Yet Chief Ken Geddes believes that Preston’s superficial placidity disguises the potential for apocalyptic violence. At least that’s what he’s saying to pre-empt potential criticism of his decision to acquire a combat-grade armored vehicle from the Department of Homeland Security.

The Preston Police Department is one of two in Idaho to receive a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle (MRAP) through the Pentagon’s Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO). Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security purchased more than 2,700 of the combat vehicles – which were developed for use in Iraq and Afghanistan – for distribution to local police departments and sheriff’s offices across the country. Most of them have very few, if any, miles on their odometers, and were scheduled to be cut up for scrap.

Through the LESO program, law enforcement agencies can receive MRAPs free of charge (apart from the initial expense to the taxpayers incurred in manufacturing them). Hundreds of police chiefs and sheriffs across the country have eagerly applied for the vehicles, urgently insisting that they meet previously unknown needs that didn’t become apparent until the Pentagon made the war-fighting vehicles available.

When I asked Chief Geddes why a police department in a town the size of Preston needs a military assault vehicle, his immediate response – expressed in a tone of theatrical indignation — was to invoke the Sandy Hook massacre.

“There isn’t much violent crime in Preston – but how much does it take?” Chief Geddes responded. “There wasn’t much crime in that little Connecticut town [Newton] before Sandy Hook – but it would have been nice if they would have had an MRAP on the day of the school shooting.”

He also took issue with the assumption that because Preston is small and relatively tranquil, his department doesn’t need to expand its paramilitary capacity: “Boise has a much larger population, and much larger police force, and much greater capacity than we do – but are we to believe that the people in Boise are more valuable than the people in Preston?” This assessment of relative value omits rational calculations of risk. It also assumes that enhancing police capacity conduces to public safety, which is at very best a thoroughly questionable assumption.

Although the advertised law enforcement purpose served by MRAPs and other armored vehicles is force protection, Chief Geddes suggests that the vehicle could also be used to evacuate citizens who are threatened by an active shooter. That claim is robustly implausible: There isn’t a recorded instance in which a SWAT team responding to an active shooter made anything other than “officer safety” is chief operational priority, and Preston isn’t likely to set a precedent – assuming that such a situation were ever to arise in that bucolic southeastern Idaho town.

Chief Geddes points out that his department and the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office (which is headquartered in Preston) are receiving training and assistance from “a military agency” regarding the operation and maintenance of the MRAP. This blending of functions and equipment summons concerns about law enforcement militarization that the Chief quickly and impatiently dismisses.

“I’m not at all concerned about it,” Chief Geddes insisted. “We’re not looking in that direction in any way. But I have to say that in the event of a Hurricane Katrina-style disaster – an earthquake, or a flood, or another large emergency – we’d welcome their assistance.”

Public concerns about the militarization of domestic law enforcement occur because the public “lags” behind their protectors in perceiving dangers and needs, according to Geddes. The general population simply doesn’t have the preternatural sense of incipient danger Chief Geddes acquired through years of patrolling the inhospitable streets of Preston and the danger-laden back roads of Franklin County as a sheriff’s deputy.

“Law enforcement may know things you don’t know,” he told me. “All you think about is sunshine and happiness, but police can’t go in with their eyes shut.” Although Geddes maintains that he’s received no negative feedback from the public in Preston, he readily deploys the familiar “uniforms that guard” trope in dealing with potential critics: “People who resist this trend, who say that we shouldn’t be getting equipment like this, live under the protection of what the protest.”

From Chief Geddes’ perspective, it’s unlikely that police can ever be too powerful, because their conspicuous presence is the only thing that prevents violent chaos from descending on society.

“How many people are saved because of law enforcement – because of crimes that weren’t committed, or violations that didn’t occur?” he asks. “How many people are alive because we patrol the streets and highways? How many people would have committed crimes if we weren’t there? Sometimes they didn’t do anything because they saw the force [that the police represent].”

Chief Geddes, who intended that those questions be taken as rhetorical in nature, is apparently unaware that they were answered more than four decades ago. In 1972, with financial backing and technical assistance provided by the Police Foundation, the Kansas City Police conducted a year-long study to measure the deterrent effect of police patrol. That survey concluded that police patrols had no documented impact on the crime rate.

Police patrols over plentiful opportunity for pro-active intervention to obtain revenue, or enforce regulations that do nothing to protect persons and property. This means that they are worse than useless from the perspective of those who value individual liberty more than state-imposed conformity. It’s reasonable to say that Chief Geddes resides in the other camp.

In an op-ed column he wrote for the Preston Citizen newspaper, Chief Geddes admonished the public to be “thankful” for Pentagon’s generosity in providing the MRAP to his department: “I appreciate our government and our military for the security they give us and for their help to increase our strength here in our schools and home.”

The problem, of course, is that once police are given access to exotic instruments of repression, they will find a reason to use them. This is illustrated by the ease and haste with which the Taser – introduced as a substitute for firearms in situations involving deadly force – has become an implement of pain compliance used to administer summary punishment upon Mundanes who discomfit their uniformed overlords in any way.

An even better illustration of this dreadful trend is the promiscuous use of SWAT teams: When introduced in the late 1960s, SWAT units were described as special-purpose teams to be deployed only in extraordinary circumstances, such as armed robberies and hostage situations. Now, however, there are, on average, approximately 220 SWAT-style raids each day. Won’t the acquisition of military-grade hardware to police departments simply exacerbate this tendency?

“That is a valid concern,” admitted Nampa Police Lt. Tim Randall, who represents the department’s Office of Professional Standards, when I posed that question to him. He also acknowledged that the department had received a great deal of public comment “concerning the possibility of police militarization, which we can certainly understand.”

Nampa, a city of about 70,000 people, has a crime rate slightly above the state average, but well below the national average. Why would its police department (which last year acquired two military-issue Humvees from the National Guard) need an armored combat vehicle designed to protect soldiers from land mines and sniper fire?

“Well, first of all, it’s free,” observed Lt. Randall. “It’s also the case that even a small agency like the Nampa PD has a big need for armored protection.” Employing the same Department of Homeland Security boilerplate language retailed in press releases from other departments around the country, the Nampa PD insists that the need for the MRAP is underscored by “a rise in mass shootings and incidents of terrorism” nation-wide.”

That rationale is rooted in a lie: Mass shootings have not been increasing, and domestic terrorism – a category that doesn’t include the FBI’s Homeland Security Theater operations – is all but non-existent.

Although Lt. Randall emphasizes that he doesn’t anticipate that the Nampa Tactical Response Team would “drive up to a house” in an MRAP on a routine warrant enforcement call, he reported that the vehicle had already been used twice in the first two weeks after the department obtained it. The first was a response to a carjacking at knife-point, the other a call involving a suicidal man. Like Chief Geddes, Lt. Randall also believes that the MRAP is valuable as a “psychological deterrent” to public disorder.

The obvious question is: Whom, exactly, does the Nampa PD seek to “deter”? I think the answer was embedded in Lt. Randall’s explanation of the department’s “need” for the vehicle: “Here in Idaho, practically everybody around here has a gun, and when we go on a call it is useful to have a vehicle that will enhance the safety of the responding officers.” He also pointed out that after the Pentagon-provided MRAP arrived, the department took its aging armored vehicle to its gun range and discovered that “rifle fire would just go right through it. We had it for years, and didn’t know that it offered no protection against ballistic arms fire.”

This belated discovery would be considered alarming if we ignore the fact that this was the first time gunfire had ever been directed at the vehicle. So far, the Nampa TRT has suffered only one fatality – Corporal Jed Webb, who died of a heart attack earlier this year at age 51.

It has been more than eighty years since a Nampa police officer died in the line of duty. Yet the people running that department appear to be convinced that their safety depends on their ability to “deter” the gun-owning public.

The Pentagon has a stock of about 20,000 MRAPs, most of which will eventually find their way into local police arsenals, along with Predator-style drones and other military hardware field-tested overseas. Although an MRAP has no discernible practical value as a tool for protection of life and property, it is tremendously useful as a prop in the ongoing campaign to indoctrinate police regarding the unacceptable danger to “officer safety” posed by an armed public — and the need for conspicuous displays of potential force to deter potential threats.

“General Colin Powell’s Doctrine of the U.S. Armed Forces is that the United States should be the `meanest dog in town’ to frighten a potential enemy,” wrote career law enforcement officer –and SWAT instructor – Edward Leach in the October 2001 issue of Police Chief magazine. “When force is used, it should be with `overwhelming strength and no half-way measures.’ In law enforcement, these principles are routinely applied in both field and tactical operations. … Law enforcement [application] of the Powell Doctrine is clear: have overwhelming and superior resources available, primarily as a deterrent, but use them decisively when needed.”

Leach, who until a year ago was Undersheriff of Idaho’s Kootenai County, unabashedly depicted police as a military occupation force. He doubtless understands the message being sent when police in a town the size of Preston acquire a combat-grade armored vehicle. So should we.

VIDEO BONUS

In this scene from “Napoleon Dynamite,” a pair of gang-bangers in Preston act as private peace officers, peacefully intervening to protect property against aggressive violence – and they didn’t need an MRAP to do so:

During the U.S. occupation of Iraq, soldiers  manning traffic checkpoints in Baghdad operated under rules of engagement permitting them to shoot any vehicle whose driver didn’t immediately comply with orders. The predictable result was that scores or hundreds of innocent people – including women, children, Iraqi police officers, and at least one intelligence officer from an allied country – were gunned down by over-anxious soldiers at traffic checkpoints.

As with so many other facets of the world-historic crime called “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” theroutine slaughter of innocent Iraqis at traffic checkpoints was documented in war logs made public by the heroic whistleblower then known as Private Bradley Manning.

In antiseptic language typical of bureaucratized killing operations, those episodes were called “escalation of force” incidents. An entry for October 26, 2005 describes how “a civilian vehicle approached and ignored shouts[,] vehicle horn[,] and flashed lights. Unit fired one shotgun round as a warning shot. Vehicle ignored warning and continued. Unit fired 13-15 rounds of 7.62 into the vehicle killing 2 children and wounding one child and one female. 2 civ KIA [civilians killed in action], 2 civ WIA [civilians wounded in action]….”

“I’m sure that these soldiers were doing a good job,” insisted an anonymous official with US Central Command following the massacre of ten Iraqis whose van was shelled at a checkpoint near Najaf. “It’s very tragic, but they acted in an appropriate way.” This was “appropriate” because the lives of U.S. soldiers were of immeasurably greater worth than those of the Iraqis whom they were there to “liberate.” Besides, it was irresponsible of Iraqis not to understand, and accommodate, the security concerns of the valiant foreigners who had invaded their country.

“It may be argued that drivers should be more careful to obey troops’ orders, but in the dark civilians can be as jumpy as soldiers,” observed a report in the Guardian of London. “Unlike troops they have no training or prior experience. They may not be sure who the people with flashing lights are on the road ahead.” (Emphasis added.)

It is entirely possible that after Miriam Carey drove her car into a barricade outside the White House that she didn’t immediately identify the armed men who surrounded her as police officers. It is quite likely – and entirely understandable – that her first impulse was to panic and flee. Her reaction was in some ways similar to that of Iraqi civilians who hadn’t been told that anything other than immediate, unquestioning submission to orders issued by foreign occupiers would provoke a fatal response.

In Iraq, the official doctrine of “force protection” dictated lethal pre-emption of any potential threat. An enhanced version of that doctrine is in effect in the Imperial Capital, which is inhabited by people whose unfathomable corruption is matched by an immeasurably vast sense of entitlement – and coupled with a vague but insistent sense that at some point their crimes will provoke retaliation. Since such people are unburdened by conscience, they see nothing amiss in authorizing summary execution of anybody who might pose some unspecified potential threat to their physical safety.

This mindset has become ubiquitous as police checkpoints have proliferated throughout the Soyuz.

Police in Brunswick County, North Carolina “started unloading” in “super trigger-happy fashion” after an officer rammed his car into a vehicle whose driver was trying to elude a warrantless DWI checkpoint last June. Jared Cleerdin, who was in a car with his wife and young daughter, told a local TV station that all of the officers were “just blasting this car to pieces. It was absolutely terrifying.”

The police directed their gunfire into oncoming traffic, heedless of the possibility that they may kill or injure innocent Mundanes. Cleerdin and his wife found themselves “inches from death,” and their experience was hardly unique.

The actions of the police were “way beyond reckless,” Cleerdin testified. “I couldn’t believe it…. It looked like every officer there did not follow protocol in any way, shape, or form.”

WECT TV6-WECT.com:News, weather

Antonine Graham, who was driving the Lincoln Navigator on that evening, had several narcotics-related offenses on his record and was allegedly carrying marijuana and paraphernalia when he encountered the checkpoint. He and his passenger, Jerry Melvin, were both shot multiple times after a cop rammed their car to force it to stop. For seeking to avoid the warrantless checkpoint, Graham was charged with ten counts of assault with a deadly weapon on a government official and several other offenses.  Because he was in a vehicle driven by Graham, Melvin was initially charged with conspiracy to commit assault with a deadly weapon.

Despite the fact that the behavior of the officers enforcing the checkpoint needlessly endangered innocent people, the Brunswick County district attorney’s office ruled that the shooting rampage was “justified.”

How could it be otherwise? To those who presume to rule us, and their costumed enforcers, we’re all Iraqis now.

Former Nevada District Court Judge Don Chairez, has described the Clark County Coroner’s inquest process as “a search for justification of an officer’s actions.” Since the procedure was introduced in 1969, hundreds of lethal force incidents have been reviewed by a seven-member jury. Between 1976 and 2012, only one police shooting was ruled “negligent” – and that decision was overturned on appeal.

This was the intended outcome of a process that was collaborative, rather than adversarial: The District Attorney’s office choreographs the questioning with the police department prior to the hearing, and no direct cross-examination of police officers is permitted by attorneys representing the victim.

“He made me do my job”

Andre Laomarsino, who represented the family of 21-year-old police murder victim Trevon Cole in a 2010 inquest, explained to me that “We were allowed to submit written questions, one at a time, to the prosecutor.” He wasn’t allowed to pose questions directly to Cole’s murderer, Officer Bryan Yant (a repeat offender), or even to ask follow-up questions.

Yant shot Cole in his apartment while his finance, Sequoia Pearce, was kneeling on the floor with a gun to her head. The 21-year-old man had been targeted by a narcotics enforcement team for a series of “controlled buys” that were captured by a film crew from the execrable police state propaganda program COPS.

Cole was suspected of selling 1.8 ounces of marijuana in one of Metro’s staged drug buys – a quantity that probably wouldn’t have merited even a misdemeanor prosecution. Although the undercover operatives diligently tried to entice Cole into selling larger amounts, he adamantly refused to do so.

Unable to connect Cole to a serious crime, Yant did what police officers in such circumstances always do: he lied, deliberately misidentifying Cole in a search warrant affidavit as another man with the same name who had a different birthday and weighed about 100 pounds less than his target, who was a former college football player. This permitted Yant to depict Cole as a dangerous repeat offender, which led a judge to approve an armed, night-time raid on Cole’s home.

The film crew wasn’t available on the night of the killing, which meant the officers wouldn’t be able to preen for the cameras. This probably left Yant – who had brought along his personal AR-15 – with a severe case of blue balls. So as a consolation prize he kicked in the door to Cole’s apartment, chased him into the bathroom, and killed him despite the fact that the terrified young man had his hands raised over his head.

During his inquest, Yant followed the familiar script, claiming that Cole – who was unarmed and outnumbered – “made an aggressive act toward me,” which he insisted was “enough to make me fear for my life.”

According to Yant, Cole “made me do my job” – which was to manipulate harmless people into committing prosecutable acts, perjure himself to obtain judicial permission for a home invasion, and then kill an innocent person without provocation or personal consequences.

The Erik Scott Murder

A few weeks after Bryan Yant gunned down Trevon Cole, three of his comrades – led by Officer William Mosher – “did their job” by murdering 38-year-old Erik Scott as he was leaving a Costco store.

Scott, an honorably discharged soldier and West Point graduate, was legally carrying a concealed weapon during his July 10, 2010 visit to the store. A clerk noticed the gun and told Scott, incorrectly, that the store had a policy forbidding guns on the premises. Another employee called the police and reported that an armed, irrational man was terrorizing the customers.

When the police arrived, patrons were told to leave because of an emergency. Scott, who was with his girlfriend, was leaving the store when he was confronted by Mosher.

No more than two seconds Mosher yelled, “Hands! Let me see your hands!” the panicking officer fired two shots into Scott at point-blank range. Without determining what had happened, Officer Thomas Mendiola fired three shots at the victim. A third officer, Joshua Stark, shot him twice.

The official account was that Scott had pulled his gun and pointed it at Mosher. In fact, the object in Scott’s hand was a Blackberry. His registered gun was still in its holster. When it became clear that Scott hadn’t drawn his gun, the police narrative shifted (as has been documented in detailby investigative writer Mike McDaniel). In support of that revised version, investigators pretended that after Scott had been shot by Mosher, he attempted to reach a second handgun – an unregistered Ruger — that he supposedly carried in his right front pocket.

That gun, which Scott had purchased as a gift for his mother, was actually in his apartment at the time he was murdered. The Metro Police acquired it in an illegal search – better described as a “black-bag job” – and then subjected it to a phony ballistics test intended to prove that it been damaged when Mendiola shot Scott in the right leg. This was impossible, since the injuries to Scott’s leg were several inches below his pocket.

None of this mattered in the official inquest – because facts are inconsequential in that proceeding. All that counted was a police officer’s subjective impression that his incomparably precious life – or that of a fellow member of the sanctified brotherhood of official coercion — faced some unspecified threat.

“I felt that my fellow officer was in immediate and imminent danger,” testified Mendiola, dutifully reciting from the police union’s catechism of self-exculpation. “I just fired until I felt that the suspect wasn’t a threat.”

When he was asked about the fact that Scott’s firearm never left its holster, Mendiola replied with a verbal shrug.

“It was still a threat, whether it was holstered or not,” he blithely stated. “I did what I had to do.”

On this construction, a police officer in Las Vegas would be entitled to kill any Mundane who is carrying a holstered weapon. Every officer who testified (that is, perjured) himself at the inquest emphasized the idea that by carrying an unregistered Ruger, Scott had committed a felony – even though there was no evidence that Scott had that weapon in his possession at the time he was murdered.

Significantly, by the time the Erik Scott inquest occurred, Officer Mendiola was under investigation for a firearms-related felony involving an unregistered Ruger pistol. Just days after helping to murder Erik Scott because his legally owned firearm was perceived as a “threat” to officer safety, Mendiola gave a Ruger .22-caliber handgun to a convicted felon named Robert Justice.

Originally charged with a felony, Mendiola was allowed to plead guilty to a “gross misdemeanor” charge, fined $2,000, and allowed to leave the Metro Police Force with his peace officer certification intact.

“Heroic Deeds” of official murder

The coroner’s inquest “was the most amazing travesty of justice,” Bill Scott, Erik’s father, told Pro Libertate. “It was entirely devoid of due process.”

“The side representing the victim has no input at all,” Scott continued. “It cannot question witnesses directly. Written questions are handed to a bailiff, who submits them to the judge, who decides whether or not they will be asked. We submitted 1200 questions over the course of a six-day hearing, which was the longest in the history of the inquest. The judge effectively disposed of all of them. In his final instructions to the jury, the judge reduced the mater to one question: `Did the officers who fired believe their lives were in danger?’”

All three of the officers involved in the murder of Erik Scott were exonerated by the inquest – and in what can only be construed as a deliberate gesture of contempt toward the public, the Las Vegas Police Protective Agency (PPA) nominated two of them, Mosher and Stark, for consideration as “national officer of the year” in 2011. Mendiola’s felony charge is the only reason he was snubbed for consideration.

PPA commissar Chris Collins referred to the murder of Erik Scott as one of the “top two heroic events our officers participated in” during 2010. He didn’t specify whether the other “heroic” act was Brian Yant’s murder of Devon Cole.

“I don’t see it as a controversial shooting,” Collins smugly told the Review-Journal. “It was a heroic deed and enough of a heroic deed for the judges [with the National Association of Police Organizations awards] to give them an honorable mention.”

“That’s typical of Collins,” Scott observes. “He is a monumentally arrogant individual, because his union runs the police force. Collins and the PPA will justify any fatality, any use of force, any beating – and [Sheriff Doug] Gillespie doesn’t have the guts to challenge them.”

Like Brian Yant, Bill Mosher – who has the physiognomy, but not the talent, to find honest work as a Curly Howard impersonator — is a repeat offender who has learned that he can kill with impunity.

“Bill Mosher, the cop who murdered Erik, is a former prison guard in Massachusetts who somehow wound up as a casino guard in Las Vegas,” Bill Scott points out. “He got hired in the mid-2000s at a time when Metro was hiring like crazy and were somewhat indiscriminate. His training officer refused to graduate him, saying that he was unsuitable to be a cop. Metro said, in effect, `We just need boots on the streets.’ Within a year, Moser had shot and killed someone on the streets, and four years later he shot Erik. So he had two fatal shootings in the first five years as a cop.”

Sociopaths in uniform 

Yant and Mosher are entirely representative of the dominant element within the Metro Police Force, according to Scott.

“Here’s the breakdown of the police composition, as described to us by some good cops – most retired, some still active,” Scott explains. “About twenty-five percent of Metro cops are what could be characterized as rogue or bad cops. Another 25 percent are simply trying to keep their jobs, their paychecks, and their pensions. Roughly half are conscientious people who became police for the right reasons – but they are frustrated by the system. As one of them told me, `It’s difficult to do the right thing when you’re working for a vindictive tyrant.’ For this reason the good cops don’t step up and confront the bad ones.”

If “good cops” are intimidated by fellow Metro officers, the public has every right to be terrified of them. Public outrage over the Metro PD’s reign of terror prompted the Las VegasReview-Journal, which otherwise faithfully carries out its duties as a local government-aligned newspaper, to commit an act of journalism. The paper ran a lengthy series exposing the entrenched corruption of the coroner’s inquest process.  This led to intervention by the US Justice Department, which took official notice of the impunity enjoyed by the department’s hired killers and urged a handful of trivial “reforms” upon the Metro Police.

Last year, Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie announced the creation of an enhanced Force Review process in which shootings would be examined by a panel composed of three officers and four Mundanes. Gillespie promised that the panel would be representative of the “community,” that it would have unfettered access to information, and that its deliberations would be transparent. However, that body has no authority to fire or discipline officers who engage in criminal violence against innocent people. Those decisions would be made by Sheriff Gillespie – as dictated by the PPA.

In late July and early August, six members of the Use of Force Board resigned in disgust after Gillespie refused to fire Officer Jacquar Rostson, who shot and seriously wounded an innocent man the previous November. In his appearance before the Board last April, Roston displayed the contemptuous arrogance one would expect from a member of the punitive caste, insisting that his actions were entirely appropriate, and defiantly promising that he would commit the same crime again under similar circumstances. The board unanimously recommended that Roston be fired.

When Roston attended a pre-termination hearing a month later, he made a ritualistic and patently insincere gesture of affected contrition. In an act of cheap grace, Gillespie said that Roston had suffered enough and imposed a week-long suspension.

This, in turn, led to the resignation of Board co-chairman Robert Martinez and five other members of the panel, including Assistant Sheriff Ted Moody.

“Why are we here?” asked former Board member Robert Le Piere, a retired police officer from New Jersey, describing Gillespie’s act in overturning their decision as “offensive.”

Running up the false flag 

The mass resignations from the Force Review Board presented another potentially huge PR problem for the Metro Police. Fortunately, its federally funded Counter-Terrorism Center had put a contingency plan into action at the same time the Roston controversy began last April – a false-flag operation involving the Regime’s preferred domestic enemy, the “Sovereign Citizens” movement.

For about a year, the Metro Police had been conducting surveillance on an ex-convict from California named David Allen Brutsche, a registered sex offender with six felonies on his record. In several traffic stops, Brutsche expressed hostility toward the police in language influenced by “Sovereign” ideology.

If there is a central casting agency for Homeland Security Theater operations – and, for all I know, there is one – Brutsche is someone who could have been built to its specifications. Last April, as the inquest into the Roston shooting got underway, Metro officers arrested him while he was selling water on the Strip. They then deposited him in a cell with a disreputable-looking specimen who played on Brutsche’s animosity toward the department.

Brutsche’s cellmate was Detective Scott R. Majewski, a fellow who is paid nearly $120,000 a year to keep political dissidents under surveillance and orchestrate what he has brazenly described as “theater” operations targeting them. Majewski’s LinkedIn profile boasts that he has “provided training nationally” in such areas as “domestic terrorism” and the use of “Confidential Informants.” It also prominently mentions his connections with the so-called Southern Poverty Law Center, a quasi-private political police and propaganda agency that indoctrinates law enforcement agencies about the supposed threat posed by political non-conformists.

When Brutsche was released from jail, Majewski offered to introduce him to others who shared “Sovereign” views – all of whom were police operatives as well. At some point, the group was expanded to include a 67-year-old woman named Devon Campbell Newman, whose role in this affair was to provide a “co-conspirator” who had no connection to the police force.

Over the next several months, Majewski and his comrades met with Brutsche and Newman thirty times, inflaming Brutsche’s already passionate resentment toward the Metro Police Force and manipulating him into participating in a police-orchestrated “plot” to kidnap officers, put them on trial, execute them, and dump their bodies in the desert.

This was a local adaptation of a familiar script used by the FBI in Homeland Security Theater operations targeting Muslims. Every element of the supposed plot to kidnap and murder police was devised by Majewski and his cohorts. Brutsche was reportedly receptive to the plan devised by the undercover operatives. Newman – an elderly lady who had never been in trouble with the police – would later claim that she wanted to extricate herself, but was afraid that either Brutsche or one of the others might kill her.

Shortly after the Roston inquest ended and the board resignations began, Majewski and a still-unidentified undercover operative decided to escalate the scripted “plot” to an operational phase.

On August 20, they summoned Brutsche and Newman to a meeting in abandoned warehouse that had been rented by the department. In a performance that merited Oscar consideration, the unnamed police operative denounced a recent police shooting and claimed that the victim was a fellow Sovereign. Playing a supporting role as a shill, Majewski insisted that there was no more time to wait – the kidnap-and-murder plan had to be put into effect.

Brutsche, significantly, came down with a case of cold feet. Newman, who was already terrified about her own welfare, was brow-beaten into saying that she would participate. That was enough to overcome Brutsche’s reluctance. As the two patsies left the warehouse, a SWAT team descended on them. A few hours later their grim and sullen mugshots were ubiquitous in media accounts describing how the Metro Police had infiltrated and disrupted a devious plot by “anti-government extremists” to abduct and murder police.

A typical news account drawing on Metro’s press releases following the arrest claimed that “Undercover Metro officers infiltrated the group … [and learned] of their detailed plans to `snatch and grab’ random police officers, try them for treason in a `sovereign’ court and execute them….”

All of this is a lie, of course: There was no “group” before Metro arrested Brutsche on a pretext and stuck him in a cell with Majewski, who was also the one who created the “detailed plans” as part of the false-flag op.

But such details mattered as little in the Metro-orchestrated homeland security theater production as they do in the department’s Potemkin police shooting reviews. The objective was to trigger an avalanche of melodramatic headlines – supplemented with appropriately alarming courtroom photos – describing a deadly plot against the heroic Metro Police,  and to associate criticism of the agency with a convicted child molester.

It won’t stay in Vegas

In every homeland security theater operation, the initial headlines about the foiled “plot” are stentorian, and subsequent corrections are issued sotto voce. The purported Las Vegas police murder conspiracy follows the standard formula: On September 25, the Clark County DA dropped all murder conspiracy charges against Brutsche and Newman, who now face a single count of conspiracy to commit kidnaping. 

This is a prelude to a plea agreement that will probably dispose of the case without the inconvenience of a trial that would expose the methods used by Majewski and his local troupe of Homeland Security Theater Players.

Here’s the murderous irony at the heart of this matter:

Las Vegas, like every other city, does face a lethal threat from people who consider themselves emancipated from the law and entitled to kill without accountability. Like the Sovereigns, those people speak in a specialized language that supposedly legitimizes their lawlessness, and that makes no obvious sense to rational people who don’t belong to their clique. The Las Vegas branch of this domestic terrorist movement maintains a fraudulent “court” where criminal actions, up to and including murder, are ratified. However, the crimes committed by that state-sanctioned terrorist syndicate are neither hypothetical, nor uncommon.

Speaking with reporters from the Clark County Jail, Brutsche observed, correctly, that police in Las Vegas are “terrorizing” people and warned that “if this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.” One objective of the Metro Police Department’s Soviet-grade psy-op was to put those words in the mouth of a convicted sex offender, in the expectation that people would revile the messenger, rather than examining the message on its merits. As long as Vegas residents are focusing on David Brutsche, they won’t remember the murderous crimes committed by Brian Yant, Bill Mosher, or other Metro Cops.

This cynical Homeland Security Theater production has played very well in Vegas, and there’s every reason to believe that the people responsible for it will soon take it on the road.

On June 3, 2011, a man wearing a ski mask hurled a crude, improvised stink bomb through an apartment window in Laguna Beach, California. The payload of that infernal device was butyric acid produced through fermentation of milk and cheese. Several people complained about the noxious odor, but nobody was hospitalized. On a garage door of the targeted building, the attacker spray-painted the demand, “Stalk someone else.”

Without any solid leads, and acting on rumors, the Laguna Beach PD dispatched a SWAT team a day later to raid the Rowland Heights, California home of Marilyn Injeyan, a 71-year-old retired schoolteacher. Her son, Vahan, was described as a “person of interest” – not a suspect, mind you — in the stink bomb attack, which through the dubious miracle of Homeland Security hyperbole had been transformed into a “domestic terrorism” incident.

The first of the intrepid heroes through the door at Injeyan’s home was Laguna PD Sergeant Robert Rahaeuser. Fearing that the 5-foot-3, 125-pound female septuagenarian posed a genuine threat to his safety, the valiant Sgt. Rahaeuser ordered that the terrified and compliant woman be seized and handcuffed. The officer who carried out that order yanked Injeyan’s arms behind her back with sufficient force to tear both of her rotator cuffs. The shock and trauma caused the elderly woman to urinate on herself, and she wasn’t permitted to clean herself up or change her clothes for nearly a half-hour. Vahan Injeyan, who was undergoing cancer treatment at the time, wasn’t injured, nor was he taken into custody.

Neither Injeyan nor her son was ever charged with a crime. Although the original “terrorist” attack drove five families to leave their homes temporarily, and caused substantial property damage, none of the victims suffered any lasting injury. Marilyn Injeyan, on the other hand, had to undergo two expensive surgeries to repair her shoulders.

A few months after being assaulted by police in an entirely unjustified raid, Mrs. Injeyan filed a $290,000 damage claim with the City of Laguna Beach – an impressively modest amount, given the expenses incurred to the victim as a result of grotesque police overkill. After that claim was rejected, Marilyn filed a federal lawsuit. The City responded with a motion for summary judgment on the basis of the spurious and all-sufficient doctrine of “qualified immunity.”

On September 11 of this year, US District Judge Beverly O’Connell validated an act of state terrorism by upholding Laguna Beach’s claim for immunity. O’Connell accepted the assertion that a SWAT raid targeting a “person of interest” in a stink bomb attack was a proportionate use of force, and that the sadistic treatment inflicted on a submissive 71-year-old woman “was objectively reasonable when judged from the perspective of an officer on the scene who was executing a search warrant in connection with a crime of violence.”

A more honest summary of the judge’s finding is this: The standard of “objective reasonableness” regarding the use of force is defined by the officer’s capacity for self-preoccupation and his innate cowardice. Since Robert Rahaeuser is the kind of person who soils himself in terror at the sight of a tiny, unarmed 71-year-old woman, it is therefore “objectively reasonable” to order that she be shackled and treated like a threat to that most precious of all things, “officer safety.”

In fact, according to Judge O’Connell, it’s not necessary that the actions of police in terrorizing or brutalizing innocent people be regarded as “reasonable.” Their “cloak of immunity” remains intact even when they act “maliciously and without probable cause,” she concluded.

Pusillanimity of this kind, although repellent, is commonplace among police officers. It is tirelessly abetted by the tax-engorged unions that represent them, and universally indulged by the municipal cliques that hire them. Judge O’Connell added another layer of vindictive privilege to this familiar ritual by ordering the elderly, impoverished victim of police abuse to pay the legal costs incurred by the government whose agent had assaulted her without legal cause or moral justification.

The claim that police exist to “serve and protect” the public is among the most perversely durable falsehoods in human history. Police cannot be held criminally or civilly liable for failing to protect individual citizens from criminal violence. They also enjoy expansive “qualified immunity” against civil and criminal claims arising from official conduct that results in the injury or death of innocent people. Legal precedents extending back at least six decades recognize that police officers are exempt from a common law “duty to care” for innocent members of the public, unless some documented “special relationship” exists between specific officers and individual citizens.

This perspective is perfectly reasonable once it is understood that the police aren’t a body of civilian peace officers, but rather members of a paramilitary occupation force employed by a municipal corporation. As attorney Joseph Kogel pointed out while defending a similarly constituted organization in federal court, people who carry out such a role aren’t liable for their actions because the duty of care has been “remove[d] … from the battlefield.”

Kogel made that argument before the US District Court for Eastern Virginia in October, 2008, while defending the military contractor CACI International in a lawsuit brought by Iraqi torture victims. CACI was employed by the Pentagon and the CIA to carry out imprisonment and interrogation of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.

In a lawsuit filed against CACI, former detainee Suhail Najim Abdullah al Shimari, who was seized in his home in November 2003, describes how he was held without charge or justification by CACI for more than four years.

During that time, he was subjected to electric shocks, endured frequent beatings, deprived of food and sleep, threatened with dogs, stripped and kept naked in his cell for extended periods, subjected to extremes of temperatures and sensory deprivation, and forced to watch as CACI contractors – including a spectacularly sadistic specimen named Timothy Dugan – abused other prisoners. On other occasions, Shimari was forced to stand on sharp stones until his feet bled.

CACI, which made tens of millions of dollars by imprisoning and torturing innocent Iraqis, has claimed that they enjoy “absolute immunity” from both criminal and civil liability.

Like the other “public-private partnerships” on which our modern fascist system has come to depend – beginning with the grand progenitor, the Federal Reserve – CACI can claim to be either a private corporation or a government entity, depending on present needs. As a private company, its operatives can’t be prosecuted for violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. As a subcontractor for the Executive Branch in a war zone they can claim that they are not subject to the jurisdiction of Article III courts.

During an October 2008 hearing, Kogel took refuge in tautology, asserting that “it is appropriate to extend the immunity enjoyed by military interrogators to [CACI’s] civilian interrogators because to do the contrary would deprive the government of the ability to delegate functions when it determines it’s appropriate to do so….[I]f contractors are exposed to tort suits, they will be either unwilling to perform those functions and that of course impairs the ability of the government to delegate functions or [the contractors] will perform them only under conditions that may not be in the government’s long-term interest.”

Briefly and more lucidly stated, CACI’s argument is that its employees can’t be held liable for committing the crime of torture, because this would foreclose the possibility of the government hiring more torturers in the future.

In June, the US District Court in Eastern Virginia formally dismissed the lawsuit against CACI. The corporation promptly demanded that its victims pay $15,580 in legal costs. In a legal motion that would be breathtakingly cynical had not such cynicism become commonplace, CACI accused the victims of failing to present their case – and then observed that “the United States, in its considered judgment, apparently views three of the Plaintiffs as sufficiently threatening to the security of the United States that it would not allow them into this country even long enough to sit for a deposition.”

The Regime used a similar argument in 2007 to prevent Maher Arar – a Canadian citizen rendered to Syrian custody to be tortured by Bashar al-Assad’s secret police – from coming to the U.S. to testify. It has used a variation on that argument to justify the continued imprisonment of innocent men at Guantanamo Bay who have been cleared to leave, but are being detained because of concerns that they may become “security risks” on account of the abuse they have endured.

Under the emerging definition of official immunity, a victim becomes a “security risk” merely by protesting the abuse he or she has suffered at the hands of the Regime’s operatives. This is true whether the abuse occurred at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, or the local police station.

Alicia Garafalo, a resident of Saratoga Springs, New York, attempted to file a complaint against an off-duty state trooper who allegedly assaulted her outside a tavern in 2009. Saratoga Springs police asked Garafalo to appear in court to sign a complaint against Trooper Kenneth Ahigian, whose brother Justin is part of the city’s police force. After she filed the complaint, state police rejected her claim – and two Saratoga Springs officers visited Garafalo’s workplace to issue a criminal citation for second-degree harassment and second-degree obstruction of governmental administration.

The abuse suffered by Garafalo, outrageous as it was, could be considered mild compared to the treatment inflicted on Monica Contreras. In August 2011, Contreras and her two-year-old daughter appeared in a Clark County, Nevada family court to respond to a petition for a protective order filed by her estranged husband. After hearing master Patricia Doninger dismissed the petition by Contreras’s husband, a court marshal named Ronald Fox ordered the very attractive young mother to accompany him into a witness room to undergo a drug search.

Disturbed by the prospect of being physically examined by a male stranger, Contreras requested that a female deputy conduct the search. What she didn’t know was that the “drug search” was a ploy by an opportunistic predator of a very common variety. After telling his victim that no female deputy was available, Fox sexually assaulted the terrified young mother by groping her intimate anatomy while making what were later described as “sexually abusive and harassing requests.”

When Fox was done with Contreras, she went back into the court to complain about her treatment. Fox then ordered that his victim be arrested for “making false allegations about a law enforcement officer.” That “offense” isn’t listed in any Nevada statute.

For several minutes, Fox and his gelatinous supervisor, James Kenyon, used the threat of an illegal arrest and the seizure of Contreras’s child in an attempt to extort a recantation of her accusation. When she refused, Kenyon handcuffed the weeping Contreras as her two-year-old daughter pleaded with him not to take her mother away.

“How could you do this to me?” Contreras pleaded as Doninger sat stolidly in the judge’s chair, pointedly ignoring the victim. “How could you watch? How could you watch?”

Contreras was taken to a holding cell where she was forced to undergo drug tests (which were negative). Her daughter was abducted by Child Protective Services and held for several hours before being released to the custody of her father. For several months, Contreras was allowed only to have limited and supervised visits with the hostage at a CPS-run facility.

The formal charges filed against Contreras by her abuser were “providing false information to a police officer” and “disturbing the peace.” They were dismissed in May 2012. By that time, the victim had filed an internal affairs complaint that led to an investigation that resulted in Fox’s termination by the Clark County Court System. Weep not for Ronald Fox: He has filed a legal motion for reinstatement, claiming that his termination violated “mandatory written procedures.”

The video of the August 2011 atrocity in Doninger’s courtroom is an amazing artifact, capturing as it does so many aspects of the compounded cruelty, corruption, and impunity that characterize the regime under which we live. Of particular note is the determined indifference displayed by Doninger as she sits with her back turned to the victim, conspicuously ignoring Contreras while playing with the two-year-old child who is about to be wrested, by force of arms, from her innocent mother.

Doninger is entirely representative of the robe-wearing functionaries who blithely issue no-knock SWAT raids now, and will, in all likelihood, soon be ratifying lethal drone strikes by police agencies. There’s no reason to believe that people of her ilk would scruple at ordering survivors of such summary executions to pay the expenses incurred in murdering their loved ones.

Madrigal, a resident of Idaho Falls, Idaho, was not a criminal suspect, nor had he been accused of a traffic violation. He and his wife Alissa were having a Saturday evening barbecue on August 31st to celebrate their daughter’s sixth birthday, and a woman who lives a block and a half away from their home called to complain about the noise. None of the family’s immediate neighbors was troubled by the festivities. Chantal Meek, a young mother who lives next door, had no complaints about the party, but was terrorized when two cops burst into her home with their guns drawn after Lund called for backup.

According to multiple witnesses on the scene, and a video record of the event, from the time Officer Lund arrived he was visibly hostile and suspicious.

“It was pretty clear he didn’t intend to leave without arresting somebody,” Alissa Madrigal told me when I visited the family’s home. “He and two other officers came right to our backyard. They never knocked on the front door – they just walked into the yard. Lund, who was the oldest of the three, stood off in the corner with his hand on his Taser the whole time, staring at Victor.”

Alissa’s name is on the lease to the home, and she tried to speak with the officers. This is in part because Victor, a retired professional baseball player from the Dominican Republic, still has occasional difficulty with English, and also because he has a deep, resonant voice that carries very well in the stillness of a late-summer evening. Alissa was also aware that Victor has a very negative opinion of the Idaho Falls Police Department, in large measure because of what he describes as routine harassment at their hands (such as a recent citation he received for driving without headlights – at about 7:00 on an August morning). But the officers repeatedly told Alissa that they wanted to speak to Victor, rather than to her.

“Victor has a loud voice, and since there were concerns about noise I wanted to be the one who interacted with the police,” Alissa told Pro Libertate. “But the officer who spoke with me kept saying, `I don’t want to talk to you, I want to talk to him’ – meaning Victor. I told them that we would turn down the music and be as quiet as possible. But it was obvious that the cops didn’t come to issue a citation. It seems that within minutes of arriving here they had decided that Victor was going to be arrested. And the older cop [Lund] had his hand on his Taser practically from the moment he walked into our backyard.”

The announcement that the Madrigals would receive a citation for disturbing the peace prompted Victor to unleash an admittedly vulgar expression to express his frustration. Rather than trying to maintain the peace and de-escalate the situation – which is how a peace officer would have responded – Lund treated Victor to a racially charged taunt.

“If you don’t like it, you know how to leave,” sneered Lund, a comment that was not merely unprofessional but an unambiguous provocation. Several of the guests criticized Lund’s remark, some of them pointing out that Madrigal is a U.S. citizen (he was naturalized in 2007) and had every right to be where he was.

At that point, Lund announced he was leaving, and Mr. Madrigal said he was glad to see him go. According to several witnesses I interviewed, it was after Lund had ended his investigative contact that he called for backup, removed his Taser from the over-burdened belt straining to contain his tax-fattened girth, and demanded that Madrigal show his ID. As Madrigal moved to comply Lund responded by bellowing that Madrigal was “under arrest.”

According to the official account, Lund and his comrades were obstructed by a “blockade” as they tried to follow Victor into the living room, and Dindo supposedly shoved Lund as he pursued his brother. A video of the incident documents that nobody obstructed the police when they illegally invaded the Madrigal residence, nor did Dindo – or anybody else- shove Officer Lund, who was the first through the door.

“I was inside the house, and too far away to touch Lund,” Dindo recounted to Pro Libertate. “I was shot in the back with the Taser, and hit the floor face-down. How could that have happened if I had been facing him and pushing him?”

There were more than a dozen guests – including several small children – at the Madrigal home at the time of the police riot. On his way inside the house, Lund made a threatening gesture to Sara Horne, a young mother holding a newborn baby in her lap. One witness recalled that Lund “made like he was going to back-hand” the terrified woman. Horne told me that Lund pointed his flashlight and Taser into her face.

Maria Madrigal, the brothers’ 79-year-old mother, had been sleeping before the police surged into the home. Summoned by loud noises, Maria came into the living room to find Dindo on the ground and Victor in handcuffs with a Taser in his face. Concerned for her sons’ safety yet displaying eerie composure, Maria repeatedly reached out to calm and reassure Victor and Dindo. One of the officers guarding Victor shoved Maria in the chest.

“Don’t push my mother!” exclaimed Victor, instinctively rising to his feet to defend. As he did so, his head made incidental contact with one of the officers assaulting him. That act would later be described as “battery on an officer.”

Letty Hernandez, a pregnant mother, was also shoved by an officer – most likely Lund – just before a Taser was fired a few inches from her face. As she was knocked to the floor, her abdomen struck the corner of a couch. After paramedics arrived, Letty was told that she should go to the hospital for an examination. To minimize expenses – since her family doesn’t have health insurance — she drove herself to the emergency room.

On the Monday following the police riot, Letty called the department to find out how the medical expenses would be dealt with. She was brusquely informed that she should be abjectly grateful that she wasn’t arrested, like her husband who had “interfered” with the police. Letty’s husband, Miguel, was not arrested that evening. Like their comrades elsewhere, police in Idaho Falls aren’t fastidious about such details.

The initial police contact – to investigate a noise complaint, recall – occurred at around 10:49 PM. Within about twenty minutes, the air was thick with shouting and screaming, and a fleet of about a dozen police cars had converged on the address. Lund’s attack on Dindo left the living room floor filled with shattered furniture. So in the interests of preserving the “peace,” Lund and his costumed buddies assaulted two unresisting men, committed felonious battery on a 79-year-old woman and a pregnant mother, destroyed property, terrorized a completely innocent next-door neighbor, and disrupted an entire city block.

Dindo was charged with resisting and obstructing an officer. Victor was likewise charged with resisting arrest, as well as battery on an officer. Their grim mugshots were prominently displayed on the local Sunday Evening News, along with a police-provided summary asserting that Victor “began yelling and swearing” the moment police arrived. The local ABC affiliate claimed that the brothers had been arrested “in a fight with police.”

“I didn’t struggle with the police at all,” Victor told Pro Libertate. “I was sitting on the couch with my hands behind my back, saying, `Here, go ahead’ — and you can see in the video that I’m not resisting. Dindo was facing away from the officer when he was tazed. The only time I didn’t cooperate was when one of them shoved my mother, and all I did was stand up and say, `Don’t push my mother.’”

Within a few days of the assault on their home, the Madrigals were able to post unedited video of most of the episode on-line. They were also able to get at least a portion of their story into the local press.

“We have a friend who contacted the Post-Register and persuaded them to send a reporter to come and interview us, as well as our neighbors,” Alissa explained to me.

“It was never that invasive,” said neighbor Chantal Meek, referring to the noise from the birthday party. “I’m 20 feet from where they were outside.” However, she did regard as “invasive” the actions of the two Idaho Falls police officers who barged into her home with their guns drawn after Lund had called for backup.

Amanda Saxton, another witness who was visiting a next-door neighbor on the night of the party, also told the Post-Register that she had her door open “and didn’t hear anything that would justify a noise complaint.” According to Saxton, “Victor came over and invited our kids over [to the party]. They seem nice.”

After the Post-Register published its report, Idaho Falls Police Chief Mark McBride demanded space on the opinion page to reiterate the discredited official account – and to traduce the Madrigal family by repeating unsubstantiated gossip as if it were actual evidence.

Chief McBride claimed that the “regular activities” at the Madrigal home include “loud music, yelling, shouting, arguing and fighting until late hours of the night all summer long” – something denied by both the family’s immediate neighbors, and the Madrigals themselves.

“We had three parties this summer, all of them for children’s birthdays,” Victor pointed out to me.

“I work two jobs, and so does Victor,” added Alissa. “I’m rarely home during the weekends, and during the weeknights we have no time for the kind of parties they claim go on here all the time.”

If those parties went on all summer long, why didn’t the police receive a complaint prior to August 31st? According to McBride, the neighbor who spoke to him “never reported any of these parties because of fear of retaliation.”

During my September 13 visit to the Madrigal home, the family hosted a large number of neighbor kids – happy, well-dressed, well-behaved children from good homes presided over by responsible parents who obviously would not send their children to a house filled with angry, violent people of the kind depicted in McBride’s dishonest little screed.

According to McBride, “officers have the authority to make an arrest for a public offense committed in their presence and to use the force necessary to affect [sic – he’s a police officer, after all, and therefore a stranger to literacy] the arrest. Running into one’s house or into a crowd does not prevent the arrest. People and things usually get knocked around when the arrest is made.”

What was the “public offense” that supposedly justified that armed incursion? Recall that Lund had said he was leaving before he returned to arrest Madrigal, who – according to every non-police witness present — was complying with the unjustified demand to produce ID. It wasafter he turned to leave that Lund called for backup and drew his Taser. All of this happened after Victor Madrigal, replying to Lund’s statement that he was going, said, in a conversational voice: “All right, then – go.”

Prior to this, Lund had made a deliberately antagonistic remark to Victor that had an unmistakable racial subtext. In an interview with the Post-Register McBride claimed: “There was [sic, again] no racial comments made in the video until they [the Madrigals and guests] brought it up.” Calling this assessment disingenuous is an act of tremendous generosity. Like his minion Clark Lund, Chief McBride is bright enough to recognize what it means to tell a large brown man with an exotic accent that he doesn’t belong in Idaho Falls.

“Idaho Falls police officers are not racist,” McBride insisted in his op-ed column. “We are biased against crime and disorder. We have a responsibility to the citizens of Idaho Falls to keep the community free from crime and disorder.”

Chantal Meek, the neighbor who was terrorized in her home by armed strangers carrying out that sacred “responsibility,” offers a very different perspective.

“I don’t see why race wouldn’t be an issue with the police,” she told the Post-Register. Referring to Victor and Delosanto, Meek observed that they “are obviously not from Idaho. I think it was uncalled for.”

According to McBride, an official review board ruled that the actions of Lund and his comrades were appropriate. The board somehow reached that conclusion without interviewing any of the witnesses to the incident.

It is entirely possible that the actions of Lund and his comrades were not motivated by racial bigotry, but by a different form of tribalism — the shared conceit that as members of the punitive caste they are entitled to slap down impudent Mundanes for the grievous offense commonly called “contempt of cop.”

If the woman is suspected of a non-violent crime, and wasn’t cooperative when police arrested her, are we permitted to conclude that she “had it coming”? Are police officers entitled to dispense summary punishment, or retaliatory violence, against uncooperative suspects?

On August 10, Christina West of Tallahassee, Florida – who was under the influence of alcohol and painkillers — drove her car off a road and into a house. Officers Christopher Ormerod and Matthew Schmidt arrived to investigate the crash. After West performed poorly on several sobriety tests, she was handcuffed and placed in a police car. The 44-year-old woman was so small that she managed to slip out of the cuffs, and when the officers attempted to shackle her again she refused to cooperate.

This led to an incident that – after being fed through the Regime’s euphemism-generation filter — was described in the media as a “struggle,” rather than an act of gang violence.

As recounted in Ormerod’s official report, “West aggressively resisted by kicking her leg behind her and striking Officer Schmidt in the leg.” That action was violent, but resistance, by strict definition, cannot be “aggressive.”

Ormerod and West then “lifted West off the car so that she could be laid on the ground to prevent her kicking.” While she was being hoisted into the air, West fired a desperate kick behind her that, according to Ormerod, hit him in the genitals.

Since he is a police officer, we can assume that the target was quite small, which means that West’s uncanny aim belied her intoxicated condition. Ormerod explains that he and Schmidt then “pulled” West “to the ground so that she was laying [sic] on her stomach,” an action that somehow resulted in the woman suffering severe contusions and broken bones in her face.

Ormerod’s austere description doesn’t do justice to the actual event, as captured in the dashcam video. The officer can be heard snarling: “Don’t you f***ing touch me!” before slamming West’s face into the side of a police car, and then onto the pavement.

In his daintily-worded report, the officer carefully omitted mention of that outburst, which demonstrated that by face-planting West he was engaged in retaliation or summary punishment, rather than an attempt to control a suspect. He described the victim’s reaction to the assault as “screaming in rage and violently grasping with her hands at me” in what he described as an attempt “to grab for my genital area” – without mentioning that this happenedafter he and Schmidt had gang-tackled the woman and slammed her face into the concrete.

When West complained about the injury to her face, her uniformed assailant dismissively

replied: “You’re fine.”

A total of six officers eventually arrived to deal with the bloodied 5 foot six-inch, 130-pound woman. An examination at a local hospital revealed that West – far from being “fine” — had a broken orbital bone around her right eye.

Despite the fact that West’s face was wrecked, and her assailants were unscathed, the victim was charged with “battery on a law enforcement officer” and “aggravated assault on an officer.” Those charges were dropped, but the Tallahassee PD insists that tag-team face-planting of the partially handcuffed woman was “appropriate.”

It’s worth noting that Ormerod was previously cleared by the department after using a Taser to punish a teenager who had stepped in front of the officer’s patrol vehicle. When the officer yelled at the 15-year-old to be more careful, the teenager fled into his home. Rather than leaving well enough alone, Ormerod – no doubt out of zeal for the youngster’s safety – pursued the teenager into the house, tasered him, and then arrested him for resisting arrest.

This peculiar form of solicitude for citizen “safety” appears to be commonplace within Florida’s law enforcement caste. A similar display of concern by Florida Trooper Dan Cole left a 19-year-old woman in a persistent vegetative state.

Danielle Maudsley was arrested in September 2011 after fleeing from the scene of two accidents. Cole handcuffed Maudsley and took her to an FHP station in Pinellas Park. While the trooper filled out some paperwork, Maudsley – who was handcuffed but not secured – dashed out of the building. Cole gave pursuit for as long as his level of conditioning permitted, which apparently was no longer than two or three seconds. Despite the fact that he was within tackling distance of Maudsley, Cole drew his Taser and shot her in the back.

The Taser strike felled the 19-year-old woman, causing her to spin one hundred eighty degrees,  then fall backwards and hit her head on the concrete sidewalk. A dashcam video captured the entire incident, including the percussive, brittle sound of Maudsley’s head colliding with concrete.

“I can’t get up,” Maudsley gasped – the last words she will ever speak. She immediately lapsed into a coma. The injury left her brain-dead, as insensible as the tax-fattened clod who left her in that condition.

During the official inquiry, Cole insisted that it was necessary to use a Taser because “she was already outrunning me” and had to be stopped before she could dash into traffic – where, presumably, she could suffer an injury that might leave her brain-dead. This might have been prevented had the officer – who outweighed the slender girl by the better part of two hundred pounds — been willing to break a sweat.

“Tell me that’s not excessive force,” protested Cheryl Maudsley, the victim’s mother. “I’m not saying she was an angel, but she didn’t deserve that. He couldn’t reach out and grab her? He was an arm’s length away.”

Going “hands-on,” however, posed unacceptable risks, Cole protested during an official inquiry by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

“I [couldn't] just jump on her,” Cole maintained. “I’m three times her weight. If we go down, one or both of us is going to get hurt. The Taser is the intermediate weapon of choice.”Although routinely described as a “non-lethal” alternative to firearms, the Taser is regarded as a deadly weapon when it is seized by a criminal suspect and used against a police officer. Assuming that it is properly described as an “intermediate” option in the use-of-force continuum, Cole’s decision to employ it against a tiny, handcuffed, non-violent misdemeanor suspect is an unmistakable violation of the guidelines contained in the Florida Highway Patrol’s policy manual.

Use of a Taser (referred to as a Conducted Electrical Weapon, or CEW) by a trooper, the manual states, is appropriate only in dealing with a suspect who “(a) Has the apparent ability to physically threaten the [officer] or others; or, (b) Is preparing or attempting to flee or escape. (NOTE: Fleeing cannot be the sole reason for deployment of the CEW).” (Emphasis in the original.)

The manual also dictates that “Unless exigent circumstances exist, members shall not use the device in the following situations: (a) In a punitive or coercive manner;(b) On a handcuffed or secured prisoner.”

While Maudsley was obviously not “secured,” she was handcuffed. Cole’s laziness or lack of conditioning did not constitute an “exigent” circumstance. His Taser use was punitive, not defensive. Despite the fatal consequences to a non-violent offender who posed no threat to anybody, Cole – an amalgam of arrogance and adipose tissue — defiantly told the inquiry that he would do exactly the same thing in the future under the same circumstances. After reviewing the incident, both the Florida Highway Patrol and the Florida State Department of Law Enforcement concurred with Cole, ruling that his actions – though a violation of established guidelines — were “justified,” as they almost always are.

Despite the fact that she suffered terribly at the hands of Officers Ormerod and Schmidt, Christina West was spared a life-ending injury of the kind inflicted on Danielle Maudsley – something that could have happened very easily when her unprotected head was driven into the pavement by two large males. Although the injury to West’s right eye was considerable, she’s still able to see.

Monique Hernandez of Beaumont, California wasn’t nearly as fortunate: As a result of her encounter with Police Officer Enoch Clark, will never see her ten-year-old daughter again.

On February 21, 2012, Clark conducted a traffic stop involving Hernandez after receiving a call about a domestic dispute involving two of her relatives. According to witnesses, Hernandez’s sister got into a fight with her boyfriend during a child custody exchange. When the boyfriend attacked the young woman, Hernandez intervened to protect her sister, then fled with the woman and her 2-year-old daughter.

After Officer Clark arrived, he demanded that Hernandez undergo a sobriety test – then claimed that the Breathalyzer unit had malfunctioned. When Hernandez asked about the test results, Clark ordered her to shut up, then he slammed her head against the hood of his car. After yanking one of the uncooperative victim’s arms behind her back, the officer pulled out a “non-lethal” JPX device – a weapon that uses a gunpowder charge to fire a stream of pepper spray at roughly 400 miles an hour – and fired it at her head.The JPX weapon is designed for use at a distance of 6 to 15 feet, and training presentations depict it being used against armed targets. Promotional literature for the JPX weapon – which isn’t categorized as a firearm, because it doesn’t fire a projectile – boasts of “devastating stopping power.”

The payload of weaponized OC spray is propelled over the prescribed distance at less than three one-hundredths of a second, making it “too fast to avoid…. The effect is immediate; there is no chance to resist.”

Clark’s attorney insists that the officer’s attack was justified in order “to gain compliance and in defense of his person.” The JPX is not designed to induce “compliance,” but rather to incapacitate a targeted person at a distance. Clark – who was armed and wearing body armor — fired it into Hernandez’s temple from less than a foot away, blowing apart her right eye and leaving the left with severe, irreparable damage.

Anyone who had undergone rudimentary training with the JPX would understand that the weapon should not be fired directly into the head or face of a non-violent suspect. Clark’s actions demonstrated that his intention was not to gain “compliance,” but rather to inflict summary street punishment for “contempt of cop.”

Hernandez was taken to the hospital and never charged with an offense. Following an investigation by the county Sherriff’s office, a grand jury indicted Clark on four felony charges: Assault under color of authority, assault with a less lethal weapon, use of force causing severe bodily injury, and assault with force likely to cause severe bodily injury.

Clark, who was chairman of the local police union, was initially placed on administrative leave, and then quietly fired by the department. With the help of the most tenacious defense attorneys the police union can afford, Clark has filed a series of dilatory motions and has yet to stand trial.

Neither the presiding judge nor the DA’s office has displayed an abundance of zeal to see Clark prosecuted for a sadistic crime of violence against an innocent woman. But this is to be expected. Any time a woman is left disfigured, disabled, or dead as a result of state-authorized violence, the official view is that the victim must have done something to deserve what she received.

As it happens, the valiant men of the Pine Bluff, Arkansas Police Department’s SWAT team were equal to that task. That’s why 107-year-old Monroe Isadore was killed in a torrent of gunfire on the evening of September 7.

“It was a lot,” one witness told KHTV news, referring to the number of shots fired by the SWAT team in the home where Isadore had holed up. “I can’t even count on my hands.” Another witness said that at least thirty rounds had been fired during the fatal fusillade.

Isadore reportedly fired a couple of desultory shots at the SWAT operators who inserted a tear gas grenade into the house, and then a few more after the entry team flung a flash-bang grenade into the bedroom. Pauline Lewis, who owns the home where Isadore was killed, told reporters that the police “didn’t have a choice but to shoot him after they had put teargas in and everything. He refused and he shot first.”

That “choice” was a result of the SWAT team’s preference for escalation, rather than containment.

Isadore allegedly pointed a pistol at Lewis and another housemate after Lewis – who had allowed the old man to live there for a few weeks – suggested that he should find another apartment. By the time police arrived, Lewis and her friend were no longer in danger. This was not a hostage situation, and the 107-year-old suspect was not a threat to engage in a killing spree. There was no reason why the SWAT team couldn’t simply lock down the house, and wait out the suspect – apart from the fact that tactical officers are trained to deal with such situations as military engagements that end when the “enemy” is “taken out.”

SWAT teams attract people with an appetite for kicking ass, preferably in situations involving minimal risk. Where real danger exists – as at Columbine, for example – SWAT operators will be judicious to the point of paralysis, dithering and equivocating until the shooter has sated his depraved appetite and taken his own life. Charging a bedroom occupied by a mentally unbalanced 107-year-old armed with a small-caliber pistol is a task better suited to the skill set and valor of the typical SWAT team.

Long before its SWAT team brought a needlessly bloody end to its standoff with Monroe Isadore, the Pine Bluff PD had displayed a propensity for overkill. For example: In April 2012, Officer Anthony Brown, who was assigned as a school “resource officer” at Jack Robey Junior High School, unleashed a chemical barrage to clear a hallway when students were a bit sluggish in returning to class after lunch.

Three students were sent to the hospital with respiratory problems. The mace assault would have been treated as a terrorist attack had it been committed by a Mundane. Officer Brown was “punished” by being docked eight hours’ pay. Neither Brown nor any of the other three Pine Bluff cops assigned as “school resource officers” had any specialized training for that role. This helps explain why his instinctive response to trivial adolescent defiance was to deploy a chemical weapon.

A few years ago, a Pine Bluff officer moonlighting as a security guard at a local big box retail store attacked and arrested a handicapped shopper named Scott Mouser, then charged him with “obstructing governmental operations” for being insufficiently submissive during the assault. The man had forgotten his cane and provoked the officer’s suspicion by using a shopping cart to assist him while shopping.

In addition to being a danger to the public it supposedly serves, the Pine Bluff PD in recent years has been at war with itself.

Tolstoy famously said that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. In a similar vein it could be said that every corrupt and abusive police department – the only variety on offer, as it happens – has its own distinctive form of institutional dysfunction. Police culture encourages a pathological sense of entitlement, and in the case of Pine Bluff that tendency appears to have catalyzed latent ethnic antagonisms.

Apparently, nobody employed by the Pine Bluff PD can be fired without immediately filing a civil rights lawsuit alleging various forms of invidious discrimination. Those lawsuits provide a fascinating composite portrait of an organization that seethes with racial resentments, percolates with petty political intrigues – and offers no evidence of being populated by the kind of judicious, disciplined people capable of waiting out a 107-year-old barricaded suspect.

Pine Bluff is an impoverished town of 47,000 people that punches well above its weight where crime is concerned. About 75 percent of the population is black, and a little more than 21 percent are white. Until the administration of former Chief Brenda M. Jones, those proportions were roughly reversed. Jones was fired earlier this year by newly installed Mayor Debe Hollingsworth, and promptly filed a lawsuit claiming that she was “discriminated against on account of her race and sex, and in retaliation for having opposed discriminatory practices.”

During her nearly three-year tenure as Pine Bluff Police Chief, Jones narrates in her lawsuit, “The percentage of white officers decreased from 75% to 52% … which caused animosity and racial resentment amongst some of the white officers … chiefly amongst them Chris Powell, who served as President of the Police Officers Benevolent Association (PBA).”

Last year, Powell’s union approved a no-confidence vote on Jones, which obviously did nothing to endear him with the chief. Powell also publicly supported the mayoral candidacy of Hollingsworth, who was “one of two white candidates running for mayor, out of a field of approximately nine candidates, the rest of whom were African-American.”

Taking advantage of a crowded field and a divided “African-American” turnout, Hollingsworth was elected with a little less than half of the votes that were cast – and in her first official act as Mayor, she fired Jones. According to the ex-Chief, this was done in the interest of appeasing “many of the white officers employed by the Pine Bluff Police Department, and much to the satisfaction of Chris Powell.”

Powell was also fired earlier this year after an internal investigation concluded that he had sexually harassed and intimated a young female police recruit named Keyonna Penister. Shortly thereafter, Powell – in keeping with local customs – filed a civil rights lawsuit alleging that he was the victim of race and sex discrimination. Powell claims that he was the victim of a racist conspiracy “to violate [his] constitutional rights … including his right to be free from discrimination based upon his sex of male, and race of white.”

According to Powell’s version of events, Miss Penister falsely accused him of sexual harassment as part of a plot carried out by then-Chief Jones and Assistant Chief Kelvin Sergeant. This was allegedly done “for the sole purpose of punishing him because of his support [for] Mayor Hollingsworth and because he was white.”

The harassment complaint “was first investigated by Lt. Joann Bates[,] a white female who was assigned to the internal investigation unit and she did not sustain the complaint,” claims Powell. “A second investigation was conducted by two Deputy Police Chiefs who were African-American and not assigned to the internal investigation unit as required by Police Department policy.” Powell insists that “The City of Pine Bluff systematically excluded whites from the Review Committee” created to conduct the second investigation of Penister’s charge.

Powell asserts that the decision to fire him was “arbitrary and capricious… and a motivating factor was [his] race and gender…..” He also claims to be the victim of disparate treatment, because “Black members of the Pine Bluff Police Department who have committed sexual harassment have not been terminated.” Among them, allegedly, are Ivan Whitfield, an assistant Chief of Police, and Officer Ed Johnson, who “was not terminated” despite supposedly conducting an affair while on the clock. Powell also claims that a black officer named Treadwell “threatened other officers and was not fired,” that Officer Billy Bradley “was arrested and found guilty of DWI, leaving the scene of an accident, and making a false statement and was only suspended; and that Lt. James Golden remains on the payroll despite being found “drinking on duty.”

Pine Bluff Police Chief John Howell, who was fired by then-Mayor Carl Redus in Mach 2010, filed his own lawsuit the day after he lost his job. Howell insists that Redus fired him in a fit of incoherent rage when the Chief expressed concerns about a proposed gun turn-in program in which police would void traffic tickets on behalf of citizens who surrendered their firearms. Powell also claims that Redus improperly intervened in criminal cases, sometimes to the extent of questioning witnesses before allowing them to talk to the police.

Redus claimed that he fired Howell for insubordination. The ex-chief described the termination as an act of age and race discrimination – and said that by choosing Brenda Jones, a 48-year-old black single mother, Redus validated that claim.

Howell’s suit was dismissed by a federal judge in December 2010. While Powell and Jones continue to pursue their lawsuits, the office they once held is occupied by Jeff Hubanks, who was lured out of retirement by Mayor Hollingsworth.

The Mayor introduced Hubanks “to a cheering crowd of police officers, many of whom had waited in the parking lot of the civic center for more than an hour,” reported the Pine Bluff Commercial. Powell – who at the time hadn’t yet been shown the door – exulted that by firing Jones and appointing Hubanks, Mayor Hollingsworth had demonstrated that “the era of tyranny is over.”

Hubanks was warmly embraced by his troops, but the public has legitimate cause for concern: Before retiring as a Lieutenant, Hubanks served as commander of the department’s SWAT team for more than a decade. At least some of the operators who carried out the execution of 107-year-old Monroe Isadore were probably selected and trained by him. Once merely dysfunctional, the Pine Bluff PD has become downright deadly.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi recently deployed the “It’s for the children” trope in a debate that she had – and lost – with her five-year-old grandson over the impending war with Syria. Since the child has not yet been processed through the government mind-laundry, he retained both his native intelligence and his natural impatience for obvious evasion. He also displayed a more mature understanding of ethics than his grandmother.

According to Pelosi’s account of the conversation, the child asked her if she favored war in Syria. Seeking refuge in circumlocution, Pelosi tried to brush off the question by replying, “We’re not talking about war; we’re talking about action.” The child, who apparently knew that the “action” being discussed would entail killing people, persisted through Pelosi’s persiflage: Did she support war with Syria? Pelosi again tried to deflect the question, this time by turning it back on the child by asking what he would do.

“I think no war,” was his reported reply.

In desperation, Pelosi unleashed the most potent weapon in her rhetorical arsenal – the “Bomb-the-children-to-save-the children” argument.

“I said, `Well, I generally agree with that, but you know, they’ve killed hundreds of children there,’” Pelosi recalled in a brief statement to reporters on the White House lawn. “And he said, `Were these children in the United States?’ And I said, `No, but they’re children wherever they are.’”

America’s political class is thickly populated with thinly educated people, and in that dismal company, Nancy Pelosi has always distinguished herself through her sheer stupidity. She is so incurably dense that she shared this story in the belief that it offered a compelling display of wisdom – rather than the pitiable spectacle of a policymaker losing a debate over geopolitics to her five-year-old grandson.

That child, displaying an intellectual acuity not possessed by his famous grandmother, instinctively drilled down to a question she and her comrades cannot answer: Quo warranto? By what supposed authority would the US government make war on Syria to deal with atrocities committed against children living in that country? 

Pelosi is famously disdainful of the idea that the U.S. Constitution imposes limits of any kind on federal action. Her platitudinous response to her grandson’s insightful and incisive question seems to assume that the US government has universal jurisdiction over mistreatment of children everywhere. One unspoken corollary is that the same government has unqualified authority to abuse and slaughter children in order to achieve its objectives.

At least for now, Syria seems to be the geographic limit of Pelosi’s exquisite sensitivity regarding the suffering of children overseas.  Her concern crested just to the west of Iraq, where more than a million children have died from violence inflicted by the government that has employed Pelosi since 1987.

No recorded examples exist of Pelosi expressing anguish over the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children who perished in anguish from starvation and disease as a result of the US-inflicted embargo that lasted from 1991 to 2003. Pelosi’s silence about that atrocity tacitly ratifies the assessment of her fellow humanitarian warmonger, Madeleine Albright, who blithely told 60 Minutes that the extermination of a half-million or more Iraqi children was a suitable price to pay in order to “punish” Saddam Hussein.

Pelosi has likewise been silent about the ongoing horrors experienced by the children of Fallujah, an Iraqi city that was pulverized by the US military in 2004 as retaliation for the killing of a handful of Blackwater mercenaries.  That onslaught included widespread use of chemical munitions in the form of white phosphorous rounds and ammunition made with depleted uranium. Those, too, are chemical weapons, unless the relevant sections of the periodic table have been revised to suit the interests of the Exceptional Nation.

The collective punishment of Fallujah for defying the illegal occupation of Iraq was an atrocity of Stalinist magnitude, and that punishment continues today as the city witnesses an unprecedented increase in the rate of pediatric cancer and birth defects, such as spina bifida, heart problems, and inexplicable deformities. Medical researchers believe that this is a result of persistent elevated levels of lead, mercury, and uranium from the onslaught.

It appears that Fallujah’s victims constitute another exception to Pelosi’s axiom that “children are children wherever they are.” The same is true of Pakistani, Yemeni, and Afghan children who have been annihilated through US drone strikes. For Pelosi they are small lives, of little consequence.

Not a syllable of condemnation has escaped Pelosi’s lips regarding her president’s murder of 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was obliterated by a drone-fired missile just weeks after Mr. Obama murdered his father, Anwar al-Awlaki.

If Abdul al-Awlaki had been a Syrian teenager killed by the government of Bashar al-Assad, Pelosi might have taken notice of the crime. When committed by her Dear Leader, however, such extra-judicial killings are considered commendable by Pelosi, who doesn’t think that the Regime needs even to acknowledge killing U.S. citizens.

“People just want to be protected,” warbled Pelosi when asked about summary execution of US citizens by drone strikes. “And I saw that when we were fighting them on surveillance, the domestic surveillance. People just want to be protected. [They’ll say] `You go out there and do it. I’ll criticize you, but I want to be protected.’”

Pelosi’s logic – if that word can be tortured into applying here – dictates that it is sometimes necessary to “fight” Americans to “protect” them — even if it means “protecting” them to death. That’s a serviceable summation of her position regarding Syria: She’s willing to bomb Syrian children in order to protect them, too. Although Pelosi’s views won’t withstand the scrutiny of her five-year-old grandson, they do display a certain deranged consistency.

At some point within the last decade or so, American police adopted a modified version of the Assyrian model of law enforcement. This helps to explain why it is now considered permissible for a police officer to assault an uncooperative but non-violent pregnant woman.

Rochester, New York Police Officer Lucas Krull was recently captured on videoassaulting a 21-year-old expectant mother named Brenda Hardaway, who had allegedly interfered with the arrest of her 16-year-old brother, Romengeno.

Police claim that they had arrived at the house to investigate a “disturbance” involving several people in the neighborhood. By the time they arrived, the fight – assuming that one had taken place – had dissipated. Rather than making sure nobody was hurt and then leaving, the police claimed that “tumultuous behavior” justified their involvement.

That “behavior” consisted of 16-year-old Romengeno calmly asserting his rights by refusing to speak to a police officer and denying him consent to come onto his property. The government-employed gangster replied by snarling that the young man was a “smartass” and placing his hands violently on the teenager. That provoked his sister to come to his defense. Krull claims that Brenda grabbed a can of pepper spray and ordered the police to leave.

That’s when Krull escalated the incident by assaulting Brenda. As Krull threw her up against a vehicle, Brenda cried out, “Get off of me, you’re going to kill my baby” just seconds before the officer punched the woman in the back of the head and hurled her face-first to the ground. In the video, the victim is heard moaning, “My baby, oh my baby” as the officer continues his assault, kneeing her in the back and forcing her to put weight on her stomach.

Rochester PD Chief James Sheppard defended the actions of his trained simian, praising him for using “tremendous restraint.” He blamed Miss Hardaway for the assault she suffered, and described the blow to the back of her head as a “distractionary” strike. “When we receive resistance from an individual, we may strike you in a way that changes your channel, so to speak,” the chief smugly explained. “In a way that changes your resistance.”

And when this tactic fails to subdue a pregnant woman, the Assyrian mercenaries under Sheppard’s supervision feel entitled to throw her face-down onto a sidewalk.

Romengeno was charged with two counts of disorderly conduct and a single count of resisting arrest. Miss Hardaway was booked on several charges, including felonious assault on a law enforcement officer.

It’s worth remembering that all of this was supposedly justified because the police were dealing with “tumultuous behavior” – that is, the impermissible offense called “contempt of cop.”

This is not the first occasion on which a Rochester Police Officer has inflicted gratuitous violence on a pregnant woman. In an earlier incident, a young pregnant girl was kneed in the stomach by one of three Rochester Police Officers who were restraining her during an arrest. The assailant had just been informed that the victim was an expectant mother – which apparently prompted him to target her for a blow to the abdomen.

A pregnant mother and an elderly woman were collateral victims in yet another episode involving “tumultuous” behavior. In April of last year, three Rochester cops swarmed and beat an innocent 25-year-old man named Jose Lugo, who was hospitalized after being subjected to “distractionary strikes.”

Lugo was walking on a street near the home where he had lived for several years when a Rochester police cruiser suddenly screeched to a halt next to him and decanted three officers – Kevin Flanagan, Joel Hasper, and Richard Doran – who seized the bemused young man and started to drag him away.

When Lugo asked why he was being abducted, the assailants threw him to the ground, kicked him, beat him, and tasered him at least three times.  The thugscrum expanded to fifteen as reinforcements arrived. Lugo’s aunt, Annette Velzquez, pleaded with the officers to stop beating her nephew, then informed themthat she was going to call Chief Sheppard, whom she had met while working in the local school district. Backup officer Benjamin Mitchell responded by shoving Velazquez, stealing her cell phone, pepper-spraying her, and arresting her. A pregnant mother and an elderly mother were also attacked by Mitchell or his comrades.

While Lugo was in the hospital – where he was kept under armed guard by the gang that had inflicted his injuries — he was charged with “assaulting” the armed bullies who had put him there. This follows long-established procedure: Any time a police officer goes “hands-on” with an innocent victim, the victim is charged with a crime to consecrate the laying-on of hands as a ministration of official justice, rather than an act of criminal violence. Lugo had to endure six months of expensive and unnecessary legal harassment before being acquitted of the spurious charges.

Raven Dozier of DeKalb County, Georgia was likewise charged with a crime after she and her then-unborn child were assaulted by a police officer. Dozier, who was nine months pregnant, was present when police arrived to deal with a domestic dispute between her brother and his girlfriend. She had actually been urging her brother to cooperate with the officers – until the point at which they threw him to the ground, attacked him with “distractionary strikes,” and tasered him.

“He’s on the ground!” Dozier cried in horror. “You don’t need to do that!”

Displaying the refinement that typifies those who follow his loathsome profession, one of the officers snarled at Dozier to “Shut the f**k up!” To punctuate that directive, Officer Jerad Wheeler strode up to the sobbing and horrified woman and kicked her in the stomach with sufficient force to open a door.

Dozier’s brother was dragged out of the house, and several police conferred on the front porch. After one of them pointed out that they had a problem because Wheeler had “kicked a pregnant woman,” another observed that they had to “charge her with something.”

Her son, Levii, was born by way of an emergency C-section a few weeks later. Doctors informed her that the kick to her abdomen had been delivered with sufficient force to cause the child to defecate in utero – which means that he had the sh*t kicked out of him by a police officer before he was born.

A few minutes later, Dozier – who was recovering from the assault – was approached by the on-scene supervisor, who in a voice of affected concern said that the officers needed to take her photograph. He instructed her to put on her shoes and follow him outside. The instant Dozier crossed the threshold of her home, Dozier was arrested for “obstruction” and taken away in handcuffs to the DeKalb County Jail. The intake officer, who possessed some residual decency, refused to book the victim. He demanded that Dozier be taken to the hospital, where she passed a small issue of blood and amniotic fluid.

Wheeler is a police officer, which means he is trained to lie, given social permission to lie, and does so without hesitation. In his official report of the incident, Wheeler falsely claimed that he was dealing with an “aggressive” woman and that he used “a front push kick to the abdomen, as [I] was taught to do at the academy” – once again, as a “distractionary” strike. It was only after he arrested this “aggressive” woman that he supposedly noticed her condition. His potentially fatal act of criminal violence was ratified by his superiors, who blithely stated that it was “within policy.”

Police in Ocean City, Maryland also “acted appropriately” when they tackled and assaulted 24-year-old Dalima Ekundayo Ibironke Palmer, who was part of a group being investigated for – what else? – “tumultuous” behavior at a local beach. Palmer was nine months pregnant, a fact that was obvious to horrified onlookers who pleaded with the police as they wrestled with the woman. Shortly after being abducted, Palmer underwent an emergency c-section – but not before being hit with four charges, including assault on a police officer.In at least two separate cases, police have attacked pregnant women who went to them seeking help.

Jacksonville, Florida resident Melanie Williams, who was seven months pregnant, went into premature labor and called 911. Bleeding and dizzy, Williams decided not to wait for help and drove herself to the hospital, running a red light en route.

When she was pulled over, Williams frantically told the officers that she was losing her baby, sped off to the hospital, and dashed inside. However, the officers pursued her into the building, tackled her, and handcuffed her as she screamed, “I’m pregnant – someone help me, I’m bleeding!” One of the officers thoughtfully responded to that plea by putting a boot on her neck, and them stomping on her back, before she was dragged from the emergency room and put into a squad car. Thankfully, the child survived the vicious attack on her mother.

Valreca Redden was tasered by police in Dayton, Ohio when she visited a suburban police station to request that her one-year-old son be taken into protective custody. After speaking briefly with the police, she changed her mind and said, “I’m leaving.” Despite the fact that Redden wasn’t suspected of a crime, she was told that she wasn’t free to leave.

Officer Michael Wilmer grabbed the thirteen-month-old child with one arm and used the other to shove the mother to the floor. A second officer materialized and attempted to handcuff the screaming woman. When she resisted, he applied a taser to the back of her neck. Redden was charged with “resisting and obstructing”; as she was being checked into jail, one of the officers discovered that she was visibly pregnant.

Seattle resident Malaika Brooks was seven months pregnant when she was stopped for speeding while driving her 11-year-old son to school. When presented with the extortion note, Mrs. Brooks refused to sign it, assuming that by doing so she would be admitting guilt. The officer then attempted to arrest her for violating a “law” that defines such a refusal as a “crime.” Not surprisingly, Mrs. Brooks didn’t allow herself to be kidnaped without putting up as much resistance as possible.

Three officers were dispatched to put down this intolerable act of defiance. Officer Juan Ornelas twisted Brooks’ arm behind her back while Officer Donald Jones applied a taser to her left thigh, then her left arm, and then to her neck. Mrs. Brooks, who was left with permanent scars, was later found guilty of refusing to sign the ticket –a misdemeanor charge – and acquitted of resisting arrest.

Once again: The infraction that supposedly justified the use of electroshock torture was a misdemeanor.

Brooks filed a lawsuit against the City of Seattle and its Police Department. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the police had used excessive force. The court also decided that the officers enjoyed limited immunity because in 2004, when the incident occurred, it had not been clearly established that using a taser in “drive-stun” mode against a very pregnant woman suspected of a traffic violation constituted excessive force.

That ruling provoked a paroxysm of theatrical outrage from police unions, and an appeal by the officers who had attacked Brooks. In their petition of certiorari to the US Supreme Court (which was rejected), the officers whined that the ruling “effectively strips officers of the authority to use any pain compliance technique to control an actively resisting arrestee.”

In an amicus brief filed on behalf of the officers, the Los Angeles County Police Chiefs’ Association predicted that the limited exoneration granted to the thugs who assaulted Brooks (and her unborn child) threatened the existence of “the rule of law” itself.

“It won’t be long before the word spreads throughout society’s criminal underground that the Ninth Circuit hasn’t simply given them a `get out of jail free’ card, but a `never have to go to jail in the first place’ card,” insisted the brief.

In other words: Unless police have unrestricted “authority” to beat and torture pregnant women suspected of trivial offenses, lawful order will collapse. One can easily imagine similar claims being made by the revenue-gatherers and dispensers of punitive violence who were employed by Sargon II or some other ancient Assyrian ruler.

As should be expected, the police had done nothing useful to solve that crime. Their only contribution to the case was to stage a lethal SWAT raid against a man who had been nowhere near the bar when the shooting took place, and had nothing to do with it.

Four days after the Mucky Duck shooting – in which three people suffered non-life-threatening injuries — a multi-agency SWAT team invaded the home of 31-year-old Rogelio Serrato, Jr.  Serrato, who was known as Roger to friends and family, was not a suspect in the shooting.

The search warrant issued for Serrato’s house should have been executed by a small group of deputies. Although police contended that Serrato was “connected” in some way to Gonzalez, there was no reason to suspect that he was harboring the fugitive. 

Serrato did have outstanding misdemeanor warrants, however, and apparently this was considered sufficient justification for sending in two dozen paramilitary drag queens who arrived in an armored convoy that included a Bearcat combat vehicle.

For about an hour, the invaders broadcast surrender demands via a “thunder-hailer” megaphone. One young female left the house and was taken into custody. Serrato – who, it is believed, was intoxicated and perhaps unconscious – didn’t comply.

A three-member “break and rake” team approached the house, shattered a window, and threw in a flash-bang grenade, which lodged itself between two highly flammable polyurethane sofas that were next to an artificial Christmas tree. One of the sofas immediately ignited. The fire quickly propagated itself through the house, generating a dense black cloud of highly toxic smoke.

Roused by either the sound of the grenade or the subsequent fire, Serrato began screaming and trying to leave the house. The sight of the unarmed man, clad only in his underwear, threw a scare into Sergeant Joseph Banuelos, who had supervised the “break and rake” team.

“Suspect!” shrieked Banuelos. Rather than rushing into the home to arrest the suspect, the intrepid sergeant – acting in the interests of that holiest of all considerations, “officer safety” – ordered his team to retreat to the Bearcat vehicle. The SWAT team then trained its weapons on the house, which effectively prevented the victim from escaping from the burning building.

Significantly, the use of a flash-bang grenade as a “scare tactic” was part of the raid’s tactical plan, rather than an improvised measure. Deputy Mark Sievers and Detective Al Martinez, who were part of the “break and rake” team, had previously ignited fires with flash-bang grenades, so they were aware of the potential fire risk involved in using that device. That the raid posed a potentially fatal fire danger is further demonstrated by the fact that the Greenfield Fire Department had been notified of the planned raid and was on standby.

The Fire Department responded quickly once fire enveloped Serrato’s home – but the SWAT team held them at bay for nearly a half-hour while the screaming victim was trapped inside. By the time the firefighters could enter the home, Serrato was dead.

Just a few days ago, Monterey County agreed to a $2.6 million settlement with Serrato’s family, which was paid by the county’s insurance carrier and absolves the sheriff’s office of legal responsibility. Speaking the language of institutional self-exculpation with remarkable fluency, County Attorney Charles McKee insisted that Serrato was to blame for his own death and that the officers should be “commended for trying to resolve a very tense situation.”

It’s often said that police are the country’s most dangerous street gang. One significant distinction between police and their private sector counterparts is that street gangs don’t expect to receive commendations when they kill innocent people.

It would be a wonderful thing if people could develop the intellectual equivalent of a computer utility that would remove uniforms, badges, and titles from news accounts of fatal police raids. Subtracting the indicia of “authority” would enhance the ability of people to see the truth about acts of aggressive violence, and recognize them as crimes irrespective of the claimed identity of those who commit them.

The killing of Roger Serrato was an act of murder through depraved indifference. The assailants had no justification to attack his home; they knew that their plan of attack posed the risk of a catastrophic fire; once that fire began, the assailants took no action to rescue the victim, and impeded the efforts of others to do so.

The SWAT raid was a specimen of police overkill born of opportunism: What’s the use of having a SWAT team unless it can be deployed to arrest people with outstanding misdemeanor warrants?

It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that police officials chose to attack Serrato’s home simply because his location — unlike that of the actual suspect, Alejandro Gonzalez — was known. If the police had actually investigated the Mucky Duck shooting, rather than seizing on it as a chance to preen on camera in paramilitary attire, they would have learned that Gonzalez was not a threat to the public.

A lawsuit filed by Todd Graham, one of the shooting victims claims that before he went to his car to get his gun, Gonzalez had seen several of his friends abused by a group of bouncers who had “escalated” a minor altercation into a life-threatening situation. At one point, a friend of Gonzalez named Mark Rosso, was thrown to the ground and pinned down by a bouncer and a bartender while another bouncer identified as “T.K.” beat and kicked him.

In pre-trial testimony, Monterey police detective Michael Bruno admitted that witnesses had described that assault to him. Witnesses also claimed that Gonzalez went to his car and grabbed a gun while his friend was being beaten.

Graham, a bystander who was leaving the bar when the shooting began, insists that Gonzalez’s decision to get his gun was made “in response to the actions of the bouncers.” Graham and two of the bouncers were the only ones who were shot.

As Judge Pamela Butler acknowledged in Gonzalez’s pre-trial hearing, the shooting was at least in part motivated by the desire to defend his friend, who was pleading for help and most likely in fear for his life. However, Judge Butler, a former gang prosecutor, insisted that Gonzalez’s alleged affiliation with the Norteno street gang meant that the shooting was “gang-related.”

This gave prosecutor Cristina Johnson a rationale for charging Gonzalez with ten felonies. The charges included not three, but four counts of attempted murder: One for the shooting of Graham, the innocent bystander; two for the bouncers who were attacking Rosso; and one more for the bartender who was helping to hold the victim down. While the bartender wasn’t shot, Johnson insisted that he be treated as a victim because he was in the “kill zone.”

The memory of man runneth not to an instance in which a police officer who used deadly force was charged for attempted murder because of the presence of an innocent victim in the “kill zone.” Where “qualified immunity” ends in such cases, “professional courtesy” takes over.

Witness the case of Robert Shawn Richardson and Paul Bradley Rogers, who were convicted of second-degree manslaughter after shooting and killing a five-year-old boy in Noble, Oklahoma six years ago while trying to kill a poisonous snake. Because they received deferred sentences, the officers served no time in prison, and their records have been expunged. Where the “law” is concerned, the incident never happened, and the victim, Austin Haley, never existed.

“If the roles were reversed and I had shot the gun, it would be much different,” observes Austin’s mother, Renee Haley. “I would’ve been sent to jail and the sentence would have been done more harshly.”

This is incontestably true. Austin wasn’t a cop; he was one of the “little people.” The same was true of Roger Serrato.

As Serrato’s grandmother tearfully told a Greenfield City Council meeting, he was not a saint – but he was a human being who should not have been summarily executed.

In seeking to justify the murderous raid on Serrato’s home, police applied the counter-insurgency template used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan and applied it to “gang enforcement.”

In Gonzalez’s pre-trial hearing, Detective Bruno reported that a search of the suspect’s home found “clothing and other items” indicating that he may have been associated with the Norteno street gang. While he admitted – under cross-examination – that the Mucky Duck shooting was at least in part motivated by self-defense, he insisted that it had the effect of enhancing the gang’s image “by instilling fear in the community.”

That sort of thing never happens when masked Berserkers in military attire lay siege to a residence, of course.

Shortly after his associates murdered Roger Serrato, Greenfield Police Department spokesliar Phil Penko told a local television station that “whether he was at the Mucky Duck is irrelevant” because “someone connected to the house” was allegedly there at the time of the shooting.

This is a specimen of what counter-insurgency experts call “pattern of life” analysis. All that is necessary to justify potentially lethal action against any individual is to create a “link” or “connection” between that person and a “suspected militant” (or, in this case, a suspected “gang associate”) or an incident involving someone who meets that description.

In Afghanistan, “connections” of that kind have been used to justify midnight raids by kill teams. In Pakistan, the same analysis is used as the basis for drone strikes. We’re seeing plentiful examples of the former here domestically, and we can expect to see the latter approach rolled out in the “Homeland” within the next few years.

Finding themselves irretrievably in the hands of an immensely powerful enemy that is entirely unburdened by moral scruples, the Gitmo hunger strikers have decided to pursue freedom on the only terms available to them: Either as living human beings, or as souls emancipated from bodies that remain unjustly confined, they will be free.

The despicable people who run the Caribbean prison are more than willing to allow their victims to kill themselves out of despair – or evento murder some of them and disguise the act as suicide. However, they will not countenance the act of self-slaughter if it is made as an assertion of self-ownership.

So since the hunger strike began in February, the gulag-keepers in Guantanamo Bay have employed the same tactic once used by their Soviet forebears in dealing with dissenters: They have been punishing the hunger-strikers by force-feeding them, an act widely recognized as torture. This involves shackling a victim to a restraint chair, immobilizing his head, and either forcing a feeding tube down his throat, or snaking it down a nasal passage through the alimentary canal into his stomach.

Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who underwent force-feeding after being arrested by the KGB and sent to the Soviet psychiatric gulag, has described the experience.

“In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow” – that regime’s functional equivalent of Gitmo – “I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner — through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.”

What Bukovsky described as a novel method is now standard operating procedure at Gitmo. In words saturated with pain, Bukovsky recounted that the effort to insert the feeding tube turned his nose into a bloody geyser, and wrenched tears from his eyes. His captors, determined to make him submit, were initially heedless of his suffering, and “kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man — my lungs felt ready to burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my stomach could I resume breathing, carefully. Then she poured some slop through a funnel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up. They held me down for another half-hour so that the liquid was absorbed by my stomach and could not be vomited back, and then began to pull the pipe out bit by bit.”To understand the depravity of this procedure, and to appreciate the focused cruelty necessary to carry it out, it is worthwhile to view the demonstration video produced by Reprieve that features actor and activist Yasiin Bey (also known by the stage name Mos Def). The video re-enactment– in which Bey was reduced to a tearful wreck within less than a minute – shows the performer being shackled, confined to a restraint chair, and enduring the insertion of the feeding tube. It was released on July 8 – the same day that US District Judge Gladys Kessler in Washington issued a ruling that she has no authority to force the military to end the practice. Apparently, this can only be done on the orders of the Dear Leader himself. The video, produced by the British human rights organization Reprieve, is unbearable to watch, but please – for the love of God – watch it.

Bear in mind that this Soviet-grade torture technique, which takes up to two hours, has been inflicted twice a day on victims who, unlike Bey, could not stop it.

Bukovksy endured this hideous ritual for ten days. He eventually outlasted his tormentors, who – unlike the American functionaries at Gitmo – retained some moral inhibitions over torture.

Eventually, he recalled, “the guards could stand it no longer. As it happened, it was a Sunday and no bosses were around. They surrounded the doctor: `Hey, listen, let him drink it straight from the bowl, let him sip it. It’ll be quicker for you, too, you silly old fool.’ The doctor was in tears: `Do you think I want to go to jail because of you lot? No, I can’t do that.’ And so they stood over my body, cursing each other, with bloody bubbles coming out of my nose. On the 12th day, the authorities surrendered; they had run out of time. I had gotten my lawyer, but neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again.”

We should take a moment to unpack this remarkable account. First of all, the Soviet doctor who carried out the force-feeding was afraid that she would be prosecuted for torturing Bukovsky. In contemporary – which is to say, Soviet – America, a doctor who enables can enjoy a lucrative pension and an appointment to a prestigious leadership position in a mainstream church. In Bukovsky’s case, the guards were eager to find some excuse to disobey orders to torture their victim, and were afflicted with decent shame over what they had done to him. I vehemently doubt that the same can be said of the supposed heroes stationed at Guantanamo Bay.

The inescapable conclusion is that the Soviet police state apparatus, while incontestably vile and murderous, was in some ways less depraved than the version over which Washington now presides. 

Pentagon spokesliar Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale dismissed Reprieve’s force-feeding reenactment as “a clever bit of cause marketing” and insisted that what was done to the heroic Yassin Bey “doesn’t comport with our procedures.” That latter comment is technically true, since there’s no evidence that Bey was beaten in his cell by a thugscrum of armored assailants and then beaten once again when he was returned to confinement – an omission that actually underplays the criminal violence that is part of the ritual.

At least 45 of the strikers have been subjected to force-feeding. After losing as much as a third of their body weight, they have been left frail and sickly – and thus are irresistible targets to the heroes who swarm the inmates in overwhelming numbers and beat them without pity. As was the case in the Soviet Union, operatives of the American Homeland Security State are drawn from a stygian talent pool in which sociopaths and sadists are common. The military personnel involved in torturing the Gitmo hunger-strikers must of necessity be the kind of people who revel in brutalizing innocent, helpless people. This is especially true of the depraved people who compose the Initial Reaction Forces (IRFs) – the SWAT-style squads used to carry out “Forcible Cell Extractions” (FCEs) of hunger strikers.

British citizen Shaker Aamer, who has been imprisoned at Gitmo since 2002 and cleared for release by both the Bush and Obama administrations, has described how he has been beaten by IRFs merely for requesting a cup of water.

“They come into my cell, slam me on the floor, shackle me, haul me out of the cell, put a bottle of water on my bed, pull me back in, and cut the shackles off – with a few thwacks in between,” Aamer testifies in a report published by Reprieve. Frightened of the abuse he would experience if he sought to take a shower, Aamer has resorted to using toilet water to cleanse himself.

“They wear white gowns with black uniforms with weapons,” testifies detainee Ahmed Ghulam Rabbani. “The outfits they wear are like the Darth Vader uniforms from Star Wars. They force me to lie on the concrete floor on my stomach. They stand outside the door and order me to bend my legs up at the back. Then they rush into the cell and sit on me. One will bind my hands, one my legs, and so on. I am not resisting or doing anything. I am just lying on the floor.”

If he offers any protest, or tries to invoke his rights in any way, Rabbani continues, he will be beaten and kicked as his assailants chant the shared refrain of police officers and rapists: “Don’t resist! Don’t resist!”

What is done in Gitmo won’t stay in Gitmo. The Regime’s offshore gulag has been a training academy for future law enforcement officers and prison guards. It has also been an experimental laboratory for techniques and strategies that will be imported into the mainland. This has happened many times before.

For example: the practice of waterboarding (aka the “Water Cure”), which had been used extensively by US occupation forces in the Philippines, was adopted as an interrogation method by many domestic police departments until the 1930s. Specialized military police units organized by US “military advisers” in Vietnam during the late 1950s provided the template used for the first SWAT team in Los Angeles in 1968. A recent 60 Minutes broadcast hymned the praises of police units in Springfield, Massachusetts that have incorporated the “counterinsurgency” methods employed by occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Shutting down Gitmo would not mean an end to the practices that have been perfected there.

Force-feeding in US prisons is commonplace. William Coleman, a prison inmate in Connecticut, has been force-fed for the past five years. Coleman staged a hunger strike to protest what he insists is a wrongful domestic violence conviction. The state supreme court agreed that this was necessary to deter other hunger strikes, which are described as a threat to “prison security.” In California, prison officials can withhold food and water from critically ill inmates who reject “life-sustaining treatment,” but they claim the authority to force-feed inmates who stage hunger strikes. On August 19 a federal judge granted permission for California prison officials to force-feed 70 inmatestaking part in a hunger strike protesting the practice of solitary confinement — which in some cases can last for decades.

There is at least one case in which police obtained a warrant for what could be called force-feeding in reverse.

A recently revealed warrant issued by a Milwaukee judge ordered physicians to pump the stomach of a man named Terrance Fleetwood, who was suspected of swallowing a bag filled with cocaine. That warrant was signed at 1:45 a.m. on February 22 by Circuit Judge Ellen Brostrom – which means that she didn’t invest any deliberation into the matter at all. From her perspective, there is nothing remarkable, let alone objectionable, about ordering physicians to torture a suspect in order to extract evidence from his stomach. Doctors refused to carry out the procedure, called a nasogastric aspiration, without Fleetwood’s consent. By upholding their obligations under the Hippocratic Oath, they risked being arrested for obstruction and being imprisoned for contempt of court.

The police staked out Fleetwood’s hospital bed for five days, and failed to find any evidence that he had consumed cocaine. They eventually charged him with several offenses, including narcotics possession and obstruction. Prosecutors extorted a plea agreement from the victim that resulted in an 18 month prison sentence.

This was not the only example of what we could call the “Gitmo-ization” of domestic law enforcement.

In August 2008,  Niagara Falls County Judge Sara Sperrazza issued an order that Ryan Smith submit to a DNA test to see if he was involved in a pair of armed robberies. Smith gave the sample, but it was sent to the wrong lab and ruined.

A second order was issued without informing Smith’s defense attorney. Smith refused the second test. The DA’s office authorized police to use “minimum force” to compel Smith to submit to the test. The police used a Taser to break down Smith’s resistance and secure the sample.

The defense challenged the legality of this act. Judge Sperrazza ruled that it is permissible to use a Taser to enforce a court order, as long as the device is not used “maliciously.”

Using the device with clinical, dispassionate indifference to the rights of the victim would be perfectly acceptable, however.

In reversing that ruling last year, a New York State appeals court recognized that the Taser is an implement that can be used to inflect “extreme pain … with little or no injury” and ruled that the use of a Taser to extract the DNA sample was “unreasonable” because the suspect “posed no immediate threat to the safety of himself or the officers.” What this means, of course, is that next time police decide to employ a Taser in an interrogation they will invoke the all-sufficient claim of “officer safety” to justify torturing the suspect.

The comprehensive denial of self-ownership is the foundation of every totalitarian system. In contemporary America, no individual has any rights that those who operate on behalf of the malignant fiction called the State are required to respect – and the innocent have no right to resist under any circumstances, even to the extent of withholding DNA or blood samples or the content of their stomachs, or choosing to die rather than enduring imprisonment that is both interminable and illegal.

It is true that we don’t see systematic abuses of the kind that took place in Stalin’s Russia. What we see instead is the imposition of Stalinism on an “as-applied” basis – or what we could call “scalable totalitarianism.” The Regime that rules us is at least as bad as the one from which it supposedly saved us during the Cold War.

With those words, which are found near the end of an August 8 motion to dismiss a spurious battery charge against Sandpoint, Idaho resident Rita Hutchens, the author – Bonner County Chief Deputy Prosecutor Shane Greenbank – incriminates himself.

For about a year, Greenbank tirelessly pursued a charge he knew to be entirely devoid of merit. His petulant motion to dismiss – a document littered with grammatical errors that occurred because the author’s protruding lower lip obstructed his view of the computer screen – offers unambiguous proof that his objective was not to convict Hutchens of an actual crime. Instead, he sought to inflict punishment on her for seeking redress for criminal violence she suffered at the hands of a Sandpoint, Idaho police officer.

Rita Hutchens is a tiny 57-year-old internationally respected quilt artist who has never committed a violent act against anybody. She was accused of “criminal battery” because she allegedly threw a ballpoint pen at a desk in the Sandpoint City Hall while doing research for a potential lawsuit against the city.

That writing utensil supposedly ricocheted off the desktop and glanced harmlessly off the blouse of a deputy city clerk named Melissa Ward. The supposed victim suffered no injury and did not press charges. Yet his incident, insisted Greenbank in a complaint filed last October 5, was a violent assault and a “grave offense against the peace and dignity of the state of Idaho.”

Greenbank, whose flair for rhetorical exaggeration would strike a hormonal adolescent girl as excessive, accused Hutchens of “willfully and unlawfully us[ing] force or violence upon the person of Melissa Ward.” Bear in mind that this was not a case in which a pen was employed as a shank, as occurred in a previous episode here in Idaho, nor was the pen hurled like a javelin. It was tossed carelessly at a desk, which means that there was no criminal intent – an indispensable element of an actual crime.

The same cannot be said of the assault she endured at the hands of a Sandpoint police officer named Theresa Heberer, who attacked Hutchens in front of her home in November 2011. After jumping Hutchens from behind and handcuffing the victim, Heberer held a lengthy conference with her supervisor in an effort to contrive a charge that would justify an arrest. They eventually settled on “obstruction,” a charge that was thrown out of court by Judge Barbara Buchanan several months later.

“There was no reason to touch her,” Judge Buchanan observed. “She did not have to answer [Officer Heberer’s] questions. She has a Fifth Amendment right not to do that…. You can’t be charged with resisting and obstructing for exercising your Fifth Amendment right, and she did have every right to say, `I don’t want to answer your questions, I want to go in my house.’ There is no basis for an arrest, there is no reason for a search warrant.”

After seeking medical treatment for the injuries she had suffered, Hutchens filed a damage claim with the City of Sandpoint. When that request was denied, she filed a notice of tort claim against the city. She was doing research into that claim on August 8 2012, when the pen-throwing incident took place.

The existing audio record of the August 8, 2012 confrontation at Sandpoint City Hall was made by one of several city officials who had surrounded Hutchens while she was trying to examine records of her unlawful arrest. Her chief antagonist was city attorney Scott Campbell, whose office had turned down her damage claim several weeks earlier. The specific official who rejected that claim was Lori Meulenberg, who had prosecuted the obstruction charge against Hutchens.

Hutchens wanted to be left alone to examine the records without Campbell and others swarming her and looking over her shoulder. It should be recalled that she was the victim of a violent crime committed by one of their associates. She finally gave voice to her exasperation.

“I’m tired of you people! Just leave me alone!” she exclaimed. “I just want to look at the record, which I have a right to do, now, in private.”

“Actually, you don’t have a right to do [that] in private,” Campbell said in a taunting voice that oozed condescension.

As Hutchens attempted to read the records, Campbell continued to violate her personal space in a fashion that he would have considered legally actionable if he had been on the receiving end. This could be considered a deliberate provocation, and if so it had the intended effect.

“Do not look over me!” she shouted at Campbell, who continued to behave like an adolescent bully.

“Is this a public place, Rita?” Campbell said, mockingly. “I have as much right to be here in a public place as you have.”

At this point, Hutchens took the initiative to de-escalate the situation by saying that she would leave and “come back tomorrow with a witness.”

What this means is that Hutchens was not looking for a fight; she was looking to avoid one. She was never the aggressor in any sense. Outnumbered, harassed, and mocked by city officials who had no respect for her rights, she withdrew from the office, allegedly throwing down a ballpoint pen as she left.

A few seconds after Hutchens departed, the silence was broken by Melissa Ward, the supposed victim.

“She just threw a pen at me,” Ward snickered. Yes, the “victim” laughed at the incident.

“Should we prosecute her?” an audibly amused Campbell asked Ward.  Significantly, there is no indication that Ward – the identified “victim” – agreed that Hutchens should be prosecuted.  Ward’s giggling comment is the only indication that a pen was thrown by anyone. Hutchens adamantly insists that she didn’t hurl the object, but simply left the building in disgust.

After Hutchens was charged with battery last November, she filed a subpoena demanding that Ward, the purported victim, provide a signed criminal complaint. Campbell, who instigated the persecution campaign against Hutchens, filed a motion to quash that subpoena.

That motion was granted by the Idaho First District Court, which ruled that “requiring Ms. Ward, the victim in this matter, to provide a signed complaint is unreasonable.”

In what sense would it be “unreasonable” to require the alleged victim of criminal battery to sign a complaint? Ward didn’t require medical treatment, and she’s not functionally illiterate, so she is physically and intellectually capable of either writing or dictating a coherent narrative. The only way that the term “unreasonable” has relevance here is as a description of the charge itself – and Campbell’s desire to prevent any critical scrutiny of the incident responsible for that charge.

Rita’s midnight arrest, April 16, 2013.

The confected charge was a misdemeanor offense. Yet after Hutchens declined to appear at a pre-trial hearing late last year, an acting judge named Don Swanstrom (who is no longer in service, and might not have been authorized to act as a judge at the time) issued a day-or-night bench warrant for her arrest.

According a 2011 state Supreme Court ruling (Idaho v. Skurlock), a warrant of that kind is generally inappropriate because at night time people enjoy “a heightened expectation of privacy that should not be disturbed by a knock on the door and the presentation of a search warrant.”

Nonetheless, three officers kicked in the front door to Hutchens’ home on April 16 and dragged her away. In the course of this Gestapo-grade act of overkill, one of the officers discovered what was identified as “drug paraphernalia” under her sofa – which resulted in yet another charge being filed against her.

The judge who was originally tapped to hear the “paraphernalia” case was Lori Meulenberg – yes, the same Lori Meulenberg who prosecuted the obstruction charge and subsequently denied Hutchens’ damage claim for the injury she suffered during her unlawful arrest in November 2011.

Finally, on July 23 – more than three months after this case was reported in detail in this space – the Bonner County Daily Bee published a story offering a critical examination of the campaign to incarcerate Rita Hutchens.

“Despite being a low-level offense, the battery case against Rita Nancy Hutchens has some of the trappings of a high-stakes affair,” observed the Bee. The article noted that the midnight arrest was questionable (at best), and that the treatment of Hutchens “stirred dismay by those in the community who contend law enforcement and the courts are running amok in Bonner County.”

It was likewise notable that the case was “being closely followed by city officials. City Attorney Scot Campbell attended [the July 19] hearing, as did police Chief Corey Coon and Det. Derrick Hagstrom.”

Why was the crème de la scum of Sandpoint’s ruling clique so interested in this trivial case, and so perversely determined to see Rita Hutchens incarcerated? Why did Shane Greenbank insist on having her submit to a mental evaluation – a demand that resulted in her being arrested for contempt on two occasions?

Shortly after Hutchens was seized in her home in a midnight police raid, Greenbank filed a motion demanding that she be forced to undergo a psychological evaluation because of what he described as “unusual behaviors and affects – both in court and in her filings.” He also made the remarkable claim – without providing a molecule of supporting evidence — that he had also been “battered” by Hutchens “outside of court when he served papers to her in the clerk’s office….”

The absence of any further description may lead the otherwise uninformed reader to assume that Rita Hutchens, who is 5’1” tall and weighs about 110 pounds, knocked Greenbank on his tax-fattened ass, which is something he richly deserves. What happened, in fact, is that Greenbank shoved a sheaf of legal documents into her face – and Hutchens shoved them right back. This, we are supposed to pretend, was an act of criminal “battery.”

It should be acknowledged, I suppose, that this act would be sufficient to hurt Mr. Greenbank’s feelings. He is an individual of remarkably delicate sensibilities: About five years ago, while defiling Kootenai County as an assistant prosecutor, Greenbank was slapped down by a judge who declared a mistrial in a domestic violence case because Greenbank, in an attempt to manipulate the jury, started crying during his opening statement.

After initially trying to deny what he had done, Greenbank was forced to admit: “I did have tears running down my face, I did have snot running down my face.” First District Judge Fred Gilber pointed out to the snot-faced prosecutor that this was not the first time the Kootenai County Prosecutor’s Office had been censured “for appealing to the passions or prejudice of the jury.”

Greenbank’s repeated demands that Hutchens undergo a psychiatric evaluation were similarly intended to prejudice the public against her. This is a violation of the ethical standards that govern prosecutors (yes, I was also surprised to learn that such guidelines exist, although they do nothing to inhibit the corrupt ambition of those who occupy the office).

Rule 3.8(f) of the ABA’s ethical standards specifies that prosecutors must refrain from making “comments that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public condemnation of the accused”; Rule 3.6(a) forbids prosecutors to make comments that they know or reasonably should know “will be disseminated by means of public communication and will have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing an adjudicative proceeding in the matter.”

Greenbank’s untutored speculation about Hutchens’ mental health was widely reported, echoed by camp-followers of the ruling municipal clique, and had a hugely damaging impact on her public reputation.

“They set out to destroy my reputation – really, to destroy me,” Hutchens told Pro Libertate. “The claims they made about my mental health were in the paper all the time, and it’s absolutely destroyed my business. If this had actually gone to trial, there’s no way I could have been treated fairly by a jury after they had done so much to prejudice the community against me.”

After being incarcerated for contempt of court in mid-July, Hutchens finally underwent the psychological evaluation, which resulted in a terse and unembellished statement that she was entirely sound of mind. This didn’t deter the irrepressibly snotty Mr. Greenbank from using his motion to dismiss the charge to traduce his victim one last time.

“[W]hile it is unfortunate that the psychological evaluation did not result in some treatment recommendation that may benefit the defendant – and, by extension, the public – the State has done all it is able to do in order to minimize further risk to the public,” sneered Greenbank. He neither explained why his judgment of Hutchens’ psychological condition was superior to that of a credentialed mental health professor, nor did he provide any evidence that she ever posed a risk to the public.

The down-market Javert took some measure of comfort in the gratuitous suffering he had inflicted by incarcerating, impoverishing, and defaming an innocent and helpless woman whose “defiance” (his word) simply had to be punished.

Since Hutchens “has spent many more days in jail than she would have if she had actually been convicted of this offense,” Greenbank gloated, “punishment for this offense has been achieved.”

It is widely known, though rarely acknowledged, that prosecutors pursue punishment at the expense of both truth and justice. Bonner County is host to a specimen of that tribe in whom resides the distilled malice one so often finds in that occupation, untempered by the rudimentary intellectual discipline necessary to maintain the pretense of a commitment to principle. Greenbank’s persecution of Rita Hutchens was nothing less than criminal, and if so much as a particle of justice still exists he will face the consequences of his actions.

Ronald Weekley, Jr. , a 20-year-old college student from Venice, California, was riding his skateboard on the “wrong side” of the street in front of his house when he was assaulted by four armed gangsters and severely beaten. The assailants then abducted the victim and accused him of a criminal offense because he was insufficiently docile while being beaten. They also claimed that Weekley had previously been seen on their turf, without permission, after sundown.

The assailants belonged to that privileged caste of social misfits andintellectually stunted functionaries called “police officers.” According to a friend named Alexis Parker, the police pounced on Weekley after he tried to avoid a confrontation with an unlicensed street gang on the other side of the street.

Weekley had done no harm to anybody by riding his skateboard on the “wrong” side of the street, but because he didn’t immediately stop with an armed stranger in a government-issued costume demanded it of him, he was taken to the ground in front of his house and beaten nearly to death, while onlookers screamed in terror. Another member of the sanctified fraternity of official violence ran interference for the four who mauled Weekley, ordering spectators to keep their distance while his comrades pummeled the helpless man. 

Weekley, who suffered a broken chin bone, a broken nose, and a concussion, was then charged with the non-crime of “resisting arrest.”

The cretinous bullies who had participated in the thugscrum also claimed that the 20-year-old man had “outstanding warrants” for “curfew” violations that he supposedly committed before he turned 18. (A curfew, it should be understood, is a martial law measure.)

“I was screaming because I thought they were going to kill him,” one eyewitness to the atrocity, which took place about a year ago, told a local television station.

This episode offers a splendid opportunity to examine the kinship between the street gang we call the “police” and their much less dangerous private sector competition. If Weekley had been confronted by the private gangbangers he sought to avoid, and then fought back when they assaulted him, the assailants would not have had the privilege of prosecuting him for resisting. That is the most significant material difference between those contending groups of armed thugs. It’s also worth pointing out that common street gangs don’t havetax-supported employee unions who demand that the public celebrate their acts of unprovoked criminal violence.

Weekley’s predicament brings to mind the passage from the Old Testament describing how “a man fled from a lion, and a bear met him; …. [then he] went into his house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him” (Amos 5:19). He had done no harm to anybody, and was trying to avoid a violent confrontation – and then encountered an even more acute threat before winding up enduring lasting and unjustified injury in his own home.

This incident likewise underscores the wisdom expressed by Edmund Burke in his essay “A Vindication of Natural Society”:

In a State of Nature, it is true, that a Man of superior Force may beat or rob me; but then it is true, that I am at full Liberty to defend myself, or make Reprisal by Surprise or by Cunning, or by any other way in which I may be superior to him. But in Political Society … if I attempt to avenge myself, the whole Force of that Society is ready to complete my Ruin. 

In any free society worthy of that description, the innate right of an innocent person to resist criminal aggression by government functionaries is recognized, respected, and cherished. While stipulating that politics is a snare and a delusion, I earnestly hope that Americans will agitate for the restoration of legal protection for the right to resist unlawful arrest. Eventually, however, we must demolish the spurious legal protections that allow the continued existence of government “law enforcement” agencies that claim a monopoly on aggression.

In the decades leading up to the American Founding, Anglo-Saxon common law recognized not only a right to resist unlawful arrest, but also the duty of bystanders to intervene to prevent an abduction by law enforcement officers.

In the in the 1710 case Queen v. Tooley, the Queen’s Bench ruled that every Englishman “ought to be concerned for Magna Charta and the laws. And if any one against the law imprison a man, he is an offender against Magna Charta.” 

An illegal arrest is an act of lawless violence against a helpless person, which “is a sufficient provocation to all people out of compassion” in any circumstance, observed the court. In fact, a criminal act of that kind carried out by a law enforcement officer is “a provocation to all the subjects of England.”

This ruling grew out of the attempted arrest of a woman named Anne Dekins by a constable named Samuel Bray. When Bray attempted to arrest Dekins for what we would now call “disorderly conduct,” she put up loud, insistent resistance. Her cries for help drew the attention of a man named Tooey, who – in the company of several others – confronted Bray and demanded that he explain his actions.

Bray produced his official credentials, which failed to impress Tooey and the others. He then called for backup. When the other constable arrived, he drew his sword and engaged in combat with Tooey, who defended himself. The constable, as it turned out, was not the better man. Several other constables arrived, seized, Tooey, and charged him with murder.

The trial court threw out the murder charge, ruling that the warrant was defective. Since the arrest was illegal, the court pointed out, Dekins had a right to resist.

In trying to enforce an invalid warrant, Bray “did not act as a constable, but a common oppressor,” observed the trial court. Tooley and the other bystanders were properly “provoked” by the act of aggressive violence against Anne Dekins, and their forceful but measured response – first demanding that the abductor release the hostage, then exercising defensive force to free her – was entirely appropriate.

There is no place in a genuinely civilized society for any group of people – however accoutered, by whatever name they call themselves – who claim the supposed authority to commit violent aggression. Anybody who countenances such behavior in the name of “supporting your local police” is an enemy to human liberty and basic decency.

Bradley Manning is the only combat veteran of the Iraq war whose service is worth honoring. Like hundreds of thousands of servicemen, Manning carried out unlawful orders to participate in an illegal war. Unlike any of the rest, he took necessary action to expose discrete criminal acts committed in the larger context of that illegal enterprise.

While serving as an intelligence analyst in Iraq, Manning sometimes felt as if he were “watching nonstop snuff films,” according to a New York magazine profile.  His job consisted of sitting at a work station and evaluating Iraqis as targets. This meant “reducing a human being to a few salient points. Then he made a quick decision based on imperfect information: kill, capture, exploit, source.”

Unlike countless other U.S servicemen who took refuge in the idea that obedience to superiors immunizes criminal behavior, Manning tried to discriminate between “insurgents” and innocent bystanders, only to find that such distinctions do not exist when one is fighting a war of aggression. When he expressed concerns about this to his superiors, Manning was told to choke down such questions and get back to the task of killing people who resented being occupied by a prohibitively stronger foreign power.

In late 2009, Manning told a psychological counselor “about a targeting mission gone bad in Basra” in which an unambiguously innocent bystander was killed. That incident left Manning incapacitated with guilt and remorse. It’s quite likely that it also led Manning to confront the moral reality that every use of lethal force by U.S. personnel in Iraq was an act of murder.

Shortly after speaking with a psychologist about the Basra incident, Manning performed a heroic act in the service of his country and the rule of law by leaking the Iraq war logs and the notorious “Collateral Murder” video documenting the slaughter – by two U.S. Apache helicopter gunships – of twelve innocent civilians.

During the recently concluded show trial of Manning, the prosecution insisted that by publicizing the “Collateral Murder” video, the whistleblower had given material aid to the enemy. In fact, he had exposed a criminal policy imposed and carried out by the superior officers to whom he was expected to report such atrocities. Former U.S. Army Specialist Ethan McCord, who can be seen in the video attempting to carry two wounded children to safety – has testified that the crime documented in the video was the product of “standard operating procedure” dictating “360 degree rotational fire” in residential neighborhoods in retaliation for IED attacks on occupation troops.

When Manning became aware of war crimes, he was legally and morally obligated to report them – not just to his superior officers, who were at best aggressively indifferent to them, but to the public from whom those officers derive their supposed authority. Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers witnessed war crimes, but as far as we presently know, Manning was the only soldier deployed to Iraq who had the character and moral courage necessary to avoid silent complicity in them.

Although Manning was acquitted of the charge of aiding the enemy – which carried a potential sentence of life without parole – he was convicted of 19 criminal counts, including five espionage charges, and could still find himself facing the equivalent of a life sentence. Prior to his trial, Manning was held for nine months in an especially severe form of solitary confinement that involved forced nudity, sleep deprivation, and persistent abuse. His treatment, which constituted torture, won him a reduction off 112 days from the prison sentence he will receive for the supposed offense of exposing officially sanctioned crimes.

If Manning had been a war criminal, rather than an honorable soldier who exposed war crimes, his pre-trial confinement would have led to dismissal of the charges against him – or his sentence being overturned.

Like Private Manning, Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins served in Iraq. He committed war crimes of the kind Manning helped expose to the public. He led an eight-man squad that kidnapped an innocent Iraqi man from his home, took him to a ditch and shot him in the face. They then planted a gun and a shovel and claimed that the Iraqi, a retired police officer, was a suspected insurgent.

Hutchins was sentenced to 11 years for murder. A military appeals court has overturned that conviction, claiming that his rights were violated when he was unlawfully detained without a lawyer for seven days. Hutchins was released after serving roughly five and a half years in prison. Manning has already spent more than three years behind bars. His father described the convicted murderer as a “scapegoat,” insisting that he “was unfortunately in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The same was true of every other U.S. soldier who took part in the occupation of Iraq, including Private Manning. The difference was that Hutchins faithfully carried out orders to murder Iraqis, and Manning understood that the government that employed him is not exempt from the moral law.

Sgt. Ray Girouard is another war criminal who was granted leniency by the government that had employed him. Like Hutchins, Girouard commanded a combat unit that committed an atrocity – in this case, the murder of three handcuffed Iraqi detainees. Like Hutchins, Girouard was convicted on the testimony of his comrades, all of whom were given lighter sentences in exchange for testifying against their squad leader. And like Hutchins, Girouard claims that he is a “scapegoat” who carried out orders and then covered up for his men “out of loyalty” when they “messed up.”

Girouard commanded a May 9, 2006 mission in which he was ordered to “kill all military-age males” in an area described as a terrorist training camp. His unit dragged three men out of a house, zip-tied their hands, and called for a chopper. Girouard claims that when he left the house, “I [heard] this volley of gunfire…. I run back and see these three bodies lying on the ground with their blindfolds half-off. My guys are shouting, `They tried to escape. We shot them. They were terrorists. They were going to come back and kill us.’”

It should be acknowledged that attempting to kill foreign invaders who have occupied your country is not an act of terrorism. It’s also worth underscoring the fact that this account, if taken at face value, marked the soldiers under Girouard’s command as incurable cowards. Their behavior is eerily reminiscent of the conduct of police officers who lose bladder control and gun down unarmed citizens who are seen as a threat to “officer safety.” This isn’t surprising, given that the crime in Iraq was carried out by another branch of the Regime’s fraternity of armed bullies.

According to Girouard, he covered up the killings by filing a false official report claiming that the victims had attacked his men. That would make him an accessory to murder. However, the soldiers who carried out the murders later testified that they had done so under Girouard’s orders. One of them, Specialist Juston Graber, claimed that he had “finished off” a wounded detainee after being explicitly ordered to do so by Girouard.

After being found guilty of negligent homicide, Girouard was given a ten-year prison sentence. He spent three years in Ft. Leavenworth before his conviction was overturned and he was given a “general discharge under honorable conditions.”

“It’s such a blessing,” exulted Girouard after returning to his home in Sweetwater, Tennessee. “I get all my benefits and everything now.”

Such leniency is reserved for those who are faithful in carrying out imperial crimes. From the perspective of those who control the Regime, committing war crimes is a duty, but reporting them is a felony.

Those were the last words spoken to 41-year-old Kamas, Utah resident Wade Pennington as he bled to death from two gunshot wounds inflicted at point-blank range. The man who hurled that sadistic taunt at Pennington, Brett Lopez, wasn’t the shooter; his role had been to trap the unarmed victim in the kill zone while his associate, Jared Nichols, pulled the trigger.

Just minutes earlier, Nichols had been overheard saying that he intended to “take out” Pennington. He and Perez were well-acquainted with the victim; indeed, immediately after he pulled the trigger, Nichols called Wade by name. After shooting Pennington, Nichols seized the dying victim and attempted to make it look as if he had been the aggressor. In doing so, Nichols wound up with some of the dying man’s blood on his clothing.

Both Nichols and Perez lied to investigators after the shooting. Their lies were contradicted by physical evidence at the crime scene and by video recordings of the incidents leading up to the homicide. A perfunctory investigation was wrapped up within twelve days without charges being filed against Nichols and Perez.

There was abundant evidence that the death of Wade Pennington was an act of criminal homicide – arguably murder in the second degree. Neither Nichols nor Perez faced criminal charges, because they were police officers, and their victim was a man with a lengthy criminal record who was on probation at the time of the May 28, 2009 shooting.

Pennington was killed in South Jordan, Utah at the end of a high-speed pursuit that was neither necessary nor authorized.

Sgt. Allen Crist, who saw Pennington in a dark SUV outside a sporting goods store, had radioed a description of the vehicle and its license plate number and asked for other officers to confirm the plate number. Crist suspected that Pennington might have burglarized the sporting goods store. He called for a K9 unit and conducted an inspection of the building, which turned up no evidence of a break-in.

As it happens, Pennington was in the area to visit a friend. He had a court date in a week to deal with an alcohol-related parole violation and wasn’t inclined to get into any more trouble. He also had ample reason to avoid contact with the South Jordan Police Department, which had kept him under close scrutiny since his release from prison in 2005.

After being imprisoned for burglary in 2001, Pennington filed a Pro Se Habeas Corpus petition challenging the legality of his sentence. In July 2005, the Utah Court of Appeals granted his motion and ordered his release.

“The day that Wade was released, there was a riot and a lock-down at the prison,” Pennington’s brother Dennis recalled to Pro Libertate. “Officials there considered Wade to be a troublemaker, because his petition was successful and it created a real stir among the inmates.”

After Wade was arraigned on a new set of felony charges, he ended up under the jurisdiction of a drug court in Duchesne County. Those charges were filed by Sgt. Crist and Salt Lake County District Attorney Lohra Miller. Wade entered a guilty plea and was placed on probation under the jurisdiction of a drug court in Duchesne County. Dennis Pennington and the rest of the family believes that the Salt Lake County DA’s office and the South Jordan Police were angered by the leniency of the sentence and targeted him for special attention in the hope of sending him back to prison.

During that period, Wade started a successful handyman business and made what appeared to be an earnest effort to make an honest living. In early 2009, his probation was revoked for reasons never made entirely clear, but apparently had to do with alcohol use. He was taken to the Duchesne County Jail to await a transfer to Salt Lake County.

State law required that a “show cause” hearing be ordered within 72 hours of Wade’s arrest. Instead, he was held for nearly 40 days before being brought in front of a judge. That hearing took place on May 17, 2009. Wade was scheduled for a sentencing hearing on June 2. He was killed on May 28.

The dark 1994 Pathfinder Pennington was driving on May 28 belonged to his girlfriend, Kristi Russell, and it was certainly well-known to the South Jordan Police Department. During the past several years, police had stopped it no fewer than ten times. If Crist had found evidence of a break-in, it would have been quite easy to find Pennington – which is why he told his subordinates not to pursue the vehicle. Nonetheless, Nichols and Perez gave pursuit – and Pennington fled.

The officers violated both the orders of their superior and their department’s vehicle pursuit policy by chasing Pennington. They committed another very serious infraction by “going to 3” – that is, covertly communicating on a radio channel that was not recorded or audible to the dispatcher. A lawsuit filed on behalf of Pennington’s parents and son asserts that this was done because Nichols and Perez had “decided to chase Pennington until Pennington hit one of their vehicles, which would justify a chase.”

The officers switched back to an open channel and continued the pursuit.  Pennington entered a cul-de-sac, with Nicholas following him. Perez got out of his police car and drew his gun; Nichols later said that Perez went “gun-up” in order “to do a felony stop” – an action that wasn’t justified because Pennington was not suspected of a felony. Perez was standing in the street when Pennington turned around and drove by him.

“He just tried to hit me with the car – aggravated assault on a police officer!” Perez shouted over the radio. The dashcam video on Nichols’s police car doesn’t provide any evidence that Pennington tried run down Perez. However, as Nichols later told investigators that Perez’s claim that Pennington had assaulted him “was a green light – let’s go ahead and pursue him.”

The original dashcam tape of the subsequent pursuit isn’t available. The version that was eventually made public has had its time code removed, and about three minutes and seventeen seconds have been deleted from it. Nichols claims that on several occasions Pennington struck his vehicle, but no there is no video evidence to support his account.

Shortly after Nichols announces that “I’m going to take him out,” he attempts what he described to investigators as a “half-assed pit maneuver” – that is, ramming the SUV in an effort to disable it.

That tactic, as Nichols pointed out to investigators, is only to be employed in situations where deadly force is justified. So by his own admission, Nichols was using deadly force in an unauthorized pursuit.

The officers succeeded in trapping Pennington in a cul-de-sac in West Jordan. Nichols, who had T-boned the Pathfinder, was separated from Pennington by about three feet. Perez, who got out of his car, approached the vehicle from the passenger side with his gun drawn. Perez – who saw that Pennington was unarmed — shouted at him to “get out on the ground. Stay

where I can see you.”

Perez told investigators that “I didn’t hear Jared” screaming orders at Pennington, because “Jared’s window was closed.” Perez also testified that Pennington was moving away from him in an effort to get out of the car – that is, to “get out on the ground,” as the officer had demanded.

When interviewed on the scene following the shooting, Perez said that he “didn’t perceive a threat” from Pennington, and that if the driver put up resistance he was prepared to “tackle him and take him down.” While Pennington started to exit the vehicle, Perez moved around the front of the car in order to avoid a crossfire with Nichols.

A second or two later, Nichols fired two shots that struck Pennington in the chest. Immediately after shooting Pennington, Nichols shouted: “Freeze, Wade! I’m going to shoot you. Get down on the f*****g ground!”

Why was Pennington shot for complying with Perez’s orders? Why did the shooter tell the victim both to “freeze” – that is, stay put in the car – and to “get on the ground” – which would have required that he exit the vehicle? And why did Nicholas sputter those self-contradictory demands after he had shot Pennington twice in the chest?

In describing the incident to investigators two days later, Nichols said that Pennington “made a lunge towards me.” Supposedly shocked and traumatized by the victim’s aggressive behavior, Nicholas claims he “said something like, `Why’d you do that, f****r?’ or `Why did you make me do that?’”

Both of those statements are demonstrable lies. 

During his testimony – which was given two days after the killing, with the aid of police union attorney Jeffrey W. Hall, and after Nichols had reviewed the dashcam video – the officer said that he had to shoot because Pennington was non-compliant, and that “he was doing something to evade, still.” He also insisted that “the vehicle was still a threat,” despite the fact that it was boxed in and disabled. By this account, Pennington wasn’t a threat to officer safety, but rather a flight risk. That “threat” would have been neutralized if he had left the vehicle. But Nichols also said that the driver’s attempt to leave the Pathfinder made it necessary to shoot him.

While neither of the rationales offered by Nichols for the shooting made any sense, the most mystifying aspect of his testimony was the self-pitying rebuke he supposedly flung at Pennington. Speaking immediately after the shooting, Perez said that while Pennington “was hanging” lifeless from the window of the Pathfinder, he and Nichols “didn’t even talk.” That would mean that he didn’t hear the other officer’s anguished outburst.

However, Nichols’s body microphone did pick up a very similar complaint – which was made by the dying victim: “I’m f*****g shot. Why did you shoot me? You bunch of a**holes.”

Perez lied about that detail, as well, telling investigators that Pennington “never, you know, made a sound, nothing” after being shot.

What this means is that Nicholas and Perez knew that Pennington was alive, and yet neither did anything to help him. Rather than rendering medical aid, Nicholas and Perez tried to pull the victim from the vehicle, and then quit when his feet were “hooked up” in the car. With the dying man hanging half-way out of the driver’s side window, Perez reported the shooting and then “walked over to the street sign to see where we were.”

Nichols went back to his vehicle and shut off his recorder. Within minutes other officers arrived. Unaware that Perez’s dashboard camera was still operating, Nichols gestured at Pennington and muttered, “There goes my job.”

That remark prompted Perez to point to his vehicle and say, “I’m sorry, man.” In a different context this might have been construed as condolences for the officer’s involvement in a fatal shooting. By gesturing toward his dashboard camera, Perez was clearly apologizing for the fact that Nichols’s callous, self-pitying comment was now on record.

The report issued by the Salt Lake District Attorney’s Office on June 30, 2009 is replete with clumsy, deliberate misrepresentations. It claims that Sgt. Crist ordered that “the vehicle be stopped”; in fact, he specifically instructed that it was not to be stopped. It also recites the disproven claims that Pennington “attempted to run over a pedestrian law enforcement officer” and that he rammed Nichols’s police vehicle “numerous times.”

According to the DA’s summary of the case, “Perez stated he could not see the suspect’s hands” and that Pennington “refused to comply with his commands.” Perez actually testified that he could see both hands on the steering wheel, and by trying to leave the SUV Pennington was complying with Perez’s orders.

Predictably, the report regurgitates the familiar refrain uttered by every police officer who murders an unarmed citizen by claiming that Pennington “made a furtive movement towards the pursuing police officer,” thereby placing the intrepid paladin of public order “in fear of his life” and thereby justifying the use of “deadly force to stop the threat by the suspect.”

Perhaps the most important of the many intentional oversights by the DA’s office dealt with the ballistics report on the shooting. The State Medical Examiner’s Office reported that the bullets fired by Nichols passed through Pennington’s torso from left to right and took a slightly downward trajectory. This wouldn’t have been possible if Pennington had been “lunging” or “leaping” from the driver’s side window, causing the valiant Officer Nichols to fear for his life. What clearly happened is that Nichols shot Pennington while the driver was shifting in his seat attempting to get out of the vehicle, as Perez had ordered.

After being exonerated by the DA’s office, Nichols was given a promotion, and he remains on the South Jordan Police Department. Brett Perez, ironically, was fired for violating the department’s vehicle pursuit policy. Apparently it is a firing offense to conduct an unauthorized high-speed pursuit – unless you’re willing to kill the unarmed suspect once you’ve chased him down.

West Jordan Police Sergeant Michael S. Leary, the protocol officer who headed the investigation, had filled the same role about two years earlier in a very similar case involving the fatal police shooting of white supremacist Darren Neil Greuber in a Salt Lake City parking lot. Grueber attempted to flee when a SWAT team from the Metro Gang Unit arrived at about4:30 a.m. to serve a search warrant. Grueber wasn’t in the apartment when the SWAT raid took place. When he arrived, officers boxed in his vehicle – and Greuber tried to escape by ramming his Chevy Blazer into parked police cars.  One of the officers, who was on loan from the South Jordan Police Department, shot the unarmed Greuber twice.

Like Pennington, Greuber was out on probation at the time of the shooting, and he had filed an appeal challenging his conviction. Law enforcement officials claimed that Greuber’s history made him an acute threat to “officer safety,” even though he was unarmed at the time of the shooting.  And the officer who pulled the trigger was Jared Nichols. Sgt. Leary, who had investigated the July 2007 shooting of Greuber, never asked Nichols about the similarities between that incident and the killing of Wade Pennington.

“Since Lohra L. Miller took office … police-caused homicides have increased significantly in Salt Lake County,” asserted the Pennington family’s lawsuit. “Officers know that if they do shoot a person without justification, the district attorney and her investigators will not, in all likelihood, prosecute them. In fact, Nichols knew this firsthand, having been exonerated by Miller in a homicide two years prior.”

After entering the DA’s office in January 2007, one of Lorha Miller’s first acts was to dismiss criminal charges against a police officer named Richard Todd Rasmussen, who had fatally shot a suspect following a high speed chase. In explaining that decision to Salt Lake NBC affiliate KSL, Miller seemed to be reading a script prepared by the police union: “The suspect was unarmed, but had a history of being aggressive toward law enforcement officers, had a history of possession of weapons, and in this particular case tried to run the officer off the road. And at the time the officer was shot, [the suspect] was lunging at the officer at close range.”

Miller’s decision prompted her predecessor, David E. Yocom, to publish an op-ed column describing her action as “a disgrace to the criminal justice system.”

Yocom elaborated on that critique in an interview with KSL, saying that Miller, who had been supported by police unions in her election campaign, dropped the charge “to please the law enforcement groups that supported her…. [O]ne way to please them is to take a law enforcement officer off the hook on a very serious charge.”

By the time Wade Pennington was killed, Miller had made it clear that she wasn’t interested in prosecuting cops for any reason – from homicide to circulating pornography through an office e-mail account. The police reciprocated by refusing to investigate complaints that the BYU graduate’s household was used for drinking parties by her teenage children and their friends. Miller served a single term before being ousted by Sim Gill.

Since November 2, Gill has been immersed in investigating the shooting death of 21-year-old Washington native Danielle Willard by two West Valley City narcotics investigators. The officers claimed that Willard, who was receiving treatment for a drug addiction, endangered their lives when she backed her Subaru Forrester into a police cruiser while trying to escape the parking lot.

Gill’s investigation of Willard’s death led to the dismissal of 19 criminal cases that had been filed by Detective Shaun Cowley, who shot the young woman. It also led to the discovery that the narcotics unit that employed Cowley had stolen money, drugs, and “trophies” from narcotics suspects; that led to the dismissal of 125 drug-related criminal cases and the dissolution of the unit. As revelations of systemic corruption within the department mounted, Chief Thayle “Buzz” Nielsen suddenly retired, supposedly for health-related reasons.

Willard’s parents have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against West Valley City for the “assassination-style” killing of their daughter. Cowley and Officer Kevin Salmon, who killed Danielle, remain on paid vacation.  Gill is continuing his investigation of the shooting, but given the precedents set by his predecessor, there’s little cause for suspense. After all, it’s well-established policy in Utah that police are permitted to “take out” unarmed suspects, rather than going to the trouble of arresting them.

Bustos would be sent to prison for manslaughter. Ogden City officials would quite thoughtfully find a way to cut the victims in for a share of the blame for the incident as a way of insulating themselves from liability for the actions of Officer Matt Jones, whose unnecessary pursuit led to the crash.

Jones, who has involved in police surveillance of a “known gang member” at what was called a “known gang/drugs/weapons hangout,” gave pursuit when Bustos left the area – apparently on the assumption that his presence in the area created reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. A federal court ruling notes that Jones “was aware of the residential address of Mr. Bustos and could have waited at that address to arrest Mr. Bustos for any crimes he may have committed.” Thus no exigent circumstances existed to justify pursuing Bustos, which is why “the officers were advised and ordered by dispatch to disengage from the pursuit.”

It was later discovered Bustos was driving while intoxicated. Officer Jones was under the influence of an even deadlier narcotic – a cocktail of adrenaline and power lust – as he blew through five stop lights, ignoring an order to terminate the chase.  After being ordered to stop a second time, Jones turned off his siren and running lights and ceased pursuit. A few seconds later, Bustos collided with Nelson’s vehicle.

Two years after the fatal car crash, Bustos pleaded guilty to two counts of vehicular manslaughter and is currently serving a potential thirty-year prison term. By the time Bustos was sent to prison, Ogden’s ruling political clique and the police force that serves it had already dealt with the problem posed by Officer Jones, who was, in effect, Bustos’s accomplice.

Although Jones’s actions met the criteria for a charge of automobile homicide – which involves causing “the death of another person” while operating a vehicle “in a criminally negligent manner” – he was not prosecuted or disciplined for that offense. Instead, he was purged from the force because he had become an irritant to the mayor and police chief.

On July 27, 2006, about eight months after the deaths of Nelson and Ellis, Jones was put on paid administrative leave after then-Mayor Matthew Godfrey complained about the officer’s involvement in a police protest over the city’s new pay policy. The new guidelines included a ticket quota as one of the 18 criteria for pay increases. Jones and other members of the Ogden Police Benefit Association – the local police union – had rented a moving van and decorated it with a banner reading: “Welcome to Ogden City, home of Godfrey’s ticket quota. If you disagree, call your city councilman.”

It’s important to understand that the police union was not taking a principled stand in opposition to the ticket quota; those officers certainly understood that extorting money at gunpoint was the most important element of their job. The officers involved in that protest were seeking an increase in pay and benefits without the imposition of performance criteria, and they were cynically exploiting public disgust over the ticket quota to that end.

Godfrey saw the van outside the Ogden Municipal Building. Noting that the person behind the wheel was a female who wasn’t a member of the Ogden PD, the Mayor lurked in the driveway long enough to see the driver picked up by a police officer he recognized on sight but whose name he didn’t know. He took down the license plate number of the officer’s car and called then-Chief Jon Grenier to demand that something be done. The Chief contacted a dispatcher and ran the license plate number. One hour later, a police lieutenant was knocking on Jones’s door to present him with notice that he was on administrative leave.

It’s worth noting that Jones faced no discipline for his actions in precipitating a fatal car crash. The death of two Mundanes was scarcely worth notice. But criticizing the Mayor and confirming the existence of a ticket quota were firing offenses – and, sure enough, Jones’s paid vacation led to termination the following January.

When the internal investigation began, Jones insisted that he would not be treated fairly – and interesting assessment of the integrity of the department that employed him. After he was fired, Jones told the media that he was the victim of official retaliation, which is almost certainly the case. The Ogden PD replied to that criticism by publicizing the fact that Jones had failed a lie-detector test (a finding not admissible in court) concerning the theft of two wallets from “undocumented immigrants” who had been the subject of traffic stops.

According to the department, the internal affairs investigation “demonstrated that Jones fit the description of the officer involved in the two thefts, that he was in the vicinity when the thefts occurred, that Jones had a pattern of targeting Hispanics, and that Jones had a pattern of manipulating and misrepresenting information about his activities and whereabouts on the job, thereby creating blocks of free time during which he was unaccountable to his employer.”

All of this may very well be true, but it doesn’t address some salient questions: Why didn’t Jones come under scrutiny until after he had offended the Mayor and Chief of Police by criticizing the ticket quota? Why didn’t the department investigate the possibility that Jones was profiling and shaking down Hispanics immediately after he had illegally pursued a Hispanic driver in an unnecessary car chase that led to the death of two innocent people?

Six months after Jones was fired by the Ogden PD, he was decertified by the Utah POST Council, which found that he had engaged in a “pattern of misconduct,” “sexual misconduct with a co-worker,” and general dishonesty.  In 2011, Jones and another former police officer named Daniel Kotter were found guilty of  trying to bribe a Utah Highway Patrol Officer who had arrested Jones for drunken driving.

By this time, Ogden’s municipal government would have forgotten about Matt Jones – but for the fact that he figured prominently in lawsuits filed on behalf of the families of Jessica Nelson and Philemon Ellis, who had died because of Jones’s actions.

The suit filed by Ellis’s family was quickly dismissed. The suit filed on behalf of Nelson’s daughter, who was 18 months old when her mother was killed, went to trial. The legal team defending the city persuaded the trial judge to exclude evidence regarding the reasons for Jones’s termination – that is, dishonesty, official misconduct, and criminal behavior that included preying on vulnerable Hispanics like Eddy Bustos. That evidence was of obvious and urgent relevance, but it was deemed inadmissible.

Robert Sykes, the attorney representing Jessica Nelson’s family, filed a motion in limine prohibiting the City from trawling through the personal backgrounds of the victims. The trial judge responded by granting that motion – and then proceeding to ignore it as attorney Heather White, acting on behalf of the City of Odgen, fired a fusillade of greasy insinuations about the character and activities of both Jessica Nelson and Philemon Ellis.

In her questioning of Theresa Nelson, Jessica’s mother, White insinuated that Jessica was a drug-addicted prostitute and that Ellis – a family friend – was among her clients. At one point White simply disregarded the order in limine outright and asked the grieving mother: “Did you know that [Ellis] had a criminal history dealing with prostitution?”

This prompted Sykes to object that “[Mr.] Ellis is dead, and his history has nothing to do with this, and [White is] trying to besmirch Jessica Nelson by using this improperly, and she knows it.”

For what little it was worth, the trial judge upheld that objection, but White’s tactic had the desired effect: It placed the onus on the victims to explain why they were at an intersection at 3:00 a.m., rather than on the City of Ogden to defend the criminal actions of the disgraced police officer who had helped bring about their deaths. The jury played the expected role of upholding the city government’s claim that both Jones and the political junta that employed him were shielded by “sovereign immunity.”

“According to our laws and social values, prostitutes are criminals who should be punished, not rewarded with a verdict,” Sykes pointed out in a motion for a new trial. “There is a reasonable likelihood that the jury would have viewed the evidence in favor of Plaintiff’s case more favorably had [the City of Ogden] not planted the seed, without any basis, that Jessica and her passenger were involved in criminal activity” (which would have been more accurately described as consensual indulgence in vice, assuming any such activity occurred).

The Utah Supreme Court agreed, ruling that Jessica Nelson’s “presence in the intersection was tragic and random. What she was doing in the intersection was irrelevant, what she had been doing that night was irrelevant, and any prior life history of either Jessica or Mr. Ellis was irrelevant. The questioning therefore … served only to prejudice the jury.” Attorney Heather White, the court observed, “surrendered, without resistance, to the impulse to win her case by bludgeoning the character of the dead.”

Those who belong to the political class assume that their natural and proper role is that of the accuser or the prosecutor, never the defendant. In the case of Nelson and Ellis, the Ogden political clique demanded that the long-dead defendants explain their actions, thereby inviting a credulous jury to make unwarranted and irrelevant inferences.

This same mindset is at work in the Regime’s defense of drone strikes overseas in which dozens or hundreds of innocent people are killed – or in the notorious “Collateral Murder” video in which a US helicopter pilot who had just committed a war crime derisively blames the Iraqi victims for “bringing kids into a battle.”

Both at home and abroad, the Regime’s armed emissaries are adept at the use of the “Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy” – essentially, shooting first and drawing a bull’s-eye around the bullet hole. This is how the people in charge of the “targeted killing program” can claim that drone strikes are a practically infallible method of killing militants: They simply redefine all “military-age” males (those at least 14 years of age) in a targeted zone as suspected “militants.”

A similar method is used by police who seek to justify patently indefensible shootings: The officer perceived a “threat” on the part of the poor schlep up was holding a garden hose, or a pair of underwear, or a cellphone, to kill whenever they consider themselves at risk, which is why pants-wetting cowardice is a job qualification, rather than a liability, for police “work.”

In some police homicides – such as the deaths of Nelson and Ellis — the claim of “officer safety” makes a poor fit. Thus the only suitable tactic is to do what Heather White did: Traduce the character of the dead victims in an attempt to convince the jury that they must have been guilty of something.

Although White’s assault on the memory of Nelson and Ellis happened several years ago, the tactic she employed acquires new relevance in light of recent revelations regarding the Regime’s omnivorous surveillance program.

The Regime and those who serve it have insisted that the NSA’s eavesdropping activities are benign because they “only” involve the collection of “metadata,” rather than content. Leaving aside the fact that this is a lie, the Regime’s collection of metadata is a totalitarian exercise. Through metadata analysis it is possible to extrapolate a detailed account of any individual’s daily life, his acquaintances, his habits, and his vulnerabilities.

As Harvey Silverglate points out, each of us commits at least three acts each day that could be described as felonies by any reasonably ambitious prosecutor.  By using NSA-provided metadata to conduct a “pattern of life” analysis of a targeted individual, law enforcement agencies could probably contrive an excuse to arrest practically anybody at any time. This capacity will dramatically expand opportunities for official retaliation against Mundanes who seek redress for abuses committed by police – including family members of deceased victims.

Bad as things are in this respect right now, it will get much worse, very soon.

If it hadn’t been for the subtle and cynical intervention of the imperial Russian government, the American War for Independence might have failed. George Washington and his colleagues would have been condemned as traitors, and then dispatched to eternity with all of the horrors devised by inventive sadists to deter similar impudence on the part of those described as the Crown’s subjects.

This little-appreciated fact should be pointed out to those who have claimed that there was something inappropriate about Edward Snowden receiving help from Russia in his search forpolitical asylum from the world’s most powerful and most lawless regime.

At the time of the American revolt, the British Empire enjoyed incontestable superiority at sea, but possessed a mediocre army. It could project power anywhere on the face of the globe, but depended on foreign mercenaries to do most of the hands-on work of killing and dying.

As the rebellion coalesced in the American colonies, George III made a formal request to Empress Catherine to rent 20,000 battle-hardened Russian infantrymen, and a flotilla of Russian naval vessels to supplement the task force en route to chastise the colonists. Catherine politely declined the offer while bidding her fellow monarch good luck. In private conversations, however, the Empress was indulgently disdainful of the British king, saying that he had bungled the management of the American colonies and should be “taught a lesson.”

Catherine’s refusal to intervene on behalf of King George was not the only favor she did on behalf of the American patriot cause. As the War for Independence unfolded, the Empress conducted a brisk business supplying the navies of France and Spain, both of which gave material support to the Patriot cause.

When the British government began to interdict neutral shipping to inspect for America-bound “contraband,” Catherine sent communiques to Sweden, Denmark, Holland, and Prussia proposing the creation of a “League of Armed Neutrality” with the advertised aim of protecting freedom of the seas. This had the effect of isolating Great Britain diplomatically, thereby nullifying its naval advantage. France labored under no similar restrictions. This is why the French fleet was able to supply ninety percent of the weapons used by American rebels in their War for Independence.

Russia was one of several countries to which the Continental Congress had deployed envoys in search of aid. Francis Dana, a former secretary to John Adams, endured a long, lonely, and apparently fruitless mission to the Court of St. Petersburg. Harried by the imperial secret police and immersed in the exhausting intrigue of court politics, Dana was never given an audience by the Empress, whose decisions were guided by calculated self-interest, rather than idealism. The dejected American emissary must have been astonished on his return to hear John Adams laud Catherine as a “friend” of liberty’s cause, and to hear Washington extol the virtues of the “great Potentate of the North.”

In his book The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World 1788-1800, historian Jay Winik describes Empress Catherine – the authoritarian ruler of a Russian police state – as the “midwife” of American independence. The American revolt quite likely would not have succeeded if Britain hadn’t been “neutralized and isolated by Catherine’s Armed League”; by denying King George’s request for military aid, and using her influence to curtail Britain’s naval advantage, the Russian tyrant “helped bolster the hopes of beleaguered American rebels fighting for their lives….”

The Russian government of Vladimir Putin has rendered similar aid to an American whistle-blower who is fighting for his life – much to the dismay and outrage of people who are Americans by birth, rather than conviction, and who mistakenly believe that patriotism is measured by one’s willingness to abide the institutional criminality of the government that insolently presumes to rule us.

In 1995, when he plagued the House of Representatives, the execrable Senator Charles Schumer of New York ardently defended the Regime’s annihilation of the Branch Davidians outside Waco, and treated with unfiltered scorn anybody with sufficient temerity to condemn that Soviet-caliber episode of state-inflicted mass murder. As it happens, the FBI’s campaign to annihilate state enemies at Mt. Carmel received material assistance from the Russian security services in the person of the late Dr. Igor Smirnov of the Moscow Institute of Psycho-Correction – whose wife, Elena Rusalkina, has continued his work as a “counter-terrorism” contractor for the Department of Homeland Security.

Commissar Schumer, who lauded the joint U.S.-Russian production at Mt. Carmel, is now distraught that the Russians aren’t willing to help the Regime in Washington apprehend a state enemy so he can be tortured and put through a show trial. In a June 23 CNN interview, Schumer fumed that by “aiding and abetting Snowden’s escape,” Putin had “put a finger in the eye of the United States.” Schumer much prefers it when the Russians are aiding and abetting Washington’s murderous crimes against the American people.

Like the rest of his detestable cohort, Schumer believes that the world’s inhabitants, including foreign rulers, have a moral obligation to submit to Washington’s will. Assuming that Putin was involved in the decision to facilitate Edward Snowden’s flight from Hong Kong to Latin America, his actions may well have been motivated by a desire to give a metaphorical middle digit to Schumer and his ilk.

In any case, if Putin consciously aided Snowden, that choice – like those made by the Empress Catherine – was based on calculations of political advantage, rather than a principled devotion to individual liberty. And Edward Snowden’s willingness to accept help from Russia is akin to the entreaties made on behalf of the American rebels by Francis Dana.

Commenting about Snowden’s flight to Russia en route to Latin America, a very good friend (and former editor) of mine observed: “If Edward Snowden is going to hopscotch around the word to locations where elections are rigged and human rights ignored, that giant sucking sound is sympathy evaporating for him.”

A better way of viewing Snowden’s behavior is that he is hopscotching around the world to countries not ruled by governments that kill people by remote control, and are strong enough to prevent him from being seized and tortured by the only government that routinely commits crimes of that kind.

Yes, Vladimir Putin and his clique are products of the Soviet system that murdered tens of millions of people. At present, however, they are content to contain their ambitions to the country they currently control.

Russian drones aren’t plying the skies above distant countries, raining death and terror on helpless neighborhoods. Putin the ex-KGB chief doesn’t have Tuesday meetings to authorize summary executions on the basis of a “Kill List” compiled by anonymous and unaccountable functionaries.Russia’s FSB secret police, like its counterpart, the FBI, does stage false-flag terrorist incidents, but once again, those are carried out for domestic political purposes. Moscow doesn’t provide arms, training, and support to terrorist groups in Syria, Iran, and elsewhere; that’s Washington’s gig. And since September 2001 it has Washington, not Moscow, that employs the services of KGB-trained secret police in countries like Uzbekistan and Syria.

During the Brezhnev era, Soviet “journalists” routinely participated in KGB-orchestrated denunciations of dissidents and human rights activists. As the well-coiffed commissar David Gregory demonstrated during his June 24 interview with Glenn Greenwald, behavior of that kind is not quite commonplace for members of the American media elite. An even more repellent example was provided by New York Times columnist Ross Sorkin, who said on CNBC that “I’d almost arrest Glenn Greenwald [because] he wants to help get him to Ecuador or whatever.”

Russia is ruled by a degenerate gangster regime, not a cunning Communist cabal pursuing global hegemony and ideological domination. In many important ways, that long-suffering country is less collectivist than the United States has become.

In Russia today, “Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is required reading in schools for 11th graders,” notes Russian writer Stanislav Mishin (who could be described as the Russian equivalent of a Pat Buchanan-style nationalist conservative). “All the brutality of the Soviets and the crimes that were committed will be in the minds of our children for generations. Where is any review [in American schools] of the crimes that Wall Street committed when it sponsored and set up those same Communist Marxists or Hitler’s Fascist Marxists? Nowhere. Where is the admission of the massacres that the American army committed in the independent nation of the Confederate States? Nowhere, nor [is there] anything of the terror bombings of German cities or anything else of that nature. You will never hear anything on these from those NYC/DC blabber heads who love their Wall Street and think that genocidaires like Sherman were bully.”

Mishin observes that under the administration of former President Medvedev (a protégé of Putin), Russia had a flat income tax – “and not the 30% or so suggested by those American conservatives but at 13″ – and a top corporate tax rate of 24% “compared to the American Federal rate of 36% and additional state rates.” There is also a far greater diversity of opinion in the Russian media than one finds in the American “free” press – a fact underscored quite memorably by the way the American media eagerly joined in the Orwellian Two-Minutes Hate of Edward Snowden.

What about foreign aggression and revolutionary subversion? Aren’t Putin and his comrades to blame for promoting terrorism? One imagines Mishin drawing a steadying breath before addressing that subject.

“Who invaded over 30 nations in less than 200 years?” Mishin quite reasonably inquires. “Who has fought over 6 wars since 1991: Iraq followed by 10 years of bombing them, Somalia, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, while engaging unofficially in Somalia, Kenya, Yemen, Pakistan and the Philippines? Who waxes and screams for full invasions of Iran, Yemen, Pakistan, Venezuela? Who threatened to bomb our ships and come in and defend the Chechen Islamics? Who sponsored revolutions in Serbia, Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus (failed), Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan (failed), Moldova (failed)?”

Whatever we learn about Snowden’s motives and affiliations, questions of the kind raised by Mishin should be honestly considered by those who criticize the whistle-blower for “hopscotching” from country to country to elude the long reach of the drone-murderers and dungeon masters in Washington. Assuming that a gap separates post-Soviet Russia from proto-Soviet Amerika, it’s one that can be crossed in the kind of modest jump one performs in a hopscotch game.

The Best of William Norman Grigg

“It was my gun that shot and killed a 7-year-old girl,” insists Detroit resident Joseph Weekley, who took part in a fatal home invasion on May 17, 2010. This apparent admission is actually an evasion, in that it assigns blame to an inanimate instrument, rather than the individual who wielded it. Weekley also insists that he didn’t intend to pull the trigger, and has no knowledge of doing so, and that he didn’t realize the child was dead until he heard a “high-pitched moan” coming from beneath a pile of clothes.

The only other eyewitness to the killing of Aiyana Stanley-Jones is Mertila Jones, the slain child’s grandmother. Weekley has claimed that Jones was to blame for the killing of her granddaughter, because the woman supposedly tried to swipe the MP-5 sub-machine gun from the hands of the assailant who had just burst into her home at midnight. That claim was contradicted by fellow home invader Shawn Stallard, who was right behind Weekley when the shooting took place and didn’t see a struggle between Weekley and Jones.

Weekley has also said that he initially thought that the shot had been fired by one of his comrades. Oh, sure, he grudgingly admits, it may have been his finger that pulled the trigger – but someone or something else is at fault. In any case, he insists that he’s not to blame – that despite the fact that Aiyana was left to die in a pool of blood, that he, the shooter, is the real victim.

“I just feel devastated and just depressed,” Weekley sobbed from the witness stand during his involuntary manslaughter trial. “Every day this replays in my head. There’s nothing else I could have done differently.”

If it weren’t for the fact that Weekley’s home invasion crew bore the insignia of the criminal syndicate claiming a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within Detroit, he would have quickly been found guilty. In fact, he most likely would have faced a charge of aggravated murder, rather than involuntary manslaughter.

The trial ended in a hung jury – not because the facts were in serious dispute, but because Weekley belongs to that sanctified caste that exercises the state-conferred power of discretionary killing. He was, and remains, a member of the Detroit Police Department’s Special Reaction Team (SRT), which staged – I’m using the word in its theatrical sense – a midnight raid on the home where Aiyana was sleeping.

The police were searching for a man named Chauncey Owens who was a suspect in a murder two days prior to the raid. They knew where the suspect could be found and had the advantage of time and superior numbers. If they had been peace officers, they would have staked out the home and waited for the suspect to emerge, then taken him into custody in a relatively low-key conventional arrest. But this wouldn’t have done anything to boost the Department’s “Q” rating.

Although the midnight raid served no legitimate law enforcement purpose, it would have made for exceptional “reality” television. Embedded with Weekley and his comrades on that evening was a camera crew from a cable TV program called “The First 48″ – which meant that PR, rather than public safety, was the defining priority of the mission.

This fact simply cannot be over-emphasized: The point of his mission was not to arrest a murder suspect; it was to turn that arrest into a propaganda film. Weekley, a veteran of more than one hundred previous raids, was already a featured performer in the agitprop series “Detroit SWAT,” which might explain why he was given the lead role in the May 17, 2010 production. That description is not an exercise in snarkiness: The A&E Network’s guide to that program lists Weekley as an “actor” and a “cast member.”

Neighbors who saw the Berserkers assemble outside the home warned that there were children inside. The presence of toys scattered in the front yardshould have made that fact obvious enough that a cop could understand it, especially in light of the fact that several testified that they had scoped out the house repeatedly in the hours prior to the operation.

Even if the yard had been barren of evidence that children lived inside the home, rational people would have understood that a full-force raid was both unnecessary and needlessly dangerous to anyone who resided therein. But anything less than a Fallujah-style “dynamic entry” would have meant missing an agitprop opportunity, and left the jacked-up adolescents in paramilitary gear with an unbearable case of blue balls. So Weekly and his fellow sociopaths attacked the living room where Aiyana was sleeping by flinging a flash-bang grenade through a closed window, kicking down the door, and storming in with guns drawn.

A few months after Weekley killed Aiyana, the officer’s taxpayer-funded defense team sketched out a legal strategy in which the girl’s family was to blame for her death. Weekley’s attorney filed a “Notice of Non-Party Fault” claiming, without providing evidence, that family members were involved in “drug dealing, vehicle theft and illegal utility hook-ups,” and that Aiyana’s grandmother was at fault for the child’s death because she “interfered in the execution of the search by unlawfully touching the defendant and causing his weapon to accidentally discharge.”

The same strategy was followed during the trial: More attention was focused on perceived contradictions in Jones’s account, and on her supposedly irresponsible statement that the police “came to kill” the night of the raid.

We are invited to believe that the anguished reaction of a traumatized grandmother to the needless death of her seven-year-old granddaughter is a more significant outrage than the act of carrying a paramilitary midnight raid on a residence for the benefit of television cameras.

The Detroit Police Department’s institutional reaction to the killing of Aiyana brings to mind the behavior of U.S. helicopter pilots involved in the massacre documented in the notorious “Collateral Murder” video. After two helicopter gunship crews annihilated more than a dozen unarmed Iraqis, troops on the ground reported that two children had been injured in the attack.

“Well, it’s their fault for bring their kids into a battle,” sneered one of the assailants.

For those who belong to the state-privileged criminal fraternity that includes Weekly, “officer safety” is at all times and in all places the highest and most important consideration. The same limitless self-preoccupation that typifies the state’s enforcement caste is also manifest in an acute sense of self-pity on the part of police officers who murder innocent people.

During his testimony, Weekly invited the public to pity him.

“I’ll never be the same,” blubbered Aiyana’s killer, who recalled playing at the park with his daughters before being called to play a part in the paramilitary assault that led to the state-sanctioned murder of someone else’s 7-year-old child.

The human type Weekly represents was described very well by Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Referring to members of the Nazi regime’s “special action squads” – which they called Einsatzgruppen, and we call SWAT teams, or SRTs – Arendt noted that the problem they faced was “how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler – who apparently was rather strongly afflicted by these instinctive reactions himself – was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!”

Weekley is a museum-quality specimen of the self-pitying Stormtrooper – and the jurors who were willing to let him escape mortal accountability for his crime would likely have done the same for Weekley’s German antecedents in the 1930s.

The Best of William Norman Grigg

Nearly twenty years ago, then-FBI Director Louis Freeh – still basking in his agency’s residual glory from the Mt. Carmel Massacre of April 1993 – visited Moscow to sign a joint cooperation accord with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). After touring the Lubyanka Square headquarters of the Russian secret police, Freeh observed that “Our nations have more in common than ever before.”

At the time I thought it was shocking that Freeh would traduce his country, and his agency, by offering that comparison to the renamed KGB (which began its existence as the Cheka). Roughly two decades later I’ve come to understand that if the comparison is offensive, the Russians have the stronger claim to be the insulted party.

Like their Russian and Soviet siblings, the FBI’s primary role is that of fabricating crimes in the service of the state. Since 1991 – more particularly, since 2001 – the FBI has engaged in this behavior far more extensively than the Russians, both in terms of the volume of fabrications and the geographical reach of its operations. And evidence is accumulating that the Bureau has added assassination to its proto-totalitarian toolkit.

In his study The Gulag Archipelago, Alexandr Solzenitsyn records that “the creation of fabricated cases began back in the early years of the Organs” – that is, immediately after the Soviet secret police agency was created in 1917. The routine fabrication of offenses was done by the Chekists “so that their constant salutary activity might be perceived as essential. Otherwise, what with a decline in the number of enemies, the Organs might, in a bad hour, have been forced to wither away.”

From its inception, the Soviet secret police agency was engaged in what we now call “Homeland Security Theater.” The same could be said of the FBI, which actually had a nine-year head start on its Soviet counterpart. J. Edgar Hoover’s two chief priorities were the collection of what the Soviets would call kompromat on significant public figures – politicians, policy-makers, celebrities – and the management of his secret police agency’s public image. With the advent of COINTELPRO in the 1950s, the FBI became fully engaged in a campaign of surveillance, harassment, disruption, andassassination (if only by proxy) targeting political dissidents. Since that time, the FBI has been a fully realized political police organization, in every evil sense of that expression.

Like their Chekist forebears, FBI Special Agents don’t solve crimes; instead, they extract confessions through intimidation or blackmail. Where confessions aren’t forthcoming, FBI interrogators will routinely deploy the usefully ambiguous and self-ratifying charge of making a “materially false statement to a federal agent” to punish those who refuse to submit.

Mind you, FBI agents – like all other law enforcement personnel in the United States – are trained and encouraged to lie as an “investigative” technique. They face no criminal, civil, or administrative punishment for lying in the course of an interrogation. Once again, they share this trait with their Soviet and Russian kindred.

“We lambs are forbidden to lie, but the interrogator could tell all the lies he felt like,” observed Solzhenitsyn. “Those articles of the law did not apply to him…. He could confront us with as many documents as he chose, bearing the forged signatures of our kinfolk and friends – and it would be just a skillful interrogation technique” rather than a prosecutable deception.

A victim who is manipulated, intimidated, and barraged with unfamiliar and often contradictory details and accusations will inevitably say something that could be considered incriminating – or that he might later contradict in some trivial way. Those who are drawn into FBI interrogation sessions suffer from an additional disadvantage: The Bureau’s inquisitors, as a matter of inflexible policy, refuse to permit an objective record of their investigative interviews.

“FBI agents always interview in pairs,” writes the indispensable constitutional scholar Harvey Silverglate. “One agent asks the questions, while the other writes up what is called a `form 302 report’ based on his notes. The 302 report, which the interviewee does not normally see, becomes the official record of the exchange; any interview who contests its accuracy risks prosecution for lying to a federal official, a felony. And here is the key problem that throws the accuracy of all such statements and reports into doubt: FBI agents almost never electronically record their interrogations; to do so would be against written policy.”

A 2006 internal FBI memo obtained by the New York Times insisted that laying bare the Bureau’s interrogation sessions to the unenlightened eyes and untutored ears of the lay public would be an offense akin to tearing the veil away from the Holy of Holies. The common public might mistakenly believe that “perfectly lawful and acceptable interviewing techniques” may involve “unfair deceit,” and question “the quality of evidence” produced thereby.

In the Stalin-era Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn recalled, victims of secret police interrogation would be handed a “206″ form to sign attesting to the accuracy of the official report, and the propriety of the methods used to extract information during the session. Defense Attorney Sam Fields points outthat subjects of FBI interrogations – whether they are potential witnesses or potential defendants – will sometimes be given a copy of the resulting 302 document prior to trial.

“If your interview lasted more than thirty seconds, it is guaranteed you will find numerous discrepancies,” Fields advises us. “Some of them will be insignificant; some of them could be material…. Whether or not the `302’ discrepancies are a result of stupidity or cupidity makes no difference. Testify in opposition to the `302’ and you are in the crosshairs of the Feds. If they believe your testimony cost them the case, the next thing you [are] likely to hear from the FBI will be: `Please place your hands behind your back.’”

Furthermore, as trial attorney Norm Pattis warns us, 302s can be used to incriminate and convict defendants, but never to exonerate them. In 2007, Pattis notes, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut “moved in limine to preclude the defense from using a 302 to impeach witnesses.” What that meant, in substance, was that the US Attorney in that case admitted “that FBI 302s aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on” – unless, of course, they can be used in a retaliatory prosecution of a witness or defendant who has somehow thwarted a U.S. Attorney’s ambition, or frustrated an FBI agent.

Another Chekist-approved method favored by the contemporary FBI is the entrapment of innocent people, either as a pure exercise in Homeland Security Theater or in order to compel them to act as informants or provocateurs. Over the past decade, this has become the FBI’s métier. The case of Portland, Oregon resident Mohamed Osman Mohamud is a museum-quality exhibit of the first approach. The Bureau’s relentless harassment of Muslims at a mosque briefly attended by Mohamud offers numerous examples of the latter tactic in action.

Mohamud’s case has been previously examined in detail. Here’s a brief capsule summary:

At age 18, as the Somali-born Portland resident got caught in an undertow of jihadist radicalism, his father made the fatal error of contacting the FBI to express concerns. The Bureau very thoughtfully braced the young man with two of its “terrorism facilitators,” who took charge of the young man’s indoctrination. Then they prevented him from flying to Alaska to take a commercial fishing job.

After eliminating any possibility that this alienated young man could have found a way to make an honest living, the FBI’s Homeland Security Theater troupe played out the familiar script: They played to the entirely justifiable outrage felt by this young man over the US government’s treatment of Muslims in Somalia, then carefully manipulated him into pushing a button on what he thought was a bomb at Portland’s 2010 Christmas tree lighting ceremony.

While one element of the Portland, Oregon FBI office was targeting Mohamud, another was focusing its malign attention on a young Eritrean-born man named Yonas Fikre, who, like Mohamud, had attended Portland’s As-Saber mosque. In April 2010, Fikre traveled to Sudan, where he planned to start a cell phone business. His first stop was at the US Consulate in Khartoum, where a State Department representative advised him to file paperwork for a Sudanese business license.

Shortly thereafter, Fikre received a phone call from a man named David Noordeloos, who represented himself as an official at the embassy. He told Fikre that he was one of several U.S. citizens in Sudan who had been invited to a luncheon at the US Embassy the following day in order to receive a briefing about safety concerns.

When Fikre showed up at the Embassy the following morning, he was taken into a small room and held for interrogation by Noordeloos and another man named Jason Dundas, who identified themselves as FBI Special Agents. Fikre immediately demanded that he have access to his attorney before being questioned. The FBI agents told him that he had been placed on the “no-fly list” and thus couldn’t return to the United States in order to confer with his attorney.

Leaving aside the fact that there is a common technology called a “telephone” that would make the distances involved irrelevant, it’s worth underscoring the fact that the FBI uses the “no-fly list” as a kind of virtual Berlin Wall: The Bureau used it to trap Mohamud in the continental U.S., so he could be indoctrinated by its terrorism facilitators, and they used it to trap Fikre overseas so he couldn’t have access to his attorney.

During that April 22, 2010 conversation (appropriately enough, it occurred on Lenin’s birthday), Noordeloos explained that the FBI wanted to conscript Fikre as an informant within the As-Saber mosque. He promised that he would be well-compensated to act as a stukach, that he would enjoy “the good life” if he were to become a snitch. He also made it plain that refusal to cooperate would have awful consequences.

“Don’t you love your wife?” Noordeloos asked ominously at one point in the interrogation. (“One could break even a totally fearless person through his concern for those he loved,” observed Solzhenitsyn of NKVD interrogation techniques.)

Since Fikre couldn’t go back to the U.S., he was released from the US Embassy. A few days later, he received an e-mail from Noordeloos that said, among other things, that “The time to help yourself is now.”

Over the next two months, Fikre noticed that he was being followed by plainclothes police. In June 2010 he left Sudan, eventually arriving in the United Arab Emirates. A year later, after moving to the city of Al Ain in Abu Dhabi, Fikre was kidnapped from his home by agents of the UAE secret police, who blindfolded him and took him to a dungeon, where he was held captive and tortured for 106 days.

The interrogators who tormented Fikre had been given detailed information about him by the FBI, and repeatedly demanded that he cooperate with the Bureau. When he resisted answering questions, or inquired as to whether his jailers were working as proxies for the FBI, he was “repeatedly beaten severely on his head, back, legs, and feet with plastic pipes, required to assume stress positions for hours, and threatened with death by strangulation by use of a flexible pipe,” Fikre recalls in a recently filed lawsuit. “One particularly painful torture method his interrogators used was to force plaintiff to lie on his stomach with his sandals off, whereupon he was beaten severely on the soles of his feet; thereafter, he was required to stand on his feet, which … caused him great pain.”

One repeated line of inquiry dealt with Mohamed Osman Mohamud – the 18-year-old from Portland who had been lured into playing a leading role in a Homeland Security Theater production. It is quite possible that the FBI was trying to torture Fikre into providing “evidence” against their patsy, in the event that they confronted that rarest of things, a conscientious federal jury.

In July 2011, Fikre’s family and friends, working through an attorney, reported that he had gone missing and was likely in the custody of the UAE secret police. A consulate employee made a perfunctory visit to his cell, and concluded that the victim – who had dropped thirty pounds, and had been told that he would be tortured to death if he revealed the abuse he had received – was in “good shape.” The consulate representative was assured that Fikre would be released “tomorrow.” He was held for another eight weeks. When he went to the airport, Fikre was told that he was forbidden to return to the U.S. because his name was still on the no-fly list. An involuntary exile, Fikre was eventually offered political asylum by a relatively free country, Sweden.

Fikre was one of at least five men who attend the As-Saber mosque whose names have been inscribed in what we could call the “Berlin Wall Registry” – or what the Regime calls the “no-fly list.” None of them has been charged with terrorism or related crimes. None has been told why he is on the list.

Among the other victims was Libyan-born US citizen Jamal Tarhuni, who was kidnapped by the Feds in Tunis while trying to return from a humanitarian trip to his war-afflicted homeland in January 2012. Tarhuni had provided translation and consulting services on behalf of a Christian charitable organization called Teams International. After being told that his name was on the Berlin Wall Registry, he was drawn into a protracted interrogation by a set of FBI agents under the lead of Special Agent Brian Zinn.

In Tarhuni’s case, the victim was told that he would be released if he took a polygraph test. A female FBI agent requested that Tarhuni sign an electronic release form on her computer. As he examined the document, Tarhuni realized that it was a waiver of several constitutionally protected rights. He quite sensibly refused to sign the form. As punishment, he was effectively imprisoned for three weeks in Tunis before his Portland-based attorney, Thomas Nelson, was able to arrange for him to fly home via Paris and Amsterdam.

Tarhuni was obviously more fortunate than Fikre, but they both should regard themselves as blessed in light of the FBI’s recent execution-style murder of Orlando resident Ibragim Todashev, a Chechen-born acquaintance of alleged Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

Yes, this was an extra-judicial murder. Todashev was unarmed, surrounded by FBI agents, Massachusetts State Troopers, and officers from the Orlando Police Department. The original story – ventilated by an anonymous source to a credulous Regime-aligned news outlet – was that Todashev, who was supposedly prepared to confess involvement in an unsolved triple murder, suddenly snapped and threatened the bold and valiant G-Men with a knife. That story has since been “rectified”; the new version is that the unarmed and outnumbered young man threatened the Chekists with a metal rod– or perhaps he threw a table at one of the interrogators – and simply had to be gunned down.

None of this would explain why there was a bullet entry wound in the back of Todashev’s head, a location suspiciously close to the spot preferred by the NKVD executioners who fed condemned political prisoners a “Lubyanka breakfast” – that is, a cigarette and a bullet to the back of the head.

That variety of lethal room service was a standard feature of the basement cells of the facility toured by then-FBI Director Louis Freeh on July 4, 1994, before he correctly observed that his agency and the one that maintained that dungeon had “more in common than ever before.” Truer words have rarely, if ever, departed the tax-devouring skull cave of a federal bureaucrat.

The Best of William Norman Grigg

In Utah, as elsewhere in the Soyuz, “battering” a police officer is considered an especially grievous crime. Until earlier this year, this offense was treated as a Class A misdemeanor. Under SB 131, a measure enacted earlier this year by the state legislature, it is now a class C felony.

Any incidental contact between a Mundane and the sanctified personage of a police officer – including the act of breathing on an officer – can be prosecuted as “battery.” This would apply to cases in which a woman is desperately trying to prevent an officer from violating her sexually: Avictim who puts up resistance in such circumstances can expect to be violently subdued, arrested, and charged with “assaulting an officer.”

In Utah, a victim of a sexual assault by a police officer could easily find herself convicted of a felony unless she submits with docility to whatever the armed predator is willing to inflict on her. On the other hand, if the officer is exposed as a sex offender, it’s quite likely that he would face misdemeanor charges. This is illustrated by the case of former Box Elder County Sheriff’s Deputy Scott Womack, who is facing multiple lawsuits and criminal charges involving illegal strip-searches of young women conducted during traffic stops over a period of about two years.

In February, Womack pleaded no contest to three counts of attempted custodial misconduct – which is a misdemeanor offense. In exchange for Womack’s plea, county prosecutors dropped nine additional charges – all of them misdemeanors, as well.

Under the plea bargain agreement, Womack’s name would not be permanently inscribed in the sex offender registry – despite the fact that his acts are, by definition, those of a violent sex offender. Since the charges against him are misdemeanors, Womack would eventually be eligible for the restoration of his peace officer certification. Womack does face federal criminal charges and federal lawsuits filed by three of his victims, but it’s likely that most, if not all, of the trouble he faces would be made to disappear once the first state case against him is closed.

After he was arraigned, Womack was compelled to surrender his passport and to avoid contact with the victims. However, he has been free during the legal proceedings. During a court hearing in early May, Womack – surrounded by family and other supportive spectators – “waited for the judge to call his case sitting in a back room of the court, shrouded by blinds that court workers said [are] typically reserved for victims who do not want to be seen by defendants,” reported the Salt Lake Tribune.

In other words, the impenitent predator was dealt with as if he were the victim, cosseted and sheltered and treated with gentle deference. He has been allowed to remain at large despite the fact that at least one of the victims, Brigham City resident Holly Griffin, said that she was afraid of retaliation by Womack “because he had my address.”

Griffin’s fears were amply justified. During a traffic stop not far from her home, Womack – in what would emerge as his modus operandi – claimed that Griffin was wanted on a narcotics warrant, and would be handcuffed and taken to the county jail unless she submitted to an invasive inspection for tattoos, piercings, and other identifiers.

“When he returned to my car [after getting the driver’s license and registration], he explained that there was a warrant out for me in Summit County,”Griffin told the Salt Lake City ABC affiliate. “I told him I had not been to Summit County in a few years and that I had never done anything wrong in my life.”

Womack presented Griffin with two options: Submit to a partial strip search, or go to jail. When she requested that a female officer conduct the search, Womack replied that none was available.

“He asked me to life up my shirt up to my bra, lift down my pants to expose my upper thigh, and to show my lower leg,” the victim recounts. After she had satisfied the armed stranger’s demands, Womack released her without issuing a citation or a warning. Understandably traumatized by her experience, Griffin didn’t file a complaint – until after another victim, 18-year-old Tamsen Reid, filed a federal lawsuit against Womack and Box Elder County.

On November 20, 2010, Reid – who was 17 at the time – was one of five teenagers in a car that was stopped by Womack during a snowstorm. Womack claimed that the driver was speeding. After noticing that one of the teens was smoking, Womack ordered the driver and the passengers out of the car to search the vehicle for drugs.

After running the IDs of the five teenagers, Womack claimed that three of them – all of them young women, wouldn’t you know – had outstanding drug warrants in other jurisdictions. He had Reid and her female friends stand barefoot in the snow while lifting up their shirts and their bras, ostensibly to search for drugs.

For some reason, the costumed creeper took a special interest in Reid. Womack claimed that Reid was wanted in that state for heroin possession. This led the young woman, who had not been to Arizona and had never done heroin, to suggest that she might be the victim of identity theft.

Displaying the affected solicitude of a practiced molester, Womack told the frightened girl that she could clear things up right away, if she would simply get into his patrol vehicle and undress so he could inspect her for distinctive tattoos and piercings. Her only other alternative was to be handcuffed and booked into jail.

Terrified, and most likely nauseous, Reid complied. This prompted the predator to escalate his demands: He claimed that it was necessary for the teenager to spread her legs in order for him to determine if she had a distinctive tattoo in her genital region. At that point, Reid finally rebelled, telling the perverted stranger that the examination was over. Womack issued a warning to the driver, and the teenagers went on their way.

At the time, Reid later recalled, the teens were relieved, rather than outraged, because nobody got a ticket.

About ten months later, following her 18^th birthday, Reid contacted the Box Elder Sheriff’s Office to have the spurious drug warrant removed from her record. The clerk with whom Reid spoke informed her that there was no warrant, and never had been.

Reid also found out that Womack didn’t file a record of the traffic stop or the warning he had issued to the driver. She was also told that her that several other complaints had been received about Womack’s behavior.

Shortly after Reid filed a lawsuit against Box Elder County, Womack was allowed to “leave employment” at the Sheriff’s Office – but he was permitted to keep his law enforcement certification until the lawsuit was made public. By that time it had been known, for more than a year, that Womack was in the habit of conducting undocumented traffic stops in which he neither filed reports nor turned on his dashcam recorder.

In the August 2011 press conference announcing her lawsuit, Reid insisted that, however inexplicably, she still “believed in law enforcement,” but that her experience left her experiencing nightmares that would cause her to “wake up screaming.”

The indelible trauma experienced by Reid and Womack’s other victims could easily have turned out even worse if any of them had put up even the slightest physical resistance to the deputy’s sexual assaults.

Reid, who was undressed and alone in Deputy Aqualung’s Creepmobile, might consider herself to be blessed: If Womack had decided not to let the victim leave after she refused to undergo a genital examination, Reid most likely would have been arrested for resisting arrest and “assaulting” the sexual predator who had detained her.

Womack is hardly the first uniformed sociopath to force females to disrobe at gunpoint. In 2009, the City of Scottsdale, Arizona hit up local tax victims to pay a $315,000 settlement to a 19-year-old woman who was the victim of a similar sexual assault by former Police officer Chong Kim. In that case, the 19-year-old made the mistake of calling the police for “help” with intruders in her apartment. When Chong arrived, he noticed that the teenager had been drinking, a fact that he used as leverage to order her to “get naked.” After that woman filed a complaint, it was discovered that Chong had committed similar crimes against as many as 20 other women. Chong was forced to resign. There is no record of him being prosecuted for his crimes.

Under SB 131, the newly enacted Utah law on “battering” a law enforcement officer, a future victim of a similar sexual assault by a cop – and therewill be others – could be charged with a felony if she tries to escape.

During a February 7 Utah Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on SB 131, State Senator Aaron Osmond explained that he filed the bill in response to a “constituent request” from a police officer in his district. Osmond recruited four students from Copper Hills High School to serve as “co-presenters” of the bill.

Each of these earnest young people dutifully recited pious platitudes about the sterling nobility of the state’s armed enforcement caste, the all-encompassing danger in which they constantly find themselves, the vulgar ingratitude of those who would criticize them, and the moral obligation of the public “to protect them” (yes, one witness actually used those words).

The last witness, a young woman named Allison (whose last name I will not mention), denounced “aggressors” who would do injury to “the heroes who promote our well-being every day…. Let’s do all we can to increase the safety of our honorable officers.”

Dear Allison: Have you met Tamsen Reid? I’m sure she would be interested in having a chat with you about the uniformed hero who was so zealous to promote Reid’s “well-being” that he tried to force her, at gunpoint, to undergo an unauthorized gynecological exam in his patrol vehicle.

The Best of William Norman Grigg

During a May 15 visit to Stockholm, Secretary of State John Kerry warned Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad that if he doesn’t begin preparations to abdicate his office, “the opposition will be receiving additional support … and unfortunately the violence will not end.”

Under the rhetorical conventions governing the cynical profession called “diplomacy,” Kerry wasn’t allowed to make his threat explicit. Fortunately, Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker labors under no such restrictions.

“I do think we’ll be arming the opposition shortly,” Corker told CBS News on May 7, referring toa measure that will be put before the Senate next week.

While alluding to the fact that Washington is already covertly arming the Syrian insurgents, Corker made it clear that the military aid wouldn’t be restricted to rebel groups that have already been housebroken, explaining that “we have to change the equation” because “the moderate opposition groups we support are not as good at fighting” as the more ruthless factions that specialize in terrorizing non-combatants, executing prisoners, and whose leaders mutilate and cannibalize the dead bodies of their enemies.

It is impossible for Washington to provide military or “humanitarian” assistance to the Syrian insurgency without materially aiding hyper-violent factions such as the Jabhat al-Nursah, which is listed on the State Department’s roster of terrorist organizations.

Under federal law, providing material aid of any kind – from money to shaving cream to ammunition – to a listed terrorist group is a felonious offense.A few years ago, the regime sentenced a Long Island cable TV operator named Javed Iqbal to 69 months in prison because his cable system broadcast programs produced by a network owned by Hezbollah.

Iqbal was imprisoned as punishment for allowing words spoken in support of a listed terrorist group to be broadcast through his cable system – yet high-ranking officials in the same regime that sent him to prison are openly discussing their plans to arm Syrian Jihadists.

On May 16, the same regime that is providing support to Syrian terrorists conducted a raid in Boise to arrest an Uzbek national named Fazluddin Kurbanov, who has been accused of providing material support to a listed terrorist group called the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). As headline bait, the Feds also charged Kurbanov with possessing components of a “weapon of mass destruction,” which in this case appears to be a homemade hand grenade.

Federal prosecutors, including Wendy Olson, the hyper-ambitious legal commissarina assigned to Idaho, insist that the public was never at danger, because Kurbanov had been under surveillance for a long time, and the threat he posed had been contained. This means we should anticipate the all-but-inevitable disclosure that Kurbanov was being manipulated by an undercover operative working as a “terrorism facilitator” on behalf of the regime.

As we should expect, the IMU is a violent group whose objectives are not entirely laudable. This doesn’t make them a threat to our country, however. In fact, their chief grievance is one most Americans would find understandable: They want to overthrow a fetid police state run by a Communist gangster.

A profile of the group published by the Foreign Military Studies Office at Ft. Leavenworth recounts how the IMU grew out of a private security group that was created by Uzbek businessmen in the early 1990s. It was originally a non-ideological, non-sectarian self-defense organization that protected citizens and business owners against criminal syndicates that grew out of the Communist nomenklatura.

By 1991, the group had fallen under the leadership of a young mullah named Tahir Yuldashev, who gave it an explicitly Muslim character and – with the help of a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan – organized it into a private police force. In December of that year, the group occupied the local Communist Party headquarters in Namagan.

Thinking he could intimidate the group into dispersing, Uzbek Communist Party leader Islam Karimov paid a personal visit to Namagan – only to be publicly humiliated by Yuldashev, who refused to back down. This earned the IMU the undying enmity of Karimov, who banned the group and declared war on it when he became the ruler of Uzbekistan following the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Karimov, a Stalin-grade despot, remains in power today. As one would expect from a product of the Soviet ruling elite, Karimov is sustained in his rule by secret police who were trained by the Soviet KGB. This has made Karimov’s regime a very useful subcontractor for Washington in its war against – well, anybody impudent enough to challenge its claims to unqualified global supremacy. Terrorists willing to serve Washington’s interests — whether they are Syrian insurrectionists or practitioners of state terrorism, like Karimov — enjoy protection as part of Washington’s official terror cartel

The KGB-constructed dungeons in Uzbekistan have been – and, for all we know, continue to be – prime destinations for people abducted by the CIA for the purpose of prolonged detention and torture.

During the reign of Bush the Lesser, Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Tashkent, exposed his government’s collaboration in the CIA’s torture program in Uzbekistan. This led to Murray losing his job and enduring the kind of focused persecution reserved for public servants who publicly condemn the criminal actions of their employers.

“If you are put into prison in Uzbekistan,” wrote Murray after he was purged by his government, “the chances of coming out again alive are less than even. And most of the prisons are still the old Soviet gulags in the most literal sense.”

A few weeks into his term as British ambassador, Murray attended a show trial of an elderly man who had been tortured into confessing involvement with al-Qaeda, and implicating his nephew as well. This totalitarian auto-da-fe, he recalls, was staged “for the benefit of the American embassy to demonstrate the strength of the U.S.-Uzbek alliance against terrorism.”

To Karimov’s embarrassment, and the discomfiture of his invited guests, the victim refused to follow the script. Summoning the heroic strength of an innocent man with nothing to lose, the frail defendant defiantly told the tribunal: “This is not true. This is not true. They tortured my children in front of me until I signed this. I had never heard of al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden.”

Karimov and his comrades had hoped to offer a gift to their new patrons in Washington in the form of a broken and contrite “terrorist” whose confession would demonstrate the efficiency of their interrogation program. Instead they had to be content with dragging this pitiful old man outside the courtroom to be shot.

According to Ambassador Murray, Karimov’s secret police frequently make use of beatings, whippings, and genital mutilation. Asphyxiation, “usually by putting a gas mask on people and blocking the air vents until they suffocated,” is another favorite method, Murray reports as well as “rape with objects, rape with bottles, anal rape, homosexual rape, heterosexual rape, and mutilation of children in front of their parents.”

Murray has described the case of a man named Muzafar Avazzov, who was submerged in boiling liquid after being beaten and having his fingernails ripped from his hands by Karimov’s CIA-allied secret police. He was hardly the only detainee who was murdered by being boiled alive.

After learning of these atrocities, Murray compiled a large dossier and expressed his outrage to his superiors – only to be rebuked for being “over-focused on human rights.” This led the ambassador to send a deputy to the CIA station chief to deliver a formal protest. The U.S. functionary deflected criticisms by boasting about the quality of the “intelligence that had been extracted through torture, and by reciting the familiar claim that torture is a trivial concern “in the context of the war on terror.”

Significantly, the U.S. government designated the IMU a terrorist group in 2005 – at the height (or depth) of official cooperation with Karimov’s torture-state, which in that year conducted a bloody operation to suppress dissent that left several hundred people dead.

None of the U.S. officials who collaborated with Karimov’s KGB-trained torturers has been punished. It’s not clear whether that collaboration continues today. Now that the regime in Washington simply assassinates people through drone strikes, it may no longer have use for such crude methods of intelligence collection.

The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is a violent and dangerous group, but it has never posed a measurable threat to the safety of Americans. The same is probably true of Fazladdin Kurbanov. However, this is emphatically not true of the regime whose secret police operatives kept Kurbanov under surveillance in his Boise apartment.

Following Kurbanov’s arrest, Boise-area talk radio programs resounded with ritualistic recitals of the prescribed talking points: We must remain “vigilant” and incurably suspicious of our neighbors – especially dusky-skinned people with exotic surnames – because our enemies are implacable, endlessly devious, and incurably determined to dominate us or murder everyone who resists. We don’t yet have reason to believe this description applies to Kurbanov. However, it does make a perfect fit for the government that is prosecuting him for the crime of seeking to undermine a ruler who is a prominent member of Washington’s officially sanctioned terror cartel.

The Best of William Norman Grigg

Sandpoint, Idaho resident Rita Hutchens is an opinionated 57-year-old quilt artist whose work has earned her international notoriety. Given that Hutchens is also an outspoken proponent of constitutionalist views, it’s possible that some people have taken issue with her political opinions.

Hutchens has never harmed or threatened another human being. Yet local officials, led by Bonner County Deputy Prosecutor Shane Greenbank – an inventively dishonest official – are trying to make a criminal out of her. Failing that, they might simply seek to have her imprisoned indefinitely in a psych ward.

Around midnight on April 16, three Bonner County Sheriff’s Deputies invaded Rita’s home while she was asleep and half-clothed on her living room sofa. The deputies were enforcing a bench warrant issued several weeks earlier after Hutchens had failed to appear for a preliminary hearing on a misdemeanor charge.

In Idaho, as elsewhere, it is exceptionally rare for police to serve warrants after sundown. In its ruling in the 2011 case Idaho v. Skurlock, the Idaho Supreme Court recognized that at night time people “have a heightened expectation of privacy that should not be disturbed by a knock on the door and the presentation of a search warrant.” In addition, executing a warrant at night “increases the likelihood of violence because nighttime searches cause an abrupt intrusion on sleeping occupants in a home, thus increasing the potential for a violent reaction from the occupants.”

The bold and valiant deputies who kicked in Rita Hutchens’s door at midnight acted in the serene confidence that they had no reason to expect a violent reaction on the part of their terrified victim.

The officials responsible for the Stasi-style midnight raid maintain that there was an element of urgency because she is suspected of a violent crime, to wit: battery on a city official at Sandpoint City Hall last August 12. If they are in a particularly creative mood, city authorities might embellish that charge by saying that it involved an impact weapon.

The implement of mayhem allegedly employed by Hutchens in the supposed assault on Deputy Clerk Melissa Ward was not a club, a set of brass knuckles, or throwing stars. It was a ballpoint pen.

No, really.

Furthermore, according to the sober and dutiful public servants who witnessed the attack, Hutchens did not hurl that potentially death-dealing projectile at Ward; instead, she threw it down on a tabletop, and the terrorized agent of the public weal was injured by a ricochet.

Somehow, Ward stoically fought through her trauma and finished her shift without being treated by paramedics. Significantly, although she did fill out a police report, Ward never swore out a criminal complaint.

Hutchens filed a subpoena demanding that Ward, the alleged victim, provide a sworn and signed criminal complaint.

Last November 14, the Idaho First District Court granted a motion by Sandpoint City Attorney Scott Campbell to quash that subpoena, ruling that “requiring Ms. Ward, the victim in this matter, to provide a signed complaint is unreasonable.”

What this means is that there is no victim of record in the August 12 “battery” incident, and no criminal intent behind Hutchens’s actions – unless, of course, Greenbank wants to pretend that this middle-aged woman deviously set up a bank-shot for the purpose of wounding the clerk. On the basis of his behavior toward Hutchens – another example of which we will examine anon – I’m convinced that Greenbank and his comrades possess sufficient cynicism to make that claim.

The patently spurious nature of the charge against Hutchens is brought into focus once it’s understood why she had visited City Hall: She was there to review public records related to an incident in 2011 in which she was assaulted and illegally arrested by Sandpoint police officer Theresa Heberer.

At the time of her encounter with Officer Heberer, Hutchens was in the middle of evicting a deadbeat tenant (who, as it happened, had been arrested the previous day on outstanding warrants). She visited her property to determine if the power and water had been shut off. When Hutchens drove by the property – making two passes when she saw the renter talking with Officer Heberer – the tenant claimed that Hutchens had been “stalking” or “harassing” her. On the basis of that complaint from a manifestly unreliable source, Heberer got into her patrol vehicle and followed Hutchens to her home.

Heberer demanded that Hutchens submit to an interrogation. Hutchens, who didn’t want to be bothered by a police officer – what decent and rational person would? – replied that she had nothing to say, invoked the Fifth Amendment, and turned to enter her home. Heberer responded by committing criminal trespass, then compounded that crime by seizing Hutchens and violently throwing her to the ground.

When her supervisor arrived on the scene, Heberer claimed that the encounter began with a traffic stop dealing with an expired registration. This was a lie, of course. Seeking to find some charge to justify the criminal violence inflicted on Hutchens, Heberer and her supervisor pored over the statute book and eventually decided to charge the victim with “resisting and obstructing” a police officer.

That charge was entirely without merit – a fact recognized by Magistrate Judge Barbara Buchanan when she threw it out of court.

“There was no reason to touch her,” Judge Buchanan observed. “She did not have to answer [Officer Heberer’s] questions. She has a Fifth Amendment right not to do that…. You can’t be charged with resisting and obstructing for exercising your Fifth Amendment right, and she did have every right to say, `I don’t want to answer your questions, I want to go in my house.’ There is no basis for an arrest, there is no reason for a search warrant.”

Unlike Melissa Ward, Hutchens was physically harmed by Heberer’s assault, in addition to suffering the indelible injury of being handcuffed and unlawfully detained. She filed a $250,000 damage claim with the City of Sandpoint, which was rejected by Idaho Counties Risk Management Program. So she filed a notice of tort claim announcing her intention to sue the city for violating her civil rights.

It was in preparation for that lawsuit that Hutchens was researching public records at City Hall on August. As she did so, she was followed by a city official who carried a digital recorder and may well have been trying to bait her into some kind of actionable misconduct.

As Sgt. Riffel noted in his official report of the incident, “Rita Hutchens… has a fairly tense relationship with the City, and has pending lawsuits against them.”

Had he possessed a particle of moral discernment and a rudimentary sense of honor, Riffel would have recognized that the battery complaint was an act of petty retaliation against a citizen regarded as an irritant. His reaction should have been to shake his head in disgust, put away his notebook, and tell the “victim” and her cronies to behave like adults. But this would have meant defending the rights of a Mundane, which would be impermissible.

Accordingly, Riffel – acting in the interests of Tax Feeder solidarity – filed his report and swore out the probable cause affidavit.

The criminal complaint against Hutchens, which was composed by Greenbank, is a masterpiece of bureaucratic hyperbole. It claims that Hutchens “did willfully and unlawfully use force or violence upon the person of Melissa Ward by striking Ward with a pen, or, in the alternative, did actually, intentionally, and unlawfully touch or strike the person of Melissa Ward against her will by striking Ward with a pen.” This, sniffs Greenbank with the practiced pomposity of a pampered parasite, was a grave offense “against the peace and dignity of the State of Idaho.”

Ward suffered no injury. There is no evidence that Hutchens intended to do her any harm. By way of contrast, judicial notice has been taken of the incontrovertible fact that Officer Theresa Heberer did “willfully and unlawfully use force or violence” upon the person of Rita Hutchens in an assault that did injure the victim.

It is precisely because Hutchens is seeking redress for the criminal violence she suffered at the hands of Heberer and her comrades that Greenbank – acting on behalf of the local political class – is seeking to imprison her.

As his florid description of Hutchens’s purported offense demonstrates, Greenbank is a bit of a drama queen. This got him into trouble in his last gig, during which he afflicted the residents of neighboring Kootenai County. During opening arguments in a September 2008 domestic violence trial, Greenbank – who at the time was Deputy Prosecutor for Kootenai County – broke down in tears and theatrically asked for a tissue as he recounted the alleged crimes of the defendant.

This display left First District Judge Fred Gilber thoroughly unimpressed. Chastising Greenbank for trying to manipulate the jury, Gilber declared a mistrial. Predictably, Greenbank’s initial reaction was to lie, insisting that he hadn’t been crying and certainly had “no intent to appeal to the passions of the jury.” However, the trial transcript documents that he admitted, “I did have tears running down my face, I did have snot running down my face.”

Nor was this the first time that Greenback or his colleagues had sought to manipulate a jury. As he declared a mistrial, Judge Gilber pointed out: “In [a] recent case the Court of Appeals has singled out the Kootenai County Prosecutor’s Office for appealing to the passions or prejudice of the jury.”

For the last six months, Hutchens has been acting as her own attorney.

Greenbank, who has no appropriate credentials, claims that she has exhibited “unusually behaviors and affects – both in court and in her filings. It is evident that her mood is changeable, and her thoughts are disorganized.” He filed, and was granted, a motion ordering Hutchens to undergo a mandatory psychological evaluation.

Embedded in that May 2 order is a remarkable claim that was introduced by Magistrate Judge Debra Heise without a particle of supporting evidence. Listed among the examples of Hutchens’s “unusual behaviors and affects” was the act of “battering the assigned prosecuting attorney [Greenbank] outside of court when he served papers to her in the clerk’s office….”

That description would lead the untutored reader to assume that Rita Hutchens, a 57-year-old woman who stands about 5’1″ and weighs all of 110 pounds, boldly attacked the intrepid paladin of the public weal in full view of witnesses, and somehow managed to avoid being dragged away in chains.

What actually happened was that Greenbank shoved a sheaf of legal papers in Hutchens’s face – and she replied in kind by shoving them right back at him. In other words, just as she had “battered” Melissa Ward by accidentally striking her in the arm with a ballpoint pen, she “battered” Shane Greenbank by pushing papers at him. Although this would hardly be enough to injure a child, it should be acknowledged that on Greenbank’s previous performance, trivial contact of this kind would be quite enough to make him cry.

It should also be noted that Greenbank’s sense of moral outrage over crimes of violence is oddly adaptable. While he is treating Rita Hutchens as if she were a public menace, last August he agreed to a plea bargain by a man accused of hog-tying one handicapped 12-year-old child, and choking another one. The assailant in that case agreed to misdemeanor charges that led to a total of two weeks in jail.

The May 2 order for Hutchens to undergo a mental evaluation specifies that Dr. Carl Haugan, a “designated licensed psychiatrist,” will file a report on Hutchens’s mental condition by May 23. If she refuses to cooperate, the order explains, “the report shall so state and shall include, if possible, an opinion as to whether such unwillingness of the defendant was the result of mental disease or defect.”

Judge Heise – whose trough is filled with a $107,043 annual salary plundered from more honest people in the private sector – clearly sought to prejudice the evaluation by imputing to Hutchens, as a matter of record, “unusual behaviors and affects” as well as a tendency toward “violence” – as supposedly demonstrated in the two instances of “battery.” If, on the other hand, Hutchens refused to submit to an evaluation foreordained to find her incompetent, her refusal is to be taken as proof of her mental incapacity.

Not surprisingly, Hutchens has refused to play her scripted role in this cynical charade – in defiance of threats to have her arrested and jailed for defying the court order. If Hutchens were taken into state custody, it’s entirely possible that Greenbank would seek to have her involuntarily committed for psychiatric treatment. While thus detained, she would be unable to pursue her lawsuit against the City of Sandpoint – which is almost certainly the point of this entire campaign of official persecution.

“What does it hurt,” asked Sheriff Ric Bradshaw of Florida’s Palm Beach County, “to have somebody knock on the door and ask, ‘Hey, is everything OK?’”

The answer to that question obviously depends on the identity of the “Somebody” who is making that inquiry. What Sheriff Bradshaw had in mind was a strike force composed of deputies, social workers, and “mental health” professionals from a “Behavioral Sciences Unit” (BSU) who would be on-call twenty-four hours a day, ready to be deployed to visit the homes of what the Soviets used to call “socially dangerous people.” In the Soviet Union, such people would often be involuntarily committed to a psihuska, or psychiatric prison.

“We want people to call us if the guy down the street says he hates the government, hates the mayor and he’s gonna shoot him,” Bradhsaw told the Palm Beach Post in describing the BSU, which would be funded through a $1 million grant from the state government. That grant hasn’t been formalized, but if the state legislature balks, it’s quite likely the Feds will chip in: In a speech last February 6 to the Alliance of DelRay Residential Organizations, Bradshaw said that he would prefer to fund the unit “through a federal grant.”

This is precisely the kind of pilot program the Feds would find worthwhile – indeed, it represents a model of “preventive intervention” that the federal government has been promoting for at least two decades.

In 1993, another law enforcement personality with roots in Florida, then-Attorney General Janet Reno, proposed the creation of specialized units composed of police and social workers who would fan out in troubled urban regions, knocking on doors, conducting “safety” evaluations, and connecting residents to government “services.”

During her reign of terror as Dade County Prosecutor – in which she displayed unalloyed viciousness in tearing children from their homes andpersecuting innocent parents – Reno created “Neighborhood Resource Teams” teams composed of “community-friendly, highly respected police officers, social workers, public health nurses, [and] community organizers, working full time within a narrow neighborhood,” she recalled in a May 1993 speech to the National Forum on Prevention of Crime and Violence.

Reno had the temerity to offer her program as a national model just weeks after presiding over the April 19 holocaust at Waco, where she and her underlings provided the indispensable service of annihilating dozens of innocent children after torturing them for fifty-one days.

Like Reno, Bradshaw describes the purpose of his proposed Behavioral Science Unit in therapeutic terms. The objective, he insists, is “violence prevention” and “referral to services,” rather than an arrest. To those on the receiving end of that intervention, this distinction is entirely theoretical: Being taken into custody by armed strangers is an arrest, irrespective of the semantic camouflage, and every encounter between the public and the State’s costumed enforcers is pregnant with life-threatening violence against the innocent.

It should also be understood that Bradshaw’s real objective is not “violence prevention,” but rather civilian disarmament. This was also explained by the sheriff in his February 6 address. The purpose of the BSU, the sheriff said, is to “identify people with a propensity and inclination to go do violent things and stop them from accessing firearms.” A system of preemptive disarmament of people considered to be psychologically unstable or otherwise “dangerous” has actually been in place in Connecticut since 1999. Although it has resulted in the confiscation of firearms from thousands of innocent people, it did nothing to prevent the horror that unfolded last December at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Employing the services of “mental health professionals” to certify that people are dangerous to themselves or others would negate the need for an actual criminal prosecution. And for Bradshaw, the most potent indicator that a given individual is a “socially dangerous person” is a hatred for the institutionalized affliction called “government.”

The man accused of shooting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords “was telling other people about how much he hated government and government officials,” Bradshaw told his audience. The assumption here is that such opinions are symptoms of incipient criminal behavior. This is why the sheriff intends to create a 24-hour tipline through which neighbors, family, friends, and others can inform on people who display such dangerous attitudes.

“It’s the same principle that’s used by the Secret Service that’s very successful,” he insisted. The S.S. has a hotline that can be used to report impious and supposedly threatening comments about the murderous bureaucrat who occupies the Oval Office, on the assumption that blasphemy against the divine person of the Dear Leader is itself a criminal act.

While Bradshaw and others of his ilk regard idle words to be dangerous, if not criminal, they can’t see how people could perceive a threat in the sudden, unsolicited presence of armed state functionaries on their doorstep. After all, asks the sheriff, what would it hurt to send his deputies to confront people who aren’t suspected of a crime?

If he possessed a particle of honesty, Sheriff Bradshaw would pose that question to Dennis Gaydos, and listen carefully to the answer. Because of the kind ministrations of Bradshaw’s deputies, Gaydos is now missing an ear and an eye.

What makes his case an even more compelling precautionary example is the fact that, according to a lawsuit he filed against Bradshaw, Gaydos – a homeless man – had “contacted a local assistance agency by telephone for the purpose of a referral for residential resources, financial aid, and general counseling.” While he was on the phone, the helpful social workers with whom he was speaking made a “referral” of their own to Bradshaw’s agency, which responded by dispatching a SWAT team.

Gaydos had established a shelter on a parcel of land behind a church. The pastor in charge of the congregation had given Gaydos permission to be there. Shortly after Gaydos called for help, a combined tactical force composed of deputies from the sheriff’s office and officers from the Palm Springs Police Department – kitted out in paramilitary drag, carrying the familiar assortment of weapons, and supplemented with a helicopter – set up a staging area near Gaydos’s shelter.

Although they were dealing with a sickly, unarmed homeless man who was not a criminal suspect, the Berserkers treated the incident as a combat situation. As they approached the encampment, Gaydos – who was holding his cell phone – stood up. Without a word of warning, he was shot twice in the head with rubber bullets. The first round damaged an ear; the second one destroyed his left eye. The assailants later tried to justify the head shots by claiming that they had seen a knife in Gaydos’s hand – but since no knife was ever recovered, this can be dismissed as a self-serving lie of the kind routinely offered by police officers after they kill or mutilate an innocent person.

Apparently satisfied merely to leave their victim partially deaf and partially blinded, the officers never arrested Gaydos. At the time of this March 2007 incident, the PBSO SWAT team was under the command of Lt. Dan Burrows, an oxycontin addict who was accused of stealing pain medicine and a rifle from a terminally ill former deputy.

About a year before the PBSO participated in the assault that mutilated Gaydos, Captain David Carhart, the head of the department’s violent crimes division, was purged from the force following multiple incidents in which he broke into the home of former girlfriends. One of them, Tracey Seberg, filed a complaint with the sheriff’s office – and Carhart responded by threatening to kill her if she didn’t retract it. According to Seberg, Carhart told her that he “felt like God when in uniform” and thus didn’t believe that he was subject to the rules that apply to mere Mundanes.

Although Carhart faced up to 15 years in prison for burglary and stalking, he was demoted to lieutenant and then quietly dismissed from the department in a mass layoff, receiving a $120,000 severance package.

Neither Burrows nor Carhart is presently available for duty with the Behavioral Science Unit. However, Sheriff Bradshaw will be able to make use of the services of Sgt. Brent Raban, a sociopath who was discharged from the force after boasting about his habit of beating suspects – and then reinstated, with the expectation of $150,000 in back pay, through the intervention of the police union.

Like the members of a hyper-violent police gang in Milwaukee, Sgt. Raban has an adolescent fixation on a comic book character called the Punisher. This wouldn’t be a problem to anybody else if Raban hadn’t been given a state-issued costume and official permission to act out his violent fantasies on helpless people. He advertised his intentions by accessorizing his costume with a camouflage-colored skullcap displaying the word “Punishment.”

“It’s not crime-fighting – I’m dealing out PUNISHMENT!” observed Raban in a 2009 Facebook post written while he was patrolling Belle Glade, a city whose residents are besieged by both private crime and officially-sanctioned police violence. Raban wasn’t concerned about facing charges, he gloated, because “Like a good batterer, I know the areas that hide the marks well.” In another post he complained that it had been at least two weeks since he had beaten somebody, and that this prolonged dry spell had left him “itchy.”

When on-shift opportunities to beat handcuffed suspects became scarce, Raban found other ways to indulge what his boss calls a “propensity and inclination to go do violent things.” On one occasion he parked his squad car behind a school bus that was decanting young children, turned on his blue lights, and used his PA system to insult and upbraid parents who were picking up their kids – most likely in the hope that one of them would be provoked into offering him an excuse to inflict “punishment.”

He was eventually fired after a woman in his neighborhood complained that he had parked his patrol car on the sidewalk in front of her home and used his position as a deputy to harass her family. By that time, Sheriff Bradshaw – who had reluctantly been forced to have Raban sign a “last-chance contract” – was compelled to fire Raban. But in Florida, as is the case in most other states, it is practically impossible to fire a law enforcement officer.

In April of this year, an arbitrator ordered Bradshaw to reinstate Raban and pay him back wages. According to the people responsible for imposing “accountability” on law enforcement officers, Raban’s sociopathic behavior does not disqualify him for service as a Palm Beach County Deputy – which may well include working with the BSU to visit and take into custody people anonymously accused of “hating the government.” After all, what other personality type would be interested in a job of that kind?

While police in Watertown, Massachusetts closed in on the boat in which 19-year-old terrorist suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had concealed himself, FBI investigators in Chicago were snapping handcuffs on 18-year-old Abdella Ahmed Tounisi as he attempted to board an airplane bound for Istanbul. He intended to travel to Syria to fight on behalf an Islamic rebel group that seeks to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

There is reason to believe that the FBI had advance knowledge of the Boston Marathon bombing plot. On the other hand, we know that Tounisi was a pure product of the FBI’s terrorist factory: He was the latest in a long procession of socially alienated teenage Muslim males who have been lured into an FBI-orchestrated plot by the Bureau’s roving troupe of “terrorism facilitators.”

What makes the terrorism charges against Tounisi more remarkable is the fact that he is accused of seeking to enlist in the service of a terrorist group that is presently receiving material aid from Washington.

Tounisi had been targeted by the FBI last fall after a friend named Abdel Daoud was snared in one of the Bureau’s prefabricated terror plots.

The indictment against Daoud claims that he had “attempted, without lawful authority, to use a weapon of mass destruction” – in this case, a car bomb – in a terrorist attack against a Chicago-area nightclub. In familiar fashion, the Bureau’s informant/provocateurs sketched out the plot and provided the targeted patsy with all of the material necessities – including the dummy bomb.

Daoud playedhis scripted role to perfection – that is, he expressed entirely justifiable outrage over the U.S. Government’s relentless campaign to kill Muslims overseas, while allowing himself to be seduced by agents of that same malevolent government into committing a proseuctable act.

The affidavit filed by the FBI claimed that in a conversation with an informant Doud said he wanted the bombing to “send the message that the United States should `stop abusing people overseas.’” Like millions of Americans who see Muslims as an undifferentiated mass of hostility, Daoud reportedly saw Americans as anti-Muslim automatons, rather than as “regular people.”

“They’re like – more like robots, even the decent, nice people, most people in this country,” Daoud reportedly told the FBI provocateur. From Daoud’s perspective, this applied even to those who “hate the president” (who, let it not be forgotten, is killing Muslim civilians through drone strikes practically every day) and who opposed “the two wars.” This is because most Americans are still “for the war on terrorism,” insisted Daoud.

As the FBI carefully reeled in Daoud, it made a play for Tounisi as well, but he was savvy enough to suspect that the operation was a law enforcement sting. Rather than using what influence it had to encourage this wayward young man onto the path of probity, the Bureau redoubled its effort to entice him into a prosecutable act: It set up a website intended to recruit fighters for the Syrian rebel group Jabhat al-Nusrah (JAN), which used to be called al Qaeda in Iraq.

After finding the website, Tounisi made contact with a purported recruiter for the group, who was yet another of the FBI’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of terrorism facilitators. It was the FBI’s asset who made arrangements for Tounisi to travel to Syria, by way of Turkey, to join the U.S.-supported terrorist group.

The FBI, whose chief occupation since 2002 has been the manufacture of ersatz terrorism plots, induced Tounisi into an act described as providing “material aid” to a foreign terrorist group. If he is convicted, he will be found guilty of carrying out the Obama administration’s official policy without official permission. He is not the only American presently facing the prospect of imprisonment on this charge. The administration has filed felony charges against a US Army Veteran from Arizona named Eric Harroun, who traveled to Syria to join the fight against Assad.

Harroun, who used his Facebook page to describe his role in the conflict, is charged with using a weapon of mass destruction – namely, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher – while fighting on behalf of JAN.

JAN is the dominant element of the rebel “coalition” being supported by the US and NATO in its insurgency against the admittedly loathsome regime of Bashar al-Assad. JAN has demonstrated its worthiness as a recipient of taxpayer-extracted material support by carrying out undisguised acts of terrorism against civilians. Of particular interest in light of the Boston bombing is the growing role played by Chechen jihadists in the U.S.-backed JAN. Chechen Jidhadists were accused of carrying out the recent abduction of two Syrian Orthodox Bishops earlier this week.

As with Tousnisi, Harroun is accused of giving “material support” to a foreign terrorist group; as in the case of Daoud, he is charged with using a “weapon of mass destruction” – a rocket-propelled grenade launcher – “without legal authority.”

The relevant section of Title 18 of the US Code specifies that the term “weapon of mass destruction” applies to the following “destructive devices”: “[A]ny incendiary, explosive, or poison gas — bomb, grenade, rocket having a propellant charge of more than four ounces, missile having an explosive or incendiary charge of more than one-quarter ounce, mine, or … any type of weapon (other than a shotgun or a shotgun shell which the Attorney General finds is generally recognized as particularly suitable for sporting purposes) by whatever name known which will, or which may be readily converted to, expel a projectile by the action of an explosive or other propellant, and which has any barrel with a bore of more than one-half inch in diameter….”

John Mueller, who holds the Woody Hayes Chair on National Security Studies at Ohio State University, points out that under federal statutes dealing with WMDs “not only is a hand grenade a weapon of mass destruction … so is a maliciously designed child’s rocket even if it doesn’t have a warhead. On the other hand, although a missile-propelled firecracker would be considered a weapon of mass destruction if its designers had wanted to think of it as a weapon, it would not be so considered if it had previously been designed for use as a weapon and then redesigned for pyrotechnic use or if it was surplus and had been sold, loaned, or given to you (under certain circumstances) by the Secretary of the Army.”

The WMD designation would likewise apply to “all artillery, and virtually every muzzle-loading military long arm for that matter,” continues Schneider.

For the Regime and its acolytes, “terrorism” is committed when private individuals, singly or in groups, emulate the criminal violence of the State without receiving official permission. That principle was explained – with admirable candor – by Bill Clinton during an interview published in the December 2009 issue of Foreign Policy magazine. Clinton defined terrorism as “killing and robbery and coercion by people who do not have state authority and go beyond national borders.” (Emphasis added.)

By reverse-engineering this definition we learn that “killing and robbery and coercion” carried out with ”state authority” isn’t terrorism; it’s public policy. We can also infer that the “war on terror” is not meant to bring an end to such violence, but rather intended to eliminate challenges to the State’s monopoly on criminal violence.

Accordingly, an act of politically motivated armed violence carried out by “non-state actors” can be described as an act of WMD-involved terrorism if it is carried out without what the Regime calls “legal authority.” On the other hand, exactly the same acts can be consecrated as “official policy” when they are committed by “non-state actors” who operated on behalf of the Regime.

Three days before the Boston Marathon Bombing, the foreign policy establishment celebrated the opening of the Washington office of the National Council of Resistance in Iran. This is the political front group for the so-called People’s Mujahadeen (or MeK), a Washington-backed Islamo-terrorist group that has carried out bombings and assassinations in Iran during the past decade. During the 1970s, the group staged several terrorist attacks that left U.S. citizens wounded or dead. It was part of the revolutionary coalition that brought Khomeni to power in 1979, but was forced to flee to Iraq following a purge. During the ten-year Iran-Iraq war, the MeK carried out attacks against Iran on behalf of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Created in 1965 as part of a Soviet-sponsored international terrorist network that waged wars of “national liberation” throughout the developing world, the MeK was listed as a terrorist organization from 1997 until last September, when it was removed from the State Department’s terrorism roster following a high-pressure campaign that included scores of prominent elected officials and veterans of the National Security “community.”

Several members of Congress, including House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Michigan), received significant cash donations from MeK’s supporters as part of the de-listing campaign. Other paid supporters of the MeK included Newt Gingrich, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey (who supervised prosecution of federal “material support” cases on much flimsier evidence), retired General Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and retired General James Jones, former National Security Adviser to Barack Obama.

Every U.S. official who lobbied on behalf of the MeK committed the federal offense of providing “material support” to a listed terrorist group. Under the Anwar al-Awlaki precedent, each of them was liable to summary execution by drone strike. Indeed, under the Abdel al-Awlaki codicil to that precedent, each of their children was likewise a fair target for a drone strike because of what White House mouthpiece Robert Gibbs would describe as the lethal irresponsibility of their parents.

As with the JAN in Syria, the Iranian MeK is considered a valuable asset in Washington’s program to foment warfare throughout the Middle East – by providing luridly unreliable but politically useful “intelligence” about the Iranian nuclear program, and carrying out assassinations and other acts of officially sanctioned terrorism within the country. One measure of the MeK’s value to the Regime is found in the fact that the office for the group’s political front group is located less than one hundred yards from the White House.

According to press accounts, Dzhokar Tsarnaev (communicating through a dense haze of painkillers and other pharmaceuticals) admitted to planting the Boston Marathon bombs and told investigators that he and his brother — like Tounisi, Daoud, and dozens of other young men their age who had been shepherded into FBI-orchestrated false flag operations – were aggrieved over the U.S. government’s unremitting state terrorism against Muslim populations abroad.

The fact that the FBI had previous contact with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, as well as “multiple” warnings about his potential involvement in terrorism, would suggest culpable incompetence on the part of the Bureau – if it weren’t for the fact that the bombing so perfectly fits the template from which scores of FBI-directed plots have been struck. This, when coupled with the fact that authorities were conducting a bombing “drill” on the day of the marathon, suggests that something other than official incompetence is involved.

If the Boston Marathon bombing plot was a case of “lone wolf” terrorism rather than an episode of Homeland Security Theater that went off-script, it would be an anomaly – albeit a fortunate one for those who presume to rule us, given that they profit from the bloody misfortune of the population they supposedly protect.

We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them. –

~ Instructions given at a congress of Soviet educators in 1918 (cited in Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families, by Sheldon Richman, pg. xv).

[The Soviet family] is an organic part of Soviet society. Parents are not without authority … but this authority is only a reflection of social authority…. In our country he alone is a man of worth whose needs and desires are the needs and desires of a collectivist…. Our family offers rich soil for the cultivation of such collectivism. –

Soviet family theorist Anton S. Makarenko, The Collective Family, A Handbook for Russian Parents, pgs xi-xii, 42.

If we want to talk about equality of opportunity for children, then the fact that children are raised in families means there’s no equality…. In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them. –

Dr. Mary Jo Bane, Assistant Secretary of Administration for Children and Families at the US Department of Health and Human Services, 1993-1996;currently Thornton Bradshaw Professor of Public Police and Management, Harvard Kennedy School; quoted in “The Family: It’s Surviving and Healthy” by Dolores Barclay, Tulsa World, August 21, 1977.

Whenever a progressive refers to “investments,” he or she is referring to confiscation of private wealth.

Whenever a progressive invokes the “community,” that term refers to a state-engineered collective in which the individual has no rights.

Whenever a collectivist refers to “public education,” that phrase is shorthand for the process of destroying a child’s developing sense of self-ownership and indoctrinating them in the notion that they are the property of the “community.” This process is also known as “socialization,” which is the indefinable value-added element that supposedly makes “public education” superior to homeschooling.

Whenever an advocate of “public education” refers to “our children,” conscientious parents should take a quick inventory of their arsenals.

Melissa Harris-Perry, a slogan-spewing news reader for the Stalinist media outlet called MSNBC, ran the table of these collectivist nostrums in a recent installment in the network’s “Lean Forward” ad campaign. The “Lean Forward” spots feature various MSNBC luminaries holding forth like Communist Party functionary exhorting the cadres at a “struggle session” in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Harris-Perry is a collectivist of such passionate conviction that she regards opposition to Obama’s radical centralization of power to be a species of sedition. She considers private firearms to be a pestilence, but embraces a vision of social engineering that would require a great amount of gun-related violence by state functionaries.

Although – or perhaps because – Harris-Perry is a credentialed academic, she has the odd and annoying habit, so common among adolescents, of ending every statement with a vocal inflection that suggests a question. In her “Lean Forward” ad, she uncorked this specimen of unfiltered collectivist cant:

“We have never invested as much in public education, because we’ve always had a sort of private notion of children – your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of, ‘These are our children.’ So part of it is that we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.”

Harris-Perry’s disdain for parental authority is wedded to a denial of the idea that the individual child has a right to self-ownership. During an MSNBC discussion about a North Dakota law that would ban abortion after six weeks, she used the expression “this thing” to refer to the developing fetus and warned that “if this turns into a person, there are economic consequences.”

It’s important to understand that Harris-Perry’s commitment to legalized abortion doesn’t grow out of a misapplied commitment to individual liberty, but rather her devotion to the collective management of the human population. It’s akin to the view expressed in the early 1970s by then-Rutgers professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg that the Roe v. Wade ruling was a product of “concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations we don’t want too many of.”

Belief that the unborn human child has a right to be protected against lethal aggression, according to Harris-Perry, is a “faith claim … not associated with science.” However one views that moral proposition, the humanity of the developing individual is an incontestable scientific fact. The existence of the invisible, intangible abstraction called the “state” is based entirely on faith claims that Harris-Perry is willing to impose through coercion.

In an essay she wrote for The Nation magazine three years ago – then, as now, she wore her surname fashionably parted in the middle, but in a slightly different style – Harris-Perry described how she catechizes her unfortunate students in the gospel of the Almighty State:

“I often begin my political science courses with a brief introduction to the idea of ‘the state.’ The state is the entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, force, and coercion. If an individual travels to another country and kills its citizens, we call it terrorism. If the state does it, we call it war. If a man kills his neighbor it is murder; if the state does it it is the death penalty. If an individual takes his neighbor’s money, it is theft; if the state does it, it is taxation.”

In addition to instructing other people’s children in the fear and admonition of the Divine State, Harris-Perry is eager to see its heretical enemies put to the torch.

“The Tea Party is a challenge to the legitimacy of the U.S. state,” Harris-Perry insisted. “When Tea Party participants charge the current administration with various forms of totalitarianism, they are arguing that the government has no right to levy taxes or make policy. Many GOP elected officials offered nearly secessionist rhetoric from the floor of the Congress [during the debate over nationalizing health care]. They joined as co-conspirators with the Tea Party protesters by arguing that this government has no monopoly on legitimacy.”

The overt act that made that impious “conspiracy” a prosecutable crime, according to Harris-Perry, was an anti-Obamacare protest in which Tea Party activists heckled Georgia Rep. John Lewis. As an elected official, Lewis is not merely a human being, according to Harris-Perry, but an “embodiment of the state” – or, to use appropriate creedal language, al living image of the invisible deity.

“When protesters spit on and scream at duly elected representatives of the United States government it is more than an act of racism,” snarled Harris-Perry, making a de rigueur – and entirely gratuitous – reference to Lewis’s ethnic background. “It is an act of sedition.”

String up the barbed wire, sharpen the guillotine, ready the basement cells of the Lubyanka: There are “seditionists” to be dealt with!

Like many others of her ideological persuasion, Harris-Perry is a stranger to concision. In describing the totalitarian state’s proprietary claim on children, someone who represented a slightly different strain of collectivism – albeit not as different as Harris-Perry would insist – stated the matter much more tidily almost exactly eighty years ago:

“When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say: ‘Your child belongs to us already…. What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in this new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”

Those words were spoken on November 6, 1933 by the community-organizing, civilian-disarming, socialized medicine-promoting, government stimulus-peddling, unitary executive who presided over Germany’s National Socialist government. When Harris-Perry and her comrades demand that we “Lean Forward,” that’s the direction they have in mind.

Recently by William Norman Grigg: ‘Norms of Non-Possession’: What the UN Firearms Treaty Is All About

We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them. –

~ Instructions given at a congress of Soviet educators in 1918 (cited in Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families, by Sheldon Richman, pg. xv).

[The Soviet family] is an organic part of Soviet society. Parents are not without authority … but this authority is only a reflection of social authority…. In our country he alone is a man of worth whose needs and desires are the needs and desires of a collectivist…. Our family offers rich soil for the cultivation of such collectivism. –

Soviet family theorist Anton S. Makarenko, The Collective Family, A Handbook for Russian Parents, pgs xi-xii, 42.

If we want to talk about equality of opportunity for children, then the fact that children are raised in families means there’s no equality…. In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them. –

Dr. Mary Jo Bane, Assistant Secretary of Administration for Children and Families at the US Department of Health and Human Services, 1993-1996; currently Thornton Bradshaw Professor of Public Police and Management, Harvard Kennedy School; quoted in “The Family: It’s Surviving and Healthy” by Dolores Barclay, Tulsa World, August 21, 1977.

Whenever a progressive refers to “investments,” he or she is referring to confiscation of private wealth.

Whenever a progressive invokes the “community,” that term refers to a state-engineered collective in which the individual has no rights.

Whenever a collectivist refers to “public education,” that phrase is shorthand for the process of destroying a child’s developing sense of self-ownership and indoctrinating them in the notion that they are the property of the “community.” This process is also known as “socialization,” which is the indefinable value-added element that supposedly makes “public education” superior to homeschooling.

Whenever an advocate of “public education” refers to “our children,” conscientious parents should take a quick inventory of their arsenals.

Melissa Harris-Perry, a slogan-spewing news reader for the Stalinist media outlet called MSNBC, ran the table of these collectivist nostrums in a recent installment in the network’s “Lean Forward” ad campaign. The “Lean Forward” spots feature various MSNBC luminaries holding forth like Communist Party functionary exhorting the cadres at a “struggle session” in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Harris-Perry is a collectivist of such passionate conviction that she regards opposition to Obama’s radical centralization of power to be a species of sedition. She considers private firearms to be a pestilence, but embraces a vision of social engineering that would require a great amount of gun-related violence by state functionaries.

Although — or perhaps because – Harris-Perry is a credentialed academic, she has the odd and annoying habit, so common among adolescents, of ending every statement with a vocal inflection that suggests a question. In her “Lean Forward” ad, she uncorked this specimen of unfiltered collectivist cant:

“We have never invested as much in public education, because we’ve always had a sort of private notion of children — your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of, ‘These are our children.’ So part of it is that we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.”

White House mouthpiece Jay Carney says that the Obama administration will “conduct a thorough review” of the UN’s newly enacted gun control pact “to determine whether to sign the treaty.” The suspense is hardly unbearable, given that the UN treaty would codify the proposition that national governments should have a monopoly on weapons.

The announced objective of the treaty is to regulate the sale and transfer of small arms and light weapons, a category that includes all civilian-owned firearms. According to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, the treaty ”will help to keep warlords, pirates, terrorists, criminals and their like from acquiring deadly arms.”

Well, actually, it would not. Nothing in the dense and nearly unreadable text of the 15-page treatywill prevent member states from arming terrorists and criminals. Article 2, Section 3 specifies that nothing in the treaty will “apply to the international movement of conventional arms by, or on behalf of, a State Party for its use provided that the conventional arms remain under that State Party’s ownership.”

Article 11, which deals with “Diversion” of weaponry, requires that parties to the treaty work to “mitigate the risk” that weapons would fall into the hands of criminals or terrorists, and that they “share relevant information … on effective measures to address diversion.” But nothing in the language forbids such diversions from States to “non-state actors” – a point that was made, ironically, by the Communist government of North Korea when it voted against the treaty.

Each government that signs the UN gun treaty agree to create “a national control system to regulate the export of ammunition [and] munitions” (Article 3), which is described in the preamble as “the primary responsibility of all States.” The document repeatedly refers to the “inherent right” of States to arm themselves and to control the weaponry within the boundaries over which they claim jurisdiction. Not a syllable can be found in the document recognizing the innate right of the individual to armed self-defense. This omission was not accidental.

For more than fifty years, the United Nations, with the enthusiastic support of the U.S. government, has pursued a vision of “general and complete disarmament” in which the world body, or its successor, would claim a monopoly on the “legitimate” use of force. Within that global monopoly, each national government would have an exclusive territorial franchise.

“Controlling the proliferation of illicit [that is, civilian-owned] weapons is a necessary first step towards the non-proliferation of small arms,” wrote former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in his official 2000 report, We the Peoples. “These weapons must be brought under the control of states, and states must be held responsible for their transfer.” (Emphasis added.)

It was in pursuit of that formula that UN “peacekeepers” were deployed in Rwanda in 1993. The peace treaty they were sent to enforce required the collection of all civilian-owned weapons. Despite that country’s history of bloody ethnic conflict, Rwandans were assured that they had nothing to fear from a UN-approved government that claimed a monopoly on weaponry; after all, the Blue Beret-wearing emissaries of the “international community” were there to protect them, in the event their government turned feral.

In January 1994, Lt. Col. Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian officer commanding the UN contingent in Rwanda, learned that the Hutu-dominated regime was planning to massacre the Tutsi population. He sent an urgent fax to UN headquarters requesting permission to disarm the government-backed militias by raiding their arms caches. He wasn’t allowed to take this pre-emptive action, because the UN’s self-assigned mandate called for civilian disarmament, not the disarmament of government operatives.

Less than three months later, the massacre began – a 100-day orgy of bloodshed in which roughly one million people were slaughtered. Most were hacked to death with machetes – but behind the machete-wielding goons were government troops, police, and militiamen armed with guns. Dallaire’s troops did nothing to protect the victims; indeed, many of them were butchered as well.

The UN official who was given advance warning of the massacre, and ordered Dallaire not to take any preventive action, was Kofi Annan – who at the time was undersecretary general for peacekeeping operations. In the finest tradition of Soviet career advancement, Annan was rewarded with a promotion to Secretary General, and eventually received the Nobel Peace Prize. Dallaire, who had done what he could to prevent the genocide, succumbed to near-suicidal depression and alcoholism. He was eventually rehabilitated after a reporter found him freezing to death under a park bench in Hull, Quebec.

Rwanda is a nearly ideal case of the UN’s model of “human security,” which requires, among other things, the establishment of “norms of non-possession” of firearms by civilians. That phrase was taken from the UN-approved “Hague Appeal for Peace,” which was unveiled at the 2000 “Millennium Summit” at UN Headquarters.

According to the Hague Appeal:

“Full-fledged demobilization programs must reclaim and destroy weaponry…. Steps toward stopping the flow of weapons include: controlling legal transfers between states; preventing illicit transfers … collecting, removing, and destroying surplus weapons from regions of conflict … [and] creating norms of non-possession.”

Those objectives are woven into the UN’s new arms treaty – but those threads run back to the late 1950s, when the world body first became involved in the “arms control” process.

Barack Obama is a left-leaning corporatist from an exotic background, but he is not the first U.S. president whose administration has promoted a UN-centered gun grab. That distinction belongs to Dwight Eisenhower, the conservative Republican whose State Department served as an incubator for a proposal called Freedom from War: The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World. That program, also known as State Department Document 7277, was introduced to the world in the fall of 1961 by Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy.

Freedom from War, and its follow-up Blueprint for the Peace Race, outlined a three-stage global program in which the UN’s machinery for “peace enforcement” – what honest people would call “warmaking” – would be built up pari passu with disarmament of national governments. In Stage III, national governments would retain only those armaments and establishments necessary to carry out UN-ordained “global obligations” and to “maintain internal order.”

“All other armaments would be destroyed or converted to peaceful purposes,” dictates the U.S.-created program. “Peaceful purposes,” in the statist lexicon, include all acts of government-sanctioned aggression and violence. “All other armaments” would, of necessity, include civilian-owned weaponry. Those points were made with plangent clarity in a 1962 State Department-commissioned study called A World Effectively Controlled by the United Nations, which was written by MIT professor Lincoln P. Bloomfield.

Dispensing with the utopian pretenses of many world government advocates, Bloomfield observed that the pursuit of a world “effectively controlled” by the UN would be to create a “stable military environment” for the benefit of the U.S. government and allied interests. This would eventually require the creation of a nuclear-armed UN “Peace Force” – a multilateral body that itself would be effectively controlled by Washington – that would include a “disarmament policing agency.” Each constituent member of the UN would be permitted a military establishment that would be limited “to the right to maintain sufficient police forces to ensure domestic security.”

One source frequently cited by Bloomfield in his study is World Peace through World Law, a 1958 book co-written by Wall Street attorney Grenville Clark and Professor Louis B. Sohn. That book unflinchingly endorsed the creation of “A World Police Force” that would possess “a coercive force of overwhelming power.” It would initially be equipped through “the transfer of weapons and equipment discarded by national military forces during the process of complete disarmament.” However, it would also benefit from a research and development program devoted to providing it with a prohibitive advantage against any potential adversary.

Such an entity does not exist within the United Nations, of course. But what Clark and Sohn envisioned looks a great deal like the military-industrial complex that serves the interest of the de facto world government operated out of Washington, D.C.

“Even in a world in which all national military forces were abolished,” continued Clark and Sohn, “it is conceivable that … an aroused nation with a strong grievance could marshal quite a formidable armed force even if no on in it possessed any weapon stronger than a rifle.” This is why, they concluded, “a strong and well-armed police force is part of the indispensable price of peace and the sooner the world faces up to this conclusion the better it will be for all peoples.”

Oh, sure, they acknowledge, the nuclear-armed world “Peace Force” they envisioned “might be perverted into a tool of world domination” – a concession they make without explaining how what they describe is something other than a plan for world domination. They then feinted in the direction of checks and balances, insisting that “careful limitations and safeguards” would be incorporated into the system – without providing so much as a hint of what they would be in a world where everybody but UN-approved government bodies would be disarmed.

In his 1962 study, Bloomfield took note of one critical complication: “In the United States, the people have the constitutional right to `keep and bear arms’; the government monopoly is legally abridged to that extent.”

Once we peel the propaganda and persiflage away from the new UN arms treaty, it becomes clear that establishing that monopoly is the entire purpose of the document.

Recently by William Norman Grigg: Resistance Is Dangerous — But Submission Is Often Fatal

White House mouthpiece Jay Carney says that the Obama administration will "conduct a thorough review" of the UN's newly enacted gun control pact "to determine whether to sign the treaty." The suspense is hardly unbearable, given that the UN treaty would codify the proposition that national governments should have a monopoly on weapons.

The announced objective of the treaty is to regulate the sale and transfer of small arms and light weapons, a category that includes all civilian-owned firearms. According to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, the treaty "will help to keep warlords, pirates, terrorists, criminals and their like from acquiring deadly arms."

Well, actually, it would not. Nothing in the dense and nearly unreadable text of the 15-page treaty will prevent member states from arming terrorists and criminals. Article 2, Section 3 specifies that nothing in the treaty will "apply to the international movement of conventional arms by, or on behalf of, a State Party for its use provided that the conventional arms remain under that State Party's ownership."

Article 11, which deals with "Diversion" of weaponry, requires that parties to the treaty work to "mitigate the risk" that weapons would fall into the hands of criminals or terrorists, and that they "share relevant information … on effective measures to address diversion." But nothing in the language forbids such diversions from States to "non-state actors" — a point that was made, ironically, by the Communist government of North Korea when it voted against the treaty.

Each government that signs the UN gun treaty agree to create "a national control system to regulate the export of ammunition [and] munitions" (Article 3), which is described in the preamble as "the primary responsibility of all States." The document repeatedly refers to the "inherent right" of States to arm themselves and to control the weaponry within the boundaries over which they claim jurisdiction. Not a syllable can be found in the document recognizing the innate right of the individual to armed self-defense. This omission was not accidental.

For more than fifty years, the United Nations, with the enthusiastic support of the U.S. government, has pursued a vision of "general and complete disarmament" in which the world body, or its successor, would claim a monopoly on the "legitimate" use of force. Within that global monopoly, each national government would have an exclusive territorial franchise.

"Controlling the proliferation of illicit [that is, civilian-owned] weapons is a necessary first step towards the non-proliferation of small arms," wrote former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in his official 2000 report, We the Peoples. "These weapons must be brought under the control of states, and states must be held responsible for their transfer." (Emphasis added.)

It was in pursuit of that formula that UN "peacekeepers" were deployed in Rwanda in 1993. The peace treaty they were sent to enforce required the collection of all civilian-owned weapons. Despite that country's history of bloody ethnic conflict, Rwandans were assured that they had nothing to fear from a UN-approved government that claimed a monopoly on weaponry; after all, the Blue Beret-wearing emissaries of the "international community" were there to protect them, in the event their government turned feral.

In January 1994, Lt. Col. Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian officer commanding the UN contingent in Rwanda, learned that the Hutu-dominated regime was planning to massacre the Tutsi population. He sent an urgent fax to UN headquarters requesting permission to disarm the government-backed militias by raiding their arms caches. He wasn't allowed to take this pre-emptive action, because the UN's self-assigned mandate called for civilian disarmament, not the disarmament of government operatives.

Less than three months later, the massacre began — a 100-day orgy of bloodshed in which roughly one million people were slaughtered. Most were hacked to death with machetes — but behind the machete-wielding goons were government troops, police, and militiamen armed with guns. Dallaire's troops did nothing to protect the victims; indeed, many of them were butchered as well.

The UN official who was given advance warning of the massacre, and ordered Dallaire not to take any preventive action, was Kofi Annan — who at the time was undersecretary general for peacekeeping operations. In the finest tradition of Soviet career advancement, Annan was rewarded with a promotion to Secretary General, and eventually received the Nobel Peace Prize. Dallaire, who had done what he could to prevent the genocide, succumbed to near-suicidal depression and alcoholism. He was eventually rehabilitated after a reporter found him freezing to death under a park bench in Hull, Quebec.

Rwanda is a nearly ideal case of the UN's model of "human security," which requires, among other things, the establishment of "norms of non-possession" of firearms by civilians. That phrase was taken from the UN-approved "Hague Appeal for Peace," which was unveiled at the 2000 "Millennium Summit" at UN Headquarters.

According to the Hague Appeal:

"Full-fledged demobilization programs must reclaim and destroy weaponry…. Steps toward stopping the flow of weapons include: controlling legal transfers between states; preventing illicit transfers … collecting, removing, and destroying surplus weapons from regions of conflict … [and] creating norms of non-possession."

Those objectives are woven into the UN's new arms treaty — but those threads run back to the late 1950s, when the world body first became involved in the "arms control" process.

Barack Obama is a left-leaning corporatist from an exotic background, but he is not the first U.S. president whose administration has promoted a UN-centered gun grab. That distinction belongs to Dwight Eisenhower, the conservative Republican whose State Department served as an incubator for a proposal called Freedom from War: The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World. That program, also known as State Department Document 7277, was introduced to the world in the fall of 1961 by Eisenhower's successor, John F. Kennedy.

Freedom from War, and its follow-up Blueprint for the Peace Race, outlined a three-stage global program in which the UN's machinery for "peace enforcement" — what honest people would call "warmaking" — would be built up pari passu with disarmament of national governments. In Stage III, national governments would retain only those armaments and establishments necessary to carry out UN-ordained "global obligations" and to "maintain internal order."

"All other armaments would be destroyed or converted to peaceful purposes," dictates the U.S.-created program. "Peaceful purposes," in the statist lexicon, include all acts of government-sanctioned aggression and violence. "All other armaments" would, of necessity, include civilian-owned weaponry. Those points were made with plangent clarity in a 1962 State Department-commissioned study called A World Effectively Controlled by the United Nations, which was written by MIT professor Lincoln P. Bloomfield.

Dispensing with the utopian pretenses of many world government advocates, Bloomfield observed that the pursuit of a world "effectively controlled" by the UN would be to create a "stable military environment" for the benefit of the U.S. government and allied interests. This would eventually require the creation of a nuclear-armed UN "Peace Force" — a multilateral body that itself would be effectively controlled by Washington — that would include a "disarmament policing agency." Each constituent member of the UN would be permitted a military establishment that would be limited "to the right to maintain sufficient police forces to ensure domestic security."

One source frequently cited by Bloomfield in his study is World Peace through World Law, a 1958 book co-written by Wall Street attorney Grenville Clark and Professor Louis B. Sohn. That book unflinchingly endorsed the creation of "A World Police Force" that would possess "a coercive force of overwhelming power." It would initially be equipped through "the transfer of weapons and equipment discarded by national military forces during the process of complete disarmament." However, it would also benefit from a research and development program devoted to providing it with a prohibitive advantage against any potential adversary.

Such an entity does not exist within the United Nations, of course. But what Clark and Sohn envisioned looks a great deal like the military-industrial complex that serves the interest of the de facto world government operated out of Washington, D.C.

"Even in a world in which all national military forces were abolished," continued Clark and Sohn, "it is conceivable that … an aroused nation with a strong grievance could marshal quite a formidable armed force even if no on in it possessed any weapon stronger than a rifle." This is why, they concluded, "a strong and well-armed police force is part of the indispensable price of peace and the sooner the world faces up to this conclusion the better it will be for all peoples."

Oh, sure, they acknowledge, the nuclear-armed world "Peace Force" they envisioned "might be perverted into a tool of world domination" — a concession they make without explaining how what they describe is something other than a plan for world domination. They then feinted in the direction of checks and balances, insisting that "careful limitations and safeguards" would be incorporated into the system — without providing so much as a hint of what they would be in a world where everybody but UN-approved government bodies would be disarmed.

In his 1962 study, Bloomfield took note of one critical complication: "In the United States, the people have the constitutional right to `keep and bear arms'; the government monopoly is legally abridged to that extent."

Once we peel the propaganda and persiflage away from the new UN arms treaty, it becomes clear that establishing that monopoly is the entire purpose of the document.

William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.

The Best of William Norman Grigg

Resisting arrest is not a crime. It is a common-law right, the exercise of which is treated as if it were a crime.

The act of resistance was transmuted into a criminal offense chiefly through judicial activism, rather than legislation. Courts that seek to criminalize resistance have generally made the pragmatic argument that resistance is more dangerous than submission. We’ve long since reached the point where the reverse is often the case.

Until 1942, when the Interstate Commission on Crime published the Uniform Arrest Act, every state recognized and protected the right to resist. Under the still-controlling U.S. Supreme Court precedent, John Bad Elk vs. US, a citizen faced with the prospect of unlawful arrest – that is, an armed abduction – has a legally protected right to use any appropriate means, including lethal force, to defend himself.

The Bad Elk ruling came in 1900. Thirteen years later, the New Mexico State Supreme Court, in Territory v. Lynch, tried out a line of sophistry that would become part of the standard refrain in judicial rulings six decades later:

“The law … calls upon the citizen to exercise patience, if illegally arrested, because he knows he will be brought before a magistrate, and will, if improperly arrested, suffer only a temporary deprivation of his liberty.”

In other words: If a cop seeks to abduct you without legal justification, you should submit in the serene confidence that your deprivation of liberty will be temporary and trivial. I have referred to this as the “Rapist Doctrine,” since rapists and police officers are the only assailants whose victims are encouraged to submit.

One hundred years after the New Mexico State Supreme Court published that ruling, the case of New Mexico resident Stephen Slevin demonstrates that this assurance is a cynical lie.

In 2005, Slevin – who was battling depression and driving a car lent to him by a friend – was stopped for driving under the influence. He was put into a special cell reserved for people suspected of being suicidal. After three days, he was transferred to solitary confinement – – where he remained for two years.

Although some may regard the traffic stop to be considered justified, and the initial arrest to be defensible, what happened to Slevin offers a stark and compelling demonstration of what can happen to anyone who finds himself immured in one of the Regime’s penal facilities. What was done to him is indistinguishable from the kind of criminal abuse associated in the public mind with prison facilities in Cuba and North Korea. More importantly, it is entirely typical of what happens in jails and prisons here in the putative Land of the Free.

Prolonged solitary confinement is a form of torture. In Slevin’s case, isolation was compounded with aggressive neglect as he literally rotted in his cell.

Despite repeated pleas for medical attention, Slevin developed skin fungus and bedsores. Deprived of dental care, Slevin was eventually forced to extract a tooth by himself. His toenails grew so long that they curled under his feet, his hair and beard grew to be long and unkempt, and he lost fifty pounds.

As his body decayed, Slevin’s mind degenerated. Already depressed at the time of his imprisonment, Slevin fell prey to hallucinations.

“I have not slept in days,”Slevin wrote to a nurse a couple of weeks into his solitary confinement. “I’m in a deep depression.” He also mentioned a lack of appetite, and that he was being afflicted with “weird and bizarre” dreams.

“I’m afraid to close my eyes,” he wrote in a plaintive letter to the jail’s “nurse practitioner,” an official with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and no medical credentials or experience. The “nurse” responded by prescribing a dose of sedatives.

The habeas corpus guarantee requires that anyone arrested by the police be quickly brought before a judge and either formally charged or released. Slevin, who was sent to solitary after failing to post $40,000 in bail, was never given a judicial hearing. If it weren’t for the intervention of his sister, who became concerned after Slevin stopped replying to her letters, Slevin would have died in jail without ever being charged with a crime.

Once he was released, Slevin filed a lawsuit against Dona Ana County. After a five-year legal struggle, Slevin was awarded $22 million by a federal court– one million dollars for every month he had been unlawfully incarcerated.

The county, which refused to discipline anybody responsible for Slevin’s imprisonment and torture, and refuses to answer questions about the crime committed against that man, protested that the civil judgment was excessive, and eventually agreed to a $15.5 million tax-funded civil settlement. This may still seem like an extravagant amount until it’s understood that the 59-year-old victim suffers from terminal lung cancer.

“The law cannot restore an arm, an eye, or a life; it can and does restore freedom,” wrote Ralph D. Smith of the University of New Mexico School of Law in a 1967 law school journal essay. His point was that “self-help” by citizens confronted with the prospect of unlawful arrest is impermissible, because they are dealing with people – that is, police officers – who have legal sanction to kill them if they resist.

“Life and liberty, though equally precious, cannot be viewed on the same plane where self-help is concerned,” Smith continues. “Liberty can be secured by a resort to law, life cannot.” A good case can be made for the proposition that Slevin’s illegal incarceration was terminal. Furthermore, unjust deprivation of liberty for any length of time is a grave and ineffaceable injury.

“If one is unlawfully arrested today, his period of confinement is likely to be brief,” wrote Smith, offering a glib assurance of the kind that comes easily to those who are paid well to defend the indefensible. “In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” – that is, the period in which British courts handed down rulings explicitly recognizing the common law right to resist arrest – “bail was usually unattainable. Today, it is freely granted for most offenses.

Requirements of a prompt hearing and arraignment before a magistrate also serve to protect today’s citizen from a lengthy unjustified detention.”

None of that was true in the case of Stephen Slevin, who suffered the theft of two years that were stolen from a life that was further abbreviated by the unpunished abuse of those who illegally imprisoned him.

During the less-enlightened times in which courts recognized that citizens had the right to avoid illegal arrest and detention, Smith continues, an improperly detained individual could be confined for months, and then “re-incarcerated until he had paid certain fees demanded by the jailer, the clerk of the assize, clerks of the peace, and the like.” What he describes is exactly the same arrangement that prevails today in a probation and parole system that encourages probation and parole officers to find excuses to “violate” their charges as often as possible in order to recycle them through the mechanism.

“Seventeenth and eighteenth century prison conditions might well induce resistance to arrest, if only to keep out of jail,” observes Smith. The same was true not only in the case of Stephen Slevin, but also that of California resident Daniel Chong, who was held, handcuffed, in isolation and darkness, for five days without being charged with a crime in April of last year.

Chong was deprived of food, water, and bathroom facilities. When he was finally released, Chong – who had begun to suffer from hallucinations – asked his captors to kill him. He was hospitalized with severe dehydration and renal failure. The officials responsible for this crime have never been punished, nor have they so much as apologized to Chong.

The late Nick Christie likewise had every reason to put up resistance when he was taken into “protective” custody by Lee County, Florida sheriff’s deputies in 2009. Christie, a resident of Cleveland, had gone to visit a brother in Florida. His wife was concerned that the 62-year-old man, who had been diagnosed with psychological problems, had left his medications behind. She made the familiar and reliably fatal mistake of calling the police for “help.”

Christie, who was detained on a spurious “trespassing” change, was shackled for nearly two full days in a restraint chair. His captors hooded the victim and repeatedly attacked him with military-grade pepper spray. Christie begged for the jailers to remove the “spit mask” from his face, complaining that he couldn’t breathe. When medical personnel were finally permitted to see Christie, they were overwhelmed by the pepper spray. When they attempted to treat him, the corrosive chemical residue was so potent it ate through their latex medical gloves.

This innocent man, who suffered from respiratory and heart disease, was tortured to death. His death was ruled a homicide. The State Attorney’s office refused to indict the officials who kidnapped and fatally tortured Christie, insisting that there was no evidence of “criminal wrongdoing.” (That prosecutor, Assistant State Attorney Dean R. Plattner, had a long history of indifference regarding criminal violence by police officers.)

Writing more than four decades ago, as efforts to repudiate the right to resist arrest were gaining momentum, Arthur Smith insisted: “Because of the evolution in criminal procedures, jail conditions, and the increased danger from resistance, an individual is less likely to be provoked at what he considers an unlawful arrest in 1967 than he would have been in 1767.”

By 2013, it should be obvious to all honest and observant people that the only material difference between the medieval system Smith described and the one that confronts us now is the fact that British subjects had a legally recognized right to resist unlawful arrest.

Resistance may be dangerous, but submission is frequently fatal.

Recently by William Norman Grigg: Prison Profiteers

Resisting arrest is not a crime. It is a common-law right, the exercise of which is treated as if it were a crime.

The act of resistance was transmuted into a criminal offense chiefly through judicial activism, rather than legislation. Courts that seek to criminalize resistance have generally made the pragmatic argument that resistance is more dangerous than submission. We've long since reached the point where the reverse is often the case.

Until 1942, when the Interstate Commission on Crime published the Uniform Arrest Act, every state recognized and protected the right to resist. Under the still-controlling U.S. Supreme Court precedent, John Bad Elk vs. US, a citizen faced with the prospect of unlawful arrest — that is, an armed abduction — has a legally protected right to use any appropriate means, including lethal force, to defend himself.

The Bad Elk ruling came in 1900. Thirteen years later, the New Mexico State Supreme Court, in Territory v. Lynch, tried out a line of sophistry that would become part of the standard refrain in judicial rulings six decades later:

"The law … calls upon the citizen to exercise patience, if illegally arrested, because he knows he will be brought before a magistrate, and will, if improperly arrested, suffer only a temporary deprivation of his liberty."

In other words: If a cop seeks to abduct you without legal justification, you should submit in the serene confidence that your deprivation of liberty will be temporary and trivial. I have referred to this as the “Rapist Doctrine,” since rapists and police officers are the only assailants whose victims are encouraged to submit.

One hundred years after the New Mexico State Supreme Court published that ruling, the case of New Mexico resident Stephen Slevin demonstrates that this assurance is a cynical lie.

In 2005, Slevin — who was battling depression and driving a car lent to him by a friend — was stopped for driving under the influence. He was put into a special cell reserved for people suspected of being suicidal. After three days, he was transferred to solitary confinement — – where he remained for two years.

Although some may regard the traffic stop to be considered justified, and the initial arrest to be defensible, what happened to Slevin offers a stark and compelling demonstration of what can happen to anyone who finds himself immured in one of the Regime's penal facilities. What was done to him is indistinguishable from the kind of criminal abuse associated in the public mind with prison facilities in Cuba and North Korea. More importantly, it is entirely typical of what happens in jails and prisons here in the putative Land of the Free.

Prolonged solitary confinement is a form of torture. In Slevin's case, isolation was compounded with aggressive neglect as he literally rotted in his cell.

Despite repeated pleas for medical attention, Slevin developed skin fungus and bedsores. Deprived of dental care, Slevin was eventually forced to extract a tooth by himself. His toenails grew so long that they curled under his feet, his hair and beard grew to be long and unkempt, and he lost fifty pounds.

As his body decayed, Slevin's mind degenerated. Already depressed at the time of his imprisonment, Slevin fell prey to hallucinations.

"I have not slept in days,"Slevin wrote to a nurse a couple of weeks into his solitary confinement. "I'm in a deep depression." He also mentioned a lack of appetite, and that he was being afflicted with "weird and bizarre" dreams.

"I'm afraid to close my eyes," he wrote in a plaintive letter to the jail's "nurse practitioner," an official with a bachelor's degree in psychology and no medical credentials or experience. The "nurse" responded by prescribing a dose of sedatives.

The habeas corpus guarantee requires that anyone arrested by the police be quickly brought before a judge and either formally charged or released. Slevin, who was sent to solitary after failing to post $40,000 in bail, was never given a judicial hearing. If it weren't for the intervention of his sister, who became concerned after Slevin stopped replying to her letters, Slevin would have died in jail without ever being charged with a crime.

Once he was released, Slevin filed a lawsuit against Dona Ana County. After a five-year legal struggle, Slevin was awarded $22 million by a federal court– one million dollars for every month he had been unlawfully incarcerated.

The county, which refused to discipline anybody responsible for Slevin's imprisonment and torture, and refuses to answer questions about the crime committed against that man, protested that the civil judgment was excessive, and eventually agreed to a $15.5 million tax-funded civil settlement. This may still seem like an extravagant amount until it's understood that the 59-year-old victim suffers from terminal lung cancer.

"The law cannot restore an arm, an eye, or a life; it can and does restore freedom," wrote Ralph D. Smith of the University of New Mexico School of Law in a 1967 law school journal essay. His point was that "self-help" by citizens confronted with the prospect of unlawful arrest is impermissible, because they are dealing with people — that is, police officers — who have legal sanction to kill them if they resist.

"Life and liberty, though equally precious, cannot be viewed on the same plane where self-help is concerned," Smith continues. "Liberty can be secured by a resort to law, life cannot." A good case can be made for the proposition that Slevin's illegal incarceration was terminal. Furthermore, unjust deprivation of liberty for any length of time is a grave and ineffaceable injury.

"If one is unlawfully arrested today, his period of confinement is likely to be brief," wrote Smith, offering a glib assurance of the kind that comes easily to those who are paid well to defend the indefensible. "In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries" — that is, the period in which British courts handed down rulings explicitly recognizing the common law right to resist arrest — "bail was usually unattainable. Today, it is freely granted for most offenses.

Requirements of a prompt hearing and arraignment before a magistrate also serve to protect today's citizen from a lengthy unjustified detention."

None of that was true in the case of Stephen Slevin, who suffered the theft of two years that were stolen from a life that was further abbreviated by the unpunished abuse of those who illegally imprisoned him.

During the less-enlightened times in which courts recognized that citizens had the right to avoid illegal arrest and detention, Smith continues, an improperly detained individual could be confined for months, and then "re-incarcerated until he had paid certain fees demanded by the jailer, the clerk of the assize, clerks of the peace, and the like." What he describes is exactly the same arrangement that prevails today in a probation and parole system that encourages probation and parole officers to find excuses to "violate" their charges as often as possible in order to recycle them through the mechanism.

"Seventeenth and eighteenth century prison conditions might well induce resistance to arrest, if only to keep out of jail," observes Smith. The same was true not only in the case of Stephen Slevin, but also that of California resident Daniel Chong, who was held, handcuffed, in isolation and darkness, for five days without being charged with a crime in April of last year.

Chong was deprived of food, water, and bathroom facilities. When he was finally released, Chong — who had begun to suffer from hallucinations — asked his captors to kill him. He was hospitalized with severe dehydration and renal failure. The officials responsible for this crime have never been punished, nor have they so much as apologized to Chong.

The late Nick Christie likewise had every reason to put up resistance when he was taken into "protective" custody by Lee County, Florida sheriff's deputies in 2009. Christie, a resident of Cleveland, had gone to visit a brother in Florida. His wife was concerned that the 62-year-old man, who had been diagnosed with psychological problems, had left his medications behind. She made the familiar and reliably fatal mistake of calling the police for "help."

Christie, who was detained on a spurious "trespassing" change, was shackled for nearly two full days in a restraint chair. His captors hooded the victim and repeatedly attacked him with military-grade pepper spray. Christie begged for the jailers to remove the "spit mask" from his face, complaining that he couldn't breathe. When medical personnel were finally permitted to see Christie, they were overwhelmed by the pepper spray. When they attempted to treat him, the corrosive chemical residue was so potent it ate through their latex medical gloves.

This innocent man, who suffered from respiratory and heart disease, was tortured to death. His death was ruled a homicide. The State Attorney's office refused to indict the officials who kidnapped and fatally tortured Christie, insisting that there was no evidence of "criminal wrongdoing." (That prosecutor, Assistant State Attorney Dean R. Plattner, had a long history of indifference regarding criminal violence by police officers.)

Writing more than four decades ago, as efforts to repudiate the right to resist arrest were gaining momentum, Arthur Smith insisted: "Because of the evolution in criminal procedures, jail conditions, and the increased danger from resistance, an individual is less likely to be provoked at what he considers an unlawful arrest in 1967 than he would have been in 1767."

By 2013, it should be obvious to all honest and observant people that the only material difference between the medieval system Smith described and the one that confronts us now is the fact that British subjects had a legally recognized right to resist unlawful arrest.

Resistance may be dangerous, but submission is frequently fatal.

William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.

The Best of William Norman Grigg