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

One aspect of drug prohibition that gets far too little attention is the fact that the drug war is immensely profitable for prohibitionists.

Ten former high-ranking officials of the Drug Enforcement Administration recently signed a letterto the Senate Judiciary Committee criticizing the Obama administration for its supposed lack of zeal in enforcing marijuana prohibition. According to the letter, the administration chief delinquency is its reluctance to crack down on Washington and Colorado, and this is impermissible in light of supposedly sacred international obligations, such as “the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs… and the United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic and Psychotropic Substances.”

Among the signatories of that letter were Robert L. Dupont, who headed the National Institute on Drug Abuse under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and Peter Bensinger, who was head of the DEA during most of that decade. Today, these drug warriors emeriti run a company called Bensinger, DuPont & Associates, which specializes in workplace drug testing.

Since they have a financial interest in marijuana prohibition, it’s reasonable to surmise that DuPont and Bensinger aren’t acting on purely idealistic motives, or out of pious ardor for the sanctity of United Nations accords.

No decent person has anything but contempt for Drug Kingpins – but it’s difficult to see how Prohibition Profiteers are any less contemptible. And they’re hardly the only people who have become wealthy by monetizing the misery generated in the prison-industrial complex. Public incarceration is the only consistently growing sector of our increasingly socialized economy.

Last August, with prisons overflowing in Idaho, the state department of correction chartered a private jet to transport 120 inmates to the Kit Carson Correctional Center in Burlington, Colorado. That prison, like the Idaho Correctional Center , is owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). The inmates, who were clothed in orange jumpsuits and shackles, were greeted at the airport by a SWAT team in full stormtrooper regalia.

Eventually more than 800 prisoners were transferred from Idaho to Colorado. Prison overcrowding wouldn’t be a problem if the government were to stop imprisoning people for non-violent offenses, something the corporate prison lobby well understands.

Over the last decade, CCA spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying on behalf of policies that increase the demand for prison space. In a 2011 corporate report, GEO Group, another prison contractor, described how its profits depended on the state providing a steady supply of inmates. This is why the company opposes “the relaxation of criminal or immigration enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction, sentencing or deportation practices, [and] … the decriminalization of drugs and controlled substances[.]”

This is a system designed to expand the profits of politically connected corporations, not to protect the public from violent crime. And the uses to which those profits are put illustrate some fascinating — albeit repellent — truths about our economy and society.

In recent decades, professional sports franchises have increasingly relied on the sale of corporate “naming rights” – in addition to various kinds of government subsidies — to pay for sports stadiums. This trend has caught on in college football, as well. As a result, a growing number of stadiums are named after companies that produce goods or offer services. Florida Atlantic University has sold naming rights to a company that warehouses convicts– and lobbies government to produce more of them.

The GEO Group, the nation’s largest private prison company, has bought the naming rights to the new 30,000-seat football stadium at Florida Atlantic University. On February 19 the company announced that its charitable foundation will pay $6 million to the university over a 12-year-period in exchange for the coliseum bearing the name “GEO Group Stadium.”

Juvenal, H.L. Mencken’s ancient Roman progenitor, observed that the Empire’s torpid subjects would never revolt as long as they were given “bread and circuses” (panem et circenses). In late imperial America, where a steady diet of television “police procedurals” and pseudo-documentary “reality” programs relentlessly exalt the State’s armed enforcers the formula could be rendered panem et circenses et carceres: This keeps the masses distracted and the prison profiteers well-fed.

Recently by William Norman Grigg: Only an Incipient ‘Terrorist’ Denounces StateMurder

One aspect of drug prohibition that gets far too little attention is the fact that the drug war is immensely profitable for prohibitionists.

Ten former high-ranking officials of the Drug Enforcement Administration recently signed a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee criticizing the Obama administration for its supposed lack of zeal in enforcing marijuana prohibition. According to the letter, the administration chief delinquency is its reluctance to crack down on Washington and Colorado, and this is impermissible in light of supposedly sacred international obligations, such as u201Cthe Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs… and the United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic and Psychotropic Substances.u201D

Among the signatories of that letter were Robert L. Dupont, who headed the National Institute on Drug Abuse under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and Peter Bensinger, who was head of the DEA during most of that decade. Today, these drug warriors emeriti run a company called Bensinger, DuPont & Associates, which specializes in workplace drug testing.

Since they have a financial interest in marijuana prohibition, it's reasonable to surmise that DuPont and Bensinger aren't acting on purely idealistic motives, or out of pious ardor for the sanctity of United Nations accords.

No decent person has anything but contempt for Drug Kingpins — but it's difficult to see how Prohibition Profiteers are any less contemptible. And they're hardly the only people who have become wealthy by monetizing the misery generated in the prison-industrial complex. Public incarceration is the only consistently growing sector of our increasingly socialized economy.

Last August, with prisons overflowing in Idaho, the state department of correction chartered a private jet to transport 120 inmates to the Kit Carson Correctional Center in Burlington, Colorado. That prison, like the Idaho Correctional Center , is owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). The inmates, who were clothed in orange jumpsuits and shackles, were greeted at the airport by a SWAT team in full stormtrooper regalia.

Eventually more than 800 prisoners were transferred from Idaho to Colorado. Prison overcrowding wouldn't be a problem if the government were to stop imprisoning people for non-violent offenses, something the corporate prison lobby well understands.

Over the last decade, CCA spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying on behalf of policies that increase the demand for prison space. In a 2011 corporate report, GEO Group, another prison contractor, described how its profits depended on the state providing a steady supply of inmates. This is why the company opposes u201Cthe relaxation of criminal or immigration enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction, sentencing or deportation practices, [and] … the decriminalization of drugs and controlled substances[.]u201D

This is a system designed to expand the profits of politically connected corporations, not to protect the public from violent crime. And the uses to which those profits are put illustrate some fascinating — albeit repellent — truths about our economy and society.

In recent decades, professional sports franchises have increasingly relied on the sale of corporate u201Cnaming rightsu201D — in addition to various kinds of government subsidies — to pay for sports stadiums. This trend has caught on in college football, as well. As a result, a growing number of stadiums are named after companies that produce goods or offer services. Florida Atlantic University has sold naming rights to a company that warehouses convicts — and lobbies government to produce more of them.

The GEO Group, the nation's largest private prison company, has bought the naming rights to the new 30,000-seat football stadium at Florida Atlantic University. On February 19 the company announced that its charitable foundation will pay $6 million to the university over a 12-year-period in exchange for the coliseum bearing the name u201CGEO Group Stadium.u201D

Juvenal, H.L. Mencken's ancient Roman progenitor, observed that the Empire’s torpid subjects would never revolt as long as they were given u201Cbread and circusesu201D (panem et circenses). In late imperial America, where a steady diet of television “police procedurals” and pseudo-documentary “reality” programs relentlessly exalt the State’s armed enforcers the formula could be rendered panem et circenses et carceres: This keeps the masses distracted and the prison profiteers well-fed.

William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.

The Best of William Norman Grigg

“There are, in increasingly frightening numbers, cells of angry men in the United States preparing for combat,” warns an unusually strident house editorial by the Los Angeles Times. “They are usually heavily armed, blinded by an intractable hatred, often motivated by religious zeal.”

That description was not applied to the masked, armor-clad Berserkers who kick down doors in the early morning or late at night and terrorize families over non-violent “offenses.” Nor was it offered in reference to the militants who have purchased more than 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition – much of it hollow-point rounds unsuitable for military use – while distributing armored vehicles and other military hardware to their adherents in practically every city nation-wide. The Times didn’t direct that rhetorical salvo at the people who are openly discussing plans to fill America’s skies with robot planes that can – and will – be used as weapons platforms.

The Times editorial collective focused its indignation upon a much safer target – namely, “white, right-wing Americans, all with an obsessive attachment to guns, who may represent a greater danger to the lives of American civilians than international terrorists.” The statist screed makes passing reference to what it calls “the massacre of a bizarre sect by federal agents in Waco, Texas,” twenty years ago – without passing moral judgment on the “massacre” in question. Slaughtering religious eccentrics is a venial offense compared to the grave heresy committed by those who speak ill of the Holy State, since their “blather” – not the murderous actions of those who impudently presume to rule us, mind you – “tends to get under the skin of the Timothy McVeighs of the world.”

Once again: Immolating harmless people in a church is a perfectly proper thing, assuming that this act of mass murder is carried out by the consecrated hands of the State’s enforcement caste, but referring to it as mass murder is the sort of thing only an incipient terrorist would do.In recent days, we’ve heard that the Obama Regime – which is running out of plausible foreign enemies – is seeking to broaden the scope of the “war on terror” to include “offshoot” groups that are connected only by rumor to al-Qaeda (which was always more of a brand name than an actual organization). Terror Warriors need not fret; ere long we’ll harvest the nettles that have been so plentifully sown by the Regime’s implacable aggression abroad. In the meantime, however, the Times suggests that the “war on terror” should re-direct its focus inward.

Citing the most recent missive from the self-appointed Stasi at the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Times claims that there are 1,360 proto-terrorist groups – sneeringly denounced as “patriots,” “constitutionalists,” and “sovereign citizens” – scattered throughout the Soyuz. “These groups should be closely monitored, with resources adequate to the task, even if it means shifting some homeland security money from the hunt for foreign terrorists,” concludes the paper.

A Sheriff’s Deputy in Gem County, Idaho deals with a “Constitutionalist.”

The Times editorial – which could be digested into the phrase, “The conspiracy theorists are plotting against us!” – brings to mind an incident in the early 1980s in which East German officials arrested a group of human rights activists for “defaming” the state by claiming that it suppressed freedom of speech. As Tony Cooper, an instructor in terrorism negotiation at the University of Texas-Dallas, pointed out in 1995, the Regime in Washington is perfectly capable of such totalitarian behavior.

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

Never forget: A “conspiracy theorist” is someone who notices things without official permission – and a “terrorist” is anybody who challenges the government’s monopoly on violence.

Recently by William Norman Grigg: The Stalinist in the White House

According to the SPLC, the people in the burning building were the “terrorists.”

u201CThere are, in increasingly frightening numbers, cells of angry men in the United States preparing for combat,” warns an unusually strident house editorial by the Los Angeles Times. “They are usually heavily armed, blinded by an intractable hatred, often motivated by religious zeal.u201D

That description was not applied to the masked, armor-clad Berserkers who kick down doors in the early morning or late at night and terrorize families over non-violent “offenses.” Nor was it offered in reference to the militants who have purchased more than 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition – much of it hollow-point rounds unsuitable for military use – while distributing armored vehicles and other military hardware to their adherents in practically every city nation-wide. The Times didn’t direct that rhetorical salvo at the people who are openly discussing plans to fill America’s skies with robot planes that can – and will – be used as weapons platforms.

The Times editorial collective focused its indignation upon a much safer target – namely, u201Cwhite, right-wing Americans, all with an obsessive attachment to guns, who may represent a greater danger to the lives of American civilians than international terrorists.u201D The statist screed makes passing reference to what it calls u201Cthe massacre of a bizarre sect by federal agents in Waco, Texas,u201D twenty years ago — without passing moral judgment on the u201Cmassacreu201D in question. Slaughtering religious eccentrics is a venial offense compared to the grave heresy committed by those who speak ill of the Holy State, since their “blather” – not the murderous actions of those who impudently presume to rule us, mind you – “tends to get under the skin of the Timothy McVeighs of the world.”

Once again: Immolating harmless people in a church is a perfectly proper thing, assuming that this act of mass murder is carried out by the consecrated hands of the State’s enforcement caste, but referring to it as mass murder is the sort of thing only an incipient terrorist would do.In recent days, we’ve heard that the Obama Regime – which is running out of plausible foreign enemies – is seeking to broaden the scope of the “war on terror” to include “offshoot” groups that are connected only by rumor to al-Qaeda (which was always more of a brand name than an actual organization). Terror Warriors need not fret; ere long we’ll harvest the nettles that have been so plentifully sown by the Regime’s implacable aggression abroad. In the meantime, however, the Times suggests that the “war on terror” should re-direct its focus inward.

Citing the most recent missive from the self-appointed Stasi at the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Times claims that there are 1,360 proto-terrorist groups – sneeringly denounced as “patriots,” “constitutionalists,” and “sovereign citizens” – scattered throughout the Soyuz. “These groups should be closely monitored, with resources adequate to the task, even if it means shifting some homeland security money from the hunt for foreign terrorists,” concludes the paper.

A Sheriff’s Deputy in Gem County, Idaho deals with a “Constitutionalist.”

The Times editorial – which could be digested into the phrase, “The conspiracy theorists are plotting against us!” – brings to mind an incident in the early 1980s in which East German officials arrested a group of human rights activists for “defaming” the state by claiming that it suppressed freedom of speech. As Tony Cooper, an instructor in terrorism negotiation at the University of Texas-Dallas, pointed out in 1995, the Regime in Washington is perfectly capable of such totalitarian behavior.

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

Never forget: A “conspiracy theorist” is someone who notices things without official permission – and a “terrorist” is anybody who challenges the government’s monopoly on violence.

William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.

The Best of William Norman Grigg

In the fashion of Caesar thrice refusing the crown even as he assumed dictatorial powers, tyrants will occasionally engage in self-aggrandizement disguised as self-deprecation. Barack Obama offered a moment of that kind last week when, in reply to a question about the budget sequester posed by a media sycophant, he said, “I’m not a dictator.”

Obama wasn’t serious, of course. He does consider himself a dictator, albeit one whose term in office is limited, at least for now.

Obama might not lock the doors of the Oval Office and force Republican congressional leaders to carry out budget negotiations, but – as his Attorney General made clear in a letter to Senator Rand Paul – he considers himself duly empowered to carry out the summary execution of U.S. citizens on American soil if he deems such action necessary.

In his March 6 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Holder made it clear that the president he serves answers to nobody, and is bound by no laws, in carrying out extra-judicial killings, either within U.S. borders or beyond them. Expressing a point of view familiar to students of Soviet Russia under the reign of Stalin, Holder maintained that the purpose of the law is to prevent anybody – whether an individual citizen, a judge, or a legislative body – from restraining the exercise of presidential will.

“Do you believe Congress can pass a law prohibiting [the President] to use lethal force on U.S. soil?” Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa asked Holder. If we still resided in something resembling a constitutional republic, that question itself would be perverse: Congress wouldn’t need to pass a law to prevent something that the law doesn’t authorize the president to do.

Furthermore, as civil liberties activist Marcy Wheeler points out, Grassley’s question wasn’t intended to suggest a general prohibition against “targeted killings,” but rather one that “would apply only where a person did not present an imminent threat.” In other words, Grassley was willing to concede that the president could order summary executions after addressing some trivial formalities about the dire necessity of such action.

But even this would be too restrictive, according to Holder.

“I’m not sure that such a bill would be constitutional,” he told Grassley. “It might run contrary to the Article II powers that the President has.” In other words, Holder is claiming that the President, as Commander-in-Chief of the military, can order the military (or, presumably, the CIA) to carry out an extra-judicial execution of a U.S. citizen on American soil – and Congress would be forbidden by the Constitution (whatever that word means to Holder and his ilk) from preventing such action.

Domestic use of the military as a law enforcement agency is forbidden by the Third Amendment and the Posse Commitatus Act. This means nothing to the budding Stalinist occupying the Oval Office.

For the Obama-centric Left, as it was for the Bush-centric Right, the U.S. President is the “Living Constitution.” His power is limited only by the resources at his command, and the extent of his sadistic imagination. Thomas Jefferson – in an essay promoting what we are told is the subversive and un-American doctrine of “interposition” – warned that “confidence in men” is a “dangerous delusion” that is fatal to liberty. Today, collectivists of the Right and Left insist that this is true only on those occasions when power is exercised by people associated with the other faction.

Perhaps this is an unfair and overbroad characterization. There are some prominent figures who can abandon partisan attachments in defense of principle. Regrettably, this usually means that party labels are discarded in favor of an unabashed embrace of the non-partisan Warfare State, and the principles being applied are entirely depraved. Witness the fact that many conservative commentators, rather than condemning Obama for assuming the powers of a literal dictator, have actually applauded him. Among them is John Bolton, who represented the Bush administration in the United Nations, who admits that Obama’s drone strike program “is consistent with, and derived from, the Bush administration approach to the war on terror.” In Bolton’s opinion, the drone-killing program is “entirely sensible.”

Channeling the spirit of a Stalin-era Communist Party apparatchik, South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsay Graham has proposed a resolution applauding the administration’s drone-killing program and urging all of his Republican colleagues to express their support. Graham has explicitly commended the administration for the summary execution of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who was murdered (no other word is suitable) by a drone strike in Yemen without ever being charged with a crime. Graham hasn’t said whether he considers the murder of Anwar’s 16-year-old son Abdelrahman to be a similarly commendable act of statecraft.

More remarkable still was the reaction of John Yoo, a former Bush-era Justice Department functionary who now teaches law at the University of California-Berkeley. Seven years before Eric Holder claimed that Congress has no authority to rein in Obama’s power of discretionary killing, Yoo breezily claimed that no law or treaty could prevent President Bush from ordering the sexual mutilation of a child in order to extract information from the victim’s parents.

Yoo employed a Wall Street Journal op-ed column to criticize the Obama “white paper” that sets out the guidelines for drone attacks – not because it gives unaccountable discretionary killing power to the president and his subordinates, but because it supposedly extends due process to “enemy combatants.” Yoo complains that the paper “suggests” that U.S. citizens like Anwar al-Awlaki “enjoy due process rights. By doing so, it dissipates the rights of the law-abiding at home.”

Presumably, Yoo’s concerns have been placated by Holder’s unflinching assertion that the president has unqualified authority to murder Americans anywhere, for any reason he deems suitable.

Senator Angus King of Maine has proposed the institutionalization of the drone program through creation of a special court that would be modeled after the tribunal that issues warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (or FISA). The FISA court, significantly, issues warrants after surveillance has begun. In similar fashion, Senator Young’s proposed court would review decisions to carry out drone strikes after the missiles had flown and the targeted individual had been killed. This proposal has been criticized by some congressional Republicans – once again, not because it represents a concession to tyrannical power, but rather because it supposedly inhibits the exercise of that power, if only by acknowledging that the power is subject to some form of independent scrutiny.

Until the filibuster staged by Senator Paul – who, despite his plentiful shortcomings, has proven that he has learned much from his heroic father – no Senate Republican had rejected the Stalinist premise that the President can order the summary execution of U.S. citizens. What about the Professional Left – the people who, like then-Senator Obama, were so agitated over the Bush administration’s crimes against the Bill of Rights? They’re too busy debating such weighty matters as the proper honorific by which to address the Dear Leader, or helping the Southern Poverty Law Center draw up “kill lists” of domestic “extremists.”

It took the 13-hour filibuster from Senator Rand Paul to wring this terse statement from Attorney General Eric Holder:

“It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: `Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?’ The answer to that question is no.”

Like all statements from people who presume to rule others, this brief message from Holder – who is Nickolai Krylenko to Obama’s Josef Stalin – should be read in terms of the supposed authority claimed thereby. This means removing useless qualifiers in the interest of clarity.

What Holder is saying, in substantive terms, is that the President does have the supposed authority to use a drone to kill an American who is engaged in “combat,” whether here or abroad. “Combat” can consist of expressing support for Muslims mounting armed resistance against U.S. military aggression, which was the supposed crime committed by Anwar al-Awlaki, or sharing the surname and DNA of a known enemy of the state, which was the offense committed by Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdel.

Under the rules of engagement used by the Obama Regime in Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan, any “military-age” male found within a targeted “kill zone” is likewise designated a “combatant,” albeit usually after the fact. This is a murderous application of the “Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy,” and it will be used when – not if – Obama or a successor starts conducting domestic drone-killing operations.

Holder selected a carefully qualified question in order to justify a narrowly tailored answer that reserves an expansive claim of executive power to authorize summary executions by the president. That’s how totalitarians operate.

About a week ago, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland insisted that Washington would maintain its embargo of Cuba because the regime ruling that island continues to be a “state sponsor of terrorism.” Unlike the Regime for which Nuland speaks, the Cuban government doesn’t occupy a foot of foreign territory, nor does it use robot aircraft to rain death from the skies on neighborhoods halfway around the world.

In its 2011 human rights report on Cuba, the agency that issues Nuland’s paycheck described its government as a “totalitarian state” ruled by a military hierarchy that routinely commits criminal violence against the innocent. All of that is true, of course. Interestingly, the document admitted that in 2011, “There were no reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings.” The same cannot be said of the Regime that employs Nuland, which in the same year murdered hundreds of people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Among those “arbitrary [and] unlawful killings” were the summary executions of at least three U.S. citizens, including – let us never forget – one involving a 16-year-old boy. And now the chief law enforcement officer of the Obama Regime insists that the “law” would forbid Congress to restrain the Dear Leader from carrying out the extra-judicial killings of U.S. citizens.

While it’s true that Cuba remains mired in poverty and still lives under the reign of a thoroughly despicable ruling clique, we really must confront this question:

By what standard is the government of Cuba totalitarian, if the Regime in Washington is not, at least in principle?

Recently by William Norman Grigg: ‘For Your Own Protection’

In the fashion of Caesar thrice refusing the crown even as he assumed dictatorial powers, tyrants will occasionally engage in self-aggrandizement disguised as self-deprecation. Barack Obama offered a moment of that kind last week when, in reply to a question about the budget sequester posed by a media sycophant, he said, "I'm not a dictator."

Obama wasn't serious, of course. He does consider himself a dictator, albeit one whose term in office is limited, at least for now.

Obama might not lock the doors of the Oval Office and force Republican congressional leaders to carry out budget negotiations, but — as his Attorney General made clear in a letter to Senator Rand Paul — he considers himself duly empowered to carry out the summary execution of U.S. citizens on American soil if he deems such action necessary.

In his March 6 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Holder made it clear that the president he serves answers to nobody, and is bound by no laws, in carrying out extra-judicial killings, either within U.S. borders or beyond them. Expressing a point of view familiar to students of Soviet Russia under the reign of Stalin, Holder maintained that the purpose of the law is to prevent anybody — whether an individual citizen, a judge, or a legislative body — from restraining the exercise of presidential will.

"Do you believe Congress can pass a law prohibiting [the President] to use lethal force on U.S. soil?" Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa asked Holder. If we still resided in something resembling a constitutional republic, that question itself would be perverse: Congress wouldn't need to pass a law to prevent something that the law doesn't authorize the president to do.

Furthermore, as civil liberties activist Marcy Wheeler points out, Grassley's question wasn't intended to suggest a general prohibition against "targeted killings," but rather one that "would apply only where a person did not present an imminent threat." In other words, Grassley was willing to concede that the president could order summary executions after addressing some trivial formalities about the dire necessity of such action.

But even this would be too restrictive, according to Holder.

"I'm not sure that such a bill would be constitutional," he told Grassley. "It might run contrary to the Article II powers that the President has." In other words, Holder is claiming that the President, as Commander-in-Chief of the military, can order the military (or, presumably, the CIA) to carry out an extra-judicial execution of a U.S. citizen on American soil — and Congress would be forbidden by the Constitution (whatever that word means to Holder and his ilk) from preventing such action.

Domestic use of the military as a law enforcement agency is forbidden by the Third Amendment and the Posse Commitatus Act. This means nothing to the budding Stalinist occupying the Oval Office.

For the Obama-centric Left, as it was for the Bush-centric Right, the U.S. President is the "Living Constitution." His power is limited only by the resources at his command, and the extent of his sadistic imagination. Thomas Jefferson — in an essay promoting what we are told is the subversive and un-American doctrine of "interposition" — warned that "confidence in men" is a "dangerous delusion" that is fatal to liberty. Today, collectivists of the Right and Left insist that this is true only on those occasions when power is exercised by people associated with the other faction.

Perhaps this is an unfair and overbroad characterization. There are some prominent figures who can abandon partisan attachments in defense of principle. Regrettably, this usually means that party labels are discarded in favor of an unabashed embrace of the non-partisan Warfare State, and the principles being applied are entirely depraved. Witness the fact that many conservative commentators, rather than condemning Obama for assuming the powers of a literal dictator, have actually applauded him. Among them is John Bolton, who represented the Bush administration in the United Nations, who admits that Obama's drone strike program "is consistent with, and derived from, the Bush administration approach to the war on terror." In Bolton's opinion, the drone-killing program is "entirely sensible."

Channeling the spirit of a Stalin-era Communist Party apparatchik, South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsay Graham has proposed a resolution applauding the administration's drone-killing program and urging all of his Republican colleagues to express their support. Graham has explicitly commended the administration for the summary execution of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who was murdered (no other word is suitable) by a drone strike in Yemen without ever being charged with a crime. Graham hasn't said whether he considers the murder of Anwar's 16-year-old son Abdelrahman to be a similarly commendable act of statecraft.

More remarkable still was the reaction of John Yoo, a former Bush-era Justice Department functionary who now teaches law at the University of California-Berkeley. Seven years before Eric Holder claimed that Congress has no authority to rein in Obama's power of discretionary killing, Yoo breezily claimed that no law or treaty could prevent President Bush from ordering the sexual mutilation of a child in order to extract information from the victim's parents.

Yoo employed a Wall Street Journal op-ed column to criticize the Obama "white paper" that sets out the guidelines for drone attacks — not because it gives unaccountable discretionary killing power to the president and his subordinates, but because it supposedly extends due process to "enemy combatants." Yoo complains that the paper "suggests" that U.S. citizens like Anwar al-Awlaki "enjoy due process rights. By doing so, it dissipates the rights of the law-abiding at home."

Presumably, Yoo's concerns have been placated by Holder's unflinching assertion that the president has unqualified authority to murder Americans anywhere, for any reason he deems suitable.

Senator Angus King of Maine has proposed the institutionalization of the drone program through creation of a special court that would be modeled after the tribunal that issues warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (or FISA). The FISA court, significantly, issues warrants after surveillance has begun. In similar fashion, Senator Young's proposed court would review decisions to carry out drone strikes after the missiles had flown and the targeted individual had been killed. This proposal has been criticized by some congressional Republicans — once again, not because it represents a concession to tyrannical power, but rather because it supposedly inhibits the exercise of that power, if only by acknowledging that the power is subject to some form of independent scrutiny.

Until the filibuster staged by Senator Paul — who, despite his plentiful shortcomings, has proven that he has learned much from his heroic father — no Senate Republican had rejected the Stalinist premise that the President can order the summary execution of U.S. citizens. What about the Professional Left — the people who, like then-Senator Obama, were so agitated over the Bush administration's crimes against the Bill of Rights? They're too busy debating such weighty matters as the proper honorific by which to address the Dear Leader, or helping the Southern Poverty Law Center draw up "kill lists" of domestic "extremists."

It took the 13-hour filibuster from Senator Rand Paul to wring this terse statement from Attorney General Eric Holder:

"It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: `Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?' The answer to that question is no."

Like all statements from people who presume to rule others, this brief message from Holder — who is Nickolai Krylenko to Obama's Josef Stalin — should be read in terms of the supposed authority claimed thereby. This means removing useless qualifiers in the interest of clarity.

What Holder is saying, in substantive terms, is that the President does have the supposed authority to use a drone to kill an American who is engaged in "combat," whether here or abroad. “Combat” can consist of expressing support for Muslims mounting armed resistance against U.S. military aggression, which was the supposed crime committed by Anwar al-Awlaki, or sharing the surname and DNA of a known enemy of the state, which was the offense committed by Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdel.

Under the rules of engagement used by the Obama Regime in Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan, any "military-age" male found within a targeted "kill zone" is likewise designated a "combatant," albeit usually after the fact. This is a murderous application of the “Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy,” and it will be used when — not if — Obama or a successor starts conducting domestic drone-killing operations.

Holder selected a carefully qualified question in order to justify a narrowly tailored answer that reserves an expansive claim of executive power to authorize summary executions by the president. That's how totalitarians operate.

About a week ago, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland insisted that Washington would maintain its embargo of Cuba because the regime ruling that island continues to be a "state sponsor of terrorism." Unlike the Regime for which Nuland speaks, the Cuban government doesn't occupy a foot of foreign territory, nor does it use robot aircraft to rain death from the skies on neighborhoods halfway around the world.

In its 2011 human rights report on Cuba, the agency that issues Nuland's paycheck described its government as a "totalitarian state" ruled by a military hierarchy that routinely commits criminal violence against the innocent. All of that is true, of course. Interestingly, the document admitted that in 2011, "There were no reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings." The same cannot be said of the Regime that employs Nuland, which in the same year murdered hundreds of people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Among those "arbitrary [and] unlawful killings" were the summary executions of at least three U.S. citizens, including — let us never forget — one involving a 16-year-old boy. And now the chief law enforcement officer of the Obama Regime insists that the "law" would forbid Congress to restrain the Dear Leader from carrying out the extra-judicial killings of U.S. citizens.

While it's true that Cuba remains mired in poverty and still lives under the reign of a thoroughly despicable ruling clique, we really must confront this question:

By what standard is the government of Cuba totalitarian, if the Regime in Washington is not, at least in principle?

William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.

The Best of William Norman Grigg

Recently by William Norman Grigg: Meet Ed Flynn — Milwaukee Crime Lord, Citizen Disarmament Advocate

There is no situation that cannot be made instantly and immeasurably worse through police intervention. A splendid illustration of this principle is found in a recent ruling from the the Arkansas Court of Appeals.

According to the court, police were entitled to arrest, taze, and beat a teenager who had done nothing more sinister than speak to his mother on the street in front of their home. A police officer accosted the young man — who, as a juvenile, is identified only by the initials "R.R." — after he saw him approaching a woman who was walking a dog.

The officer, who belongs to a social cohort of people who are distinguished primarily by their timidity, claimed that he was "concerned for the woman's safety." His fears should have been allayed when it was established that the woman was the teenager's mother.

If the cop had been an actual peace officer, he would have tipped his hat and left. But he was a law enforcer — that is, someone through whose dark ministrations innocent people are transformed into "criminals" — and so he insisted on detaining and interrogating the entirely harmless youngster. To that end he sent for "backup," and a thugscrum soon coalesced around the puzzled and terrified teen.

As the Court of Appeals summarizes, R.R. was "tasered several times, removed from the backseat [of a police vehicle], thrown to the ground, tasered again, kicked, handcuffed, and arrested." All of this was done because the young man "moved around and wrestled around while the officers held him on the ground, making it difficult for the officers to put the cuffs on him."

Because he didn't permit himself to be shackled like a slave in front of his own home because he had been seen speaking to his mother, the teenager committed the supposed crime of "refusing to submit to arrest."

The trial court in the case also acknowledged that the victim was "a fine young man, an excellent student, and active in sports, clubs and church activities." The judge reportedly expressed dismay that "an innocent situation … just completely got out of hand" — which is, once again, the familiar and entirely predictable outcome when members of the State's enforcement caste materialize. Despite these superficial expressions of regret, the Judge sentenced the victim to serve one day in detention — thereby leaving him with a criminal record because he had been on the receiving end of a state-aggravated assault.

Like most communities in its section of the country, Pope County, Arkansas, where that incident occurred, is thickly populated with Evangelical Christians, whose numbers probably include most elected officials, prosecutors, judges, and police officers. At some point in Sunday School they probably read the 22nd chapter of the Book of Acts, which describes how the Apostle Paul, accused of disturbing the peace, was arrested by Roman occupation soldiers and taken to a local barracks to be questioned under scourging.

As the interrogator was preparing to whip the apostle, Paul pointed out to the centurion in charge that it was illegal to flog a Roman citizen unless he had been tried and convicted of a crime. This objection caused the interrogator to desist immediately, and prompted the officer in command to express the fear that he could face criminal charges because he had chained — that is, handcuffed — a Roman citizen.

Every day in this supposedly free country, police commit an act that was impermissible for their antecedents in imperial Rome: In the name of "officer safety," they handcuff American citizens who are not criminal suspects while conducting investigations. Police also routinely inflict summary punishment — using batons, Tasers, pepper spray, or other means — against those who resist being detained without cause. Within a few years police will have at their disposal handcuffs that can impart electrical shocks to detainees.

In an 1894 essay published by The Strand Magazine, Inspector Maurice Moser of Scotland Yard wrote that the earliest historical mention of handcuffs was in the fourth century B.C., "when soldiers of a conquering Greek army found among the baggage of the routed Carthaginians several chariots full of handcuffs, which had been held ready in confident anticipation of a multitude of prisoners."

"My personal experience of handcuffs is small, because I dislike them," wrote Inspector Moser of the restraints. He pointed out that in Belgium, which at the time was the seat of a substantial empire, "the use of handcuffs by police is entirely forbidden."

Like most police officers of his era, Moser was a relatively civilized man who found the act of shackling another human being to be barbarous and punitive. Handcuffing a human being certainly doesn't enhance the safety of the person being restrained. Nor does it relieve police anxieties about the all-encompassing threat to that most sacred of considerations, "officer safety." Witness the large and ever-growing number of cases in which officers — almost always in the plural, of course — beat, taze, pepper-spray, and even shoot suspects who have already been handcuffed.

Last summer, police in Aurora, Colorado indiscriminately handcuffed and detained scores of people for the space of more than four hours following an armed robbery at a branch of Wells Fargo bank.

According to Officer Frank Fania, drivers and passengers in the vicinity "were handcuffed, then were told what was going on and were asked for permission to search the car. They all granted permission, and once nothing was found in their cars, they were un-handcuffed."

Once the victims were handcuffed, of course, they had no choice but to grant "permission" for their abductors to paw through their vehicles. What if they had withheld consent? What if they had refused to endure the indignity and injury of being handcuffed in the first place?

Fania insisted that the mass arrests were necessary and justified because it was a "unique" situation. But it's more honestly described as mass application of the standard approach to "protective" detention of individuals who are not criminal suspects.

Owing to the semantic deviousness of police and prosecutors, citizens are increasingly unsure of their status when they are accosted by police: Are they under arrest, or subject to "investigatory detention"?  If the citizen isn't formally under arrest, is he free to leave? Can police draw their guns and threaten a citizen with lethal force if he is not formally under arrest?

That last question has been addressed in a recent ruling by Louisiana's Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal, which held that those circumstances do not constitute a formal arrest — at least when the legitimacy of that arrest is questioned by the defendant.

On June 8, 2010, Robert Carter of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana parked outside a convenience store. Acting on a tip from a snitch that Carter would soon arrive at the location to conduct a drug deal, two undercover detectives had kept the lot under surveillance. After Carter parked his car, the detectives used their unmarked vehicles to cut off his escape and approached him with guns drawn.

In a panic, Carter threw his car into reverse, severely damaging the unmarked car behind him.

During his bench trial, Carter claimed that the arrival of two armed men — one of whom admitted in testimony that they didn't clearly identify themselves as police — made him fear for his life. After being convicted of felony malicious property damage, Carter — a second offender — was sentenced to 20 years in prison. On appeal, Carter insisted that the arrest was unlawful.

In a remarkable achievement in judicial sophistry, the appeals court ruled that what it called an "investigative detention" is not an arrest — while insisting that Carter had no right to leave what the trial judge called "the arrested place [where] he's supposed to remain." In practical terms this means that cops are permitted to detain any citizen at gunpoint without such an action qualifying as an "arrest" — and therefore being subject to the restrictions supposedly guaranteed by the Fourth and Fifth amendments. Once the individual is detained, he can be shackled at the discretion of the officer — and then beaten, jailed, and prosecuted if he objects.

The act of handcuffing another human being is a serious injury. When not done to restrain someone who has actually harmed another human being, handcuffing is a morally impermissible form of aggressive violence. It is meant to be a tangible demonstration of superiority that requires the victim to submit to the supposed authority of the aggressor. It is designed and intended to humiliate the victim. This is why it is done even to six-year-old inmates of government schools who are dragged away by police officers, nonagenarians who are abducted at gunpoint for neglecting to pay traffic tickets, or pregnant female inmates who are chained while giving birth.

This is also why police who are charged with crimes are often spared being handcuffed out of "professional courtesy" — which in some cases has actually imperiled the arresting officer.

In the American Soyuz, any of us, at the whim of an armed stranger in a government-issued costume, can find himself being treated in the same way that the Carthaginians treated captured prisoners of war. At least Carthaginian soldiers didn't insult the intelligence of their victims by insisting that they were being shackled for their own "protection."

William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.

The Best of William Norman Grigg

Recently by William Norman Grigg: ‘No More Hesitation’

Police Chief Ed Flynn of Milwaukee believes that his department is at war with the gun-owning public. In his February 27 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Flynn claimed that "in the last 20 years we've been in an arms race" with private citizens who supposedly out-gun the police.

Flynn testified in support of a proposed federal ban on so-called assault weapons. But in the past he has made it clear that he considers a Mundane carrying a firearm of any kind is an unlawful enemy combatant subject to detention and forcible disarmament.

"My message to my troops is if you see anybody carrying a gun on the streets of Milwaukee, we'll put them on the ground, take the gun away, and then decide whether you have a right to carry it," Flynn said a few years ago in response to a statement from Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen recognizing that residents of the state have a right to carry firearms openly.

Flynn clearly sees himself as commanding an army of occupation. In practical terms, he is less a warlord than a crime lord who presides over an officially sanctioned street gang.

Milwaukee resident Brad Krause was one of the armed citizens targeted by Flynn's criminal syndicate. Mr. Krause was arrested and had his gun confiscated in August 2008 after a neighbor called to complain that Krause was carrying it while doing work in his own yard. To provide official cover for their crimes, Flynn's "troops" filed a bogus charge of disorderly conduct. Krause was eventually acquitted, but his gun was never returned.

Like most petty dictators of his ilk, Flynn is protected by a praetorian guard that will retaliate against people who speak ill of their dear leader. In November 2009, his "troops" arrested a local gadfly named Bob Braun, who had committed the unpardonable sin of publicly embarrassing Commissar Flynn.

Braun and a friend picketed Milwaukee Police headquarters carrying signs describing Chief Flynn, who admitted to an extra-marital affair with a sycophantic reporter, as an adulterer. Citing the relevant section of Wisconsin law, Braun demanded that Flynn be prosecuted — a sentiment shared by many Milwaukee residents. Instead, Braun was arrested by Sgt. Mark Wagner and charged with disorderly conduct. The citation falsely claimed that Braun, a devout Christian, repeatedly told Sgt. Wagner to perform an anatomically impossible sexual act.

When the case was heard before a jury, the only witnesses the prosecution could produce were Wagner and two fellow police officers — whose travel and subpoena fees were paid by Braun. The jury quite sensibly concluded that the officers — who are, let us not forget, trained liars — were perjuring themselves in the service of the adulterer who commands them.

Given the abysmal character of the chief who commands the Milwaukee PD, it shouldn't surprise us to learn that the department has been a haven for uniformed sexual predators.

In July 2010, a single mother in Milwaukee (whose name has not been publicly disclosed) was raped by Officer Ladmarald Cates. After someone vandalized the woman's home, she made the common mistake of calling the police in the entirely unfounded belief that they would be of help. Cates was the first on the scene.

Acting on instinct and experience, the predator recognized an exploitable opportunity. The officer ordered the boyfriend to go to a nearby convenience store to buy some bottled water. Once he had isolated the victim, Cates maneuvered her into the bathroom, where he put her "on the ground" by forcibly sodomizing and raping her.

Immediately after the assault, the woman — barefoot and wearing tattered clothing — ran screaming from the house. Cates stormed out of the building and grabbed the victim by the waist, causing her feet to strike his partner. This gave the officers an excuse to arrest the battered and traumatized woman for "assaulting an officer."

The victim was taken to jail and held for 12 hours before receiving medical aid. After the hospital visit, she was sent back to jail for four days before being released without charges.

This was not Cates’s first assault — but the department wasn’t willing to take disciplinary action of any kind until DNA evidence corroborated the rape victim’s account. Instead of prosecuting Cates, Flynn fired him for “idling or loafing on duty." In January 2012, Cates was convicted of federal civil rights charges and sentenced to 24 years in prison.

Flynn would insist that Cates isn't representative of his officers. This is true, but not in the sense Flynn would have us believe. What makes Cates an anomaly is not the fact that he was a purulent thug, but rather that he was actually punished for his crimes: The Milwaukee Police Department holds down the number two spot in the national police brutality rankings. Its distinguished contributions in the field of state-sponsored crime include a lengthy and growing list of suspicious deaths of people in police custody.

Cates was not the only uniformed sexual predator in Milwaukee who earned headlines in 2012.

Last September, four of Flynn's "troops" who had followed his orders with exceptional zeal were charged with felonies for assaulting and strip-searching citizens both in the street and in district stations. In one case, three officers restrained a victim — one of them putting him into a choke hold, while another held a gun to his head — while a third jammed a hand into his rectum.

The ringleader of this rape gang, Officer Michael Vagnini, was charged with 25 counts of sexual assault and related crimes.

In a press conference after charges were filed, Flynn professed to be "disgusted" by the conduct of his minions.

"Crime cannot be fought with criminality," warbled the costumed functionary who had publicly abetted criminal violence against innocent citizens — and who has actually protected an undisguised street gang within his department.

This hyper-violent clique adopted the logo of a nihilistic comic book character called the "Punisher," and they brazenly displayed the insignia on their police vehicles and their uniforms as they prowled the street in search of helpless people whom they could "put on the ground." Among the formidable figures targeted by the Punishers was a male dancer named Frank Jude, who was nearly beaten to death in October 2004 because he was suspected of stealing a badge.

After putting the terrified male dancer "on the ground," the Punishers severely beat, kicked, and choked him — then put a knife to his throat and jammed a pen into one of his ears. The victim survived the assault, but was left with permanent brain damage. The officers later claimed that this amount of violence was necessary to "subdue" Jude — who was never charged in connection with the incident. The jury in the criminal trial accepted that claim and acquitted the officers — who were later found guilty of criminal civil rights violations.

Former Milwaukee Police Officer Jon Bartlett, the ringleader of the gang beating, was eventually convicted — along with six others — on federal civil rights charges. An internal affairs investigation conducted by MPD Commander James A Galezewski produced a detailed description of the Punishers in official reports filed on two separate investigations — one in 2005, the other in 2007. He also described his findings at length in a sworn deposition in November 2010.

One training supervisor and at least one active-duty police officer were identified as current members of the gang. Nonetheless, as late as January 2011, Flynn insisted that the existence of the gang was merely a matter of “rumor." A reasonable surmise would be that Flynn wasn't engaging in conscious deception; after all, the moral gradient leading from his normal "troops" to the berserkers who belong to the "Punishers" gang isn't very steep.

Every city police department is an armed gang organized to implement the will of the municipal corporation that employs them. Under the rule of Ed Flynn the Milwaukee PD has become one of the most malodorous outfits of its kind in the Midwestern United States. He and his "troops" appear to be determined to validate every syllable of Albert Jay Nock's famous capsule description of the State:

“Everyone knows that the State claims and exercises [a] monopoly of crime … and that it makes this monopoly as strict as it can…. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien…. Of all the crimes that are committed for gain or revenge, there is not one that we have not seen it commit — murder, mayhem, arson, robbery, fraud, criminal collusion and connivance.”

If Ed Flynn presided over a police agency in Latin America or Africa, his deeds would be chronicled in the annual human rights reports issued by the State Department, which diligently catalogs the offenses of every regime but the one ruling us.

Flynn's misbegotten reign in Milwaukee reminds me of a comment made by Isaac Lappia of Amnesty International in Sierra Leone at the 2001 UN Small Arms Conference at the world body's headquarters.

The UN's proposed international firearms treaty — which, in updated form, will likely be signed later this year by Barack Obama — was intended to disarm civilians. However, as Lappia pointed out, his organization's studies proved "incontrovertibly that small arms are … used in many more countries to facilitate serious crimes by law enforcement personnel — including police, prison authorities, paramilitaries, and the army — where they commit persistent human rights violations, including rape, torture, `disappearances,' and arbitrary killings."

This reads like a profile of the department Ed Flynn commands — and it's on the basis of a record of this kind that Flynn was invited to testify on behalf of the Obama regime's citizen disarmament initiatives. Res ipsa loquitur.

William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.

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Recently by William Norman Grigg: Idaho, Arizona Schools Go Into Full PrisonMode

You know the score… You're not a cop, you're little people!

LAPD Captain Harry Bryant to retired "Blade Runner" Rick Deckard, who was reluctant to resume his career as a state-licensed killer.

    No more hesitation – Little boy with real gun    

Barack Obama's advertised purpose in visiting Minneapolis on February 4 was to combat the scourge of gun violence. The substantive purpose of his visit was to promote a state monopoly on gun violence, exercised by people who are trained and authorized to kill pregnant women, children, and the elderly.

It would take about fifteen minutes — assuming that the traffic is favorable — to drive from the Special Operations Center in downtown Minneapolis, the site of Obama's photo op with hundreds of area police, to the home office of Law Enforcement Targets, Inc., in nearby Blaine. The company, a contractor for the Department of Homeland Security, produces training targets that are "designed to give officers the experience of dealing with deadly force shooting scenarios with subjects that are not the norm during training," according to its promotional literature.

Among the training targets are images depicting "non-traditional threats," such as pregnant women, children, and grandmotherly women — in other words, "Little People" — carrying guns.

The company's marketing team explains that the "non-traditional targets " were created at the request of police officers and trainers, who are seeking to dis-inhibit the killing instincts of police "when deadly force is required on subjects with atypical age, frailty or condition…. This hesitation time may be only seconds but that is not acceptable when officers are losing their lives in these same situations…. If that hesitation time can be cut down due to range experience, the officer and the community are better served."

That is to say, it can condition them to overcome the natural and indispensable reluctance to kill the innocent and helpless. This is summarized in the company's sales slogan: "No more hesitation."

A few years ago, the media experienced a brief but acute spasm of indignation over the fact that pictures of Obama were being used as targets at arcade games. This was done to capitalize on a commendable impulse — unfettered contempt for a corrupt official who kills and impoverishes others under the color of "authority" — that had curdled into simple rancor. The paying customers at that shooting gallery, however, had not been indoctrinated in the belief that they had social license to engage in discretionary killing, nor were they being conditioned to kill others without hesitation.

According to Law Enforcement Targets, Inc., its training materials are used by several federal agencies, every branch of the military, and "thousands of law enforcement agencies at the municipal, county, and state levels." Its materials were almost certainly used to train some of the officers assembled at the Special Operations Center for Obama's February 4 photo-op. It's likely that company officials had been invited, as well.

That fact didn't perturb the Secret Service as it made security arrangements for the photo-op. However, the presidential security detail should have taken alarm over the fact that the assembly included the hyper-violent men who shot and killed Obama — not the politician, the six-month-old Pitbull puppy — three years ago.

On July 9, 2009, a ten-officer Minneapolis SWAT team attacked the home of Darrell and Cymonne Williams. The no-knock raid — which violated the terms of the search warrant — was staged to arrest Cymonne's adult son, Tierre Caldwell, who was a suspect in a shooting. At the time of the raid the police knew that Caldwell lived at a different address.

With weapons drawn and wearing standard Stormtrooper attire, the police broke down the front door and barged into the home. Reacting to the commotion, Obama (the puppy) barged downstairs with Cymonne following behind him. Before she could clearly see the intruders, they had already shot and killed the dog. She retreated back up the stairs in terror, passing her alarmed husband, who had settled down for an afternoon nap after finishing work. Darrell was clad only in his underwear when he confronted the invaders.

"What the hell are you doing in my house?" he demanded. One of the officers yelled at him to get down. With his hands raised, Darrell reiterated his question. By way of reply, Sgt. Mark Sletta committed an act of aggravated assault by hitting Darrel in the face with the butt of his assault rifle. As the victim hit the floor, Officer Mark Durand kicked him repeatedly in the torso while two others zip-cuffed him. Two other officers pitched in by stomping on the prone and helpless man. The intruders briefly searched the home and, failing to find the subject of the arrest warrant, left with neither an explanation nor an apology.

Darrell Williams was taken to the hospital to be treated for severe trauma to his right eye, bruised ribs, and other injuries. The criminal violence inflicted on him by the armed tax-feeders who invaded his home caused Darrell to miss eight days of productive work.

After the Williams family filed a lawsuit against the department, the perpetrators invoked the familiar claim of "qualified immunity." The US District Court for Minnesota, examining the incident with solicitous care for the privileges of the state's punitive priesthood, ruled that the sacred imperative of "officer safety" justified the killing of Obama (the dog), the use of a rifle to attack Darrell Williams, and the act of stomping on his head once he was prone, handcuffed, and bleeding.

For reasons not clear to the rational mind, the same court that approved of those acts of violence and property destruction said that Officer Durand's act of kicking Williams in the ribs was not covered by "qualified immunity." It's possible that this was done to provide the family with a single actionale claim. This, in turn, gave the city an opportunity to negotiate a paltry civil settlement in order to make the case go away. The Williams family eventually received $75,000 from the City of Minneapolis.

Minneapolis taxpayers were forced to underwrite a much bigger settlement with Rickia Russell, a young woman who suffered third- and fourth-degree burns to her legs during a SWAT raid on her boyfriend's apartment.

On February 16, 2010, Russell and her boyfriend were eating a late dinner when a SWAT team broke down the door to the apartment. One of the raiders looked into Russell's eyes before throwing a flash-bang grenade directly at her.

"Get on the ground!" grunted one of the stormtroopers as more than a dozen others swarmed into the room. While she was being zip-cuffed, Williams complained that her legs were "on fire." Her legs were covered with shrapnel from the flash-bang grenade, which burns at a temperature of 3,800-4,200 degrees. The skin on both of her calves had been eaten away.

The raid was staged in pursuit of a drug dealer who didn't live at the address, and who wasn't known by either Williams or her boyfriend. The city paid off the victim with a huge subsidized settlement, but the criminals who left her mangled were never punished.

Rickia underwent long and painful skin-graft treatments in which flesh was removed from her scalp in order to reconstruct her legs. She is still undergoing therapy to recover from her injuries.

In December 2011, the City Council shelled out $1 million in plundered wealth to settle Russell's lawsuit — and most of that sum will probably be devoured by medical expenses. One of her assailants, former Minneapolis Police Sgt. David Clifford — has subsequently been charged with first-degree assault for an unprovoked attack on a 40-year-old man named Brian Vander Lee at a bar last June.

Vander Lee, a father of four who is employed in the productive sector, was talking on a cell phone when Clifford accosted him and then hit him with a punch to the head that knocked him to the ground. As a result of falling head-first onto a concrete surface, the victim suffered head trauma so intense that it required two brain surgeries and 40 hours on life support.

The bold and valiant SWAT operator who sucker-punched the unarmed and puzzled victim, and then ran away, insisted that he acted in "self-defense" — but don't they always? He remains on paid administrative leave pending his trial in April.

KMSP-TV

In 2011, Minneapolis tax victims underwrote $4.7 million in legal settlements to "Little People" who suffered criminal violence at the hands of the municipality's punitive caste — and to the survivors of people who were killed by them. City Attorney Susan Segal breezily dismisses that figure, and the carnage that produced it, as the kind of overhead that comes from doing a brisk business in official coercion.

"Minneapolis Police have more than a million contacts with people every year, and our officers are constantly in harm's way," Segal sniffed. She apparently believes that the danger comes from the police coming into contact with the public they supposedly serve, when clearly the police themselves are the most prolific practitioners of violence.

In 2007, a $4.5 million settlement was paid to a single victim — the late Duy Ngo. Mr. Ngo was a Vietnamese refugee who enlisted in the Army the summer of his senior year in High School and became a police officer a few years later. In 2003, while working undercover with the Metro Gang Strike Force, Ngo was shot by a fellow officer.

Ngo, who was sitting in an unmarked police vehicle in an area frequently by drug dealers, was shot by a would-be carjacker. His bullet-resistant vest saved Ngo's life during the initial shooting. After calling for assistance, Ngo pursued the attacker, but lost him within a few blocks. Seeking to catch his breath, and dealing with abdominal pain from the point-blank shots fired into his vest, Ngo slumped to his knees at an intersection, then waved his hands feebly when a police car pulled up. A few seconds later, Officer Charles Storlie emerged from the car and immediately opened up on Ngo with his MP5 semi-automatic machine gun. Ngo survived the second shooting, but was left permanently disabled.

More painful than his physical injuries was the sense of disillusionment that descended on Ngo as he found himself being treated as one of the "Little People."

The department he had served ventilated rumors that Ngo, an Army reservist, had staged the initial shooting in an attempt to avoid deployment to Iraq. When Storlie visited Ngo in the hospital, the shooter informed the victim that although he regretted Ngo's condition, he believed that he had done the right thing in the circumstances by shooting him — and that he would do exactly the same thing in the future in similar situations.

Ladies and gentlemen: Behold a police officer who meets Law Enforcement Training, Inc.'s "No Hesitation" standard.

Ngo eventually underwent twenty-six surgeries. The department, employing every dilatory tactic it had perfected in dealing with excessive force complaints filed by Mundanes, dragged out the official inquiry through four years and the administrations of three police chiefs. In 2007, the city approved a $4.7 million civil settlement to Ngo.

"The settlement was a staggering amount of money," observed Mayor R.T. Rybak. "But it's staggering how much officers put their lives on the line."

Rybak deployed the appropriate cliché without considering the context: Ngo, once again, was shot to pieces by another police officer — that is, someone who represents the most dangerous element in the city.

Ngo's vest saved him from the first shooting. In the second shooting, his body was mangled but his life was spared because of the characteristically poor marksmanship of a police officer. But the wounds — and the concentrated viciousness of the bureaucracy that employed him — did eventually prove fatal: He committed suicide in June 2010.

By that time, Ngo — who remained on the force — was confined to clerical duties. That means that he was a Cop In Name Only, a status just above that of the Little People. And in the eyes of the Exalted Purveyors of Officially Sanctioned Violence, such creatures are useful for little more than target practice.

William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.

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Recently by William Norman Grigg: Officer Safety Uber Alles: Christopher Dorner and the ‘RickoverianParadox’

Schools in Meridian, Idaho went into full “prison mode” after a student who brought a folding shovel to Heritage Middle School in Meridian, Idaho prompted the school’s “resource officer” to call for a full lockdown.

Deputy Chief Tracy Basterrechea told KTVB news that the youngster had been seen “jogging out of the school, then back into the school with what [staff members thought] was an axe.” After the “resource officer” called for a lockdown, police arrived “seconds” later, set up a perimeter, and deployed “search teams” to confront the “suspect” – an innocent teen who had brought the shovel to serve as a prop in a classroom presentation. Meanwhile, students at four nearby schools were put into “shelter in place” mode – that is, they were confined to their classrooms until police at Heritage Middle School gave the all-clear.

All of this occurred, once again, because a junior high school student brought a shovel to school, and none of the purported adults on campus was blessed with the presence of mind to approach the kid and find out what he was doing. Interestingly, the state stenographers in the local media referred to the farm implement as a “military-style shovel,” a cosmetic designation that might someday be seized on by Commissarina Feinstein when she and her comrades seek to deprive the public of any implement that could possibly be used against their tax-feeding overlords.

The militarization of government schools has reached a point at which a tangible “threat” like a shovel is no longer necessary. On February 5, three schools in Yuma, Arizona were placed on lockdown as the result of what was later described as a “rumor” of a gun on campus. Officers from two local law enforcement departments and two federal agencies – many of them kitted out in full combat attire – were mobilized for the operation. Following an evacuation each of the school campuses was subjected to a systematic search. The students were held in custody for more than three hours before being released.

As such examples of reflexive overkill multiply, we will have frequent opportunities to recall the admonition given to the School Resource Officer Corps by soi-disant “tactical and counter-terrorism expert” John Giduck at a 2007 professional retreat at Orlando’s Disney World:

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

Apparently Giduck wants SROs to see themselves as the domestic equivalent of U.S. soldiers patrolling Fallujah – and this is likely to get innocent kids killed.

In Iraq, US occupation forces were taught to consider shovels as evidence of potential hostile intent: They could be used to bury IEDs, or even employed as close-combat weapons. They could also be used to cover up incidents in which U.S. troops shot and killed unarmed Iraqi civilians. Jason Moon, who served with the U.S. Army in Iraq, recalls that troops were instructed to carry “drop shovels” that could be placed near the bodies of non-combatants they had killed. This was done so that the dead civilian could “retroactively” be classified as a suspected insurgent.

Given the mindset propagated by Giduck and his ilk, it’s possible that next time a junior high school student brings a shovel to school he could find himself injured or killed by the “resource officers” deployed on campus for the supposed purpose of protecting him.

Thanks to LRC reader Edward Dindinger for the tip.

William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.

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The intrepid Captain Phillip Tingirides of the Los Angeles Police Department has come down with a sudden case of “Blue Flu.” This is an oddly selective malady, one that only afflicts police officers. “Sick-outs” are a common police union tactic in contract disputes with municipal governments. In this case, the epidemic appears to be contained in the Tigirides household, where the bold and valiant captain is cowering in fear of his former comrade, Christopher Dorner.

“This month, it will be 33 years on the Los Angeles Police Department,” Tingirides told theOrange County Register. “I have had a number of threats and very rarely do I take them seriously. In this case… I’m taking it very seriously…. I recognize I am susceptible to his violence.”

Little in Tingirides’s official bio would suggest that danger has been his constant companion. Early in his career he patrolled such grim and forbidding territories as Wilshire and Hollywood before being promoted to such assignments as Prostitution Enforcement Detail, Community Relations, and the Vice Unit.

His career has been devoid of measurable peril, even by the standards of law enforcement – which is one of the least risk-laden occupations in contemporary life. This helps explain why Tingirides has been hiding out in his home, surrounded by a phalanx of timid and trigger-happy police bodyguards who are entirely willing to open fire on innocent people if they come within eyeshot.

“I haven’t been able for the last few days to go outside my house,” whined Tingirides to the Register. “Am I afraid? Well, I hesitate to use that word – but I saw what he did to his attorney.” The attorney to whom he referred was Randy Quan, who represented Dorner during the 2008 disciplinary hearings that resulted in Dorner’s dismissal from the LAPD for supposedly lying about abusive conduct by another officer. Lying about a Mundane is part of a police officer’s job description; lying about a fellow officer is simply impermissible.

Dorner is believed to be the assailant who shot Quan’s 28-year-old daughter, Monica. That young woman was apparently killed for the same reason the Obama Regime murdered 16-year-old Abdel al-Awalki: Someone habituated to criminal violence decided that the child was guilty of having an irresponsible parent.

Tingirides was chairman of the three-officer “board of rights” that upheld the decision to terminate Dorner’s employment, and the stalwart captain was mentioned by name in the vengeful ex-cop’s online “manifesto.”

Back in August 2011, Captain Tingirides was interviewed on the beach near Torrance to promote a youth “Surf Camp” program. Despite the fact that he had grown up within easy distance of the shore, that interview represented the first time he had ever attempted to surf.

The time devoted by Captain Tingirides to producing that PR spot for the LAPD constituted the most danger-intensive hour of his career. Surfing is a far riskier activity than working as a law enforcement officer. The risks are particularly acute for surfers who have the misfortune of encountering police, as David Perdue can testify.

Last Thursday, as the LAPD’s institutional panic escalated, Perdue visited a beach near the site of Tingirides’s 2011 press stunt to enjoy some early morning surfing. He happened to be driving a pickup truck that resembled the vehicle being driven by Dorner. Two officers flagged Perdue down, determined that he wasn’t the suspect, and then let him go. Scant seconds later, two other officers rammed their vehicle into Perdue’s truck and opened fire.

It was Perdue’s immense good fortune that the assailants were police officers – which means that their marksmanship was poor enough to make the typical Imperial Stormtrooper from Star Wars look like William Tell. Although he wasn’t shot, Perdue suffered a concussion and a shoulder injury.

Robert Sheahen, Perdue’s attorney, described the episode as one of “unbridled police lawlessness.” The Department offered Perdue the same perfunctory apology it had issued to two women who were shot at by another security detail guarding the home of another LAPD luminary. The LAPD has thus established itself as a greater threat to public safety than the “rogue” cop they are pursuing: While Dorner’s alleged crime spree targeted a narrow cohort – police officials and their families – the police have engaged in indiscriminate violence against innocent citizens.

The manhunt for Dorner has involved the deployment of thousands of police personnel and the use of unmanned aerial drones. It will cost tax victims in Los Angeles and elsewhere millions of dollars in overtime. This means that the police involved in the pursuit – who are already trained to be risk-aversive – will have a financial incentive to prolong the exercise as long as possible. So it shouldn’t surprise us that the police, who are preoccupied with the sacred imperative of “officer safety,” have turned to the public for help in solving the crime.

LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has offered a $1 million reward – provided by private interests; all the available public money will probably be devoured by police overtime – for information leading to the arrest and capture of Dorner.

“We will not tolerate anyone undermining the security of this community,” mewled Villaraigosa. “We will not tolerate this reign of terror.” LAPD Chief Charlie Beck also characterized Dorner’s shooting rampage, as “domestic terrorism.”

Who, exactly, is being “terrorized”? The productive public at large has been going about its business without facing any discernible risks from Dorner, whose only identified would-be victims are either police officers or their families (who have done nothing to injure anybody, of course).

The only way that private citizens could collect the reward for Dorner’s capture would be for them to take risks that police aren’t willing to run. For example: A citizen or privately employed security guard wouldn’t be able to ram an unidentified truck and open fire on its driver, or spray gunfire in a residential neighborhood, without facing criminal charges.

In the official reaction to Dorner’s rampage, we see an unusually candid manifestation of the “Officer Safety Uber Alles”mentality that defines police work. From their perspective, the population exists to protect and serve the police, rather than the reverse. This brings to mind the concept of Rickover’s Paradox, which I encountered in a science fiction novel decades ago. According to author Vonda McIntyre, was used to test the moral attitudes of officer candidates at the U.S. Naval Academy.

The most famous version of this conundrum is the following:

Two individuals, the only survivors of a tragic shipwreck, are adrift in a small, damaged lifeboat. The water is pitilessly cold and infested with ravenous sharks. The boat itself is irreparably damaged in such a way that it will only be able to carry one of its occupants. If nothing is done, both occupants will perish. But whichever is cast into the sea will die very quickly.

One of those aboard the stricken lifeboat is a highly trained officer with valuable – perhaps irreplaceable – technical skills. A huge sum has been spent on his training, which makes him all but irreplaceable.

The other refugee is an innocent and law-abiding person of no particular achievements or aptitudes. Few if any would notice that person’s absence, and the community at large would be impoverished in no discernible way if he were thrown overboard.

Since only one can be saved, which of the two should it be?

The only morally sound answer to this predicament – assuming that the military is actually the institution it pretends to be – would be for the officer to sacrifice himself on behalf of the civilian. This isn’t because there is a natural duty on the part of any individual to sacrifice himself for another, but rather because the officer had freely chosen that duty, and refusing to carry it out would invalidate the entire stated purpose of having a military establishment in the first place. Any other course of action would be based on the assumption that the civilian population exists to defend the military, rather than the reverse.

Although this parable is supposed to instill an attitude of chivalry on the part of military officers, it actually underscores the uselessness of the state as a protective institution, because human beings are not wired to sacrifice themselves on behalf of strangers – and the state is structured in such a way that those who work on its behalf always place individual and institutional self-preservation above every other consideration.

This is why tax-subsidized cowards like Phillip Tingirides are cowering behind both their tax-funded bodyguards and the public the police supposedly serves, while someone who was once a part of the state’s punitive priesthood carries out a mission of revenge against his erstwhile comrades in officially sanctioned violence and plunder

If the police are reduced to puddles of panic at the thought of dealing with one of their own, why should the public trust them – or countenance their institutional existence at all?