The Authentic Cruelty of a Synthetic Man

Yes, I'm willing to see you suffer, and throw you in prison -- but don't expect me to admit it.

Mitt Romney, a polymer-based life form of nearly limitless pliability, is as long on cash as he is short on genuine convictions. For the Power Elite's political brokers, few traits are more endearing in a potential president than malleability. Romney's suppleness of spine helps explain how he was able to soak up $10 million in promised campaign donations from politically connected oligarchs during a day-long marathon fundraiser in Las Vegas.

Seeking an issue on which Romney takes a binding, definitive stand often seems like trying to overtake the horizon. Clayton Holden, a wheelchair-bound man and long-time medical marijuana patient, may be the only person who has ever seen Romney perform a plausible impression of Martin Luther (“Here I stand, I can do no other") regarding any subject.

Holden suffers from Duchene Muscular Dystrophy, an affliction that has left him with a twisted spine, inflamed nerve bundles, and unremitting chronic pain. When Holden was 16, his suffering was compounded when he was hit by a car while crossing the street in his wheelchair.

Like many others who suffer from debilitating pain, Holden has found that marijuana offers him relief while inflicting none of the side-effects that accompany many government-approved drugs. On at least ten occasions, Holden has been confronted by police, who – to their credit – have been willing to flout what they are required to call “the law” in favor of elemental decency. It’s only a matter of time before some armed functionary will be found who is sufficiently vicious to throw Holden in a cage. That’s the outcome that Mitt Romney would favor.

During an October 7, 2007 Republican presidential forum in New Hampshire, Holden politely but forcefully confronted Romney to ask him the same question he had posed to other candidates (only one of whom – no extra credit for guessing which one – actually gave him an unequivocal answer): Since Holden has to use marijuana to treat his affliction, would Romney be willing to see him and his doctors arrested and carried off to jail? 

Romney, as is his habit, tried to take refuge in persiflage, insisting – on the basis of what qualifications, he didn’t say – that synthetic marijuana would work just as well. He then sought to ooze his way out of the question by quipping that he doesn’t “arrest anyone."

The most remarkable aspect of Romney’s encounter with Holden is that he displayed none of his characteristic equivocation in defending drug prohibition. He yielded not so much as a millimeter in his insistence that medical marijuana is a "gateway drug"; this means that Holden and other patients who use it either have to settle for useless or harmful government-approved treatments or endure the punitive wrath of the divine State. The Mittster didn't even seek to palliate the feelings of this powerless, suffering individual by deploying a sympathetic platitude.

Presidential politics in our putrefying empire deals in the infliction of wholesale cruelty -- through the destruction of wealth, the propagation of aggressive violence, and the constriction of individual liberty. Like most people who aspire to the imperial purple, Romney doesn't like to be seen dispensing cruelty on an individual basis, which is why he ended the conversation with Holden as quickly as possible, and was palpably angry that this uncomfortable moment was caught on camera.

Owing to the influence of big-money campaign donation "bundlers," and dubious bookkeeping of the sort that that is common among the politically protected Wall Street denizens whose favor he ardently courts, Romney has emerged as the fundraising front-runner among among GOP presidential aspirants.  As Romney campaign minion Chris Slick memorably put it during the day-long grovel-fest in Vegas: “Today we demonstrate our ability to raise excessive and ungodly amounts of cash while other candidates are still pattering about in bumf*ck, Iowa somewhere. No one can come close to what our machine can do. No one.”

 By "our machine," Slick wasn't just talking about Romney's political campaign; he was referring to an interlocking network of pressure groups, lobbyists, and political criminals that  support, sustain, and profit from the Warfare State.

Slick himself is director of online operations for "ACT! for America," an anti-Muslim pressure group whose founder and chief spokesperson, Lebanon-born Brigette Gabriel (nee Nour Saman), tirelessly evangelizes on behalf of a war of annihilation against Islam. In a 2007 address at Rev. John Hagee's mega-church, Gabriel insisted that Muslims "have no soul". This which would mean, of course, that Muslims aren't merely mistaken or sinful, but that they aren't genuinely human.

There are many pressure groups who promote various elements of the War Party agenda ala carte. Gabriel's group will settle for nothing less than the Full Cheney combo meal: Permanent war abroad, unlimited regimentation at home, indefinite detention of suspected terrorists, institutionalization of torture, and so on.

It's worth pointing out that during the 1980s, Gabriel -- under her birth name -- was a correspondent/propagandist for a television network affiliated with the South Lebanon Army (SLA). During the horrific Lebanese civil war -- a multi-sided conflict in which no belligerent had a monopoly on unspeakable acts -- the SLA was an Israeli-supported militia that ran a notorious torture dungeon called Al Khiam Prison. Many of the methods now employed by Washington's Homeland Security State -- those not devised by the CIA, or reverse-engineered from Soviet sources, that is -- were field-tested on detainees in the Al Khiam prison.

While Romney is connected to all of this by the only most tenuous of threads, it's important to remember that he has spoken of the supposed need to "double Guantanamo" -- that is, to expand the use of indefinite detention and the application of torture techniques that have been cloaked in the Gestapo-derived euphemism "enhanced interrogation."

Whatever  transgressions Romney has committed against the current GOP line, the hints of calculated cruelty behind his smarmy demeanor make him irresistible to at least some of those who want to make war against Islam the central organizing principle of American life.

It is in Romney's profitable relationship with former U.S. Ambassador to Italy Mel Sembler that these separate strands of cruelty are woven together like the braids of a torturer's whip. In 2008, Romney appointed Sembler to serve as one of his ten national campaign fund-raisers.  Sembler, a retired shopping mall magnate from Florida, also served as chairman for the legal defense fund established on behalf of convicted felon Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's former chief of staff. 

In addition to being an architect of the war in Iraq, Libby helped devise the legal framework for the globe-straddling archipelago of CIA torture facilities. In 2007, Libby was found guilty of perjury and obstruction in the case of outed CIA operative Valerie Plame; his prison term was commuted by George W. Bush, who --like Romney -- is someone whose sympathy for the powerful and corrupt is inexhaustible.

Long before the administration of Bush the Dumber made torture an official federal policy, Mel Sembler and his wife were promoting the use of torture and indefinite detention in the "war on drugs." In the early 1970s, they created a behavioral modification program called “Straight” that targeted youngsters who either had drug or alcohol addictions, or were considered to be “at risk” of falling prey to addiction. Many of the teenagers put into Sembler's program complained of physical, emotional, psychological, and sexual abuse.

 Teen inmates at a Behavior Modification facility.

 "Straight" grew out of a federally funded pilot program called “The Seed,” which according to a 1974 Senate Judiciary Committee investigation used methods similar to the “highly refined `brainwashing' techniques employed by the North Koreans” against US prisoners of war. 

Thus Sembler's "Straight" program was, in a sense, a progenitor of the Bush-Cheney "enhanced interrogation" regime.

“The Seed” was shut down in the mid-1970s, but Sembler's network (nine clinics in seven states) continued to receive funding from the same federal agencies that had underwritten the Communist-derived initiative. "Straight" was closed down in 1993, but by this time it had planted seeds of its own that sprouted up across the U.S. and abroad, where "drug rehabilitation" facilities employed "treatment" techniques that were indistinguishable from the criminal abuses carried out in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

A "Straight"-inspired drug "treatment" dungeon in Mexico.

 In her valuable book Help at Any Cost, investigative journalist Maia Szalavitz documented how programs constructed from Sembler's template had employed "punishments banned for use on criminals and by the Geneva Convention."

"Beatings, extended isolation and restraint, public humiliation, food deprivation, sleep deprivation, forced exercise to the point of exhaustion, sensory deprivation, and lengthy maintenance of stress positions are common," continued Szalavitz.

Some teenagers selected for forced enrollment in BM programs have been treated exactly like terrorist suspects -- snatched from their homes or the streets by rented thugs and then sent by way of “extraordinary rendition” to isolated detention facilities, often in foreign countries. The best-known professional child-napper is Rick Strawn, a retired Atlanta police officer whose personal history includes alcoholism and domestic abuse, as well as repeated accusations of child sexual exploitation.

The very model of authoritarian piety, Strawn conspicuously wears his "What Would Jesus Do?" wristband as he places handcuffs on the wrists of a teenager being forcibly conveyed to a distant, inaccessible dungeon. Often this is done with the knowing consent of criminally credulous parents following a "hard sell" by a pitchman for a behavior modification (BM) program, which is usually portrayed as an enhanced summer camp intended to impart "respect for authority" in a beautiful natural setting.

More than a few of the teenagers consigned to those facilities -- which have been uncovered in several states, as well as Mexico, Jamaica, American Samoa, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere -- had no documentable problem with drugs or alcohol, or any other self-destructive behaviors. But just as we're told that practically any development justifies "expanded vigilance" against terrorism, just about any adolescent problem or behavior can be depicted as an indication that the youngster is "at risk," and thus needs to be confined in a BM facility to get “straightened out" through means that include unambiguous torture.

At one BM facility in Puerto Rico, “teens were found bound and gagged with nooses around their necks,” reports Szalavitz. At "High Impact," a Mexico-based facility run by  the Utah-based World-Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS), teenage detainees were locked in dog cages. One survivor of that gulag was nearly drowned to death by a group of older kids who -- having been made feral through prolonged mistreatment -- hoped that the murder would shut the program down. 

"The Hobbit."

Amberly Knight, former director of the WWASPS-affiliated Dundee Ranch in Costa Rica, testifies that food deprivation was commonly used to punish inmates, and particularly rebellious kids were taken to a tiny isolation room and forced to kneel on concrete for up to 14 hours a day.

Inmates at a WWASPS program in Samoa were sometimes held for hours in an "ISO Box," a three-foot by three-foot box akin to a North Vietnamese “tiger cage.” Others were hog-tied with duct tape or beaten by staffers. When the Samoan government began a child abuse inquiry, WWASPS hastily shut down the facility.

 
WWASPS's Spring Creek Lodge in Montana featured a tiny disciplinary cubicle called "The Hobbit" in which some inmates were confined for weeks or months at a time and fed nothing but beans and bananas. One counselor at Spring Creek was charged with sexually molesting two boys who had been imprisoned in The Hobbit.

Robert Lichfield.

In 2006, more than two-dozen families filed a lawsuit against WWASPS, alleging that inmates of the residential programs were “subjected to physical abuse, emotional abuse and sexual abuse.” Many of them had been directed to the program through Teen Help, a business operated by Utah businessman Robert Lichfield that served as a processing center for WWASPS. 

As it happens, Lichfield was co-chairman of WWASPS, and as of 2006 he was pulling in an estimated $90 million a year by funneling teens into a globe-spanning network of detention camps. At least some of that money used to fuel Romney's presidential ambitions. 

During the 2008 campaign, Lichfield was appointed by Romney to head his fundraising efforts in Utah.  In that capacity he helped raise $2.7 million for Romney, including $300,000 at a single event in St. George. All of this happened after Richfield's role in WWASPS was known. Romney dismissed Richfield in late Summer 2007 after a second lawsuit was filed on behalf of more than one hundred of the organization's victims. At about the same time, a "counselor" at a WWASPS facility was found guilty of assault and false imprisonment.

The lawsuit against WWASPS coincided with the housing bust. Like many other criminal enterprises that prospered during the bubble, WWASPS has gone out of business, even as the attorneys for Lichfield and his cohorts have employed every dilatory maneuver in their arsenal to hold the lawsuit in abeyance. 

In spite of all this, there still seems to be a market for a business specializing in teen "rehabilitation" through torture: Narvin Lichfield, Robert's brother and partner in crime, recently re-opened a WWASPS-inspired facility in South Carolina that had been shut down amid an avalanche of civil lawsuits and criminal charges. 

Apparently, there are still people who can scrounge up nearly $3,000 a month to purchase the services of people who specialize in "therapeutic" child abuse, and state officials willing to countenance such operations as an adjunct to the "war on drugs." There is a lot of ambient cruelty in late-imperial America, and Mitt Romney's presidential aspirations will depend on his ability to catalyze that cruelty into hard cash.

Once again: Thank you!

I wish to reiterate, and amplify, my thanks to everyone who has responded to my recent appeal; this has been a tremendous blessing to me and my family, and we are deeply grateful. I've made a start at expressing individual thanks to each of you who have donated to us, and I promise that I will get in touch with all of you as soon as I can. Thanks again, and God bless.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Heads Up, Mexico: You May be Next

The time has come, insists Representative Michael McCaul (R-Texas), "for the U.S. to show serious commitment to war in our own backyard." 

It's shamefully narrow-minded of Washington to confer the blessings of humanitarian mass murder on distant Bedouins while ignoring our Mestizo neighbors to the South. McCaul, a former federal prosecutor who now chairs the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, is eager to help rectify that inequity by designating six Mexican drug syndicates -- including Los Zetas, which is led by U.S.-trained military personnel -- as "foreign terrorist organizations."

The War Down South:  U.S.-funded Mexican paramilitary police.

This would permit deportation or prosecution of anyone providing "support" to the narcotics syndicates. Of course, this wouldn't apply to the public officials in the United States responsible for the huge narcotics price support program called the "War on Drugs."

Over the past five years, an estimated 37,000 people have been killed as a result of the U.S.-funded war between the administration of Mexican President Felipe Calderon and various narcotics syndicates. Several months ago, Texas Governor Rick Perry suggested that Washington should invade Mexico for the supposed purpose of ending the violence.  The only trivial impediment to that plan, Perry observed, is that Mexico's government would have to "approve" of the invasion.

As if to answer the question, "What kind of Latin American political figure would `approve' of a U.S. invasion and occupation of his country?" Colombian-born Washington Post columnist Edward Schumacher-Matos offered a very public endorsement of the proposal. 

It's worth pointing out that between positions with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and his present gig at the Post, Schumacher-Matos taught a course at Harvard's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American studies, which is one of several academic nurseries in which the Establishment cultivates tomorrow's Quislings.

Schumacher-Matos piously chastises Mexico's political class for being "too proud to do what they immediately should: Call in the Marines." Only if Mexican somehow emerge from "their nationalistic stupor" will they see the light of reason and welcome the presence of  their new overlords -- "American military specialists stationed within [their] borders to help the country build powerful electronic intelligence systems and train modern military and police forces to replace its suffocatingly hierarchical, outdated ones."

Although Mexico "is our neighbor and supposed longtime ally, the Mexican army has never -- never -- participated in a joint military exercise with the U.S. military," Schumacher-Matos points out, inviting us to sorrowful contemplation of the shame of it all. To substantiate the point, he cites a recent study by Roderic Ai Camp of the Woodrow Wilson Center, oblivious to the irony of mentioning Wilson's name in connection with proposed U.S. military intervention in Mexico.

"What is getting in the way of deeper cooperation with the U.S. military is that the Mexican military, political and intellectual leaders, abetted by U.S. intellectuals, still have their heads in the Mexican and American wars for the 19th century and the Cold War of the 20th," Schumacher-Matos scolds. "They talk of imperialism and hegemony -- which are irrelevant today."

This isn't "imperialism" that we're discussing, insists this Rockefeller-suckled sock puppet: It's applied humanitarianism of the kind that has turned places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Kosovo, and Libya into havens of peace and prosperity.

Elements of Schumacher-Matos's prescription are a bit outdated.  The "electronic intelligence systems" he describes are already operating in Mexico; huge amounts of money are being poured into training and equipping Mexican military and police; and U.S.-trained paramilitaries are actively involved in the Drug War -- on both sides of the conflict.

U.S.-trained Mexican Stormtroopers.

 "The U.S. agents generally provide intelligence and training, while Mexicans do the hands-on work," explains a recent AP dispatch from Mexico City. Brad Barker, president of a "private" mercenary firm called HALO Corporation, told the AP: "Yes, we're tracking vehicles, yes, we're tracking people.... There's been a huge spike in agents down here."

For the nonce, however, the huge and growing population of U.S. military and intelligence "advisers" infesting Mexico have to "play down" their role, in order "to avoid rubbing nationalist raw spots."

The division of labor used to maintain the fiction of Mexican independence was displayed in joint operations staged to murder Arturo Beltran-Leyva, the admittedly vicious head of a narcotics operation (an offshoot of the Sinaloa Cartel) he co-founded with his four brothers. On December 11, 2009, a team of U.S.-trained Mexican Special Forces operators, acting on intelligence gathered by their American "advisers," attacked a Christmas party, slaughtering several guests, wounding numerous others, and terrorizing scores more while Beltran-Leyva fled.

Name the "good guy" in this photo. Yes, this is a trick question.

Several days later, U.S. agents tracked the fugitive to an apartment in Cuernavaca. This time 200 special forces troops laid siege to the building, surrounding it with tanks and helicopter gunships.

The outcome was predictable, and proudly memorialized in trophy photos of Beltran-Leyva's dead, mutilated body that were given wide circulation by the Mexican government.


This assassination was hailed as a significant "victory" in Washington's drug war in Mexico. Indeed, from the perspective of the people who manage that war, it was an ideal victory -- the kind that helps perpetuate the conflict, rather than bringing it to an end. As the AP points out, in the year following the killing of Beltran-Leyva, arrests of drug cartel leaders were up, cocaine seizures expanded, and extraditions of drug suspects to the U.S.  increased -- "and yet, killings jumped to a record high ... and more heroin and marijuana are being produced in Mexico and smuggled into the U.S." 

As with all other "successful" government programs, Washington's narco-war in Mexico is a breeder reactor for larger and even more profitable problems. The escalating violence by Washington and its puppet government in Mexico City is provoking retaliatory violence against American assets.

Washington's proxy war in Mexico has killed tens of thousands of Mexicans, as well as a small but growing number of U.S. citizens. What really prompted the ire of Rep. McCaul, however, was the murder last February of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata by a hit team employed by Los Zetas. This episode, in which a Federal Agent was assassinated by a cartel led by U.S.-trained Mexican paramilitaries that led McCaul to demand that Mexican drug syndicates be classified as "foreign terrorist organizations."

(Courtesy of Sipsey Street Irregulars.)

 While Mexican President Calderon has “boldly declared war against the cartels," McCaul declares, "the Mexicans are losing the war – and so are we.”

Of course, the most effective way to destroy the criminal syndicates -- as a growing number of war-weary Mexicans understand -- would be to de-criminalize narcotics, which would mean an immediate end to the grotesquely inflated profits that sustain the cartels. 

McCaul and his ilk, however, prefer to take the contrary approach -- continued escalation of the conflict with no imaginable end. "We can't afford a failed state in Mexico, and we must secure our borders," intones McCaul.

Let's briefly examine this familiar piece of thought-stopping boilerplate.

Since the housing bubble burst four years ago, immigration from Mexico is down dramatically. The chief threat to "border security" at present is the violence being churned up in Mexico through Washington's drug war. If the threat of "spillover" narcotics violence is the main problem, ending the drug war is the obvious solution -- yet ideologues like McCaul have a way of resisting the obvious.

For those who understand that the state is always and everywhere the chief enemy of liberty, prosperity, and peace, the term "failed state" is a pleonasm. When employed by spokesmen for the Imperial power elite, however, the term is invoked as a prelude to military intervention in order to impose a government-exercised monopoly on force -- which in practice has meant becoming local franchises of a U.S.-dominated global political system. 

Interventions of this kind are justified as a form of preventive counter-terrorism. Accordingly, whenever U.S. politicians and policy-makers suggest that Mexico is in danger of becoming a "failed state," they are tuning the atmosphere for even more forceful intervention in that country's domestic affairs.

It shouldn't surprise us to learn that a growing number of Mexicans are weary of being on the receiving end of Washington's armed benevolence.

"We are fed up with this war that nobody asked for," exclaimed Ciudad Juarez resident Leticia Ruiz, one of thousands of Mexicans who attended protests on April 6 demanding an end to Washington's drug war in Mexico. 

"We're sick of you politicians," declared Javier Sicilia, a noted Mexican author whose 24-year-old son was murdered by cartel hit-men. "In this badly planned, badly executed and badly led war, you have put the country into a state of emergency."

The horrors being visited on Mexicans in this unnecessary war are of little concern to the ruling elite on either side of the border. As Hillary Clinton admitted in a moment of stunning candor, de-criminalization of narcotics and de-escalation in the drug war simply aren't possible, because there is "too much money" to be made through prohibition. One illustration of this can be seen in the fact that when the global finance system went into cardiac arrest in 2008, laundered narcotics proceeds were the only liquid capital available for inter-bank loans. 

Many law enforcement agencies in the United States have become addicted to drug war subsidies, both in the form of funds stolen and redistributed through taxation and in the form of direct highway robbery by way of "asset forfeiture." The Texas legislature has sought to expand that symbiosis between the criminal underworld and the even more disreputable political "overworld" by expanding the use of highway checkpoints -- for seatbelt enforcement, license and insurance inspections, and drug and weapons searches -- in order to harvest revenue to make up for shortfalls in tax revenue. 

Significantly, Rep. McCaul points out that his proposal to designate drug cartels as "terrorist" organizations would "intensify southbound inspections to seize weapons and cash." In practice this would mean an escalation in Washington's unremitting war against privacy and private property.

Rep. McCaul himself illustrates another reason why there is no official interest in ending the drug war. As the Houston Chronicle points out, McCaul "unveiled [his] legislation as he raises his profile in Washington for a possible bid for statewide office" -- specifically, the Senate seat being vacated next year by Kay Bailey Hutchison.  Being a dutiful drug war drone is a prescription for job security -- and in many cases, the key to a lucrative political career. Despite growing public disenchantment with this murderous charade, there is no political profit in working to bring it to an end.

No hyperbole is involved in describing Mexico as another front in the Regime's war with -- well, practically everybody. This is illustrated by the fact that several months ago, beginning with a September 2010 installment of Oliver North's "War Stories" agitprop series, the Fox News Channel has been referring to the proxy conflict in Mexico as America's "Third War" (which would mean, of course, that the ongoing campaign in Libya would be the Regime's fourth war).

Like other spokesmen for the War Party, Rep. McCaul has promoted a unified field theory of global conflict in which Mexico is emerging as a haven for Islamic terrorists bent on destroying the U.S. Although there's no evidence of an Islamist/Narco-terrorist alliance, undisguised U.S. military intervention in Mexico could conceivably provoke a nationalist backlash that would serve the War Party's propaganda needs nearly as well.

The Empire's Clone Army: Mexican narcotics troops.

For decades, some elements of the Right (occasionally abetted by people who should have known better) have peddled the notion that Mexico has created a vast and well-organized "fifth column" within the United States dedicated to La Reconquista -- the re-conquest of territories seized by the U.S. during the Mexican-American War.

In this scenario, non-assimilated Mexicans by the millions join in a campaign of violence orchestrated by the Mexican government with the help of foundation-funded anti-American groups on this side of the border.

Whatever revanchist sentiments may exist in Mexico are the residue of Washington's seizure of roughly half the country through a war of aggression. Washington's proxy narco-war has done nothing to palliate those feelings. About the only thing that could vindicate the alarmist fantasy of a nationalistic uprising on the part of Mexicans living on the U.S. side of the border would be direct U.S. military intervention in Mexico. I'm just cynical enough to believe that this would be considered a selling point to the people who profit on the misery inflicted by Washington's drug wars, both here and abroad.

A quick note ....

My apologies, once again, for postponing the  promised Maryanne Godboldo report. The delay reflects the unusual difficulties I'm having in contacting some of the key figures in this story. I appreciate your patience. 

Thank you so much for helping to keep Pro Libertate on-line! God bless.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Stealing Camp Zoe: The Federal "Forfeiture" Gang Strikes

Kids terrorized, dogs killed, a family traumatized: Welcome to Missouri.

Mike Johnston's first hint that something unusual was happening at Camp Zoe was the presence of four police officers at Tiffany Hall, the campground's dining area.

"I wondered if the police might be looking for someone's missing kid," Mike recalled to Pro Libertate. "But as I walked through the camp I saw a couple more, and then a couple more -- and then I saw a bunch of guys in SWAT fatigues with assault rifles. One of them had a German Shepherd on a leash. All of them were doing their best to look intimidating."

The armed visitors who materialized at about 7:30 a.m. on November 1 were part of a multi-jurisdictional task force that invaded Camp Zoe, a popular outdoor music venue and campground in Missouri's Shannon County. The previous evening had brought the 2010 concert season to an end with the final night of the fall "Spookstock" festival. 

"Every letter of the alphabet was represented" in the raid, Mike's wife Joni wryly observes. "There were people from the DEA, the IRS, the Highway Patrol, from Homeland Security, the local police and country Sheriff's Office. There was a group from the Rolla Police Department, which is two counties away from here."


Mike and Joni were among those who had stayed overnight to help with custodial work and other housekeeping matters. Mike had slept in later than he had planned, so he may have still been a little groggy as he absorbed the shock of seeing SWAT operators prowling the grounds. While he tried to make sense of the spectacle, one of Mike's friends commented: "You haven't seen what's going on behind the bus."

In the open field behind the bus "there were three huge RVs surrounded by more than a dozen other vehicles from every local police department and several federal agencies," Mike recounted. "One of the RVs was a State Police SWAT command center, and another one was a communications center for the federal agencies. And there were dozens of cops and SWAT guys swarming everywhere."



According to multiple accounts, one camp staffer (who prefers not to be named) was briefly stopped by police on nearby Highway 19 as he was driving his children to school. He was separated from his wife and children at the point of an M-16 rifle. The detainee was taken into the camp and briefly questioned before being released.

Witnesses estimate that as many as 200 law enforcement officers took part in the assault on Camp Zoe. Given the size of that mobilization, some would expect that the police were dealing with a heavily armed gang that posed an imminent threat to public safety. Yet no criminal activity was found during the raid, and not a single person was led away in handcuffs.

This should come as a surprise only to those who persist in believing that "law enforcement" is connected in some way to the protection of life, liberty, and property. Those who invaded Camp Zoe didn't find criminal activity because they weren't looking for any. They weren't there to arrest criminals; they were preparing to steal the property in the name of "civil asset forfeiture." 


"From what I saw, it looked like the people from the IRS were in charge initially," Mike Johnston relates. "The original search warrant was for business records, and I saw the IRS personnel hauling off boxes full of papers, computer drives, and other materials of that kind. Apparently they didn't find what they were looking for right away, so the DEA guys were next in line."


Camp Zoe was placed under lock-down while the raiders rummaged through every corner of the campground, intimidating staff and visitors and seizing personal items (including cash). As this was going on another federal contingent was dispatched to clean out the personal and business accounts of Jimmy Tebeau, the musician and entrepreneur who owns and operates the campground.


The Feds "just siphoned away all of his money, and then filed a civil asset forfeiture lawsuit seeking to seize his property," protests attorney Dan Viets, who has volunteered to represent Tebeau. "This would mean that he wouldn't have the money needed to fight the seizure in court."


Camp Zoe was opened in 2004 by  Tebeau, who plays bass in The Schwag, a hugely popular Grateful Dead tribute band. Since coming together in 1992, The Schwag has developed a large regional following, playing an average of roughly 140 concerts a year in addition to the "Schwagstock" festival performances. By some accounts, the 330-acre Camp Zoe is Shannon County's largest employer, and Tebeau's entrepreneurial accomplishments were recognized in a resolution enacted by the Missouri legislature in July 2005. 

Counter-culture entrepreneur: Tebeau on stage.

Tebeau himself is not accused of a crime. Yet Camp Zoe has been seized and Tebeau's personal financial assets have been confiscated by a motley assortment of "law enforcement" groups.   

Under the Orwellian standards governing  federal "civil asset forfeiture," Tebeau's property has already been found "guilty" of involvement in a crime. The agencies that seized it will be permitted to keep and divide it among themselves unless Tebeau can prove a negative -- namely, that he did not knowingly permit the sale and use of proscribed substances by others. 


Missouri state law dictates that forfeiture proceeds be given to the School Building Revolving Fund, which is administered by the state's Department of Revenue and subject to official audits. However, this isn't the case when the assets are seized as part of a joint (or "hybrid") operation with the Feds.

The Justice Department's manual on asset forfeiture describes this as "equitable sharing" of revenue proceeds, and explains that it is intended  "to increase or supplement the resources of the receiving state or local law enforcement agency" and can be used by the recipient "for any permissible purpose as long as shared funds increase the entire law enforcement budget."
This helps explain why practically every federal agency represented by an acronym -- as well as every local police agency -- joined the Gadarene rush to invade and occupy Camp Zoe.


If, on the other hand, the raid had been a purely local affair, it could have been "adopted" by the Feds after the fact. In congressional testimony, former deputy assistant attorney general Joe Whitley described how such an "adoption" takes place: "We receive a case which is in every aspect a local case, been worked on pretty much by the local agencies all the way from beginning to end, and we put our cover on it."

Under either approach,police agencies are typically permitted to keep at least eighty percent of the haul. The objective "is to reward the help we get from our brother and sister law enforcement" agencies, explained former Justice Department official Jerry McDowell in 2000. 

Since these "rewards" are doled out in explicit and willful defiance of state forfeiture laws, what McDowell is describing is a criminal syndicate, one far larger than any of the private criminal gangs whose depredations supposedly justify the forfeiture racket. Steve Kessler, a former prosecutor and recognized expert on forfeiture laws, has described the practice of asset forfeiture as "unquestionably the largest, most lucrative business in the United States."

Much of the money subject to federal forfeiture through "equitable sharing" is never reported to state governments. In Missouri, notes Eapen Thampy of Americans for Forfeiture Reform, a non-profit civil liberties group, "prosecutors and law enforcement have been able to systematically dodge requirements on how forfeited property is reported and recorded." 

In many instances, Thampy reports, civil forfeitures are filed as such "until prosecutors can convince defendants to not contest the claim, at which point the forfeiture action can be re-filed as an administrative forfeiture because the property is now abandoned or unclaimed."


Furthermore, "prosecutors around the state routinely send in incomplete records that detail only a small fraction of the total forfeitures around the state," Thampy continues. Most of the recorded forfeiture proceedings "are marked `pending' in the year they are audited," and prosecutors seldom if ever revise the records to reflect whether or not the seizure was connected to an actual criminal conviction, as state law requires.  

Highway robbery: Texas state police swarm a vehicle in search of loot.

As a result, literally millions of dollars harvested through asset forfeiture in Missouri are diverted from their legal use and funneled into the coffers of law enforcement agencies. The same racket is operating in practically every other state. 

In northern Texas, reports the Amarillo Globe-News, officers in the State Department of Public Safety have hauled in at least $14.6 million through asset forfeiture over the past five-and-a-half years. However, "only about 6.4 percent -- or roughly $935,000 -- of those seizures have remained in the area to benefit regional law enforcement agencies and taxpayers"; the state police simply chooses "to bypass Panhandle state courts in exchange for Amarillo's federal court when the largest amounts of money are at stake."

Predictably, this "has left some I-40 district attorneys frustrated and raised concerns the federal court route gives DPS an easier and larger payday at the expense of local counties and taxpayers," observes the paper. Which is to say that the "problem" isn't the fact that the DPS is plundering people in defiance of the law, but rather that the State Police insist on Bogarting the booty.

The federal forfeiture racket has turned I-40 into huge revenue stream for police and prosecutors. That stretch of highway is just one of several coveted forfeiture corridors. The municipal government that afflicts Tenaha, a one-stoplight town located on U.S. Highway 59, has profited immensely from shakedowns carried out by local police:  Any driver stopped by police for any reason can expect to be relieved of anything of value in his possession. 


Should a "suspicious" amount of cash be found during the traffic stop, the motorist and any passengers will be placed under arrest for "money laundering" or drug-related charges, and given an ultimatum: Sign away the loot, or face prosecution. 

This form of extortion-robbery works best when the victim is carrying an unusual but relatively small amount of cash -- say, less than $5,000 -- that wouldn't be enough to compensate for the hassle and expense of mounting a legal defense.

In one of the cases described in a federal lawsuit, an individual named Danny Green who works as an investigator for the Shelby County Prosecutor's Office threatened to kidnap a couple's children (by turning them over to the state's corrupt and frequently lethal child "protection" bureaucracy) if they didn't immediately sign a document surrendering about $6,000 in cash.


It is in the neighborhood of "impossible" to define a moral distinction between institutional corruption of the kind displayed by those Texas law enforcement agencies, and the variety frequently encountered on the other side of the border with Mexico. 

Granted, the squabbling over lucrative forfeiture corridors hasn't degenerated (yet) into open warfare -- but bear in mind that the ongoing depression is still young, and official corruption will most likely take on a much cruder aspect as existing revenue streams evaporate. 

To plunder and suppress: A Utah state trooper grabs the loot.

It's important to recognize that the civil forfeiture racket involves calculated bribery and subterfuge on the part of the Feds. 

In 1990, the Missouri State Supreme Court ruled that forfeiture proceeds had to be used to fund the school system. The ink was barely dry on that ruling when Jean Paul Bradshaw, U.S. attorney for the state's Western District, wrote a letter suborning state and local police agencies to defy both the court and the state legislature by inviting the Feds to take part in forfeiture operations.

"I know all of you in law enforcement are in desperate need for additional financial resources," wrote Bradshaw. "As most of you know, the money we share through our forfeiture program goes directly to the state or local law enforcement agency."

One year earlier, a DEA agent teaching a training session on civil forfeiture for the North Carolina State Highway Patrol found little enthusiasm on the part of his audience -- until he explained that collaboration with the Feds meant that the police got to keep most of the take. 

"Then everybody's eyes lit up," recalled one participant in that meeting in later congressional testimony.

In 2000, following five years of hearings on abuses of civil asset forfeiture, Congress enacted a largely useless measure to "reform" the practice. The late Henry Hyde, who at the time was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, had proposed an amendment (sometimes called the "Missouri provision") intended to end the federal kick-back scheme. Hyde's office was immediately "swamped by faxes from law enforcement protesting the provision," reported the Kansas City Star. Janet Reno's Justice Department pressured Congress into removing the amendment, which mysteriously fell prey to a "glitch" when the measure was presented for a vote.

While an emasculated version of the forfeiture "reform" bill worked its way through Congress, the issue was a hot topic at the July, 2000 National Conference of State Legislatures in Chicago. Ballot measures demanding substantive reform of civil asset forfeiture were passed by overwhelming majorities in several states. This prompted the institutional equivalent of a smirk and a shrug from the federal "Justice" Department, which continued to play Fagin to its growing network of state and local plunderers.


The overt thuggishness displayed by some police unions during the debate over forfeiture reform a decade ago suggests a capacity for undisguised criminal violence on the part of our supposed protectors that we ignore at our peril. In its detailed series examining forfeiture, the Star pointed out that in many states "public officials shrink from angering police." Eric Sterling of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation observed that it is "dangerous" when "non-police public officials feel sufficiently threatened that they will not challenge police lawlessness."


Police unions in Utah organized a show of force perfectly suitable to late Weimar-era Germany.


"Last year when we had a hearing on forfeitures, they brought in 200 officers in uniform and just intimidated everybody," recalled Utah state representative Bill Wright in 2000. "As a matter of fact, I had two ladies who said they were scared to death. I have never been more intimidated in my life to look out there and see 200 officers in uniform with guns on their hips, staring me down." 


It may be hyperbole -- then again, it may not -- to compare the scene Wright described to the intimidation tactics employed by the uniformed enforcement arm of Germany's National Socialist Party during the March 23, 1933 Reichstag debate over Hitler's "Enabling Act."

Despite the Brownshirt-style intimidation of the state legislature and a taxpayer-subsidized propaganda campaign depicting the asset reform ballot measure as the work of a purported "drug legalization lobby," the measure was enacted with nearly seventy percent of the vote -- and immediately fell into desuetude, thanks to federal intervention.

The Institute for Justice notes that county prosecutors simply ignored the law and used forfeiture assets as they saw fit, until a federal lawsuit forced them to stop. In 2004, Utah's police unions induced the legislature to overturn the forfeiture reform measure; accordingly, "one hundred percent of proceeds once again go to police and prosecutors" through the federal Crime Reduction Assistance Program (or, appropriately, CRAP). Thus police in Utah are once again empowered to steal any large amounts of cash they happen to find, even when no criminal charges are involved.


When it examined the practice of civil asset forfeiture a decade ago, the Kansas City Star confirmed that the federal kick-back scheme was operating in at least half of the states -- that is, in every state the paper had time and assets to investigate. This corrupt arrangement has, in principle, federalized every state and local police agency involved therein: The police can seize any money or other valuable property they can find and use it fund their operations in defiance of any limits imposed on them by the population to which they should be accountable. 

"A lot of state agencies, like the GBI [Georgia Bureau of Investigation], prefer to work federal cases because we know it will go directly into our asset forfeiture bank," admitted GBI official Mark Jackson. The same is true of any other state or local police agency. And this arrangement results in skewed and potentially dangerous priorities: Why should police focus on offenses against person and property, rather than on low-risk, high-yield federal forfeiture raids?


One ironic but eminently predictable result of this corrupt arrangement is the growing trend toward tardy enforcement of narcotics warrants. 

"There's been a pattern of SWAT raids and other drug enforcement actions in which the police were very late in executing a narcotics-related warrant," Eapen Thampy of Americans for Forfeiture Reform pointed out to Pro Libertate. "This makes sense if the real objective

is to `forfeit' money believed to be the proceeds of a drug transaction. If the police had arrived on time, they might have prevented a sale, but then they'd be stuck with the product, rather than the proceeds. So they wait until after the deal is supposed to have gone down, then they carry out their SWAT raid and take the money instead."  

This is a double-decker sandwich of official dishonesty: The police insist that SWAT teams

must be sent to serve "no-knock" drug warrants in order to prevent the destruction of evidence -- and then they wait until the evidence is gone so that they can grab the cash. The contraband ends up in the street, and the money (less the amount skimmed by the Feds) ends up in the hands of police and prosecutors. 

The ongoing effort to confiscate Camp Zoe follows this formula perfectly. The paramilitary force arrived long after any alleged criminal behavior took place. Because of the involvement of multiple federal agencies, a criminal conviction isn't necessary in order for the forfeiture to be consummated. And proceeds from the sale of the property -- as well as the money stolen from Jimmy Tebeau's bank accounts -- would go directly into the coffers of state and local law enforcement, after the Feds take their cut. 

According to the forfeiture complaint, both local and federal law enforcement officials spent four years building a narcotics investigation at Camp Zoe. The document claims that Tebeau both permitted and "profited" from the sale of drugs on his property. At least some of those sales allegedly involved undercover police operatives, in their familiar role of breaking the laws they're supposedly enforcing.

Under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, as well as the equivalent provisions in the Missouri state constitution, the criminal allegations against Tebeau must be proven in court before his property can be taken. The civil forfeiture complaint against Camp Zoe is intended to permit the police to profit from alleged criminal behavior without proving that Tebeau ever committed a crime.

Can't we all just get along?

"If they succeed in seizing Camp Zoe, we can expect the same tactics to be used against music venues nation-wide," Dan Viets told Pro Libertate. "This is a major test case that is being watched very carefully by people who hold music festivals and other large events, and who might find their property and profits subject to seizure without even being accused of a crime, let alone convicted of one."

 Those seeking to steal Camp Zoe -- and their stenographers in the local press -- are betting heavily that the mainstream public won't rally to the defense of a counter-culture outpost owned by an bass-playing entrepreneur in dreadlocks. 

William Jon Cox, a former prosecutor and police sergeant, points out that the current War on Drugs grew out of cynical political calculations of this kind. For reasons rooted in sheer political opportunism, the Nixon administration devised the drug war as a cultural conflict pitting the "Silent Majority" against the "Damn Dirty Hippies." 

Nixon enjoyed an immediate (albeit short-lived) political benefit. The impact on the culture of law enforcement was much more dramatic and enduring: The federalization and militarization of "local" police is almost entirely an outgrowth of the War on Drugs, which now poses a potentially lethal threat to the very concept of due process and property rights. This is why everybody who claims to cherish individual liberty protected by law -- whether they are Dead-Heads or Ditto-Heads -- should support Jimmy Tebeau's effort to save Camp Zoe from the federal forfeiture gang.



(A fund has been established for those interested in helping Tebeau pay his legal bills.) 

(Publisher's note: This version of the essay is updated to include a revised estimate of the number of officers who took part in the raid on Camp Zoe, and clarified with respect to other pertinent details.)

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