Pro Libertate

The Shadow of Claude Dallas

2012-01-29T00:45:00.001-07:00

Senseless, lawless violence -- government reduced to its essence: BLM employee C.J. Ross commits a felonious assault on Nevada property rights activist Ken Greenwell, in Palomino Valley, Nevada, November 13, 2001. Greenwell had staged a peaceful protest of the BLM's theft of cattle belonging to rancher Ben Colvin. Ross, acting on behalf of the rustlers, took offense. Note the contrast between Ross's snarling, feral visage and the incredulous composure displayed by Greenwell, and ask yourself: Which of these two displays the civilized face of freedom?

When they arrived at the cattle camp in Nevada’s ParadiseValley, the three shabbily dressed men claimed that they were interested in ajob. Their timing was a bit odd; it was November, a little late in the year fora ranch to take on new hires. As it happens, the visitors weren’t looking forwork as buckaroos; they were looking for the wiry, brown-haired ranch hand namedClaude.

“You’re Dallas, aren’t you?” one of the strangers, a mannamed Frank Meale, asked the hand. When the young man replied that he was,Meale-- an undercover FBI agent -- and his two comrades -- FBI agent GeorgeSchwinn and Elko County Deputy Sheriff Noel McElhany – seized him, cuffed him,and stuffed him into the worn-out pickup truck that had brought them to thebunkhouse.

A few months earlier, Claude Dallas had been secretlyindicted by a federal grand jury, triggering a nation-wide manhunt by the FBIand the U.S. Marshals Service. Dallas, an Ohio native, had drifted west toNevada, where he found work as a cowboy. Polite, disciplined, and literate,Dallas distinguished himself by his appetite for honest work and his generaldisdain for the dissipations available in local saloons. He was alsodisinclined to talk about his background – a trait he shared with many otherswho chose this itinerant lifestyle.

“Claude is true Old West,” commented rodeo champion CortlandNielsen. “A lot of guys try it, but the first time they have to shave with coldwater they change their mind. Claude keeps going after it and after it. Heshould’ve been alive in the old days – a scout, the guy you send a day or twoahead to tell you how things are. He’d be perfect.” A photographer from National Geographic agreed with thatassessment, which is how Dallas ended up being featured in a story entitled “TheAmerican Cowboy in Life and Legend” – a clue not even the FBI could miss.

The officers who arrested Dallas said he was polite andfriendly. His captors didn’t reciprocate. Dallas was flown across the country,frog-marched through airports in handcuffs and a belly chain. On his arrival inMt. Gilead, Ohio, he was thrown into a drunk tank, where he was singled out forabuse by sheriff’s deputies.

Dallas was regarded as an exceptionally depraved offender: Hewas a “draft dodger,” having refused induction in 1968. This isn’t because hewas afraid to fight, or unable to – a fact well understood by the predatorybureaucrats who tracked him down.

“Most likely he’ll try to run, but he may try to shoot itout,” Meale told the other two members of his snatch team just before theabduction. “We’ll have to shut him right down.”

That “arrest” took place in November 1973 – nearly a yearafter the Vietnam War officially ended. The indictment against Dallas had beenissued the previous July – a month after the draft was discontinued. Yet theFeds insisted on stalking Dallas, humiliating him, abusing him, and trying toput him in a cage. After the case against him was dismissed because ofprocedural mistakes by the Mt. Gilead Draft Board, one of his kidnapperspromised that the persecution wouldn’t end.

“I’m gonna get you, Dallas – even if it’s just for taxevasion,” the FBI agent hissed in his ear as the cowboy was released.

When Dallas returned to Paradise Valley, his fellow ranchhands noticed an ominous change in his disposition.

“They wouldn’t have took me like this if they hadn’t got thedrop on me,” he fumed to friends in the bunkhouse. Dallas “was publicly heard toswear that no one would ever outdraw him again – no one,” recounted Jack Olsen in his book Give a Boy a Gun. “One of his closest friends asked how he feltabout the draft and the Vietnam War. He said that he would fight for hiscountry if he were asked in a nice way, but `nobody’s gonna order me around.'”

Roughly seven years later, two Idaho fish andgame wardens – Bill Pogue, a former Winnemucca, Nevada police chief, and ConleyElms – tracked down Dallas’s campsite about three miles on the Idaho side ofthe Nevada border in Owyhee County. Dallas, who had spent several years workingintermittently as a ranch hand and trapper, had developed a reputation amongfish and game officials – and Pogue most likely considered himself just the manto rein in the “renegade.”

Pogue, like other self-important martinets who seethemselves as indispensable cogs in the “mighty machine of the State,” was anauthoritarian prig who expected deference from Mundanes. Dallas, according to JimStevens, an eyewitness to the January 5, 1981 confrontation, wasn’t undulyimpressed by the uniformed bureaucrat. Dallas, Stevens later recalled, possessed“eyes that showed no fright.” This obviously wouldn’t turn out well for someone.

Ever since he had arrived in the West, Dallas had frequentlydisplayed an insouciant disregard for poaching laws. He had a handful of bobcathides in his camp. Although Dallas had a valid Idaho trapper’s license, bobcatseason wouldn’t open until January 9 – four days later. Pogue told Dallas thathe was going to be cited for possessing illegal hides and venison taken out ofseason. Then, according to Stevens, Pogue said he would have to arrest Dallas.

Those words would prove to be a death warrant.

“Areyou going to take me in?” Dallas asked Pogue. At the time, Dallas and the twogame wardens stood at points of a triangle roughly five to six feet apart. Atsome point, Pogue made a threatening gesture to his pistol. Stevens, who wasbusy elsewhere in the camp, didn’t see what happened next – but he heard theunmistakable report of a handgun, and whirled around to see Dallas in a shooter’scrouch, and a bloodstain spreading across Pogue’s chest. A fraction of a secondlater, Dallas shot Elms as well.

The wardens almost certainly died instantly. Nevertheless,Dallas delivered a coup de grace to each of them with a .22 rifle.

“Why, Claude? Why?” exclaimed Stevens in horror.

“I swore I’d never be arrested again,” replied Dallas. “Theywere going to handcuff me.”

Stevens would later testify that the wardens did notthreaten Dallas’s life “in any way.” This isn’t true: Every demand made by agovernment official contains the implicit threat of lethal violence against thosewho refuse to comply. This was particularly true of the armed strangers whothreatened to kidnapDallas at gunpoint – something not mandated by what they called the law, butmade necessary by Bill Pogue’s punitive nature.

“Nobody has the right to come into my camp and violate myrights,” Dallas insisted as Stevens absorbed the bloody aftermath of theencounter. “In my mind it’s justifiable homicide.”

Many people in Idaho and throughout the Intermountain Westagreed with that evaluation during the lengthy manhunt and high-profile trialthat followed the killings. The arrest was illegitimate, which meant thatDallas – under the Bad Elk precedent– had the right to use lethal force in self-defense. He didn’t ambush thewardens; he was outnumbered by armed, truculent men, and outdrew them.

It is true that Dallas had been poaching hides and game.Consider this: Seven years earlier, the Feds had seized him out of season, asit were, by arresting him after Congress had rescinded the hunting license ithad granted the draft-nappers. There’s no moral case to be made for theproposition that poaching game is a crime, but poaching human beings is soundand defensible public policy.

Claude Dallas was not a saint, but he only became a killerwhen he was cornered by gun-wielding government employees who most likely wouldhave found some way to validate the FBI agent’s threat: The FederalGovernment would find some way to “get him,” no matter how trivial theviolation.

The lethal encounter between Dallas and the Idaho gamewardens “fundamentally changed the relationship between the West and thosecharged with preserving its resources,” opinedthe Twin Falls Times-News in aneditorial clotted with collectivist assumptions (derived from the notion that theearth is the State’s and the fullness thereof). “Before Jan. 5, 1981, we hadwilderness rangers; ever since we’ve had wilderness policemen. The conservationofficer who checks your fishing license nowadays is more likely than not to bearmed.”

Of course, this isn’t a novelty, given that the wardens whothreatened to kidnap Dallas were carrying weapons and prepared to use them. Themost important difference is that most wilderness “policemen” have adopted theswaggering, imperious disposition of William Pogue.

Consider the case of Chico, California resident Jeff Newman, 53, a life-long avid skier who operatesa painting business. As a sideline, Newman "tunes" skis and teaches others how to performthis kind of maintenance.

Withthe exception of a decade he spent in the employment of the Forest Service(more appropriately called the Sylvan Socialist agency, or SS), Newman has madean honest living. In early 2010, Newman and some friends he had met in theemploy of the SS visited Colby Meadows in the Lassen National Forest, oneof their favorite skiing destinations.

Yearsearlier, Newman and his friends built a bulletin board -- with the permissionof the SS -- on which could be posted maps and emergency information. Duringtheir recent visit, one of Newman's friends, Larry Chrisman, posted anadvertisement for Newman's ski tuning service on the otherwise vacant bulletinboard.

Neither of them thought more of the matter untila few days later, when an armed, bellicose SS troglodyte named Paul Zohovetz materializedon Newman's doorstep in full battle array.Newman initially thought Zohovetz was a customer. Quite the opposite was thecase: He had traveled more than fifty miles to threaten Newman with a citationfor posting a commercial flier without the specific permission of the SS.

Asis often the case in such situations, thefoul-tempered official busybody began to harass Newman about mattersthat had nothing to do with the flier.

"I'mnot sure what this is all about," Newman complained.

"You'reunder arrest," snarled Zohovetz by way of reply.

Newmancommanded the armed intruder to leave his property. Zohovetz, already guilty ofcriminal trespass, compounded the crime by threatening to attack Newman with adeadly weapon by pointing his Taser at the man's face and neck.

That’sright: Even the Regime's forest rangers are now equipped with portable electro-shock torturedevices.

"Hehad this look in his eyes like he wanted to beat the crap out of me,"Newman recalled. A diabetic who suffers from permanent nervous system damage,Newman was understandably concerned that a Taser attack would kill him. So asany rational person would, he fled into his house. His deranged assailant,badly overestimating his physical prowess, tried to kick down the door,succeeding only in leaving a muddy footprint.

Newmancalled Chrisman to his home as a witness. Zohovetz, having failed in his effortto bully the mild-mannered Newman by himself, called for backup from the localpolice department. After his friend arrived, Newman emerged from the house,only to be handcuffed. As a result of not taking insulin yet that day, he wentinto convulsions.

Satisfiedthat he'd made whatever point he sought to make, Zohovetz released Newman andtold him that he was only issuing a "warning" regarding the flier. He also issued acitation for "threatening an officer," a charge that carries a sixmonth jail sentence and a $5,000 fine.

Theappropriately named SS spokesman John Heil insisted that Zohovetz behavedappropriately by driving 50 miles to issue a "warning" and thenneedlessly escalating a trivial matter into a life-threatening confrontation.

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

It’sall but certain that those in the leadership echelons of SS are aware of theoutcome of that case – and it’s just as likely that they have made a consciousdecision to ignore it. This would explain a nearly fatal incident involving SSofficer Shawn Tripp that took place in Montana’s Little Belt Mountains lastNovember 26.

Bill and Tammie McCutcheon, residents of Roundup, Montana,were on a hunting trip with their four children – two teenagers and18-month-old twins. Tammie, along with her 12-year-old daughter andthe twins, had pulled over to the side of the road while Bill and the couple’steenage son gone into the nearby forest.

Tripp,who was patrolling on a four-wheeler, approached the truck from behind. Tammie toldthe Billings Gazette that sheinitially thought Tripp, who was wearing a jacket with no insignia identifyinghimself as a federal officer, was another hunter. When she asked Tripp who hewas, the SS officer “refused to identify himself and demanded that she get outof the truck.”

Things became immediately and dramatically worse, recountsthe Gazette. Tripp began “questioningher about whether they had driven past the `road closed’ sign…. TammieMcCutcheon said she was worried about her twins alone in the truck but wastrying to respond to Tripp's questions. The encounter escalated, TammieMcCutcheon said, when Tripp tried to remove a hunting tag from theantlers of a deer in the back of the couple's truck. Tammie McCutcheonsaid she believed Tripp had no authority to remove the tag, and she grabbed itfrom his hand, bumping against him as she reached for the tag.”

Owing to the State supremacist indoctrination he had received,Tripp perceived that incidental contact as the high and grievous crime – nay,sin – of “assaulting a federal official.” Accordingly, he grabbed the terrifiedmother, threw her up against the truck, and roughly cuffed her hands behind herback. He then shoved her face-down on the open tailgate and began to paw theshrieking woman beneath her clothes.

Tripp might consider this a “search”; by any rational definition,it was a sexual assault by an armed stranger who had spit out several angrydemands but refused to identify himself (not that doing so would have justifiedhis actions).

“Ithought I was going to get raped," Tammie later recalled. The noiseattracted the attention of her husband Bill, who had reached the top of a smallnearby hill – and looked down to see, from about 100 yards away, a man ontop of his wife as she screamed for help.

Hurryingdown the hill, Bill ordered the assailant to leave his wife alone. As Tripplater admitted on the record, the properly infuriated husband never pointed hisrifle at him – even though he would have been well within his legal and moralrights to use lethal force to stop the assault. Tripp, however, drew his pistoland pointed it at Bill, ordering him to drop his rifle. At one point, accordingto Tammi, the “unstable” and “muttering” SS enforcer pointed his sidearm at thecouple’s 12-year-old daughter.

Acall for assistance issued by Tripp was answered by Wheatland County SheriffJim Rosenberg, who was hunting nearby. The Sheriff, who should have arrested Tripp for aggravated armed assault and sexual battery, chose instead to arrest Bill, who was heldin jail for five days before being released. Significantly, in an interviewwith an investigator hired by the McCutcheons’ attorney, Sheriff Rosenberg wastold by Tripp that Bill never pointed the rifle at him.

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

Duringa dispute over the SS’s actions in closing down a road in Nevada’s Elko Countya decade ago, the Jarbidge Shovel Brigade, alocal citizen’s group ran a radio ad describing the agency’s personnel as“armed and dangerous.”

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

Thatprompted a petulant complaint from the SS that the ads were “inflammatory” andtended to promote “ill will” toward the agency. Oh, dearie dear – we can’t havethat, can we?

LikeJeff Newman – who was once employed by the agency -- Bill and Tammie McCutcheoncan testify of the indisputable truth of the characterization offered by the ShovelBrigade. Their experiences also underscore the wisdom of having the means todefend one’s self and one’s family in the event one encounters a predatory Fedin the wilderness – or, as Newman’s case demonstrates, in one’s own home.

For killing the two wardens who tried to kidnap him, Claude Dallas eventually served 22 years for voluntarymanslaughter. The foreman of the jury that convicted Dallas later said that he would have been acquitted ofall charges if he hadn’t delivered what was most likely a gratuitous coup degrace. The Regime remembers those details. We should, as well.

Obiter Dicta

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Santorum: State Murder as a "Moral Enterprise"

2012-01-18T18:35:00.000-07:00

“God did not just give us rights,” pontificated His HighHoliness Rick Santorum duringa January 17 campaign stop in Lexington, South Carolina. “He gave us amoral code by which to exercise them. See, that’s what Ron Paul sort of leavesout. He leaves out [that the] rights and responsibilities that we have comefrom God…. And he says, `No, we just have rights, and then that’s it.’ No, wedon’t. America is a moral enterprise.” And morality, Santorum believes, is best instilled through State coercion, including officially sanctioned murder.

Santorum presented that assessment just a few hours after aGOP debate in which Dr.Paul precipitated torrential booing from the pious Republican crowdby insisting that government is bound by the central tenet of the Christian moral code – the Golden Rule.

According to Newt Gingrich – whose General Urko actdrove the assembled Republicans into a simian frenzy of bloodlust – it is “irrational”of Paul to insist that there are limits on the government’s powers ofdiscretionary killing.

Elaborating on that idea in a January18 interview with South Carolina pastor Kevin Boling, Gingrich assertedthat Dr. Paul’s insistence on applying the Golden Rule to foreign policydemonstrated that he had absorbed the “anti-American, self-hating attitude ofthe American Left.”

That accusation of moral lassitude against Dr. Paul – who servedin the military as a young father with two small children – dribbled down themultiple chins of an impenitent Chickenhawk who used his wife as a draftdeferment, then spent the last few years of the Vietnam Era schtupping collegegirls. ("We would have won in 1974 if we could have kept him out of theoffice, screwing [a young volunteer] on the desk,” lamented hiscongressional campaign director.)

In the same interview, Newt -- who is the Hogarthian embodimentof several of the deadly sins – reiterated the indolent smear that most of Paul’score supporters are young people obsessed with recreational drug use (somethingin which Newt indulged before emerging as the self-appointed “Teacher ofCivilization”). Perhaps inspired by Santorum’s example, Newt used thatcaricature as the basis for his own little collectivist homily.

“We have been endowed by our Creator with certain unalienablerights, but that means we have to be citizens,” Newt decreed, claiming that “aheroin addict or a methamphetamine addict [has] lost the ability to be a truecitizen.”

There is nothing in the Declaration of Independence thatdescribes rights as contingent on citizenship. According to that document, individualrights are innate and unalienable; government, on the other hand, enjoys acontingent existence, and can be altered or abolished whenever it imperilsthose rights. In that scheme, the purpose of citizenship is to restrain thegovernment, rather than to submit to its supposedly ennobling influence.

Like most of the people who support him, Dr. Paul has nointerest in drug consumption, recreational or otherwise. He simply understandsthat the federal government has no constitutional authority to wage war on drugconsumption, and that no government anywhere has the moral authority toregulate what individuals choose to ingest. He likewise understands thatprohibition always engenders lethal violence – something vividly illustrated bythe horrendous death toll exacted by Washington’s proxy drug war in Mexico,which has claimed more than 40,000 lives since 2006.

Once again, Dr. Paul’s perspective on this question isinformed by the New Testament: “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth aman; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man…. Do not yeyet understand, that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly,and is cast out into the draught? But those things which proceedeth out of themouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heartproceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, thefts, false witness,blasphemies....” (Matthew 15:10-12,16-19)

While Jesus of Nazareth neveruttered a syllable endorsing drug prohibition, He had a great deal to saydenouncing war and related violence. To judge from the priorities and behaviorof the “Christian” Right, one would assume that exactly the opposite were thecase.

Although Rick Santorum’s politics are detestable, he is arobustly decent husband and father. That certainly isn't true of the humanpustule called Newt Gingrich. Although sharply different in terms of theirpersonal deportment, Santorum and Gingrich share a totalitarian worldview: Theyassume that while nobody is virtuous enough to govern himself, they belong to aconsecrated caste that is holy enough to rule over others.

Reaching for a big historical idea and falling badly short,Santorum attempted to depict Dr. Paul as a Jacobin:

“I would argue that [Dr. Paul’s] understanding of theConstitution was similar to the French Revolution…. Their founding watchwordswere the words, `liberty’ and `fraternity.’ Fraternity. Brotherhood. But nofatherhood. No God. It was a completely secular revolution. An anti-clericalrevolution. And the root of it was, whoever’s in power rules.”

Bear in mind, once again, that Santorum offered thatdescription of the candidate who – just hours earlier – had been publiclyridiculed for insisting that God’s law, the Golden Rule, applies to everybody,including those who preside over the criminal enterprise called the State.Furthermore, among the current GOP presidential contenders, Dr. Paul is theonly candidate to extol the Constitution as a law that restrains thegovernment. Santorum, on the other hand, consistently seeks to restrain theindividual and emancipate the State. While he insinuates that Ron Paul is ananarchist (he isn’t -- none save One was perfect, after all -- but he should be), Santorum has giddily celebratedState lawlessness.

During an October visit to SouthCarolina, Santorum endorsedassassination as an instrument of policy when employedby the U.S. government.

“On occasion, scientists workingon the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead," he explained, broadlyintimating that the U.S. government was responsible. "I think that's awonderful thing, candidly….I think we should send a very clear message that ifyou are scientist from Russia or North Korea or from Iran, and you are going towork on a nuclear program to develop a nuclear bomb for Iran, you are notsafe."

Santorum,who is regarded by somemisguided conservatives as a champion of the pro-life cause, warned thosewho doubt that the U.S. government would assassinate civilian scientists shouldtake heed to the way it treats American citizens designated enemies of theState: "When people say, `You can't go out and assassinate people' — well,tell that to al-Awlaki…. We've done it. We've done it to an Americancitizen."

Actually, the Obamaadministration not only assassinated U.S.-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki —who was never charged with a crime of any kind, let alone convicted andsentenced by a court -- but also al-Awlaki's 16-year-oldson, Adbdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was killed by a drone strike in Yemenwhile he was having dinner with a cousin (who also perished).

The Obama administration circulatedthe story that the 16-year-old was actually an adult “suspected” of being a“militant,” thereby redefining the killing as a strategic success. But thefamily was able to document that the youngster — who hadgone to Yemen in a frantic search for his father, known to be on a U.S.assassination list — was born inColorado in 1995.

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

For Santorum, the definingprinciple of politics is power, not liberty. His chief ideological inspirationis not the imperfectly realized individualist James Madison, or even thecentralizing constitutionalist James Madison, but the arch-authoritarian Josephde Maistre, the 18^th Century apostle of absolutism. His role modelin policy terms could well be the murderous “Operative” from the film “Serenity.”

Maistre taught that “allgreatness, all power, all social order depends on the Executioner; he is theterror of human society and tie that holds it together. Take away thisincontrovertible force from the world, and at that very moment order issuperseded by chaos, thrones fall, society disappears."

Santorum visibly shares the fearthat society will disintegrate if the State is deprived of the discretionarypower to kill people. In the film “Serenity,” the Operative acted as Maistre’sExecutioner on behalf of a galaxy-spanning bureaucratic empire called theAlliance. He spent most of the film pursuing River Tam, a brilliant and irrepressiblyindividualistic young girl with psychic abilities who had been abducted by theregime and programmed to be an assassin.

River’s brother, a giftedphysician named Simon, sacrificed his future to free River, and the two of themwound up aboard the Serenity, a merchant ship commanded by a noble butembittered man named Malcolm Reynolds. Years earlier, Malcolm (or Mal) hadfought with the “Browncoats,” a group of separatists who waged a valiant butlosing battle for impendence from the Alliance.

In his pursuit of River and Simon,Alliance forces commanded by the Operative lays waste to an outpost calledHaven, where Mal and his crew had briefly found refuge. Similar Allianceattacks have destroyed every other colony where Mal might have taken cover.
“I’m sorry,” the Operativeexplains to Mal following the massacres. “If your quarry goes to ground, leaveno ground to go to…. [D]id you think none of this was your fault?”

“I don’t murder children,” Malreplies with frigid disgust.

“I do,” the Operativeunblinkingly replies. “If I have to.”

“Why?” Mal demands. “Do you evenknow why they sent you?”

“It’s not my place to ask,” theOperative wearily explains. “I believe in something greater than myself. Abetter world. A world without sin.”

Although he possesses none ofthe Operative’s fearsome martial prowess, Rick Santorum likewise believes it ispossible to build a better world through State murder – not just Iraqi, Afghan,Pakistani, and (soon) Iranian children, but American children like Abdulrahmanal-Awlaki.

It’s little wonder that Santorum – like Newt Gingrich and the deathcult adherents who compose much of the GOP’s rank and file -- finds Ron Paul’sdevotion to the Golden Rule to be morally unsatisfactory.

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When the Right to Resist Becomes the "Duty to Submit"

2012-01-10T17:31:00.001-07:00

Anne Dekins was a loud-mouthed party girl -- or at least, that's what the arrest warrant suggested. Whatever she may havedone in the past, Miss Dekins was quietly minding her own business when OfficerSamuel Bray found her on the street and began to haul her away.

Dekins wasn’t inclined to goquietly, and she put up a struggle. Her cries for help attracted the interestof several armed men led by an individual named Tooley, who confronted Bray anddemanded to know what he was doing to the frantic woman. The officer producedhis official credentials and insisted that he was making a lawful arrest for“disorderly conduct.” When witnesses disputed that description, Bray called forbackup.

Tooley and his associatesordered Bray to release the woman, and then took action to enforce that lawful order.After Bray’s partner was killed in the ensuing struggle, Tooley and hisassociates were arrested for murder. The trial court threw out the murdercharge, ruling that the warrant was defective. Since the arrest was illegal,the court pointed out, Dekins had a right to resist – and bystanders likewisehad a right, if not a positive duty, to assist her. The defendants were eventuallyfound guilty of manslaughter, but quickly pardoned and set free.

By trying to enforce an invalidwarrant, Bray “did not act as a constable, but a common oppressor,” observedthe trial court. Tooley and the other bystanders were properly “provoked” bythe act of aggressive violence against Anne Dekins, and their forceful butmeasured response – first demanding that the abductor release the hostage, thenexercising defensive force to free her – was entirely appropriate.

Lawless violence against thehelpless “is a sufficient provocation to all people out of compassion” in anycircumstance, observed the court, “much more where it is done under a colour ofjustice, and where the liberty of the subject is invaded….” In fact, an act ofthat kind carried out by a law enforcement official is nothing less than “aprovocation to all the subjects of England.”

Every Englishman “ought to beconcerned for Magna Charta and the laws,” concluded the Queen’s Bench inthe 1710 case Queen v. Tooley.“And if any one against the law imprison a man, he is an offender against MagnaCharta.”

Roughly forty years earlier, thesame court had issued a similar opinion in HopkinHuggett’s Case. Huggett and his friends had come to the aid of a manwho had been arrested by a constable named Berry. Huggett demanded to see thearrest warrant. When Berry produced a clearly spurious document, Huggett drewhis sword and demanded the prisoner’s release. Berry refused, and finishedsecond in the ensuing swordfight.

The wrongfully arrested man inthat case (who was threatened with impressment into the military) did nothingto resist his abduction. It wasn’t clear that Huggett knew the man, or had evenmet him prior to the incident. Yet the Queen’s Bench ruled that Huggett’sactions were justified, since a situation in which a “man [is] unduly arrestedor restrained of his liberty … is a provocation to all other men of England,not only his friends but strangers also[,] for common humanity’s sake.”

In addition to codifying theCommon Law right to resist arrest, HopkinHuggett’s Case and Queen v. Tooley recognized that this right inheresnot only in the victim, but in citizens who interpose on the victim’s behalf.

Simply put: When a policeofficer commits the crime of unlawful arrest, the citizens who intervene areacting as peace officers entitled to employ any necessary means –including lethal force – to liberate the victim.

In early 18^thCentury England, this was seen as anon-negotiable bulwark against what the heroic Algernon Sidney called “theviolence of a wicked magistrate who, hav[ing] armed a crew of lewd villains,”would otherwise inflict his will on innocent and helpless people with impunity.Sidney’s martyrdom at the hands of precisely that kind of degenerate,tyrannical magistrate underscored the vitality of the principle he expressed.

“The right to resist unlawful arrestmemorializes one of the principal elements in the heritage of the Englishrevolution: the belief that the will to resist arbitrary authority in areasonable way is valuable and ought not to be suppressed by the criminal law,”observed Paul Chevigny in a 1969 Yale LawJournal essay. Actually, Chevigny – like many others – elides a criticaldistinction between “power” and “authority”: While a police officer may havethe power to abduct or abuse aninnocent person, citizens have the authorityto prevent that crime.

Until the late 1960s, moststates recognized – albeit grudgingly -- the Common Law right to resist arrest.By 1969, that right had been transmuted, through judicial activism, into arevocable “privilege” – one that had to be dispensed with to serve the interests of the State's punitive caste.

“The weight of authoritativeprecedent supports a right to repel an unlawful arrest with force…. This wasthe rule at common law,” admitted the Alaska State Supreme Court in a seminalwork of sophistry called Terry Glenn Miller v. State of Alaska. “Itwas based on the proposition that everyone should be privileged to usereasonable force to prevent an unlawful invasion of his physical integrity andpersonal liberty.”

That admission clearlyanticipated the familiar use of the magical conjunction “but” as a rhetoricalreset button, and the Court didn’t disappoint:

“But certain imperfections inthe functioning of the rule have brought about changes in some jurisdictions. Anew principle of right conduct has been espoused” – by whom, the Court didn’tspecify. “It is argued” – once again, the parties to that argument were notidentified – “that if a peace officer is making an illegal arrest but is notusing force” – something that could not occur, given that an arrest, by strictdefinition, is an act of armed coercion – “the remedy of the citizen should bethat of suing the officer for false arrest, not resistance with force.”

“The control of man’sdestructive and aggressive impulses is one of the great unsolved problems ofour society,” pontificated the Court as it destroyed one of the few effectivechecks on the deadliest manifestation of those impulses. “Our rules of lawshould discourage the unnecessary use of physical force between man and man.Any rule which promotes rather than inhibits violence should be re-examined.”That objective is not legitimately served by granting State functionaries an unqualified licenseto commit criminal violence against the innocent.

Four years after the Miller decision, a decision entitled Richardsonv. Idaho emerged from the Idaho State Supreme Court’s emunctoryaperture. John Richardson had been convicted of resisting arrest throughviolence and sentenced to five years in prison. The incident in which thesupposed crime occurred took place at a restaurant in Idaho Falls. Richardsonand his ex-wife, who were having dinner, got into an argument, and were askedto leave when the latter became loud and profane.

Two off-duty police officersescorted them outside, and then tried to arrest Richardson for “disorderlyconduct” after he became annoyed by their unwarranted intrusion. Richardsonkicked one of the uniformed buttinskis in the mouth, and managed to grab one oftheir pistols, which he fired into the air, rather than at his assailants (ashe was entitled to, both morally and – under the Supreme Court’s still-valid 1900 Bad Elk precedent – legally).

Prominentlyciting the Miller decision in Alaska,the Idaho Court observed that “More than one state has, without legislativeaction, modified the traditional common law rule and has adopted the rule thata private citizen may not use force to resist a peaceful arrest,” blithelyignoring, once again, the fact that a “peaceful arrest” is a creature morefanciful than a left-handed unicorn that speaks Norwegian. “We are of theopinion that the trend is, and should be, away from the traditional common lawrule, and therefore we hold that if a person has reasonable ground to believehe is being arrested by a peace officer, it is his duty to refrain from usingforce or any weapon in resisting arrest regardless of whether or not there is alegal basis for the arrest.”

The key holding in theRichardson ruling has been enshrined in the Idaho Code Judicial Instructions(ICJI 1262), which asserts that “it is the person’s duty to refrain from usingforce or any weapon in resisting arrest regardless of whether or not there is alegal basis for the arrest.” The obverse of this spurious “Duty to Submit toArrest” is a police officer’s privilege to commit criminal acts for the purposeof nullifying the Exclusionary Rule – something the Idaho Supreme Courtacknowledged in a 2008 ruling captioned State v.Lusby.

Police paid a visit to Lusby’sapartment to investigate a disturbance. She quickly grew tired of the uninvitedcompany – what decent person wouldn’t? – and went into her apartment, closingthe door behind her. One of the officers committed an act of criminal trespassand announced that Lusby was under arrest for “obstruction” and “resistance.” Atone point the bully caught an elbow in the face from the victim, a small down-paymenton what he deserved – but enough to earn Lusby a charge of felonious assault onan officer. She was also charged with drug possession on the basis of evidencefound in the officer’s illegal search.

Because that search was patentlyillegal, the trial court granted a motion to dismiss all charges against Lusby.The State Supreme Court admitted that this was the case – but insisted that Lusby’s resistance to the illegal invasion of herhome retroactively legalized the unconstitutional search.

“It appears to be a nearlyuniversal rule in American jurisdictions that when a suspect responds to anunconstitutional search or seizure by a physical attack on the officer,evidence of this new crime is admissible notwithstanding the prior illegality,”decreed the court, extracting that “rule” from precisely the same orifice fromwhich the Richardson rulingoriginated. “The rationale … [is that] a subsequent attack on the officer is anew crime unrelated to any prior illegality…. Accordingly, we hold thatevidence of Lusby’s alleged batter on an officer or other forceful resistanceis not suppressible … [and] evidence of paraphernalia found in the searchincident to Lusby’s arrest [is] admissible.”

On this construction, a policeofficer can nullify the Fourth Amendment anytime he pleases, simply by claimingthat the victim committed the supposed crime of resisting. This can take theform of assuming an “aggressive posture,” such as “blading” the body or evenputting one foot in front of the other in what can be construed as an “attackstance.” Or, as the recent assault on Austin, Texas resident Antonio Buehlerdemonstrates, the “assault” can be nothing more than breathing in the face of apolice officer.

Buehler, 34, is a combat veteran of Kosovo and Iraq, West Point graduate,and middle school teacher.He was serving as a designated driver on the morning of New Year’s Day when hesaw a woman being abused by police outside a 7-11. The costumed assailants,officers PatOborski and RobertSnider, were conducting what they called a DWI arrest of a woman lateridentified as Norma Pizana.

To Buehler and his friends, thespectacle looked more like a gang assault.

"We hear a loud scream, andwe look over, and we see the cop violently yanking the female out of the caronto the ground," Buehler told local ABC affiliate KVUE. "She is screaming. The other copran up and they both sort of grabbed her arms. Her hands were behind her backstraight out and they lifted her up by her arms. It looked extremelypainful."

With the help of a friend,Buehler began to document this act of "street justice" with his cellphone. That prompted Oborski to confront Buehler, who was not interfering inany way.

According to Buehler, Oborskibarked, "What the hell are you taking pictures for?"

"My response was, `I amallowed to. Public official in a public place.'"

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

"Once he had me pinned upagainst the back of the truck he kept leaning in," Buehler continued."He kept pushing me."

Eventually Oborski got so closethat Buehler actually breathed on him — which gave him a pretext to accuse thewitness of "spitting" on him. With some difficulty, and Snider’s help,Oborski wrestled Buehler (who offered only passive resistance) to the groundand handcuffed him. The cops took Beuhler to a BAT van—- a patently unreliable mobile alcohol testing unit — in the hope of documenting that thewitness was intoxicated, which he wasn't. The cop finally settled on charginghim with "harassing a public servant" — a third-degree felony — and"resisting arrest."

As is always the case inincidents of this kind, Buehler wasn’t arrested for an actual crime; hewas vindictively punished for “contempt of cop.”

“You don’t f*** with cops,” Oborski snarled at Buehler. “Youdon’t get in our f***ing way. You don’t question us, and we’re going to teachyou a lesson.”

Norma Pizana’s plight was strikingly similar to that of AnneDekins, with at least one critical difference: Dekins and her rescuers were blessedto live in 18^th Century England, a relatively civilized society thatrecognized and protected a free individual’s indispensable right to resistState-licensed criminal violence.

Acknowledgements and Updates

Once again, thanks to everyone who has donated so generously. This really means a great deal to me and my family.

Among the reasons why my activity here at Pro Libertate has tapered off somewhat is the fact that I've been very busy curating the blog at Republic magazine. Check out the website and, if you're interested, sign up for a free digital subscription.

Some of you are aware that my wonderful wife Korrin has been hospitalized several times since 2006. She's in the hospital again. I would appreciate prayers on her behalf from those of you so inclined. Thank you.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Militarists, Drug Warriors, and Heresy-Hunters: The Anti-Ron Paul Axis of "Decency"

2011-12-29T12:38:00.002-07:00

Toxic smugness: Google the term "Backpfeifengesicht."

Newt Gingrich, lapsed adulterer, impenitent warmonger, and self-appointed“teacher of civilization,” has excommunicated RonPaul and his supporters from the ranks of human decency. A similar anathema hasbeen pronounced by left-wingheresy hunter David Neiwert -- a former sidekick to the degenerate fraudnamed Morris Dees – and many other self-appointed political “watchdogs.”

Those banishment decrees condemn Dr. Paul and his supporters forrejecting the fundamental tenet of statism – the belief that officiallysanctioned lethal coercion is the key to social progress.

"I think Ron Paul's views are totally outside themainstream of virtually every decent American," insisted Gingrich in a CNNinterview. Although Gingrich alluded to the manufactured controversy overdecades-old newsletters published by Dr. Paul that contained supposedlyoffensive material dealing with matters of political correctness, Gingrich’schief complaint – which he has reiterated on many occasions – is that Dr.Paul seeks to end America’s interventionist foreign policy and the God-awful wars that policy entails.

Gingrich has also dismissed Dr. Paul’s constituency as beinglimited to “peoplewho want to legalize drugs.” Unlike Gingrich – who used government-proscribed canabinoids as ayoung adult – Ron Paul has never used such illicit substances nor condoned their non-medical use, whileunderstanding that no government has the moral right to punish individuals who consume them as they see fit. In 1988 – at a time when, according to Gingrich andother detractors, Paul was peddling racist propaganda – Dr.Paul was denouncing the racist roots of the so-called War on Drugs. Gingrich,on the other hand, has endorsedthe execution of first-time drugoffenders who possess trivial amounts of narcotics.

For Gingrich and the dominant militarist wing of the GOP, itis rank indecency to oppose the mass murder of foreigners through aggressivewar overseas, and to leave individuals free to choose what mood-altering substances they consume, if any. For “Progressives” of Neiwert’s ilk, it is similarly uncivilized totreat Americans as adults capable of managing their own affairs, and choosing theirown associations, free from the directives of bureaucrats and social engineerswhose mandates are backed by the threat of deadly force.

Neiwert volubly disapproved of foreign war when GeorgeW. Bush was in power, but found other things to complain about once Obamaascended to the Imperial Purple. A deeper problem than such facile and predictablehypocrisy is the insistence – which Neiwert shares with many other figures onthe academic Left -- that war and military occupation are morally superior topeaceful, market-centered action in dealing with institutionalized bigotry.

“The hand-wringing about whether Paul is a racist or notreally is beside the point,” declaredNeiwert in a typically sanctimonious outpouring. “Labels really becomeinconsequential when the real issue is how their politics would play out on theground if they achieved power.” He denounces a supposed “monstrous bind spot inlibertarianism – namely, their apparent belief that the only element ofAmerican political life capable of depriving Americans of their rights is thegovernment….”

Actually, the core libertarian tenet is the non-aggressionaxiom (an application of the Golden Rule), which recognizes that it is anunalloyed wrong for anybody to commitaggressive violence against the person or property of another human being. Libertariansdo not exempt private actors from that principle. We refuse to exempt thegovernment from it, as well – and this is what is deemed unacceptable by collectivistsof Neiwert’s ilk, who believe that all good things in life begin withofficially sanctioned coercion.

Consider, for example, Neiwert’s claim that it waslibertarian-leaning conservatives (or their philosophical ancestors) in theaftermath of the War Between the States, who “led the resistance toReconstruction that overturned the verdict of the war….”

Neiwert’s use of the term “verdict” in this fashionresonates with the view expressed by Thrasymachus,the notorious sophist depicted in Plato’s Republic– namely, that “in all states there is the same principle ofjustice, which is the interest of the government; and as thegovernment must be supposed to have power, the only reasonableconclusion is, that everywhere there is one principle of justice,which is the interest of the stronger.”

In Neiwert’s moral universe, only incorrigibly hatefulpeople question “verdicts” imposed through mass slaughter and propertydestruction.

The “Reconstruction,” it must be remembered, was anundisguised military occupation of the conquered South, in which “wholesalecorruption, intimidation of new voters by the thousands and tens of thousands,political assassinations, riots, [and] revolutions … were the order of the day,”as Dr. Paul Leland Haworth wrote in his1912 study Reconstruction and Union,1865-1912.

The objective that inspired Reconstructionwas not a vision of civicequality, but rather a desire to destroy the troublesome Southern aristocracy, whichwas seen as an impediment to the designs of the Northern corporatist elite.

“I was satisfied, and have beenall the time, that the problem of war consists in the awful fact that thepresent class of men who rule the South must be killed outright rather than inthe conquest of territory,” wrote General Sherman to his wife (in a letterquoted in VictorDavis Hanson’s book The Soul of Battle). In what Hanson approvinglycalled Sherman’s war of “terror” against the South, the General warned thatthose who refused to display a properly submissive posture would be “crushedlike flies on a wheel.”

"Good Indians," by Sherman's definition, at Wounded Knee.

Sherman, and his fellow stateterrorist Philip Sheridan, would follow the same approach in dealing with thePlains Indians, who also had the temerity to claim a measure of independence fromthe supposed authority of the Central Government. Neiwert, interestingly,addresses that horrifying historican episode in his recent book TheEliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right.

In a chapter dealing with "Eliminationism in America,”Neiwert describes some of the atrocities committed against the Plains Indiansby U.S. military forces commanded by Sheridan and Sherman. He then devotesthe rest of the book to ritual execration of "neo-Confederates." That category must include anybody who understands that war to reclaim and “reconstruct”the South was a bloody prelude to the slaughter of the Plains Indians, theimperial war of conquest in the Philippines, and contemporary campaigns ofhumanitarian bloodshed that have blessed the lives of “people of color” in suchplaces as Iraq and Afghanistan.

Neiwert, who is consistently oblivious to the implicationsof his own research, also points out that the Ku Klux Klan’s early-20^thCentury revival began when it was embraced by local governments (including somein the Midwest) as "an auxiliary police outfit" to enforce lawsagainst bootlegging. The Klan, of course, is the marquee hate group that hasserved as such a profitable foil for Neiwert’s mentor, Morris Dees – and it’squite possible that group would have disappeared permanently had it not becomea government sub-contractor in the first War on Drugs.

This brings up a very important point: If Morris Dees andhis comrades at the SPLC are genuinely agitated over institutionalizeddiscrimination, why have they never publicly uttered a syllable of condemnationfor the patently racist “War on Drugs”?

One possibility is suggested by the fact that thecontemporary SPLC, like the Ku Klux Klan of roughly a century ago, is aquasi-private adjunct to lawenforcement agencies that profit extravagantly from Prohibition. Dees istoo canny and cynical to disturb that lucrative arrangement by protesting aboutthe costs inflicted by Prohibition in terms of the lives and liberties of blackand Hispanic Americans. After all, complaints of that kind are the sort ofthing one hears from indecent, irresponsible extremists like Ron Paul.

David Neiwert and other self-anointed custodians of socialjustice insist that Ron Paul and his supporters have somehow inherited the sins of bigoted people whodied long before they were born, and prospectively share the guilt of those whomight do horrible things if federal power were curtailed. Meanwhile, thepresident supported by Neiwert and his ideological kin is massacring innocent “people of color” in at leastthree countries, and escalating a domestic Drug War that is rife with racialprofiling and racial disparities in sentencing guidelines.

The mass slaughter of brown people abroad, and massincarceration of brown people at home, are a price Neiwert and his ilk arewilling to pay to preserve a system that can regiment societal arrangements totheir liking. In that system, as Neiwert candidly admits, social “verdicts” areimposed and upheld through state-licensed murder, rather than achieved through peacefulcooperation.

Professor George P. Fletcher of Columbia Law School provides an incisive description of the ideological foundation of that system in his valuable book The Secret Constitution.

Fletcher, anunabashed Marxist, is difficult to dismiss as a “neo-Confederate,” yet heagrees with the revisionist view that the war waged by the North was not aneffort to "preserve the Union," to emancipate the slaves, or (asLincoln absurdly claimed) a crusade to restore the pre-war constitutionalorder. Instead, that war was intended to consolidate a confederation of statesinto a unitary regime governed by what Fletcher calls a "New ConstitutionalOrder." The founding premise of that New Order is that "the federalgovernment, victorious in warfare, must continue its aggressive interventionin the lives of its citizens." (Emphasis added.) That "aggressive intervention" inescapably involves the threat -- and, increasingly, the exercise -- of deadly force.

Newt Gingrich and David Neiwert -- and the ideological cliques they represent -- disagree about a great deal,but they agree that “decency” in political affairs is measured by one’s willingnessto support State-sanctioned murder as the central organizing principle ofsociety.

Once again, thank you!

My family and I wish to express our continued gratitude for the generous support so many of you have offered to Pro Libertate. This means more to us that we can adequately express. God bless you all.

On another matter: I have been curating the news blog for Republic magazine; please pay that site a visit, and -- if it meets with your approval -- spread the word.

Be sure to check out Republic magazine!

Dum spiro, pugno!

Their Right to Kill, Our Duty To Die: The Murder of Otto Zehm

2011-12-22T15:06:00.001-07:00

Otto Zehm, a mentally handicapped, 36-year-old unemployedjanitor, wasbeaten to death in a Spokane convenience store in March 2006.

"All I wanted was a Snickers bar," pleaded the battered and bloody man before he was gagged by his assailant.

On November4, Karl Thompson, the man convicted of killing Zehm, was taken to jail. Severaldozen members of Thompson’s gang were gathered outside the courtroom – most ofthem proudly wearing the colors – to “show their honor” by offering themurderer a public salute. Thompson – whose hands weren’t cuffed, inviolation of long-established rules – smiled and returned the gesture. Zehm’s still-grieving mother and several otherrelatives stood just a few feet away.

The gang in question is the Spokane Police Department, whicheven now refuses to acknowledge that Thompson – who was a nominee to becomeChief at the time he murdered Zehm – ever did anything wrong when he clubbed,tased, and suffocated a terrified, innocent man who did nothing to provoke theattack, and who put up no violent resistance to the assault.

Zehm had done custodial work at Fairchild Air Force Base andwaswell-known, and equally well-liked, by many people in his neighborhood,some of whom were aware that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. He wasin the daily habit of visiting a convenience store called Zip Trip to purchasejunk food – usually Pepsi and a candy bar.

On March 18, 2006, Zehm retrieved some money at an ATM nearZip Trip. Something in his behavior struck two girls as odd, so they called thepolice. Although there was no reason to believe that Zehm had committed acrime, Thompson entered the store as if he were pursuing a dangerous fugitive.Security video documents that Thompson approached Zehm from behind, whileretrieving his custom-made, over-sized ironwood nightstick.

Thompson introduced himself to Zehm by shouting at him todrop the two-liter bottle of Pepsi. According to the officer, the startled andpuzzled man responded by quite reasonably asking, “Why?” Thompson interpretedthat Zehm’s fleeting non-compliance as an immediate and intolerable threat toofficer safety. So he rushed at the terrified man and began to beat him withhis nightstick – clubbing him first in the legs, then on the shoulders, neck,and head. Blows to the head are defined as lethal strikes under the SpokanePD’s use-of-force policy, justifiable only when a suspect threatens the life ofa police officer or bystanders.

Asthe security video demonstrates, Zehm never put up a fight. He retreatedfrom Thompson, and then made a pitiable attempt to use his bottle of soda todeflect blows aimed at his face. Thompson escalated his assault by tasering himat least three times. Thompson was eventually joined by six other other policeofficers. Eventually, Thompson was actually sitting on Zehm, who was face-downon the floor.

The victim was hog-tied in a “four-pointrestraint,” meaning that his hands were shackled to his ankles. Departmentpolicy guidelines emphasize that suspects restrained in this fashion are neverto be placed face-down, since this posture can result in “positional asphyxia.”Yet Zehm was left in that position for about seventeen minutes, and at onepoint an officer actually pulled his feet backwards – which increased the riskof suffocation by placing pressure on the victim’s diaphragm.

After emergency personnel arrived, they were instructed to digthe Taser barbs out of Zehm’s flesh. They were also asked to provide a“non-rebreathing” oxygen mask; this was placed over the victim’s face,supposedly to prevent him from assaulting the officers by spitting on them.This mask was not designed or intended to be used without being attached to anoxygen supply. Once the mask was placed on Zehm’s face, the traumatized andpanicking man – who was already at severe risk of hypoxia – was forced tobreathe through an easily obstructed opening roughly the size of a quarter.

Thomspon, immediately after assaulting Zehm.

Did Thompson and his cohorts deliberately set out tosuffocate Zehm? Every step they took led inexorably to that outcome, andincompetence can only explain so much. That was the outcome, whether it was theresult of deliberate malice or depraved indifference. Zehm stopped breathingabout seventeen minutes after Thompson’s initial assault, and died in a nearbyhospital about two days later. But the police department’s assault on Zehmcontinued while he struggled for life in the hospital, and didn’t end with hisdeath.

On the day of the beating, Police Chief Jim Nicks told themedia that Zehm had “lunged” at Thompson, thereby threatening his life. Otherofficers claimed that Zhem had a prior arrest for assaulting an officer. Bothclaims were conscious, deliberate lies.

About two weeks after Zehm’s death, Detective TerryFerguson, who “investigated” the incident for the Spokane PD, filed a reportclaiming that none of the seven officers who assaulted Zehm committed a crime.Ferguson had little time to investigate what was done to Zehm, because she was toobusy investigating the victim. The detective persuaded a judge to issuewarrants to pry into every aspect of Zehm’s medical, employment, and personalhistory, on the pretext that the deceased was suspected of “assaulting a policeofficer.” This was actually an unsuccessful effort to exhume something –anything – that could be used to denigrate the victim.

After the pressure of a threatened lawsuit, Spokane CountyProsecutor Steve Tucker released the video recordings of the assault, which heand the police had diligently suppressed. The recordings contradicted everycritical element of Thompson’s version of the event, beginning with the claim thatZehm had “lunged” at the officer.

With no criminal charges filed against Thompson, Zehm’sfamily announced its intention to sue the City of Spokane, and the JusticeDepartment began a civil rights inquiry. In March 2009 – three years after thekilling – Chief Anne Kirkpatrick (who had replaced Chief Nicks) issued a publicstatement offering her “unequivocal support” to Thompson. “Based on all theinformation and evidence I have reviewed, I have determined that Officer KarlThompson acted consistent with the law,” Kirkpatrick insisted.

A few months later, Chief Kirkpatrick assigned Thompson –who was, recall, the subject of a federal civil rights investigation – to helptrain other Spokane police officers how to deal with “high-risk liabilityincidents,” which have been plentiful.

Spokane’s municipal government, whichpaid out $2.5 million to resolve police-related lawsuits between 1996 and 2007,has a policy of filing counter-suits accusing citizens of “conspiracy to misusethe judicial process.” This is made possible by a state statute intended toprotect police against supposedly frivolous lawsuits. Given all of this it’snot surprising that Chief Kirkpatrick’s unqualified endorsement of Thompson’sactions was coupled with an unyielding official line blaming the victim for hisown death. “Any injury or damage suffered by Mr. Zehm was caused solely byreason of his conduct and willful resistance,” proclaimed the City of Spokane’sofficial response to the family’s civil lawsuit.

Mr. Zehm’s “conduct” – which, according to Chief Kirkpatrickand Spokane’s municipal government, justified the use of lethal force --consisted of doing exactly nothing. Thenagain, he was armed with a bottle ofPepsi, which apparently left the heroic Officer Thompson no choice but to stagea preemptive strike with his club and Taser. Perhaps if it had been Mt. Dew,the use of tactical nukes would have been appropriate.

“If all [the victim] wanted to do was surrender, he couldhave done so,” insisted Officer Terry Preuninger, the Spokane PD’s SWAT TeamLeader and patrol tactics instructor, during the trial. “[Officer Thompson’s]assessment was accurate. He continued to use force. It did allow him to keepthat man from hurting him or anyone else.”

Thompson began his attack within seconds of arriving at thestore – before Zehm had a chance to “surrender.” Furthermore, the victim wasbacking away from the officer. According to Preuninger – who, as SWAT leader,approaches such situations with a militarized close-and-kill mindset – thisdidn’t matter: “Picture wrestlers or boxers. It’s definitely not an indicationthat they don’t want to hurt or assault you because they move back.”

“A police officer becomes an expert in evaluation ofbehavior or picking out little things that are different,” Preuninger assertedon the stand. Victor Boutros, chief prosecutor during the trial, treated thatclaim with laudable contempt, mockingthis supposed preternatural gift ofdiscernment as a “Spidey sense” that “can’t be impeached by citizen eyewitnesses or video. Only [Thompson] could have seen those things.”

Furthermore, according to Preuninger, police have plenaryauthority to use lethal force even when their perceptions are in error: “Apolice officer can make a mistake. An officer could believe their [sic] lifewas in danger or they [sic] were in danger of being assaulted when in fact we couldgo back in hindsight and show that’s not true. But the force would beauthorized.”

This is to say: From the perspective of the individual whotrains the Spokane PD regarding the use of force, Karl Thompson was completelyright – but he could have been entirely wrong, and he would still have had theauthority to kill Otto Zehm. This is because police officers, who face anall-encompassing threat from the public they supposedly protect, must beentitled to employ aggressive violence at all times, Preuninger maintains: “Ifyou approach law enforcement situations the same way you would a neighborhoodmeeting … it will directly lead to you getting murdered on the job or gettinghurt or assaulted.”

Really?

Between 1867and 2009, a total of 23 law Spokane County law enforcement officers –police, Sheriff’s deputies, and one member of the County Game Commission – diedin the line of duty. Eleven of them – fewer than half that total – were killedby suspected criminals. Six died in traffic accidents. Two were struck andkilled by drunk drivers. Two were fatally shot by fellow law enforcement personnelduring training exercises (one of them was killed by a police officer showingoff a quick-draw technique), and another was a game warden shot by a hunter whowas reaching for a permit. One officer died from a heart attack during SWATtraining.

None of those line-of-duty deaths occurred because anofficer was insufficiently aggressive during one of the perilous “lawenforcement situations” that haunt Preuninger’s imagination.

Interestingly, Spokane County – which maintainsa police Honor Guard that attends police funerals throughout the Northwest –describes itself as “third in the state for line of duty deaths.” Thisillustrates – redundantly – that law enforcement is not a particularlyhazardous occupation. In Spokane, as elsewhere, the citizen in a “lawenforcement situation” is at far greater risk than the police officer.

A little more than a year after Otto Zehm was murdered byThompson and his cohorts, 37-year-oldTrent Yohe, the father of a young child, was beaten, tasered, and hog-tied bySheriff’s deputies who had illegally entered his home.

Yohe was asleep when the deputies invaded his home. The last wordshe heard before lapsing into an irreversible coma were orders from hisassailants to stop resisting.

Shortlyafter the incident, Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich admitted in an official memothat at the time Yohe – a known meth addict subject to Grand Mal seizures – “wasnever under arrest.” The County eventuallypaid $50,000 stolen from local tax victims to settle a lawsuit filed byYohe’s family.

The deputies who murdered Yohe followed almost exactly thesame protocols used by the murderers of Otto Zehm a year earlier. Sheriff Knezovichdefiantly insistedthat he saw no reason to change those procedures.

This isn’t to say, however, that the Sheriff wascategorically opposed to reform: In a joint press conference with ChiefKirkpatrick, Knezovich indignantly protested the use of the term “hog-tied” todescribe the method used by officers to truss their prone and helpless victims;the appropriate term, he insisted, is “hobbled.”

That promptedSeattle Spokesman-Review columnistDoug Clark to compose a lexicon of law enforcement euphemisms.

In keeping with Sheriff Knezovich’s delicate sensibilities, Clarksuggested that language like the following would be suitable: “Trent Yohe, amethamphetamine addict, was holiday gift-wrapped after a spirited difference ofopinion with sheriff’s deputies.” What about the eyewitness report thatdeputies had kicked out the victim’s false teeth? Easy: Yohe wasn’t brutalized –he “participated in a police-assisted dental plan.” And henceforth, a Taserwill be called a “joy buzzer.”

Clark’s essay was aimed at the Spokane PD’s institutionalvanity, a target that’s impossible to miss. This prompted Officer Preuninger – whowept openly when Thompson was taken away to jail -- to rebuke the impudent

Mundane via a letterto the editor in which thedecorated SWAT team leader struck the familiar pose ofpoliceman-as-maligned savior.

“Sleep well, Mr. Clark, because no matter how much youinsult me, no matter how low you go to belittle my profession, if you findyourself in harm’s way, you need only call and one of us will come and risk ourlife to save yours: an irony I am quite sure you can never fathom,” whinedPreuninger in a tone worthy of a passive-aggressive teenage girl.

As is almost always the case in such matters, it is OfficerPreuninger who suffers from a severe irony deficiency: None of the officers hetrained intervened to save Otto Zehm when that innocent man was being beaten todeath by Karl Thompson, who was a “mentor” to the entire force and theirpreferred candidate to be chief.

Following Thompson’s guilty verdict, U.S. Attorney MikeOrmsby asserted that “This is not an indictment of our entire police force.” Oh,yes it is.

Thank you, once again!

On behalf of the entire Grigg family, I want to tell you how much we appreciate your very generous donations. This means more than I can adequately express. Have a wonderful Christmas!

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Send In The Drones: The Predator State Goes Domestic

2011-12-13T02:05:00.002-07:00

“Eventually, we’ll have to putan end to this, one way or another.”

SheriffKelly Janke of North Dakota’s Nelson County utteredthat ominous sentence in mid-September, during what the local media giddilydescribed as a stand-off with local farmer Rodney Brossart and his family. Bythat time, Sheriff Janke, with the help of the Department of Homeland Securityand the U.S. Air Force, had already run the table where “non-lethal”means of compelling the family to surrender were concerned. This included everything from the Taser used duringBrossart’s June 23 arrest to the precedent-setting use of a Predator-B droneto conduct surveillance of the home several days later to facilitate the arrestof the farmer’s three sons.

The most recent conflict betweenJanke’s department and Brossart began when a half-dozen stray cattle wanderedonto the family’s farm, which is located near the tiny village of Lakota(roughly 100 miles northwest of Fargo). Brossart, who reportedly believed thatthe cattle were unclaimed and thus belonged to him under a disputed interpretationof open-range law, refused to turn them over to the Sheriff.

Sheriff Janke.

A team of deputies tasered the55-year-old farmer and took him into custody. His daughter Abby, frantic forthe safety of her father, tried to intervene; for “striking” the sanctifiedpersonage of a deputy, she was arrested and charged with assault. When Brossart’swife Susan refused to help the deputies locate what they described as “illegal”firearms, she, too, was arrested and charged with lying to law enforcementofficers (whoare trained to lie and cando so without legal consequence).

When deputies returned thefollowing day, they were reportedly confronted by Brossart’s three sons –Jacob, Alex, and Thomas -- who were allegedly carrying the rifles the policehad tried to confiscate the previous day.

This led Sheriff Janke to escalatethe confrontation to a full-spectrum military response – including, in the wordsof the Los Angeles Times, elements “from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWATteam, a bomb squad, ambulances, and deputy sheriffs from three other counties. Healso called in a Predator B drone.” That unmanned aerial vehicle, identical tothose used in CIA-directed missions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere, was suppliedby the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP), an affiliate ofthe Department of Homeland Security.

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

That was the “one way” Janke hadalready tried. What, pray tell, would have been the “other” – short ofequipping the drone with Hellfire missiles and using it to annihilate theBrossart family as suspected terrorists?

If this had happened, theBrossarts would not be the first Americans to be killed by way of a drone-firedmissile. That unwanted distinction is owned by Anwar al-Awlaki and his son,Adbulrahman, who were killed inseparate drone strikes in Yemen about three weeks apart. Abdulrahman, a16-year-old boy who was born in Denver, wasmurdered while eating dinner with his 17-year-old cousin, who was alsokilled in the missile strike.

The originalstory was that Abdulrahman was a “suspected militant,” and thus a “legitimate”target. He was actually a teenage boy frantically trying to find his father,whose name was on a roster of terrorist suspects who had been sentenced to summaryexecution by a secretive executive branch committee that answers to nobody.

As a result of a dispute involving a half-dozen cows, the Brossart family found itself treatedas if they were terrorists. The CBP’s drone fleet is described by the agency as acounter-terrorism asset. For the act “brandishing” legally owned rifles in thepresence of armed sheriff’s deputies, the three Brossart sons have been chargedwith “terrorizing” law enforcement personnel -- fragile, timid creatures that they are. Most significantly, however,the family had been enrolled on a roster of domestic terrorists – one compiled not bythe Obama administration, but rather by the quasi-private Stasi calling itselfthe SouthernPoverty Law Center (SPLC).

According to the SPLC,Brossart’s family received special attention because Sheriff Janke “knew theBrossarts were followers of another Lakota resident, Roger Elvick, one of theoriginal gurus of the bizarre but remarkably resilient sovereign citizensmovement.”
For the past several years, theSPLC has been indoctrinating local law enforcement agencies in the belief thatthe sovereign citizens movement – and, for that matter, the entire “radicalRight,” a label the SPLC applies to anyone more conservative than Hugo Chavez –is an undifferentiated mass of menace and a particular threat to lawenforcement. This campaign is perfectly calibrated to play on the fears ofpolice, for whom there is no higher priority than “officer safety.”

Little of consequence wouldresult if the SPLC were simply a private pressure group. However, theorganization seamlessly interfaces with a number of government agencies,including the State and Local Anti-Terrorism Training(SLATT) program, which is funded through the Justice Department’s Bureau ofJustice Assistance. National and regional law enforcement seminars havebeen used to cultivate alarm among police officers regarding the supposedlyall-encompassing terrorist threat posed by domestic “extremists.”

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

“We’re trying to reach out tothe family to get them to surrender,” Janke told the publication. “It’s notcommon for people to brandish weapons against law enforcement, and to have themall be family members is unique. [It tells me] they’re up to something, they’replanning something, they have some different beliefs…. We’re meeting with ateam of experts to find out the best possible way to resolve this.”

Janke’sbelief that the Brossarts were “planning” something sinister proved to be entirelyunfounded. In November, months after the family had refused to attend an August26 preliminary hearing, RodneyBrossart and his son Jacob – both of whom were unarmed – were arrested while finishingthe fall harvest. Alex and Thomas, along with their sister Abby, were arrested“without incident” at the family’s home.

During what the local media –which dutifully regurgitated a porridge of alarmist sound-bites it had been fedby the SPLC – called the “stand-off,” Brossart gave one brief interview inwhich he insisted that his family were not “violent people.” Janke, on theother hand, did his best to depict the family as a menace to the public.

“We have been able to associatethem with an individual that has served time in the State Pen that is givingthem advice,” the Sheriffclaimed in a September 13 interview, referring to Elvick. By that time, Elvick– who had briefly lived in an apartment in Lakota – had apparentlydeparted for California. But his geographic proximity to the Brossarts wasapparently enough for the latter to be “associated” with the ex-convict, andthus tainted as potential domestic terrorists.

This concept of being “associated”with a suspected terrorist is impressively elastic and immensely dangerous.Section 1031 of the proposed National Defense Authorization Act (NADA), whichprovides for indefinite military detention of suspectedterrorists, permits the military to target anyone the Federal governmentdecides is “associated” with an identified terrorist threat.

“Is a terrorist under this lawnecessarily a member of al-Qaeda or the Taliban?” asksthe estimable Matt Taibbi of RollingStone in his analysis of the NADA. “Or is it merely someone who is `engagedin hostilities against the United States’? Here’s where I think we’re in verydangerous territory. We have two very different but similarly large protestmovements going on right now in the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement. What ifone of them is linked to a violent act? What if a bomb goes off in a police stationin Oakland, or an IRS office in Texas? What if the FBI then linked those actsto Occupy or the Tea Party?”

Where Sheriff Janke wasconcerned, a potential terrorist was anyone he could “associate” with anex-convict described by the SPLC as a guru of the “sovereign citizens”movement. He also alluded to the “history we’ve had with the family over time” asa cause for concern.

In 1996, Rodney Brossart was chargedwith violating a state land use ordinance by plowing and seeding a section lineon his own property. Although he was found guilty on that charge, the verdict wasoverturned by the state Supreme Court. This episode was one of severalinstances in which the Brossarts have come into conflict with the CountySheriff’s Office.

Five years ago, Brossart wascharged with disorderly conduct and “Preventing Arrest” after shouting atsheriff’s deputies and “tensing his arm” when one of them laid hands on him totake him into custody. He was acquitted on the first charge, and found guiltyof the second. That case was likewise appealed to the state Supreme Court.

Citing facts that were uncontested at trial, a brief filed onBrossart’s behalf notes that he “did not at any time threaten the officers,or become physically aggressive toward them. At worst, he simply did not complywith their unlawful orders when they attempted to arrest him.”

“Brossart did not take anyaggressive stance, did not swing, or attempt to strike the officers in any way,”continues the brief. “He was simply verbally combative, and uncooperative.”

Thedeputies, on the other hand, employed what can reasonably be described as excessiveforce by throwing him to the ground and employing “the mandibular anglepressure point technique upon him” – a pain compliance technique in which the thumb is placed at thehinge of the jaw below the right ear.

North Dakota law (Section12.1-05-07 of the Century Code) recognizes the right of an individual to resistunlawful arrest and excessive force, observes the brief:

“When faced with a man who wasnot physically aggressive, and was simply verbally loud and angry, anduncooperative, it was unnecessary for both officers to slam him to into theground, and use the mandibular angle pressure point upon him to effectuate anillegal arrest. Brossart was then within his rights to resist the unlawful andexcessive force used in the arrest by the officers.”

Thus the troubled “history” towhich Janke refers is one in which a family living on a small farm in ruralNorth Dakota has been repeatedly abused under color of official “authority,”and have chosen to pursue their grievances through the courts, rather thanthrough armed violence. They have endured years of what they regard asharassment and surveillance by law enforcement personnel: During the “standoff”this fall, one Lakota resident told a local television station that “when RodneyBrossart used to attend school board meetings there was always a police officerpresent.” As a result, the family decided to home-school the younger children.

The Brossarts may well beeccentric or even misguided. They might be regarded by some as poor neighbors. Butonly those with a unique gift for dishonesty – and a large measure of cravenness– could depict them as a Predator-worthy menace. The SPLC is amply endowed withthe former, and Sheriff Janke’s department apparently boasts a large measure ofthe latter.

As a result, we’ve seen thefirst test run of the vertically integrated Homeland Security State, in which yourfriendly local sheriff or police chief, using hit lists compiled by the SPLC,can call in the drones to help round up anybody he considers to be potentiallytroublesome.

Thank you so much!

I am deeply grateful to everyone who has responded so generously to the appeal at the end of my last installment. Over the next few days I will extend personal thanks to each of you. This means more to me and my family than I can adequately express. God bless you.

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The Right to Resist: Will Michigan Repeal the "Rapist Doctrine"?

2011-12-06T12:39:00.001-07:00

“Don’tresist – you’ll just make it worse.”

Untilrecently, the only people expected to make that demand of their innocent victimswere rapists and police officers. Fortunately, women are no longer expected tosubmit to sexual assault, but rather to fight back by whatever means are available– unless the assailant is one of the State’s costumed enforcers, in which caseresisting sexual assault would be a felony.

Thisadmission was pried from Gregory J. Babbitt, assistant prosecuting attorney forMichigan’s Ottawa County, during the October 4 oralargument before the state supreme court in the case of People v. Moreno. At issue in that case is the question of whether a citizenhas a legally protected right to resist an unlawful search or unjustifiedarrest by a police officer.

Ina colloquy with Babbitt, associate justice MichaelCavanaugh described a scenario in which a woman in police custodywas sexually assaulted during a body search. In that situation, Cavanaughinquired, could the victim be charged under the State’s “resisting andobstructing” statute?

“Technically,you could do that,” Babbitt grudgingly replied, while insisting that “as aprosecutor, I wouldn’t do that.” Rather than putting up physical resistance andthereby risking criminal prosecution, the victim should simply endure the assaultand then file a civil complaint after the fact. That approach, of course, would most likely result in asettlement that protects the offender at the expense of the local tax victimpopulation.

Ifcitizens have no right to resist illegal violations of their property andpersons by the police, “What is left of the Fourth Amendment?” one of thejudges asked Babbitt.

“Well,life isn’t perfect,” Babbitt replied with a shrug – which to people of his ilkmeans that in any conflict between individual liberty and institutionalizedpower, it is the former that must yield. Otherwise, mere Mundanes “will be ableto make the determination as to whether the police officers [are] actingproperly or not,” he said, his voice freighted with horror over the prospect. “Wecan’t have individuals ... making that decision in the heat of the moment.”

Ofcourse, that is precisely what Babbitt insisted must be done – as long as the “individuals”in question are emissaries of the State. That claim iscomplicated by the fact that Michigan’s self-defense act explicitly recognizesthe right to use appropriate defensive force to prevent the “imminent unlawfuluse of force by another individual” – without limiting the application of thatright to aggression committed by private citizens.

Furthermore,as the Michigan Court of Appeals recognized in a 1999 ruling (People v. Wess), the statute -- as it read atthe time -- expressly recognized the individual right "to use such reasonableforce as is necessary to prevent an illegal attachment and to resist an illegalarrest."

In the dicta of that ruling the court pleaded with thelegislature to change the law:

"Weshare the concerns of other jurisdictions that the right to resist an illegalarrest is an outmoded and dangerous doctrine, and we urge our Supreme Court toreconsider this doctrine at the first available opportunity.... [W]e see nobenefit to continuing the right to resist an otherwise peaceful arrest made bya law enforcement officer, merely because the arrestee believes the arrest isillegal. Given modern procedural safeguards for criminal defendants, the`right' only preserves the possibility that harm will come to the arrestingofficer or the defendant."

Ofcourse, there is no such thing as a “peaceable arrest.” Forcible detention is aviolent act, as is an armed invasion of one’s property. Like similar measuresprotecting the common law right to resist arrest, Michigan’s SDA recognized thereis no moral reason why a police officer’s judgment that a search or arrest is “legal”is any sounder or more authoritative than that of any other citizen.

However,the Michigan state legislature – prompted by theCourt of Appeals -- modified the relevant section of the state code (MCL705.81d) by removing the clause recognizing the common law right to prevent anunlawful arrest (that is, an armed kidnapping) by a police officer.

Thiscreated a potential conflict between the SDA and the state’s resisting andobstructing statute – and that conflict came to a head threeyears ago when two Holland, Michigan police officers attempted to searchthe home of Angel Moreno without a warrant.

OnDecember 30, 2008, Officers Matthew Hamberg and Troy DeWeis knocked on Moreno’sdoor while searching for an individual suspected of violating probation. Morenomade the mistake of speaking with Hamberg through an open door, thereby giving the policeman an opportunity to say that he detected the odor of marijuana (even though DeWeis did not).

WhenMoreno refused to consent to a search, Hamberg said that he would get a warrant– and then lied by saying that it was necessary for him to enter the house inorder to “secure” it.

To his credit, Moreno told Hamberg to get off his porch,and began to close the door. Hamberg bulled his way into the house, instigatinga brief scuffle that ended when Hamberg told his companionto attack the victim with his Taser. (Had DeWeis acted as the law requires, rather than out of tribal loyalty to his State-licensed gang, he would have intervened to prevent the invasion of Moreno's home.) Although a trivial amount of marijuana wasfound, no drug-related charges were filed. For trying to resist a patently illegalhome invasion, Moreno charged with felonious assault on a police officer.

TheState admits that Hamberg’s search was “unlawful,” which means that he was actingas an armed, violent intruder, rather than as a peace officer. This means thatMoreno had a legally recognized right to employ deadly force, if necessary, todefend himself and his home. As the Michigan State Supreme Court acknowledgedin People v. Riddle (2002), “regardlessof the circumstances one who is attacked in his dwelling is never required toretreat where it is otherwise necessary to exercise deadly force inself-defense. When a person is in his `castle,’ there is no safer place toretreat….”

Michigancourts have been predictably reluctant to apply that principle to the mostviolent segment of society – the State’s armed enforcement caste.

Ina 2004 ruling (People v. Ventura) dealing with the right toresist an unlawful arrest, the same Michigan Court of Appeals, which had badgeredthe state legislature to modify the SDA, cited that modification as a positivestatement of legislative intent. In a transcendently cynical passage, the courtwrote that "it is not within our province to disturb our Legislature'sobvious affirmative choice to modify the traditional common-law rule that aperson may resist an unlawful arrest."

The same court had previously neglected to show such pious respect for the "Legislature's obvious affirmative choice" in explicitly protecting the right to resist arrest. However, under state precedents more than a century old, the Michigan legislature cannot tacitly repudiate a common law right. As Justice Brian K. Zahra noted during the oral arguments, the legislature is required to make an "express abrogation" of protection for a common law right.

Duringhis presentation before the court, Babbitt -- in the mistaken belief that he had precedent on his side -- repeatedly insistedthat deletion of the passage recognizing the right to resist arrest was materially equivalent to formal abrogation of that common law right. This was dictated by the “modernview" of the matter, which is that “we don’t want violence between the citizens and thepolice.”

Indeed:The modern – which is to say, Leninist – view is that all violent encountersbetween citizens and agents of the State should be one-sided affairs, with thelatter entitled to exercise “power without limit, resting directly on force”and the latter required to endure whatever is inflicted on them.

Remarkably,Babbitt’s argument was met with withering skepticism by several members of thecourt. Among them was ChiefJustice Robert P. Young, Jr., who asked Babbitt what “textual” supportexisted for the proposition that the legislature had abrogated the common lawright to resist arrest.

“Ican’t answer that question, because it doesn’t say `We are abrogating the commonlaw right to use self-defense,'” Babbitt replied, perspiration condensing on hisbrow as he realized where the conversation was headed.

“Ithink you answered it, then,” Young replied, thereby -- one imagines -- causing that trickle offlop sweat to become a torrent. “Don’t you lose if you can’t answer thatquestion?”

Babbitt was allowed a briefinterval in which to dither and dissimulate before Young summarized the matterwith brutal concision:

“I’mposing a very simple question to you, the answer to which, I think, isdispositive: If the arrest is unlawful, if the intrusion is unlawful, and aphysical melee ensues because of the resistance of the resident, under thecommon law rule, he can do that…. You don’t win [the case] unless you canpersuade us that the [statute under which] he was charged abrogates the commonlaw rule. Tell me why, when the text is silent on the common law rule, youstill win.”

Atthat point, Babbitt must have understood – but could hardly be expected toadmit – that as a matter of both common and statutory law, the “rapist doctrine”is indefensible.

It’s quite possible, perhaps even likely, that the statesupreme court will contrive some way to preserve that doctrine. If the court’sruling in State v. Moreno vindicatesthe right of citizens to resist unlawful police violence, the state legislaturewill be tag-teamed by prosecutors and police unions demanding an explicitrepudiation of that common law right.

Butwhat if the Michigan State Supreme Court definitively rejects the "rapist doctrine" -- and the state legislature doeslikewise?

A special request

First of all, I want to thank everyone who has donated generously to keep this site up and running. If there is anyone who has yet to receive a promised copy of Global Gun Grab, please let me know (WNGrigg [at] msn [dot]com).

When friends ask me if I'm working, I -- like may others, I'll wager -- answer: "Sure, I've got the `working' thing nailed cold, it's the `getting paid' part of the deal that has proven elusive."

Over the past couple of months I've been working with Republic magazine (please check out the website), a very worthwhile publication that, to be candid, doesn't pay well -- enough to pay the rent, but not enough to support a family of eight.

Christmas is terrifyingly close, but the end of our available financial resources is even closer. If even a portion of those of you kind enough to read my blog could pitch in a couple of dollars, I would be eternally grateful. Thank you, once again, for your kindness.

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Dum spiro, pugno!

The Making of a Prison Society

2011-11-28T01:46:00.001-07:00

"That's why you shouldn't bring kids to protests."

This taunt, which issued from the sneering lips of anarmored riot policeman, struck Don Joughin with the force of a billyclub as hetried to comfort his children – a three-year-old and a newborn – after they hadbeen showered with a chemical agent by a riot policeman.

That assault did not take place during any of the recent “Occupy”-inspiredprotests. It occurred in August 2002, during a fundraising visit by then-PresidentGeorge W. Bush to Portland, Oregon.

In keeping with then-recently established “security”protocols, local police were deployed in riot gear to keepdemonstrators confined inside "free speech zones" located severalblocks away from the motorcade route. Joughin, who was accompanied by his wifeand three children, was present when police unleashed a pepper-spray fusilladeagainst a small group of protesters who had taken a few steps outside thedesignated protest zone.

After the police attack began, Joughin and his family attempted toleave, but found themselves penned in. Acting on the tragically innocentassumption that the police were present in order to keep the peace, Joughinpolitely asked the officer obstructing an exit how he and his family couldleave the turbulent intersection. "He pointed and said to exit to the[northeast], into the spraying police opposite him," Joughin recalled.

Don Joughin comforts his son after the infant suffered a pepper spray assault by a Portland cop.

With his family in danger of being trampled by protesters fleeing the chemical barrage, Joughin asked the officer to let him and hisfamily through. "He looked at me, and drew out his can from his hip andsprayed directly at me," Joughin recalled. He didn't bear the bruntof that criminal assault, but his three-year-old caught some of the blast. Theassailant then turned on Joughin's wife and the infant "and doused both oftheir heads entirely from a distance of less than three feet," Joughin testified.

As his children were screaming in agony, Joughin pleaded with the cops to allowhim and his family to leave and seek help. They responded by closing ranks andblocking the Joughin family's escape. They didn't relent until someone in"authority" gave them permission to set them free. The last thingJoughin and his traumatized family heard as they left the scene was thesadistic taunt hurled by one of the tax-devouring thugs who had assaulted the children with a chemical weapon.

While millions of Americans have been horrified by recent incidents of armored police officers beating and pepper-spraying unarmed,unresisting protesters, those nauseating spectacles are neither novel norparticularly rare. In “SecuritizingAmerica: Strategic Incapacitation and the Policing of Protest Since the 11September 2001 Terrorist Attacks,” a heavily sourced paper recentlypublished in the journal SociologyCompass, Patrick F. Gillham of theUniversity of Idaho observes that current police doctrine dictates that publicprotests are to be treated as “security threats,” and dealt with using methodsinspired by “a new penology philosophy.”

From that perspective, every public demonstration -- however peaceful and orderly it might be -- is to be treatedas the equivalent of a prison riot. This means that police are free to employevery available means – pre-event surveillance, pre-emptive arrest,hostage-taking, and the use of incapacitating “less-lethal” weaponry – in orderto “neutralize” people suspected of being “disruptive” elements.

Illegal mass arrest in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Under the “strategic incapacitation” model, Gillham notes, “policeoften refuse to communicate at all with possible or actual transgressiveprotesters except to issue commands onceprotest events have already begun.” (Emphasis added.) It’s not enough toconfine protest to “free-speech zones”; the right to assemble itself is subject tomodification or revocation without prior notice – even in the absence of disorderlybehavior on the part of the protesters.

Typically, phalanxes of riot police will appear and slowlyherd protesters into a confined area. An announcement will be made that thedemonstration has been designated an “unlawful assembly,” and shortlythereafter the attack will begin, typically culminating with either massarrests, needless injuries, or some combination thereof.

A September 2001 anti-war protest in Washington, D.C.offered the first opportunity to field-test this approach. A small group ofanarchists were driven into an improvised holding area by riot police, wherethey were literally held as hostages: “After 2 hours of detention, policeconveyed the terms under which protesters would be released to a neutral thirdparty of legal observers and not to the detained protesters.”

Two years later, during the Free Trade Area of the Americassummit in Miami, “police not only pre-emptively arrested perceivedtransgressive protesters, they also arrested scores of union members andstudent activists walking to permitted events, as well as credentialed reportersand curious bystanders,” recalls Gillham. Most of those arrested had not beenordered to disperse, and had violated no law – including a draconiananti-assembly law that had been enacted by the city government just days priorto the summit. In addition, Gillham observes, “Bails were set high as a furtherway to keep those arrested off the streets.”

The same approach was used at both the Republican andDemocratic national conventions in 2008. In one particularly memorableapplication, 284 people were arrested at a public park in St. Paul, Minnesota onLabor Day 2008 during the Republican Convention. A huge contingent of riotpolice – supplemented by the NationalGuard’s JTF-RNC, and equipped with chemical munitions and gas masks -- cutoff access to the park, which was bordered on one side by train tracks and theother by a river. This turned the park, however temporarily, into ahuge open-air detention center.

An amplified version of the same tactics was employed bypolice in Pittsburgh when the 2009 G-20 summit brought the crème de la scum ofthe world’s criminal class to that city.

As helicopters plied the night air and serried rows ofarmored riot police assembled, a robotic voice announced:“By order of the chief of police, this has been declared an unlawful assembly.I order all those assembled to immediately disperse. You must leave theimmediate vicinity. If you do not disperse, you may be subject to arrest,and/or other police action” – the latter being a euphemism for summarypunishment through “the use of riot control agents and/or less lethalmunitions.”

Once again, protesters were ordered to leave, and threatenedwith severe reprisals if they didn’t – only to find that the police already hadthem surrounded and were determined to arrest and assault at least some ofthem.

Those crackdowns, in keeping with the “strategic incapacitation”doctrine, were not employed in response to criminal violence, or to deal withany impending threat of the same. Gillham points out that under the newapproach “arrests are selectively applied to neutralize known or suspectedtransgressive actors often times before any crimes are committed.”

The same is true of aggressive violence employed by riotpolice, notes Gillham: “Less-lethal weapons such as tear gas, pepper spray,Tasers, rubber bullets, wooden missiles and bean bag rounds are now the weaponsof choice…. Evidence suggests that police use these weapons as a means totemporarily incapacitate potentially disruptive protesters and repel othersaway from areas police are trying to defend such as entrances and exits tosecured zones.”

Of course, once the riot police appear and the decree goesforth that a given protest is an “unlawful assembly,” the protest area itselfis designated a “secure zone,” and those within it can only leave with thepermission of their captors.

Thugswarm: Riot police assault female student in Pittsburgh.

All of this is manifestly the product of a military mind-set– one better suited to a military prison camp than a battlefield. The behaviorof domestic police in dealing with political demonstrations is nearly identicalto that of specialized “Immediate Reaction” forces (IRFs) deployed in militaryprisons such as those at Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Air Force Base inAfghanistan.

In his memoir, FiveYears of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo, Turkish national MuratKurnaz – who was kidnapped by Pakistani bounty hunters and sold into U.S.custody for $3,000 – describes his captivity in Gitmo (as well as Bagram) as a supposed “unlawful combatant." Any violation of the arbitrary -- and ever-changing-- rules of prisoner conduct provoked an attack by the IRF, a unit consistingof "five to eight soldiers with plastic shields, breastplates,hard-plastic knee-, elbow-, and shoulder-protectors, helmets with plasticvisors, gloves with hard-plastic knuckles, heavy boots, and billyclubs."In other words, they were accoutered exactly like the domestic riot police whohave become such a familiar presence in recent weeks.

Breaking a rule wasn’t a prerequisite for a visit from the IRF. The team wouldbe summoned to inflict punishment for any act of defiance -- such as an insult hurled at an abusive guard, or even an attemptto exercise. Typically the IRF would soften up the target by infusing the cell witha liberal dose of Megyn Kelly’s much-discussed “food product” – weaponized capsaicin.Once the prisoner had been left entirely incapacitated, the IRT would swarm himto deliver a beating.

Former military interrogator Erik Saar provides a parallel accountin his remorseful memoir, Inside the Wire.

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

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

Nearly identical tactics were used at “CampGreyhound” in New Orleans, an improvised jail modeled after Gitmo and operatedby FEMA in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Among those imprisoned there wasSyrian-American businessman Abdulrahman Zeitoun, who was seized in his own homeby National Guardsmen, imprisoned on unspecified charges, and escaped with hislife only because of the providential intervention of a Christian clergyman whohappened to visit his cell after Zeitoun had been transferred to the Elayn Hunt CorrectionalCenter.

For Zeitoun and the other prisoners, the Camp Greyhoundexperience was one of tedium punctuated by sheer terror. The guards exploitedany excuse to inflict exemplary "discipline" on the detainees, mostof whom had been arrested for violating curfew or similar petty matters.

"Always the procedure was the same," recalled DavidEggers in his book Zeitoun;"a prisoner would be removed from his cage and dragged to the groundnearby, in full view of the rest of the prisoners. His hands and feet would betied, and then, sometimes with a guard's knee on his back, he would be sprayeddirectly in the face" with pepper spray. "If the prisoner protested,"continued Eggers, "the knee would dig deeper into his back. The sprayingwould continue until his spirit was broken. Then he would be doused with [a]bucket and returned to his cage."

The victims of this pointless and whimsical cruelty included one disturbed manwith the intellectual and emotional capacity of a child who was"punished" because he displayed the irrepressible symptoms of mentalillness.

FEMA camp survivor: Abdulrahman Zeitoun with his family.

These ritual acts of sadism, Eggers observes, were "born of a combinationof opportunity, cruelty, ambivalence, and sport." They were intended totorment the other prisoners, most of whom -- like Zeitoun – were possessed ofmore decency than their captors and thus left sick with rage by the spectacleof helpless men being tortured.

"Under any normal circumstances [Zeitoun] would have leapt to the defenseof a man victimized as that man had been," observes Eggers. "But thathe had to watch, helpless, knowing how depraved it was -- this was punishmentfor the others, too. It diminished the humanity of them all."

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

After heroically subduing an unresisting man -- who by this time was dealingwith an infected foot and a mysterious kidney ailment -- the ERP tore apart thecell before forcing the victim to strip and submit to another body cavitysearch. By some oversight, the ERP neglected to use pepper spray on theinnocent and helpless man. All of the prisoner-control tactics used in Gitmo and "Camp Greyhound" have been employed against peaceful protesters in New York, Oakland, and elsewhere

Civil libertarians are understandably concerned about sections 1031 and 1032 of the proposedNational Defense Authorization Act, which would authorizethe indefinite military detention of Americans – including those seizedhere in the United States – who are suspected of terrorism. That abhorrentmeasure represents an enhancement of current policies and procedures, ratherthan an abrupt departure from them. Whether or not the Senate approves theNDAA, the people in charge of Regime Security already consider this country tobe one vast military prison, and are willing to act on that assumption wheneverthe opportunity presents itself.

Obiter Dicta

Anyone who has donated to Pro Libertate and is still awaiting a copy of Global Gun Grab, please contact me -- WNGrigg [at] msn[dot] com -- and I will get it to you as quickly as possible. Thank you for your generosity, and your patience.

Your donations are still very much needed, and deeply appreciated. Thank you!

Dum spiro, pugno!

Support Your Local Police State

2011-11-19T23:21:00.001-07:00

Heroic local police at work.

"Whichis better—to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away, or by threethousand tyrants not a mile away?" –

Attributed to Bostonphysician Mather Byles, 1770.

“Do you see this soldier in thischeckpoint?” Iraqi Wael al-Khafaji asked a Reutersreporter, pointing to a spot just a few feet from his Baghdad barbershop. “He can do whatever he wants to me right now and I can't say a word. Isthis democracy?”

Before the U.S. invasion, thisbusinessman – like millions of other Iraqis – was ruled by a distant dictatorwho had little direct influence on his life. Today, everything he does takesplace under the shadow cast by armed men who have given themselves permissionto brutalize or kill anybody who refuses to obey them.

For Mr. al-Khafaji, it makes nomaterial difference whether the checkpoint is manned by U.S. soldiers, StateDepartment-employed mercenaries, members of Saddam’s Republican Guard, orelements of a local sectarian militia. The problem is the presence of peoplewho claim the right to use aggressive violence to force him to submit to theirwill. The problem is not one of geography or affiliation; it is a matter ofinstitutionalized immorality.

Americans who supported the Iraqwar would be scandalized by Mr. al-Khajafi’s ingratitude. They would be wise toponder his insight while examining the extent to which our own country isbecoming a garrison state. They would also do well to emulate his habit oflooking with acute suspicion – and no small measure of resentment – on theoddly dressed armed men who presume to exercise authority over us.

Democracy is the art of inducingvictims of government power to focus on the question of who controls the government, rather than what it does. The same can be said of the perspective encapsulatedin the slogan “Support Your Local Police” (SYLP).

As sociologist David Bayleypointed out, “The police are to the government as the edge is to the knife.” The police are an implement of coercion wielded by the political class, whether they are operationally under the controlof Washington, D.C. or City Hall.

From the SYLP perspective, the police and the “criminaljustice” system they serve exist to protect life and property against criminalviolence and fraud. If this were true, it would follow that most of thosearrested and punished would be found guilty of crimes against person andproperty.

According to the most recent available statistics regardingincarceration, however, people convicted of actual crimes compose a very smallminority of America’svast and growing federal prison population. As of 2009, crimes ofviolence accounted for roughly eight percent of that total, and property crimescontributed a bit less than six percent. More than half of all inmates wereconvicted of non-violent drug offenses, and thirty-five percent were caged forwhat are called “public order” offenses.

Libertarian activist Michael Suede points out that eighty-sixpercent of all federal inmates were punished for what are called “victimlesscrimes” – that is to say, offenses not properly described as crimesat all. It is reasonable to assume that similar trends exist at the state andlocal level as well.

There are instances in which police act in defense ofpersons and property. Those are genuinely exceptional, because rendering thatservice is not part of their formal job description: The Supreme Court hasrepeatedly ruled thatpolice have no enforceable duty to protect individual rights. This helpsexplain why, aseconomist Robert Higgs pointed out roughly a decade ago,“there are three times as many private policemen as there are public ones.”

In choosing to pay for private security assistance,Americans freely spend more than twice the amount stolen from us each year topay for the government’s armed enforcement caste. This is because thegovernment that takes our money fails to provide the promised social good –protection of life and property.

Writing nearly a century ago, when our contemporary policestate was in its infancy, theimmortal H.L. Mencken protested that the government supposedly protectinghim was actually the most rapacious and tenacious enemy of liberty and personalsecurity. While it is possible for the typical American to repel the aggressionof private criminals, “he can no more escape the tax-gatherer and thepolicemen, in all their protean and multitudinous guises, than he can escapethe ultimate mortician. They beset him constantly, day in and day out…. Theyinvade his liberty, affront his dignity, and greatly incommode his search forhappiness, and every year they demand and wrest from him a larger and largershare of his worldly goods.”

The one refinement we can make to this otherwise flawlesspolemical gem is to note that the terms “tax-gatherer” and “policeman” arefunctional synonyms. Both offices exist to extract wealth from the productiveat gunpoint on behalf of the political class. The only substantive differencebetween them is that the latter are granted slightly wider latitude ininflicting aggressive violence, and equipped to do so.

As Carl Watner pointed out in “Call the COPS – But Notthe Police,” a seminal 2004 essay published by The Voluntaryist, gathering taxes has been acore police function since the institution was first imposed on theAnglo-Saxons following the Norman Conquest. The feudal order implemented byWilliam the Conqueror was built upon the “frankpledge,”which was the institutional foundation for a a police system designed tocollect revenue for the monarch.

The Anglo-Saxon tribes had provided security throughkinship-based groups called “tithes” and “hundreds,” who defended cattle herdsand other property and acted as posses to apprehend thieves. Anglo-Saxon courtsemphasized restitution, with any punitive damages being used to compensatevolunteers who had tracked down the offenders. Under the frankpledge, however,the “justice” system diverted all revenues into the king’s treasury.

Royal courts worked tirelessly to expand the king’sjurisdiction, which was enforced by royal appointees called shire-reeves (fromwhich the term “sheriff” is derived). Eventually, royal enactments criminalizedefforts by victims to seek private restitution; since such arrangementsdeprived the treasury of revenue, they were seen as a form of theft. Thisconcept of the “King’s Peace” could be considered the distant but recognizableancestor of the modern notion that the disembodied abstraction called “society”is a victim of criminal offenses – even those in which no individual has beeninjured.

A heavy residue of Anglo-Saxon tradition endured into the 18^thCentury. A French visitor to London in the mid-1700s was astounded when none ofthe local residents could direct him to the police – or even recognize theterm. “Good Lord! How can one expect order among these people, who have no sucha word as police in their language?” he exclaimed.

In fact, the term was familiar to educated 18^thCentury Britons, who – as historian Leon Radzinowicz points out – considered itto be “suggestive of terror and oppression.” A 1785 Police Bill proposed byWilliam Pitt the Younger shattered against an iron wall of opposition to whatwas regarded as a “dangerous innovation.” Until the second decade of the 19^thcentury, the British government’s ambition to create a standing police forcewas confined to its Irish colony, where its heavily armed Royal Constabularyfield-tested methods that would later be imported to the homeland.

The First Modern Police Chief: Fouche.

During the same period, Napoleon Bonaparte, the armedevangelist of the Jacobin revolution, created the first modern police force.Bonaparte’s ascent to power began with a brutal police action: The massacre of13 Vendemiaire (October 5, 1795), during which the young Corsican general used artilleryto slaughter Royalist protesters on the streets of Paris.

By 1812, writes David A. Bell in his book The First Total War, large areas ofEurope under Bonaparte’s rule were afflicted with “pervasive bureaucracy,particularly new agencies for tax collection and conscription…. To implementthe new order, there came new police forces, often staffed largely byFrenchmen.”

Presiding over this apparatus of regimentation, extraction, andcoercion was secret police Chief Joseph Fouche, the Jacobin fanatic whoprefigured Felix Dzherzhinsky.

Bonaparte’s star was in eclipse by 1814. However, as British historian Paul Johnsonobserved in his book TheBirth of the Modern, “the golden age of the political police” had justbegun. The Congress of Vienna gave birth to what one contemporary critic called“All sorts of wild schemes of establishing a general police all over Europe.”

At the same time, Robert Peel, the military governor ofIreland, introduced the so-called Peace Preservation Police, a centrallycontrolled paramilitary auxiliary to the 20,000-man military force garrisonedon the island. Peel explained that the force “was not meant to meet anytemporary emergency” but rather intended to become a permanent institution. In1829, Peel was England’s Home Secretary. With Parliament’s resistance at lowebb, Peel proposed the creation of the Metropolitan Police.

“The new police institution had many supporters ingovernment, but opposition was to be found in the wider society,” wrote Watnerin The Voluntaryist. “The fundamentalprinciples behind the force were seen as … anathema to Whig politicalprinciples, which emphasized `liberty over authority, the rights of the peopleagainst the prerogatives of the Crown, local accountability in place ofcentralization, and governance by the “natural”rulers of society instead of salaried, government-appointed bureaucrats.’”

Populistparliamentarian William Cobbett, an outspoken foe of “tax-eaters,” wasamong the fiercest critics of the Metropolitan Police, which he saw as thevanguard of a country-wide army of occupation.

“Tyranny always comes by slow degrees,” Cobbett declared inan 1833 speech in Parliament, “and nothing could tend to illustrate that fact[better] than the history of police in this country.” Less than a generationago, Cobbett pointed out, the very term “police” was “completely new among us.”Now, owing to Peel’s innovations, London was now overrun with “Blue Locusts” –“a police with numbered collars and embroidered cuffs, a body of men as regularas the King’s service, as fit for domestic war as the redcoats were for foreignwar.”

In 1783, the last of King George’s occupation troops wereevicted from New York. In 1844, New York City’s municipal government became thefirst in America to embrace Robert Peel’s system of paramilitary police. Thisamounted to exchanging Redcoats for “Blue Locusts.” Other major cities – New Orleansand Cincinnati in 1852, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago in 1855 -- soonfollowed. State police agencies began to appear in the last decade of the 19^thcentury, and first decades of the 20^th.

While those police agencies were locally controlled, theywere not servants of the public; they were instruments of the political classthat created them. On the western frontier, where political power was eitherradically decentralized or entirely theoretical, security for person andproperty was “protected by private policemen who were paid by – and, so,responsible to – the community where they served,” notes libertarian writer Wendy McElroy.

Unlike the European gendarmes and royal British “shire-reeves,” McElroy pointsout, “Western sheriffs did protectpeople and property; they did rescueschoolmarms and punish cattle rustlers. Their mission was to keep the peace bypreventing violence.”

Most importantly, in the Old West, sheriffs and marshalsdidn’t claim a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Thus when corruptsheriffs like Montana’s Henry Plummer or Idaho’s David Updike used their officeas cover to operate as “road agents” (horse thieves and highwaymen), theywere arrested, tried, and punished by private “committees of vigilance.”

The only legitimate role for apeace officer is to interpose himself on behalf of individuals threatened byaggressive violence. That is a role that can (and should) be carried out by anylaw-abiding individual – including instanceswhen the purveyor of aggressive violence is a police officer or other stateofficial.

In therecent nationally coordinated police crack-downs on “Occupy” protesters wehave seen the following scenario play out numeroustimes: Peaceful demonstrators confront riot police; individual riotpoliceman commits physical aggression against protester, then immediatelyescalates the conflict by using potentially lethal force; when the crowdreacts, the other police officers – rather than coming to the aid of the victim– form a protective barricade (I call it a “thugscrum”) around the assailant.

It is all but impossible to findan example of a police officer who interposed himself on behalf of the victimof criminal violence inflicted by a fellow officer. This isn’t surprising: Apoliceman can refuse to render aid to a crime victim without legal liability,and abuse innocent people without alienating his professional peers – but “going rogue” by interveningto prevent a criminal assault by another member of the punitive priesthoodis a career-killer. Former AustinPolice Officer Ramon Perez can supplythe details.

Anytime a police officer commits an act of aggressive violence he is engaged in a criminal assault. If his fellow officers won't intervene to stop him, law-abiding citizens have the moral authority to do so. But this simply won't do, tut-tuts the program manual for the national Support Your Local Police campaign:

"The local police are not your enemy. Your committee is not here to attack them, blame them for violating the Constitution or your civil liberties because they are enforcing a measure of the Patriot Act or conducting a joint Federal and State anti-terror drill. Those are federal issues, which the local police in some cases may have already have little to no say if they are to continue receiving their additional Homeland Security funds, new equipment and weaponry.... We urge all responsible citizens in this community to work with us to ...[s]upport our local police in the performance of their duties [and] oppose all harassment or interference with law enforcement personnel as they carry out their assigned tasks.... [We must accept] our responsibilities to our local police, to defend them against unjust attacks, make them proud and secure in their vital profession, and to offer them our support in word and deed wherever possible." (Emphasis added.)

Their "assigned task": Local Police grab guns in New Orleans.

It apparently didn't occur to the author of that passage that claiming citizens have "responsibilities to our local police" is to assume that the people exist to serve the government, rather than the reverse. Furthermore, it's pretty clear that from this perspective, the police have no reciprocal "responsibilities" to the citizenry.

Does that "responsibility" to defend the police and "make them proud" extend to supporting local police when they carry out lethal paramilitary raids, like the one that resulted in the murder of Jose Guerena? Would it include support for firearms confiscation of the sort carried out by local police (as well as National Guard personnel) in post-Katrina New Orleans?

At the very least it would mean refusing to interfere when an armored bully carries out his "assigned task" of brutally assaulting a helpless, unarmed citizen, rather than carrying out the moral duty to do whatever is feasible to prevent the crime or end the attack.

"When law and morality are in contradiction to each other," observed Frederic Bastiat, "the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing respect for the law -- two evils of equal magnitude...." The "Support Your Local Police" perspective undermines morality by enshrining unconditional support for the police -- who are, as SYLP admits, simply local affiliates of a nationalized Homeland Security system -- as a supposed civic duty.

No individual or institution has the moral right to use aggressive force. That principle applies not only to the Federal Leviathan, but to the loathsome little replicas of that vile beast found in every city, county, and state. Rather than helping to consolidate the existing police state, supporters of the rule of law should work to end their local government's monopoly on the police power -- with the ultimate objective of abolishing it outright.

Your donations to help keep Pro Libertate on-line are indispensable -- and greatly appreciated. Thank you so much!

Dum spiro, pugno!

Where Justice Goes to Die

2011-11-11T01:34:00.001-07:00

Federal Court is in session.

Ten years ago, a 21-year-old woman named Tonya Hart was shotto death in a Moscow, Idaho trailer court. Two years later, a local man named David J. Meisner, whoconfessed to the crime during a recorded police interrogation, was convicted ofmurder and sentenced to life in prison. Last month, the Idaho State SupremeCourt ruled that trial judge John Stegner committed a reversible error when herefused to allow the defense to present evidence that someone else might havepulled the trigger on the gun used to kill Miss Hart.

Anew trial for Meisner is currently underway in Moscow. The prosecution hasfinished presenting evidence, and the defense is expected to take at least twoweeks presenting its case. The first witness summoned to testify on Meisner’sbehalf is Dr. Richard Ofshe, an emeritus professor at the University ofCalifornia-Berkley, a nationally respected expert in the field of falseconfessions.

The taped confession is the central piece ofevidence against Meisner in what the prosecutioncharacterizes as a case of “murder for hire.”

Hart’s ex-boyfriend, Jesse Linderman,supposedly offered to pay Meisner $1,000 to murder the young woman, with a $100bonus if the killing took place before Christmas. Thecharges against Linderman were dropped for a lack of evidence. As the statesupreme court noted, the only evidence tying Linderman to the crime wasMeisner’s disputed confession.

During the trial, Judge Stegner refused to permit thedefense to present evidence that a man named Lane Thomas, who had repeatedlyconfessed to the murder, was the individual who had shot Miss Hart. Stegner didn’texplain why Meisner’s confession was uniquely credible. The Idaho Supreme Courtruled that by granting the prosecution’s motion to exclude Thomas’sconfessions, Judge Stegner had violated Meisner’s right to present a defense,as protected by the Sixth Amendment.

In this “murder for hire” case, the supposed triggerman wasconvicted on the basis of a confession that was considered inadequate toestablish the guilt of the alleged instigator of the plot. However, in the newtrial the defense will have be permitted adequate time to present its case;this includes testimony from expert witnesses like Dr. Ofshe.

The Tonya Hart murder case is practically a photographicnegative of another high-profile murder for hire case from northern Idaho: The supposedplot by attorney Edgar Steele to hire a handyman named Larry Fairfax to murderhis wife Cyndi by planting a pipe bomb on her SUV.

In the latter case, however, the confessed bomber, who actedas a “cooperating informant” with the FBI, was sentenced to a mere 27 months inwhat amounts to a halfway house for possession of an unregistered firearm. Mr.Steele, a 66-year-old man who has survived prostate cancer and a nearly fatalcoronary aneurysm, was sentenced on November 9 to 50 years in federal prison. While Meisner wasn't permitted to mount a defense in his original trial, the re-trial offers him a chance to exercise that right. Steele will most likely die in prison before he is afforded a similar opportunity.

Edgar Steele, who describes himself as the "attorney to the damned," has made a career out of defending reviled clients, such as the Aryan Nation. His political views and professional associations have made him a widely reviled figure -- but they do nothing to establish his guilt. The same is true of the supposition-rich and substance-poor case presented against him in court.

The prosecution’s case against Steele depended entirely ontwo mutually dependent pieces of defective evidence. The first was theaccusation of the confessed bomber, Fairfax, who was accused by Steele and hisfamily of stealing a large quantity of silver and then framing thecontroversial lawyer in order to conceal his crime. The second piece ofevidence was a third-generation copy of a digital recording made by the FBI ofa conversation in which Steele and Fairfax supposedly discussed the plan tokill Cyndi.

Fairfax’s guilt is demonstrated by a huge volume of physicalevidence, including the defective pipe bomb whose existence he concealed fromthe FBI until it was discovered on the undercarriage of Cyndi’s vehicle duringan oil change. Absent the recorded conversation between Fairfax and Steele onJune 9, 2010, the murder for hire case against Steele would disintegrate.

Prior to the trial, the FBI recording was examined by Dr. George Papcun, a forensic scientist who has advisednumerous law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Dr. Papcun discernedhundreds of “transients” and other anomalies in the pre-trial version of theFBI recording. He concluded that there was “a reasonable degree of scientificprobability that [the recordings] do not represent a true and validrepresentation of reality and they are unreliable.”

Winmill (l.), seen here, appropriately, with a Soviet-era Russian Judge.

This expertassessment would have been devastating to the prosecution. This is probably whyJudge Winmill, during Steele’sSovietesque trial in federal court last May, exerted himself to prevent it from being shared with thejury.

At the time of the trial, Dr. Papcun was vacationing in Bora Bora. On May2, Winmill ruled that Papcun would be permitted to offer testimony by way of avideo teleconference at a U.S. Consulate the following day.

That ruling causedTraci Whelan, the federal commissarina presiding over the prosecution, to stompoff into a corner, stick out her lower lip, and began to sniffle. Winmill – whoeither believes in mysticalbilocation, or (more likely) subscribes to a totalitarian view of the law-- reversed himself, ruling that Papcun had to be present in the Boise courtroomno later than 8:30 a.m. on May 4.

This wasn’t the end of Winmill’s corruptsolicitude for the prosecution. The Judge also permitted Whelan and her comrades topresent the videotaped and translated testimony of a Ukrainian woman namedTatyana Loginova, who claimed that Steele was conducting an online affairwith her. Steele maintained that his online conversations with Loginova – who advertisedherself as a mail-order bride -- were research for a book about internationalsex trafficking. Implausible though that account might seem to some people, itwas validated by Steele’s friends and family – including his wife Cyndi, whohas loudly and consistently protested that her husband is innocent.

Lying by headline: The "victim" is alive, and supports her husband.

Cyndi’s role – indeed, her very presence – underscores the mostcritical contrast with the Tonya Hart murder. In the Edgar Steele case, the “victim”is alive and well. Indeed, there is no victim, at least as that term was usedby the prosecution.

“We have a great marriage,” Cyndi Steele told Winmill duringthe sentencing hearing. “I am not a victim of my husband because my husband didnothing wrong. I am a victim of the government.”

When it was announced that Edgar Steele’s murder-for-hiretrial in Boise would be heard by Judge Winmill, informedcourt-watchers in Idaho knew that the proceedings would be a show trial – a spectaclescripted by Franz Kafka and directed by Andrei Vyshinsky. Lynn Winmill’s courtroom is where justicegoes to die. The family of the late Verl Jones, who owned a family ranch nearthe Montana border, can testify that his description is untainted by hyperbole.

For many years, Judge Winmill has been a stalwart ally ofthe Western Watersheds Project (WWP), a foundation-funded radical environmentalgroup that has played a key role in the eco-Jihad against property rights inIdaho. WWP has filed several lawsuits intended to shut down human use of landsthat – in defiance of the Constitution – are owned and controlled by thefederal government.

Writing in the Spring 2008 issue of Range magazine, StateRepresentative Judy Boyle described Winmill as the “WWP’s sugar daddy who veryseldom rules against them, often incorporating pieces of WWP’s briefs tojustify his decisions.” In fact, when the WWP files a claim under theEndangered Species Act, Winmill generally won’t even require the group topresent evidence before ruling in its favor.

This was what happened in the case of Mr. Jones, who wassued by WWP in 2001 over an irrigation ditch he had dug forty years earlier.Exercising his federally recognized right to use water from Otter Creek, Jonesdug the ditch on his own property to grow hay. The WWP claimed that the diversion of water harmed the endangered bulltrout, despite the fact that none existed in Otter Creek. Without requiring theWWP to show evidence to support its claims, Winmill ordered Jones to stopirrigating his hay fields, and to pay the WWP’s legal fees.

"I'm a victim of the government": Cyndi Steele.

The requirements imposed by Winmill on the 85-year-old Joneswere akin to Pharaoh’s spiteful order that the Hebrew slaves be required tomake bricks without straw.

The loss of Jones’s hay crop threw the ranch into afatal economic tailspin. Unmoved by the rancher’s plight, Winmill ordered himto provide the WWP with a list of all his assets, which the eco-radical groupsold in order to pay its court costs. The stress and frustration literallykilled the elderly rancher.

Seattle-based litigator Russell Brooks of the Pacific LegalFoundation took the case before the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals,which overturned Winmill’s decision.

“The 9^th Circuit judges ruled thatactual evidence of a species being harmed must be presented, not just alleged,before a judge can legally order an injunction,” recalls Rep. Boyle – aprinciple that Winmill is intelligent enough to understand, but sufficientlycorrupt and arrogant to ignore.

Winmill’s behavior in the Edgar Steele case was of a piecewith his treatment of Verl Jones, and any honest federal appellate court -- a species last seen keeping company with the unicorn -- would overturnthe conviction and order a new trial. It’s quite reasonable to suspect thatWinmill, a recidivist persecutor of sick, powerless, elderly defendants, hascynically calculated that Steele, like Jones, will expire before being granted an actual trial.

Obiter Dicta

The next issue of Republic magazine -- for which I serve as managing editor -- will have a detailed cover story examining the Edgar Steele case.

Grateful as I am for the Republic gig, I'm compelled to point out that it doesn't offer an extravagant paycheck -- so your help in supporting Pro Libertate is still desperately needed and emphatically appreciated!

Dum spiro, pugno!

Let a Thousand "Rogue" Grand Juries Bloom!

2011-11-02T16:29:00.000-06:00

Amanda Culbertson has a conscience, which isanother way of saying that she wasn’t well-suited to government “work.” Untilrecently she was employed by the Houston Police Department as a crime labsupervisor. In 2009, she became aware of serious problems with the reliabilityof the department’s roadside blood alcohol testing vehicles, more commonlyknown as BAT vans.

Over the past decade, hundreds of police departments nation-wide have purchased the vehicles with the help of federal grants. The testing device deployed in them, the Intoxilyzer, is considered infallible by law enforcement agencies and most trial judges. However, the Kentucky-based company that manufactures the the Intoxilyzer has refused to disclose its source code. Without access to the source code, the device's findings are unverifiable. As one defendant points out, the machine could simply be a gimmicky random number generator, rather than a finely calibrated scientific instrument.

In 2008, it was discovered that a supervisor for the Houston Police Department had falsified BAT van inspection records for at least the previous eighteen months, thereby calling into question test results in at least 2,600 cases. When Culbertson was appointed to supervise the inspections, she learned that indifferently trained police officers allowed the units tooverheat, which would skew test results. In addition, a glitch in the systemcaused the much-heralded Intoxilyzer to reset every timethe air conditioner was turned on.

Overthe course of several months, Culbertson tried to get officials in the policedepartment and the Harris County DA’s office to address her concerns. None of them was interested in disturbing what had become a veryprofitable scam.

In June, Culbertson and two of her colleagues quit their jobswith the HPD. “We could no longer choose between a paycheck and our integrity,”Culbertson explained. Not surprisingly, she was called to testify by attorneysrepresenting some of the hundreds of people facing DUI charges as a result ofBAT van tests.

Inprofessional terms, Culbertson landed on her feet: She was hired by alaboratory at Lone Star College that had a contract to conduct breathalyzeranalysis for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. Shortly thereafter, the HarrisCounty Commission – at the initiative of DA Pat Lykos – ended its contract withthe Lone Star College lab. In effect, Lykos – in an act of vulgar retaliation--arranged for Culbertson to be fired.

HarrisCounty’s 185^th criminal court grand jury, which had beeninvestigating problems with the BAT vans, called Culbertson to testify, alongwith former Harris County Prosecutor Brent Mayr. Lykos dispatched two membersof her flying monkey corps – assistant DAs Carl Hobbs and Steve Morris – to“monitor” the grand jury testimony.

SinceLykos and her office were suspected of covering up the use of tainted evidenceand retaliating against a whistleblower, the DA and her underlings were barredfrom being present in any capacity other than as sworn witnesses. Accordingly,when Lykos’s minions materialized during Culbertson’s testimony, the Grand JuryForeman ordered them to leave. When that directive was ignored, theForeman instructed the Baliff to remove them or place them under arrest.

Lykosunsuccessfully sought a court order compelling the grand jury to grant accessto her underlings. When that effort failed, the DA's office exploited aback-channel to obtain official transcripts of the grand jury testimony. Thatled to a summons from Judge Susan Brown to Hobbs and Morris, along with courtreporters Javier Leal and Katherine Chagaris, who face the possibility ofcontempt citations and the prospect of six months in jail.

TheHarris County grand jury's insurrection caused consternation in the DA'soffice, and astonishment in the local media. "All too often in the past,Harris County grand juries have functioned as rubber stamps providingprosecutors with indictments without impartial scrutiny of theirsubstance," notes the Houston Chronicle. Of course, this is true of practically every grand jury sincethe enactment of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure in 1946.

The Federal Rules ofCriminal Procedure were created by committee to be an instrument of what theGerman National Socialists called Gleichschaltung – the “synchronization” oflegal (as well as political and cultural) institutions with the dictates of thecentral government. Germany had been a federated constitutional republic priorto 1933, when Gleichschaltung gotunderway. Five years later, the FDR regime’s Advisory Committee on the Rules ofCriminal Procedure – invoking the supposed need for “simplicity” and“efficiency” – began the same process in the United States.

TheAdvisory Committee had no legislative authority or popular mandate; it was apure creation of the prosecutorial class. Thus it’s hardly surprising that oneof its most urgent priorities was to transform the grand jury from a citizen’s assembly into an instrument of theprosecution. This meant “rectifying” – in the Orwellian sense – the FifthAmendment by effectively removing the troublesome word “presentment.”

TheFifth Amendment specifies that “No person shall be held to answer for acapital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment ofa Grand Jury….” A “presentment” is essentially a proprio motu indictment delivered by a grand jury without approvalof a government prosecutor.

Presentments were often filed by grand juriesinvestigating official corruption – such as the grand jury in Minneapolis thatforced the resignation of the mayor and police chief in 1902, or the one thatdislodged Boss Tweed and his politically sheltered cronies thirty yearsearlier.

Thiswas an entirely appropriate function of the grand jury. The “grand jury in itsprimal, plenary sense … was a group of men who stood as a check on government,often in direct opposition to the desires of those in power,” points out constitutional scholar Roger Roots.Rather than being an instrument of the political class, Roots continues,“American grand juries initiated prosecutions against corrupt agents of thegovernment, often in response to complaints from individuals.” It also servedas “a people's watchdog against arbitrary and malevolent prosecutions."

Formost of America’s history, “the evil that the grand jury sought to address wasthe exercise of distant power locally,” wrote Kevin K. Washburn in an articlefor the Fordham Law Review. “Indeed,the grand jury came to us as an institution that was respected for its profoundability to protect local communities – indeed, possibly rebellious ones – fromcentral government authority. It was, in essence, a local check on Crownauthority.”

In1734, grand juries twice refused to indict John Peter Zenger for “seditiouslibel.” New York’s Royal Governor William Cosby bypassed the grand jury byfiling a “criminal information” against Zenger – only to see the trial jurynullify the sedition law and acquit the newspaper publisher. During the 1760s,Crown prosecutors in Massachusetts were constantly stymied by grand juries thatrefused to indict colonists accused of violating the Stamp Act and otherimpositions.

Bothbefore and after American Independence, “the grand jury’s primary method forexercising its power was not rigorous review of facts, but nullification ofvalidly enacted laws,” Washburn observes. They didn’t dispute the prosecutor’spresentation of the facts, but rather “the legislator’s right to impose suchlaws, or at least the prosecutor’s decision to enforce them in a givencontext.”

Obviously,this kind of power simply couldn’t be left in the hands of mere Mundanes.Accordingly, the term “presentment” was conspicuously absent from Rule 6 of theoriginal Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which dealt with the role of thegrand jury. Lester B Orfield, who served on the Advisory Committee, laterexplained that retaining the term “might encourage the use of the `run-away’grand jury as the grand jury could act from their own knowledge or observationand not only from charges made by the United States attorney.”

“Today,the grand jury is the total captive of the prosecutor, who, if he is candid,will concede that he can indict anybody, at any time, for almost anything,before any grand jury,” wrote federal District Judge William J. Campbell in a 1973law journal article calling for formal abolition of the institutionon the grounds of redundancy. This isn't to say that the grand jury is considered useless by the prosecutorial caste: It helps maintain the pretense that prosecutors are servants of the public will.

What is happening in Harris County is not an example of a grand jury going "rogue," but rather one behaving exactly as it should. It is interposing itself on behalf of the public by investigating a federally subsidized revenue-collection racket, and the abusive prosecutor who presides over it. Hopefully its example will prove to be contagious.

Programming Note

This Saturday (November 5) I will be one of several featured speakers at the United Republicans of California state convention at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Arcardia, California. UROC, which bills itself as "The republican wing of the Republican Party," is emphatically not a neo-con group: In 2008, it unanimously endorsed Ron Paul's presidential bid.

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Dum spiro, pugno!

"Rising" to Empire, Falling from Grace

2011-10-26T00:18:00.000-06:00

The following article is adapted from my contribution to a forthcoming collection of essays addressing America's descent into imperialism.

“If we have to use force, it is because weare America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see furtherinto the future.”

This panegyric to what is commonly called“American Exceptionalism” could have been composed by any of a number ofGOP-aligned media figures, such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, ortheir legions of local imitators. Those words were actually spoken by Madeleine Albright in 1998, when she was the Clinton administration’s Secretary of State. She was defending the U.S. role in enforcingan embargo on Iraq in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1991.

Albright had memorably addressed that issue in a different fashion three years earlier during an interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes.

“We have heard that a half million children have died,”observed interviewer Leslie Stahl. “I mean, that's more children than died inHiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Without challenging the statistics, or displaying even atremor of remorse, Albright replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, butthe price--we think the price is worth it.”

By reconciling Albright’s statements we learn that when “we have to”impose policies that result in the avoidable death, through starvation anddisease, of hundreds of thousands of children, “it is because we areAmerica.... We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

For some reason, the self-styled seers and visionaries whodefended the Iraqi embargo didn’t foresee how that policy, coupled with decadesof U.S. meddling in the Middle East, would cultivate and nurture the seeds thatbore murderous fruit on September 11, 2001.

To ordinary people not blessed withAlbright’s oracular insight, it seemed obvious that some variety of murderous blowback would be the inevitable product of a foreign policy thatfeatured deliberate mass starvation punctuated with bombing raids. However, the custodians of permissible opinion havedecreed that history began on the morning of 9/11 – that nothing the U.S.government did prior to that date has any organic connection to the motives andactions of those who carried out the attack (at least as that attack isdescribed in the officially sanctioned narrative). To suggest that Washington’spolicies had some relationship to anti-American sentiment in the Middle East isto commit a grave blasphemy against American Exceptionalism – the officialcreed of the ruling Establishment, irrespective of party.

What makes America exceptional, from this perspective, isnot the blessings we have been allotted by Providence, or the individualliberties promised by our country’s founding documents. America is exceptionalbecause of the power of the government that rules us, as manifest in itsability to kill people in distant lands.

Death-dealing herald of empire: A Global Hawk drone.

That view, once again, is not limited to bellicose left-winginternationalists like Albright. On several occasions, Rush Limbaugh – who,like fellow late-blooming militarist Dick Cheney, had “other priorities” whenhe was of draft age during Vietnam – has related an anecdote about witnessing amilitary fly-over during a Super Bowl in the 1980. Aroused by the spectacle tothe point of rapture, Limbaugh (by his own account) was moved to exclaim, “Howcan you see something like that, andbe a liberal who hates your country?”

Offensive as it would be to both Limbaugh and Albright, acompelling case can be made that their reflexive militarism is a repudiation ofour country’s founding principles. The Framers of the Constitution, painfullyfamiliar with the uses to which large military establishments could be put,never intended for the united States of America (in Congress assembled) to havea standing, centralized army. While they did have the lamentable intention of creating a consolidated central government -- and pretty clear ambitions for territorial expansion to the West -- they did not entertain grandiose ambitions ofpolicing the world.

The most admirable members of the Founding Generation understood that love of country was not measured by one’senthusiasm for government-inflicted bloodshed. That’s why Washington’s FarewellAddress emphasized both adequate provision for defense and thecompelling necessity to avoid entanglement in the affairs of other countries.

Imperialism by joystick: A drone operator carries out an attack.

“Whereverthe standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, therewill her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be,” observed John QuincyAdams in his 1821 Independence Day Address. “But she goes not abroad, in searchof monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independenceof all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She well knows thatby once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the bannersof foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power ofextrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice,envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy wouldinsensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatressof the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” (Emphasisadded.)

Unlikethe supposedly far-seeing Madeleine Albright – who couldn’t foretell how herarrogant endorsement of genocide in 1995 would help catalyze the enmity thatled to the devastating 9/11 assault six years later – Adams displayed uncannyforesight in describing the degenerate state of American “patriotism” today,190 years after he delivered his warning against interventionism: “Patriots”today celebrate force, not liberty.

Today,what Adams and his generation called “Independence Day” is simply called the Fourthof July. Rather than being a celebration of individual liberty, the “Fourth”has become an annual orgy of militarism, often involving saturation-levelbarrages of propaganda in the form of televised war “movie marathons” andmilitary parades that wouldn’t be out of place in Pyongyang.

Lestit be forgotten, Independence Day originally commemorated an act ofinsurrection against the “legitimate” government – an incomparably powerfulglobe-spanning empire on which the sun never set. The men who committed thatact of rebellion would probably consider it perverse that they are “honored” bypublic rituals extolling the imperial power of a government that is morecorrupt and oppressive – by several orders of magnitude – than that of GeorgeIII.

Americawas unique because of its origins in principled rebellion against lawless rule,and because of a set of founding political instruments that, while imperfect, did provide individuals some protection against government aggression. Those traits that are typicallycelebrated as tokens of “American Exceptionalism” – an interventionist foreignpolicy; a Chief Executive with unqualified power to kill, imprison, and torturepeople at whim; a badly overgrown military establishment – are, in a specificsense, un-American.

A commercial republic in which both citizens and theirelected representatives are governed by law, and individual liberty is regarded asthe highest political good, would be truly exceptional. A sprawling empireruled by a corrupt oligarchy that plunders both the national treasury and theresources of distant lands is actually quite commonplace.

To catch a glimpse of the America that could have been, it's useful to pay a brief visit to the period between the end of the War for Independence and the mercantilist counter-revolution in Philadelphia that abolished the Articles of Confederation and created a more centralized constitutional Union.

In 1782, a year after the British surrender at Yorktown andone year before the Treaty of Paris finalized American independence, a formerFrench Lieutenant named J. Hector Saint John de Crevecoeur composed a series ofessays entitled Letters from an AmericanFarmer. Six decades before Alexis de Tocqueville published Democracy in America, Crevecoeur devotedhis considerable literary gifts to an examination of the question: “What, then,is the American, this new man?”

Unlike Europe, a continent plagued by entrenched elites,there were “no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, noecclesiastical dominion, no invisiblepower giving to a few a very visibleone” in America, he wrote. The inhabitants of this new-born confederacy ofconstitutional republics were “a people of cultivators, scattered over animmense territory … united by the silken bands of mild government, all respecting the laws, without dreadingtheir power, because they are equitable.” (Emphasis added.)

At its best, the "mild" government to which Crevecoeur referred was self-government; it was the spontaneous cooperation of productive people, rather than the imposed order of a parasitical elite. This state of affairs was hardly uniform throughout the confederation, of course, but that it existed at all was something truly inspiring.

On "Evacuation Day," November 25, 1783, British troops ended their occupation of New York. In comments recorded by the New York Packet newspaper, a departing British officer expressed a bemused admiration for the Americans, who distinguished themselves by their unwillingness to be ruled:

“Here,in this city, we have had an army for more than seven years, and yet we couldnot keep the peace of it. Scarcely a day or night passed without tumults. Nowwe are [leaving] everything is in quietness and safety. These Americans are acurious, original people; they know how to govern themselves, but nobody elsecan govern them.”

The promise of the War for Independence was the establishment of asystem of individual liberty protected by law – and, at least at that early stage, that promise was being kept. Thatgenuinely exceptional America earned the admiration of the world – not becauseits government possessed the power to murder people by remote control, orannihilate entire continents in a nuclear paroxysm, but rather becauseits people were free and independent, and its society -- although displayingall of the imperfections to which fallen man is heir – aspired to be governedby the Golden Rule.

Tragically, "our" government’s rise to global power has meantour country’s fall from grace.

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Steven Pinker's Statist Gospel

2011-10-18T18:04:00.001-06:00

Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, who has saidthat he never “outgrew my conversion to atheism at thirteen,” has written atheodicy – a tract intended to validate the redemptive power of the LeviathanState. In his new book The Better Angelsof Our Nature, Pinkerinsists that humanity has “evolved to become less violent” through the ministryof elites who employ the State to evangelize on behalf of what he calls “enlightenmenthumanism.”

According to Pinker, since the emergence of the modern secular state in the 18th century there has been a dramatic decline in primitive expressions ofaggressive violence. People who live in contemporary developed societies “no longer have to worry about abduction into sexualslavery; divinely commanded genocide; lethal circuses and tournaments;punishment on the cross, rack, wheel, stake, or strappado for holding unpopularbeliefs; decapitation for not bearing a son; disembowelment for having dated aroyal; pistol duels to defend their honor … or the prospect of a nuclear world warthat would put an end to civilization or to human life itself,” Pinker asserts.

The precipitous decline in private violence,which Pinker heralds as “the most important thing that has ever happened in humanhistory,” is a triumph of the “social contract,” an arrangement in which political government asserts a monopoly on the “legitimate” use of force. By over-awingthose inclined toward individual acts of violence, the State supposedly suppresses“demonic” impulses – such as greed and sadism – while emancipating the “betterangels of our nature” – empathy, self-discipline, and peaceful cooperation.

"Oh Divine State, protect us from the unenlightened...."

As is the case with most religious doctrines, Pinker’stheology of the divine State is built on a paradox – in this case the idea thatthe human tendency toward violence can be eradicated through the scientificapplication of the same by enlightened people who have supposedly transcendedsuch primitive impulses.

Given that Pinker is one of the leading exponents ofthe “box with wires” view of the human brain, there is also a rich vein ofirony in Pinker’s unabashed use of the terms “demons” and “angels” indescribing a conflict over competing visions of morality.

In an interview given more than a decade ago, Pinker describedhuman beings as “nothing more than a collection of ricocheting molecules in thehead.” Like others who subscribe to that view, Pinker has yet to submit a schematic explaining how morality is produced through molecular reactions.And like theologians from other traditions, Pinker is content to leave such mattersundisturbed in the unfathomable depths of mystery. This would be a perfectlyacceptable arrangement – were it not for the fact that Pinker, like fundamentalists from other traditions, embraces the use of sanctified coercion as a meansof purifying those less enlightened than he.

As a child, Pinker, says, he thought as a child, embracinganarchism at about the same time he converted to atheism. But as an adult, hehas put away childish things: “I was a Rousseauan then; now I’m a Hobbesian.”What this means in practice is that he merely abandoned one sect of totalitarianstatism for another.

Rousseau, it should be remembered, was wasthe author of whathe called "The CivilReligion" — a doctrine that would enable themasses, in Rousseau's phrase, to "bear with docility the yoke of thepublic good."

The most important article of Rousseau's Civil Religion was the absolute divinity of the State; the gravest transgressionwas "intolerance," which was regarded as evil not because it injured therights of individuals, but because it challenged the State's authority.

According to Rousseau, the ideal social arrangement would be a "form of theocracy, in which there canbe no pontiff save the prince, and no priests save the magistrates.... [W]hoever dares to say, 'Outside the church is nosalvation,' ought to be driven from the State, unless the State is the Church,and the prince the pontiff."

TheState would make belief in its dogmas compulsory, even as it denied it wasdoing so: "While it can compel no one to believe them, it can banish fromthe state anyone who does not believe them…..” Apostasy would be a capital offense: "If any one, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if hedoes not believe them, let him be punished by death -- he has committed the worstof all crimes, that of lying before the law."

Rousseau believed that man --until corrupted by traditional institutions -- was intrinsically good. Thomas Hobbes– not to put too fine a point on the matter – didn’t share that opinion. He didagree that the State, as the embodiment of what could be called the “generalwill,” should combine the civil and ecclesial functions and exercise unlimitedpower to regiment the lives of its subjects. The objective wouldn’t be to savepeople’s souls, or elevate their morals, but merely to impose order.

Pinker claims to be “eclectically, non-dogmaticallylibertarian” in his political outlook. Given his unbuttoned embrace of Hobbesianabsolutism, that’s a bit like claiming to be an “eclectic, non-dogmatic vegan”while subsisting on a dietof steak tartare.

Although Pinker began his academic career in a Montreal counter-culturalmilieu “dominated by hippies ... and US draft dodgers,” he has endorsed theexercise in State-inflicted violence called the “War on Drugs” in terms thatwould earn Hobbes’s approval: “A regimethat trawls for drug users or other petty delinquents will get a certain numberof violent people as a by-catch, further thinning the ranks of the violentpeople who remain on the streets.”

This process involves filling the streets with State-licensed“violent people” in military attire, and granting them a plenary indulgence to loot and terrorize the public. The “by-catch” gathered by thegovernment’s trawling net includes perfectly innocent people. But it is not ourplace to question the inscrutable wisdom of the divine State, which causes thepain to fall on the righteous and unrighteous alike.

Leviathan's "by-catch": A 71-year-old victim of a wrong-door drug raid.

There is also the matter of quo warranto: By what authority doesthe State assault and imprison people who peacefully ingest mind-alteringsubstances?

This is where Pinker’s Rousseauist background comes into play: It’snot necessary for subjects to understand the logic of the State’s decrees; theysimply must have faith in its bottomless competence and unalloyed goodness – orsuffer the penalty for their apostasy.

All religious belief requires the acceptance “of thingshoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” Pinker’s dogma requires that weignore the evidence of things that are clearly visible in order to embrace hisvision of something yet to materialize. The most compelling argument againstPinker’s claim that humanity has evolved beyond violence is the systematic slaughter duringthe 20^th Century of at least 170 million people by governmentsclaiming and enforcing a monopoly on the “legitimate” use of force.

In The Better Angelsof Our Nature, Pinker – to his credit – does recognize R.J. Rummel’s pioneeringresearch into the phenomenon of "democide." Given the body count compiledthrough war and politicized mass murder during the 20^th century, andthe persistent bloodshed in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere, the ideathat humanity has progressed beyond violence “seems illogical and obscene,” Pinkeradmits. This is something else we simply have to take on faith as well, itappears.

The rampages carried out by totalitarian states were atragic prelude to the “Long Peace” that has prevailed since WWII, Pinker insists.We’ve reached a point at which mass violence only among those sub-populationsthat have resisted signing on to a “social contract that [gives] government amonopoly on the legitimate use of violence.” That heathen population, he pointsout, includes Americans who reside in the southern and western states, wherepeople “retain the right to bear arms [and] believe it is their responsibility,not the government’s, to deter harm-doers.” This means that “private citizens,flush with self-serving biases, [can act] as judge, jury, and executioner….”

Of all the impious nerve! Such power can only be exercisedby those duly anointed as emissaries of the divine State – beginning with the ExaltedOne in the Oval Office, who commands the power to imprison, torture, or execute anybody on the face of theplanet.

In a 2007 TED lecture, Dr. Pinker urged Leviathan’s subjectsto count their blessings: A mere century ago, he pointed out, some of them mayhave been “burned at the stake for criticizing the king, after a trial thatmaybe lasted ten minutes.” Today, by way of contrast, a U.S. citizen who condemns Washington’s imperial aggression can be summarily executed by way of adrone-fired missile without the benefit of a trial. The latter approach is acceptable to at least some peopleof Pinker’s persuasion because the State’s priestly caste possesses themystical power to transubstantiate violence into “policy.”

Although he followed a different vector, Steven Pinker, a proudly irreligious cultural Jew, has arrived at the same destination as the reactionary 18th Century Catholic writer Joseph de Maistre, who insisted that "all greatness, all power, all social order dependson the executioner; he is the terror of human society and tie that holds ittogether. Take away this incontrovertible force from the world, and at thatvery moment order is superseded by chaos, thrones fall, societydisappears." While Dr. Pinker criticizes the death penalty, his view of social order ultimately rests on the supposed authority of State functionaries to kill those who refuse to submit to them.

The modern material and ethical progress Pinker properly celebrates are not the product of State coercion. They are the result of private, mutually beneficial action based on reciprocal respect for individual rights -- in other words, the application of the Golden Rule, which Pinker acknowledges in passing while pointedly ignoring uncomfortable questions about its provenance and most notable Exponent.

To use Pinker's categories: The impulses unleashed by the State are demonic, not angelic.

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