a distinguished panel of guests on Chris Hayes’ terrific new MSNBC show “Up.” The theme of the discussion, which you can watch here, was the state of national security policy after Moammar Gadhafi’s death and President Barack Obama’s announcement of the end of the Iraq war. The conversation soon turned to a topic that is almost never mentioned, much less seriously explored, in the traditional media: the subject of American Empire. Our dialogue provided a perfect example of how troublesome newspeak continues to muddle our foreign policy discussions.

Fellow panelist P.J. Crowley, a former State Department spokesman, vehemently objected that “you cannot describe the United States as an empire,” insisting that the system should be called “a liberal hegemonic project” built around “a World Trade Organization [and] a functioning United Nations….”

“We have created a system that we invite everyone in the world to participate in,” Crowley observed. Of course, the same could be said of the Soviet Union, which helped create the global architecture whose supposed merits Crowley extols.

The idea that Washington’s unique benevolence entitles it to preside over a “unipolar” world was expressed with breathtaking candor fifteen years ago in an essay published by Foreign Affairs, the flagship journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. Authors William Kristol and Robert Kagan — two prominent representatives of the “neo-con” network that promoted the Iraq War — asserted that Washington exercised a “benevolent global hegemony,” and that the “appropriate goal of American foreign policy … is to preserve that hegemony as far into the future as possible.”

The terms “empire” and “hegemony” are functional synonyms, a fact that is obvious to those who reject the generous imperial invitation and endure humanitarian chastisement – in the form of bombing, embargoes, and occupation – as punishment for their impudence.

“Crowley bridles at the idea that America’s long history of geopolitical aspirations, invasions, occupations and various extensions of power is part of an imperial project,” Sirota points out. “Instead, we are told that it’s all just one `liberal hegemonic project’ (as if alleged liberalism somehow makes it a `hegemonic project’ not an `imperial project’). Yet, even beyond this almost overt contradiction of himself, his examples betray what really drives American foreign policy. The World Trade Organization, for example, uses the imperial threat of sanctions to help American corporate interests trample the will of local governments in order to exploit host nations for profit. Likewise, the United Nations — which certainly does a lot of good, important work — is still structurally rigged with a security council to make sure America has outsize imperial influence in proportion to its population.”

Although his assessment of Washington’s imperial pretensions is sound, Sirota’s qualified enthusiasm for the United Nations is unfortunate: That entity has always been an imperial project. This was acknowledged in A World Effectively Controlled by the United Nations, a 1962 State Department-commissioned study written by Dr. Lincoln P. Bloomfield of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Imposing the “secure military environment” necessary for the UN to exercise effective global control, according to Bloomfield, would require an “international force, balanced appropriately between ground, sea, air, and space elements” as well as “a nuclear force” and (Bloomfield’s study suggests) perhaps even a stock of chemical and biological weapons. In this system, the UN (or, once again, a successor) would “monitor and enforce disarmament, settle disputes, and keep the peace. All other powers [would be] reserved to the nations,” which would be “disarmed to police levels.” Furthermore, “a significant ‘UN presence’ “would exist in all countries to monitor and enforce the disarmament program.

A central concept in A World Effectively Controlled by the United Nations is that the collective security system it describes must be “global, with no exceptions to its fiat: universal membership.” Building that order will require treating nations outside of it as “aggressors,” and forcibly assimilating them. This point is described with stunning candor in a March 2003 Esquire magazine article by Thomas P.M. Barnett, a Pentagon specialist in “Strategic Futures.” Barnett’s essay, “The Pentagon’s New Map,” is essentially an updating of A World Effectively Controlled by the United Nations.

“When the United States finally goes to war again in the Persian Gulf, it will not constitute a settling of old scores, or just an enforced disarmament of illegal weapons, or a distraction in the war on terror,” wrote Barnett in cheerful anticipation of the disastrous Iraq war. Instead, it represents what Bloomfield called a “threshold,” or Barnett calls a “tipping point”: “Our next war in the Gulf will mark a historical tipping point–the moment when Washington takes real ownership of strategic security in the age of globalization.”

The conflict with Iraq, continued Barnett,  would force “America to come to terms with what I believe is the new security paradigm [or model] that shapes this age, namely, Disconnectedness defines danger. Saddam Hussein’s outlaw regime is dangerously disconnected from the globalizing world, from its rule sets, its norms, and all the ties that bind countries together in mutually assured dependence.” Notice how Barnett acknowledged that although the designated foreign enemy was Saddam’s regime, the Iraq war’s true target is America, which would be forced to assume a new global role.

The wages of imperial foreign policy include the destruction of domestic tranquility, prosperity, and what remains of our liberty — which will eventually include the freedom to condemn the Empire that is afflicting us.

Read more at Salon.

When Rice’s adult daughter answered the door, the officers repeatedly demanded to know if her life was in danger. According to her mother’s account, she calmly explained that there was nothing wrong, that she and her children were all right, and that the police were free to inspect the home to see if Ruiz was there.

Instead of acting on that invitation, the police seized the young lady, detained her in a vehicle for four hours, and then took her to jail. They then unloaded several rounds of tear gas into the house, leaving it with shattered windows, perforated walls, and a dense, suffocating chemical mist. The residue of the tear gas attack is now infused into the carpets and the furniture. After failing to find the fugitive following a siege that lasted several hours, the police eventually lost interest in the home and drove off without offering to help – or providing so much as an apology.

Reports Stockton’s CBS 13 News:

The San Jose Police Department stormed into a Stockton home searching for an accused killer, but they left without him, and left behind a complete mess.

“I feel like a war was taken on here, and we lost,” homeowner Joann Rice told CBS13.

Almost all of the windows are smashed in, there are holes in the wall, and there’s a layer of tear gas in the air so thick breathing it in makes you cough.

“We want it fixed,” Rice told the local CBS affiliate. “Of course I’m calling my insurance, but San Jose has to pay for this, there is no reason why they shouldn’t.”

Actually, there is a reason – albeit not one reasonable people would find persuasive: Because they were State-licensed purveyors of violence, the armed goons who laid waste to Joann Rice’s home aren’t vandals, but rather “heroes in error.”  That’s the expression used by Ahmed Chalabi, the con-man and CIA-cultivated crook whose “Iraqi National Congress” peddled much of the disinformation used to justify the 2003 invasion of that country.

The marauders who laid waste to Rice’s home acted on bad intelligence, refused to accept the findings of a voluntary inspection, trashed the place, terrorized those who lived therein, and then shrugged and walked away. The same treatment, on a much larger scale and with a huge attendant loss of life, was inflicted on Iraq – and even now, the Regime responsible for that atrocity is refusing to leave that country alone.

While many Americans will be outraged over the treatment inflicted on Joanne Rice, relatively few will understand that it is a microcosm of what the U.S. government did to the innocent people of Iraq. On the other hand, given the extent to which Americans have been programmed to worship the armed emissaries of the divine State, it’s possible that a few – including Michelle Bachman or Dana Rohrabacher, perhaps– will rebuke Rice for her lack of gratitude, and explain to her that she should pay at least part of the expenses for rebuilding her home after its “liberation.”

Read more at CBS 13 News.

Reports the Huffington Post:

The case was triggered by Davis herself, according to a search warrant affidavit written by Norman Conley, an agent for the inspector general.

She emailed a NASA contractor May 10 trying to find a buyer for the rock, as well as a nickel-sized piece of the heat shield that protected the Apollo 11 space capsule as it returned to earth from the first successful manned mission to the moon in 1969.

“I’ve been searching the internet for months attempting to find a buyer,” Davis wrote. “If you have any thoughts as to how I can proceed with the sale of these two items, please call.”

Davis told AP the items were among many of the space-related heirlooms her husband left her when he died in 1986. She said she had worked as a lexicographer and he had worked as an engineer for North American Rockwell, which contracted for NASA during the Apollo era.

Davis claims Armstrong gave the items to her husband, though the affidavit says the first man on the moon has previously told investigators he never gave or sold lunar material to anyone.

In follow-up phone conversations with a NASA agent, Davis acknowledged the rock was not sellable on the open market and fretted about an agent knocking on her door and taking the material, which she was willing to sell for “big money underground.”

“She must know that this is a questionable transaction because she used the term `black market,’” Agent Conley states in the search warrant.

Curiously, though, Davis agreed to sell the sample to NASA for a stellar $1.7 million. She said she wanted to leave her three children an inheritance and take care of her sick son.

NASA investigators then arranged the sting, where Conley met with Davis and her current husband at the Denny’s at Lake Elsinore in Riverside County.

Soon after settling into a booth, Davis said, she pulled out the moon sample and about half a dozen sheriff’s deputies and NASA investigators rushed into the eatery.

Moonrocks and related material are regarded as “government property,” and NASA  — which has its own armed investigative branch — has pursued anyone selling lunar material. It hasn’t always been so fastidious about collecting and retaining regolith: NASA has handed out the incomparably rare specimens to foreign dignitaries as if they were party favors, and thoughtlessly sluiced away a huge volume of lunar dust (some of which may have contained helium-3, a potentially valuable isotope) that was hosed off of EVA suits worn by some of the ten men who have trod the moon’s desolate, airless surface.

In this case, the Feds spent an undisclosed amount of money, and conducted an terrifying armed raid, in order to seize a fragment of moonrock smaller than a grain of sand.

“This [is] abhorrent behavior by the federal government to steal something from a retiree that was given to her,” said Davis’s attorney, Peter Schlueter, who is planning a lawsuit.

Few things bring out the raw courage of Federal law enforcement officers than the prospect of going mano-a-mano with a frail, terrified septuagenarian woman.

Read the full story at the Huffington Post.

Reports the Detroit Free Press:

Motorists driving on expressways around Flint are getting surprised by a stunning tactic that the Genesee County sheriff has been using to fight the flow of illegal drugs — one that legal experts said will not withstand a court challenge.

At least seven times this month, including Tuesday, motorists have said they have seen a pickup towing a large sign on I-69 or U.S.-23 that depicts the sheriff’s badge and warns: “Sheriff narcotics check point, 1 mile ahead — drug dog in use.”

The checkpoints are part of a broad sweep for drugs that Genesee County Sheriff Robert Pickell and his self-titled Sheriff’s Posse said are needed, calling Flint a crossroads of drug dealing because nearly a half-dozen major roads and expressways pass in and around the city. Pickell said he decided to try checkpoints when he learned that drug shipments might be passing through Flint in tractor-trailers with false compartments.

University of Michigan law professor David Moran points out that a 2000 U.S. Supreme Court decision held that similar open-ended, all-encompassing narcotics checkpoints in Indianapolis were unconstitutional. He points out that one tactic used by the Genessee County Sheriff’s Office — waiting to stop motorists who make a last-minute U-turn to avoid the illicit checkpoints — is “perilously close to entrapment.”

“It’s just the kind of shabby treatment that the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent,” Moran concludes.

The unconstitutional checkpoints in Flint are an outgrowth of the wide-spread and increasing use of “asset forfeiture” — seizure of money and other assets supposedly related to drug trafficking — that has become an epidemic in economically devastated Michigan.

In Detroit, municipal authorities, led by the local police, have dealt with the economic 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 to 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.”

A growing scandal in Romulus indicates that the money and property seized in the name of drug enforcement is actually abetting institutional corruption within law enforcement, a development that should come as a surprise to nobody.

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy recently announced criminal charges against former Romulus Police Chief Michael St. Andre, his wife Sandra Vlaz-St. Andre, and five Romulus detectives — Det. Sargent Richard Balzer, Det. Richard Landy, Det. Donald Hopkins, Det. Jeremy Channells and Det. Larry Droege — for misconduct, corruption, embezzlement, and witness intimidation.

“All seven are accused of participating in a scheme to improperly use drug forfeiture funds for personal benefit,” reported MLive.com. “Worthy says the allegations include purchasing a Westland tanning salon operated by Vlaz-St. Andre, hiring prostitutes and spending $40,000 on marijuana and alcohol in a one-year period.”

Drug Checkpoints aren’t a public safety measure. They’re highway robbery carried out under color of the “law.”

Read more about this at the Detroit Free Press.

As a commentator at AlterNet observes, this comparison

illustrates how our nation treats the haves vs. the have-nots — the 1% vs. the 99%, if you will. We live in a country where white collar criminals convicted of multi-billion-dollar fraud schemes get less than 3.5 years in prison, while homeless men who take a hundred bucks (and feel bad about it) are tossed behind bars for 15 years.

Under the current corporate socialist regime, bankers who steal billions can expect clemency; desperate people who steal a pittance from a bank, on the other hand, can expect to face the unfiltered wrath of the state’s punitive apparatus. Or, to put it in terms Yakov Smirnoff might appreciate: “In Soviet Amerika, bank robs you.”

This whole process begins with the malignant engine of fraud called the Federal Reserve.

In the early 2000s, with the Federal Reserve pumping huge amounts of “liquidity” into the economy, it was immensely profitable for lenders to entice borrowers of dubious credit-worthiness into mortgages and other loans they weren’t really able to pay. Before the collapse, bundling and re-selling bad debts to investment banks was a lucrative enterprise for Goldman Sachs and other major powers on Wall Street. Now that the bubble has burst, the titans of Wall Street are bailed out by the same taxpayers who often face the prospect of arrest and incarceration for their own bad debts.

The welfare queens of Wall Street, cushioned by subsidizes extracted from taxpayers at gunpoint, are ill-disposed to liquidate bad debts through negotiation. This helps explain why an increasing number of people who find themselves “upside down” on their home mortgages are practicing “strategic default”: With lenders unwilling to negotiate reasonable terms, the debtors simply stop making payments. This has inspired Wall Street’s tax-subsidized deadbeats to begin a PR campaign to demonize “ruthless borrowers” as uniquely depraved.

“Having been deadbeats and strategic defaulters of the first order,” writes economic analyst Yves Smith, the major banks “continue to manifest their characteristic unmitigated gall [by] hectoring the public about honorable behavior.” Smith predicts that ere long we will witness the return of debtor’s prison, which was supposedly abolished in the 19th century.

A cynic once said that while a petty thief will find himself behind bars or dangling from the end of a rope, the most powerful criminals are those who run the jails and operate the gallows. The corporatist plutocracy controlling our country is determined to make a prophet of that anonymous cynic.

Go here for more on this story from AlterNet.

You’re probably use to seeing TSA’s signature blue uniforms at the airport, but now agents are hitting the interstates to fight terrorism with Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR).

“Where is a terrorist more apt to be found? Not these days on an airplane more likely on the interstate,” said Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons.

Tuesday Tennessee was first to deploy VIPR simultaneously at five weigh stations and two bus stations across the state.

This represents a significant expansion of the powers granted to the TSA, which started out by groping and irradiating airline passengers and stealing their property without improving the security of air travel in any measurable way. The agency has also been an employer of last resort for a remarkably high number of sexual predators and kleptomaniacs.

The VIPER teams initially focused their unwanted and counterproductive attention on Amtrak and Metro stations. More recently, however, the VIPER teams have given themselves the assignment of pestering their betters at practically every significant node of commerce and travel. Even before Tennessee’s state-wide exercise, VIPER teams in other states began to conduct  warrantless searches of private automobiles.

The program’s original purpose, explains the Washington Post, was to “provide a beefed-up law enforcement presence at … public transit stations over the busy holiday period. “ Now it is simply another way the Regime can harass people in search of prosecutable activity – or for property that can be confiscated in the name of asset forfeiture.

See more on this story from Nashville CBS affiliate NewsChannel 5.

Gadhafi, 69, ruled Libya with an iron fist for almost 42 years. He seized control of Libya in Sept., 1969 in a bloodless coup when he was just 27 years old. The then young and dashing army captain and his small band of military officers overthrew the monarch King Idris, setting up a new Libyan Arab Republic that over the years became increasingly isolated from the rest of the world.

Gadhafi took over the top spot as the world’s most wanted man after Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. troops in Pakistan.

At the height of his ability to threaten terrorism, President Ronald Reagan dubbed Gadhafi the “mad dog of the Middle East.”

He was accused of backing the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco popular with American soldiers, reportedly funding the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985, and the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which resulted in the U.N. and United States imposing sanctions on Libya.

Just two years ago, Gadhafi was regarded by Washington as an ally in the “war on terror,” after the regime — at Washington’s behest — dismantled its WMD program. The fact that Gadhafi, who cooperated with Washington, was deposed and then killed at Washington’s orders, is likely to inspire other autocrats to expand their efforts to acquire a nuclear deterrent.

The Obama administration’s war in Libya was the first to be conducted without any congressional input or oversight whatsoever. Since 1951, it has become commonplace for presidents to conduct undeclared (and thus unconstitutional) foreign wars. In carrying out the Libyan campaign, the incumbent administration,circumvented Congress entirely, building an international “coalition” for a UN declaration of war. It did so in stupendously cynical fashion.

In March, the Arab League, by unrecorded voice vote, petitioned the UN to enact a “no-fly zone” over Libya. The League’s resolution was brought about, in large measure, through a covert deal between Washington and Riyadh allowing the Saudis to dispatch an expeditionary force to Bahrain to help the Sunni al-Khalifa monarchy put down an uprising on the part of its suppressed and persecuted Shiite minority. With Washington’s tacit blessing, Saudi troops helped Bahrain’s U.S.-equipped security forces to massacre peaceful protesters — even as the U.S., France, and other NATO member states imposed a UN-authorized “no-fly zone” in Libya for the supposed purpose of preventing a humanitarian catastrophe.

The Libyan “rebels” from which the post-Gadhafi regime will coalesce included various factions organized and supported by the CIA and Britain’s MI6, many of whom had combat experience fighting American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

More on this story from ABC News.

The government afflicting the State of Louisiana is expanding this war on cash  by enacting a measure forbidding many kinds of small cash transactions:

House bill 195 basically says those who buy and sell second hand goods cannot use cash to make those transactions, and it flew so far under the radar most businesses don’t even know about it…. The law states those who buy or sell second hand goods are prohibited from using cash. State representative Rickey Hardy co-authored the bill.

Hardy says, “they give a check or a cashiers money order, or electronic one of those three mechanisms is used.”

Hardy says the bill is targeted at criminals who steal anything from copper to televisions, and sell them for a quick buck. Having a paper trail will make it easier for law enforcement.

“It’s a mechanism to be used so the police department has something to go on and have a lead,” explains Hardy.

This is not a measure intended to protect private property. It is designed to make all private commerce subject to state scrutiny, and to make potential criminals out of people who engage in legitimate, mutually beneficial transactions. It will also have a severe negative impact on small businesses involved in downmarket retail.

“We’re gonna lose a lot of business,” protests Danny Guidry, proprietor of the Pioneer Trading Post in Lafayette, which specializes in buying and selling unique second hand items. “We don’t want this cash transaction to be taken away from us. It’s an everyday transaction…. We are being targeted for something we shouldn’t be.”

It should never be forgotten that the only things government makes are criminals out of innocent people — and corpses out of living human beings.

See more on the story from CBS affiliate KLFY.

After Mr. Cain dismissed the “Occupy Wall Street” protests as the work of misinformed malcontents, Rep. Paul pointed out that “Mr. Cain has blamed the victims. There are a lot of people who are victims of this business cycle…. [The Federal Reserve] creates the financial bubbles. Who got stuck? The middle class got stuck. They lost their jobs and they lost their houses…. We have to blame the business cycle and the economic polices that led to this disaster.”

As the Death and Taxes commentary site observes:

Paul, of course, traces a lot of the economic problems back to the Federal Reserve, the fractional banking apparatus of which Herman Cain was a member (of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank), and which allowed a number of banks and investors to make risky investments with criminal financial instruments (the credit-default swap), knowing full well that the Federal Reserve and the federal government would have no choice but to bail them out if toxic mortgage securities began to implode.

While Rep. Paul agrees that at least some elements of the Occupy Wall Street movement are hostage to misguided economic ideas, he — alone among Republican presidential aspirants — understands that the protests are inspired by legitimate outrage over the wholesale plundering of the public on behalf of politically protected Wall Street interests. Herman Cain insisted that the protesters should target the White House, rather than Wall Street — a convenient suggestion, given Cain’s background in the Federal Reserve System, and his desire to replace the current occupant of the Oval Office. Rep. Paul, on the other hand, is a principled critic of both the Federal Reserve and unconstitutional executive policies. Unlike Cain, who has equivocated regarding the need to audit the Fed, Rep. Paul has consistently opposed the institution for nearly four decades.

Read more at Death and Taxes.

The conversation touched on the ongoing — and on-growing — “Occupy Wall Street” movement, its similarities to the Tea Party movement, and Republican presidential contender Herman Cain’s so-called “9-9-9″ tax reform plan. Mr. Obama acknowledged that the protests on both sides of the political spectrum reflect a growing public perception that the “system” in Washington was broken down — an opinion he professed to share, even though he appeared to exempt himself from blame.

Despite the fact the Obama apparently considers his record to be flawless, the one-time college instructor declined to give himself a grade:

Tapper: You have gotten a lot passed though, much of your agenda has been passed — the stimulus, health care, Wall Street reform — so we’re sitting in a state right now where a majority of the voters disapprove of your handling of the economy and we’re going to Virginia later, where a majority of the voters do not thing you deserve to be re-elected. We’re sitting in a school, what grade would you give yourself?

In defiance of the Due Process guarantees in the Bill of Rights, the Bush administration summarily imprisoned Padilla – an ex-convict suspected of a terrible crime, but an American citizen nonetheless — in a U.S. Navy brig in South Carolina. The administration insisted that the presidential decree had deprived Padilla of any legal immunities or protections, including the ancient habeas corpus guarantee, which requires that the government either formally charge a detainee with a crime, or release him from custody.

For years, the U.S. government systematically worked to destroy Padilla’swill through psychological torture, and – according to attorneys who eventually were permitted to examine him – the forcible administration of psychotropic drugs.  A “Declaration” filed by a political hack named Michael Mobbs was presented as the functional equivalent of a grand jury indictment, and a separate “declaration” by Defense Intelligence Agency head Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby was offered to explain why Padilla could not be permitted due process of any kind, including conventional legal representation.

“Any interruption of the intelligence gathering process, especially from an external source [such as legal counsel], risks mission failure,” insisted Jacoby. The key to extracting intelligence from Padilla, he continued, was “creating an atmosphere of dependency and trust between the subject and interrogator…. Anything that threatens the perceived dependency and trust between the subject and interrogator directly threatens the value of interrogation as an intelligence-gathering tool.”

How were we to know that Padilla was a valuable intelligence source about al-Qaeda, rather than, say, a trivial gang-banger from Chicago whose only serious professional training came at Taco Bell? According to Jacoby, it is enough for us to know that the Grand and Glorious Decider — and let all stand hushed in awe-struck reverence at the mention of his name — has “determined” that this is so.

In 2005, as the Supreme Court prepared to hear a legal challenge to the illegal detention of Padilla, the Bush administration – which had maintained that the suspect was “too dangerous” to be granted a trial in the civil courts – released him from military confinement. Padilla was transferred to a civilian jail, and charged with providing unspecified “support” for terrorism abroad. The evidence Padilla consisted of accusations from two confessed terrorists, who implicated him after being tortured. A third “witness,” Ethiopian refugee Binyam Mohammed, likewise named Padilla after being tortured extensively under CIA supervision by Moroccan secret police.

Padilla was never charged with involvement in the supposed dirty bomb plot. After several years of isolation, forced drugging and other abuse in military detention, Padilla was convicted of conspiring to “support” terrorism abroad. The key evidence in that trial consisted of transcripts of innocuous conversations in which – according to government “experts” — Padilla and Muslim acquaintances spoke in “code” about terrorist activities. The trial judge excluded all evidence of Padilla’s torture, while allowing as evidence statements he made before being Mirandized.

On September 20, a federal appeals court panel vacated, by a 2-1 vote, Padilla’s 17-year prison sentence – not because it was the product of a manifest miscarriage of justice, but because it was considered to be insufficiently severe.

According to the two-judge majority, “Padilla’s sentence is substantively unreasonable because it does not adequately reflect his criminal history, does not adequately account for his risk of recidivism, was based partly on an impermissible comparison to sentences imposed in other terrorism cases, and was based in part on inappropriate factors . . .”

The “inappropriate factors” referred to by the majority included evidence of torture inflicted on Padilla during his illegal military detention – something the two appeals court judges dismissed as irrelevant.

The dissenter on the panel, Judge Rosemary Barkett (a Mexico-born daughter of Syrian parents who was a Catholic nun before going to law school), summarizes some of the evidence dismissively described as “inappropriate factors” taken into account by the trial judge as he imposed a relatively brief prison sentence on Padilla:

“Padilla presented substantial, detailed, and compelling evidence about the inhumane, cruel, and physically, emotionally, and mentally painful conditions in which he had already been detained for a period of almost four years. For example, he presented evidence at sentencing of being kept in extreme isolation at the military brig in South Carolina where he was subjected to cruel interrogations, prolonged physical and mental pain, extreme environmental stresses, noise and temperature variations, and deprivation of sensory stimuli and sleep.”

“In sentencing Padilla, the trial judge accepted the facts of his confinement that had been presented both during the trial and at sentencing, which also included evidence about the impact on one’s mental health of prolonged isolation and solitary confinement, all of which were properly taken into account in deciding how much more confinement should be imposed,” concluded Judge Barkett. “None of these factual findings, nor the trial judge’s consideration of them in fashioning Padilla’s sentence, are challenged on appeal by the government or the majority.”

From the perspective of the other two judges on the panel – Joel Dubina and William Pryor, both Republican appointees – there is nothing unconstitutional about abusing and torturing an illegally imprisoned man, and then convicting him of an entirely different charge on the basis of profoundly dubious “evidence.” However, it is entirely “inappropriate” for a trial judge to mitigate that atrocity by imposing a relatively lenient sentence.

Although Thomas Jefferson wouldn’t recognize the America we live in, Josef Stalin would certainly approve of it.

Today, twenty years after the death of the Soviet Union, Marx’s theory is alive and well in the purported Land of the Free. The current issue of Republic magazine, devoted to the theme of “The Coming Greater Depression,” documents in detail how property rights have been nullified by the American political and economic system – beginning with the “invisible prison” called property taxes. Forcing people to pay tribute on property that they already own makes sense only to those whose minds are held hostage by collectivist assumptions.

But this is hardly the limit of the criminal impositions experienced by property owners – perhaps a better expression would be “people who believe they own property” – by the current system. Those who want to see socialism in action need not travel to Beijing or Pyongyang. All they need to do is attend a meeting of their local planning and zoning board.

The municipal government of San Juan Capistrano California, which was settled by Catholic missionaries, is extorting money from a couple as punishment for the supposed crime of holding prayer meetings on their own property. Chuck and Stephanie Fromm hold Bible study sessions each Wednesday evening and Sunday morning. They also run a home-based business publishing Worship Leader magazine. Their 4,700-square foot home was built on a parcel of land that includes a corral, barn, pool, and sizeable back yard. While dozens of people assemble for the study meetings, parking is ample and the proceedings are meditative – which means that there is no reason for anyone to complain about the noise.

Yet complain someone did, and now the city government has inflicted on the couple $200 in fines for failing to receive a “conditional-use permit” to do something on their own property that no government has the authority to forbid or regulate.

This is hardly the first or only example of a municipal government in the United States of America making use of zoning regulations to punish people for conducting prayer services in their own homes.

Like the Guttmans, Michael and Suzanne Salman of Phoenix, Arizona held regular church services at their home. The couple has also sponsored missionaries to Syria and other Middle Eastern countries.

On June 11, 2009, the Salmans’ home was besieged by a swarm of police officers who detained the family for several hours. The police had been sent by the local zoning board to collect evidence that the Salmans were conducting church services in their home.

For a year and a half, the Salmans worked to comply with the zoning board’s requirements to build a 2,000-square-foot outbuilding, which cost them some $80,000. The function of that building is to entertain visitors. According to the zoning board, it is permissible to use that building to watch movies, but not to hold worship services.

A missionary from Syria who was present during the police raid on June 11 pointed out: “We came to America to get away from this kind of persecution.”

The United Presbyterian Church of Middletown, New York learned that it’s not only the preaching of the word, but also practicing it, that provokes the wrath of municipal Marxists. In December, 2008, as the town experienced a severe cold snap that threatened the lives of homeless people, the church established a shelter that routinely took in dozens of people with no other refuge, providing them with a warm place to sleep, food, and clothing.

Shortly before Christmas, the City sent its fire inspector to examine the premises. He found nothing amiss. Yet the City’s chief legal counsel insisted that the homeless shelter was an impermissible residential use of the church property. The City filed a zoning violation against the church. The perversity of that action was underscored by the fact that until 2007, the zoning ordinance explicitly permitted such charitable use of the church facility. But no church should have to beg the government’s permission to serve the poor, and no property owner should be subject to the scrutiny of socialist community planners.

The Communists who operate county planning soviets are equal-opportunity persecutors of the faithful. In February 2007, the municipal government afflicting the Township of Freehold, New Jersey informed Rabbi Avraham Bernstein that he was in violation of zoning ordinances by holding Sabbath services in his home each Friday night, as well as on Jewish holidays. The Rabbi was issued a legal summons accusing him of illegally operating a house of worship. He was also informed that the Township government had kept their home and visitors under video surveillance.

All of this is patently unconstitutional, both under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Article I, section 3 of the New Jersey State Constitution, which promises that: “No person shall be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshiping Almighty God in a manner agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience….”

It’s doubtful that Jews living in Tehran have been treated this inhospitably. No government anywhere in the United States has the authority to criminalize worship.

Adam Guerrero, a math teacher and urban homesteader from Memphis, Tennessee, discovered that in America’s Sovietized America’s legal system, any individual can lose what he had considered his own property at the whim of an anonymous detractor – even if that property owner has done no harm to any living thing.

Mr. Guerrero, along with three of his students, maintains an extensive garden in his front yard, as well as a backyard worm farm and equipment for making soap and producing biodiesel. The property is tidy and well-organized. Yet a single anonymous complaint from a neighbor was sufficient to send Guerrero before Shelby County Environmental Court Judge Larry Potter.The Judge told Guerrero that anything that generates a complaint is considered a “nuisance” under city ordinances and ordered him to remove any of his property considered “unsightly” or a “nuisance.”

The foundation of the Soviet legal system was the assumption that anything not explicitly permitted by the government was illegal. The chief enforcement agent of the Soviet police system was the citizen informant, someone eager to report his neighbors or family members at the first sign of non-conformity.

In 2007, Laura Soelberg, who conducted a fall garage sale in the church lot next to her mother’s old house in Minnetonka, Minnesota, was also threatened with a fine and jail time after police arrived to shut down the event. The city accused Soelberg of a zoning violation. Her supposed crime, as in the foregoing examples, was using her own property in a fashion disapproved of by municipal bureaucrats.

One city official told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that Soelberg’s events aren’t authentic garage sales, since she uses each of them as “an income-generating venture” rather than to “get rid of items around the house.” That distinction makes sense only to the sort of person who inhabits a bureaucracy, rather than making an honest living.

Some might object that it is hyperbole to compare planning and zoning bureaucrats with Soviet commissars whose decisions consigned tens of millions to insuperable poverty, and millions more to death. But it must be understood that those who presume to control the property of others arrogate to themselves literal power over life and death. No better illustration can be found than the case of Ronald “Bo” Ward, a genial and well-liked man who operated a barber shop in Clarksville, Tennessee.

During the decades that he ran his shop, Bo cultivated a large and faithful clientele. He took a paternal interest in the soldiers at nearby Fort Campbell, often giving them haircuts for free. During the mid-2000s, amid the housing boom, Bo incurred debts by expanding his shop. He found that he could get a debt consolidation loan on his home if it was re-zoned as a commercial property. When he put in a request to the City Council in September, Bo explained that if the loan didn’t go through, “I lose my home, I lose my shop, I lose everything I got.”

During an October 4 meeting, the City Council turned down the request. Distraught, Bo declared: “Y’all have put me under,” then drew a gun and killed himself.

Bo had asked to make more profitable use of his own property, only to learn that, because of the socialist practice of municipal planning and zoning, he didn’t really own that property – including the life ruined by the local zoning bureaucracy.

Many Americans who remember the horrors of the Cold War remain vigilant for any tremor of Communism’s resurgence abroad. The Commies we should worry about it aren’t haunting the halls of the Kremlin or hiding under our beds. They’re doing their ruinous – and potentially – lethal work at City Hall and in county planning boards.

Artis was savoring his long-overdue meal and pointedly minding his own business when he was accosted by James Rollins of the Raleigh Police Department. Rollins asked if “the beer” belonged to Artis, who replied that he didn’t see any beer. Rollins pointed to a discarded can beneath a newspaper rack at least ten feet from the bus stop.

“Why, Officer, if that beer were mine, I would be enjoying it with my meal,” Artis replied equably, turning his attention back to his taco.

For reasons he never deigned to explain, Rollins demanded that Artis produce identification — a demand for which he had neither a legal warrant nor probable cause.

“Why are you asking me for identification? I already told you that the beer was not mine,” replied the puzzled Artis. The officer replied to that entirely reasonable objection by assaulting Artis by grabbing his arm, jerking it behind his back, and then sweep-kicking his feet out from under him. As Rollins kicked Artis’s leg, the victim heard a distinctive cracking sound, a noise that resulted from what was later diagnosed as a left bicondylar tibial plateau fracture.

After landing face-first on the ground, Artis cried out that his leg had been broken. This didn’t deter Rollins from roughly handcuffing him and dragging him to a detention cell. For hours, the hapless and agonized innocent man was taunted and tormented by Rollins and other uniformed bullies, who insisted that he was exaggerating his injuries.

Roughly an hour and a half after being assaulted by Rollins, Artis was taken, by wheelchair, before a judge identified only as Magistrate Bostrum for an initial appearance on entirely spurious charges of having an open container and “disorderly conduct.”

Bostrum demanded that the injured man stand while bond was set. Artis complained that he was unable to do so. Perhaps wanting to improve upon Officer Rollins’ feat of manufacturing an offense, Bostrum slapped the wounded man with a 300-day contempt sentence without bond. Artis spent the night in jail before he was able to receive medical attention. After awaking from surgery, Artis found pins inserted into a leg that could no longer function normally. He also learned that he was no longer in custody. The initial charges were later dismissed when Officer Rollins didn’t bother to appear in court. Artis has filed suit against Rollins and the police depart