Romney: Official Candidate of the War and Torture Party?

Mitt Romney (right) stands with George W. Bush and International Olympic Chairman Jacques Rogge at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

“Paris is well worth a mass,” insisted Henry of Navarre as he underwent a politically motivated conversion to Catholicism that secured his throne as the first of France's Bourbon kings.

Henry had previously “converted” before, as a self-preservation gambit following the 1572 St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Born and baptized as a Catholic, Henry was raised as a Protestant and even bore arms with the Huguenot forces during the mid-16^th Century Wars of Religion.

But it wasn't until it became clear that embracing Catholicism was the price of securing the throne he inherited in 1584 that Henry IV was prompted to settle on one flavor of religious “conviction.” (His large retinue of illegitimate children demonstrated that his piety did little to inhibit his appetites.)

Flexibility of conviction is a consistent trait among politicians, but few have developed that trait to the extent that Henry IV did. Where cynical flexibility is concerned, Mitt Romney – whose lust to be president borders on the pornographic – might give Henry some stiff competition.

In recent days, citizens of the Blogosphere have passed along this video excerpt from Romney's Senate campaign against Ted Kennedy more than twelve years ago. The debate footage from an October 1994 displays Romney offering an impassioned, finger-thrusting defense of “safe” and legal abortion. He even plumbs the depths of pathos by invoking the death of a “close ... relative” from an illegal abortion, an event which apparently caused not only Romney but his mother, a one-time Senate candidate, to become deeply committed to the pro-abortion position.

Needless to say, as Romney has courted the unflinchingly anti-abortion Christian Right, he has employed the same acting school tricks to convey an impassioned commitment to the pro-life position.

The Boston Globe, which is having altogether too much fun underscoring Romney's hypocrisies (this is not to suggest, of course, that they should stop doing so), has pointed out that where in 1994 Romney “backed two gun-control measures strongly opposed by the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups,” he now “touts his work to ease restrictions on gun owners.”

“That's not going to make me the hero of the NRA,” Romney commented during the 1994 Senate campaign, referring to his support for the Brady Bill and a ban on so-called assault weapons. “I don't line up with the NRA,” he observed on another occasion during that race. Today, however, he proudly claims membership in the NRA (pshaw – if he really supported the right to armed self-defense, he'd offer to join Gun Owners of America – not that they'd take him) and recently put in face time at one of the nation's largest gun shows.

Clearly, John Kerry is not the only conspicuous member of the Bay State Mandarinate to whom flip-flopping comes naturally.

As the experiences of the Donner Party and Uruguay's national rugby team demonstrate, if someone gets hungry enough, he'll set aside nearly every moral inhibition to sate his appetite. Politicians, an exceptionally well-fed lot, generally know nothing of the primal desperation that prolonged physical hunger can inflict on otherwise civilized people – but they are well acquainted with cognate psychological appetites for power and money.

Even in such loathsome company, Mitt Romney distinguishes himself by his indecent hunger for the White House. And this may explain why he has taken to his bosom Mel Sembler, a squalid little pile of degeneracy for whom mere indecency would represent a monumental achievement in personal reform.

Months ago I took note of the fact that Romney, seeking the blessing of Evangelical Republicans leery of him because he's a Mormon, had made a point of expressing support for indefinite detention and torture of alleged terrorists.

As I commented then, it strikes me as perverse that a Mormon would endorse such official lawlessness, given that Mormons in the 19^th Century were on the receiving end of some of the most notorious abuses of power in our nation's history. Likewise, I cannot see how anyone who worships Jesus of Nazareth as God Incarnate could countenance torture for any reason. And it is abhorrent to think that it is on this ground that professed Christians could find common cause with a Mormon presidential aspirant.

In the essay immediately following the one described above, I profiled Republican fundraiser Mel Sembler, a Florida shopping mall magnate who is considered an intimate friend of the Bush Crime Family.

"Narcissus, thy name is Sembler": Mel Sembler (center), seen here in 2005 as U.S. Ambassador to Italy, prevailed on his friend, Rep. CW Young (R-Florida, right) to introduce a bill renaming a U.S. diplomatic facility the "Mel Sembler Building."

I published those essays back-to-back because I was confident that eventually these two would hook up. As it happens, Romney recently announced that Sembler will serve as one of his ten national fund-raisers.

Despite his prodigious fund-raising efforts on behalf of the GOP, Sembler helped raise money for Joe Lieberman's “independent” Senate campaign last fall. He is also head of the Lewis I. “Scooter” Libby Legal Defense Fund.

The trial of Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, will begin on Tuesday. In addition to being a key architect of the Iraq war, Libby is accused of playing a pivotal role in the outing of CIA covert operative Valerie Plame, which was done to retaliate against her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, an outspoken critic of the war. Even more importantly, Libby helped craft the detention and interrogation policies that led to creation of a global archipelago of CIA torture facilities.

Sembler clearly places prosecution of the war against “Islamo-Fascism,” and preservation of unaccountable executive power, at the top of his list of priorities. His support for one of those who crafted the Bush Regime's torture policies could be considered a form of professional courtesy.

Along with his wife, Sembler created the “Straight” behavioral modification program for youngsters with drug or alcohol addictions or considered to be “at risk” of developing the same. The Sembler-created “rehabilitation” network was based on programs and principles developed in a federally funded early 1970s enterprise called “The Seed,” which (according to a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation) used methods similar to the “highly refined `brainwashing' techniques employed by the North Koreans” against US prisoners of war.

“The Seed” was shut down in the mid-1970s, but Sembler's network (nine clinics in seven states) received funding from the same federal agencies that had underwritten the earlier Communist-derived program. Many of the teenagers put into Sembler's program complained of physical, emotional, psychological, and sexual abuse.

The program was shut down in 1993, but not before calving off similar efforts throughout the country and even abroad in Latin America and the Carribbean. Many of those programs are run by veterans of Straight; the ones operating abroad have quite literally made use of the same torture methods that became notorious at Abu Ghraib.

Many of the teenagers consigned to those facilities have no problem with drugs or alcohol, or any other self-destructive behaviors; nonetheless, they often are literally kidnapped from their homes (with the consent of parents terrified by lurid "War On Drugs" agitprop) and taken to a BM facility – sometimes abroad – and kept there until their thinking gets “straightened out.”

(The definitive research on this topic has been done by investigative author Maia Szalavitz; see her invaluable book Help At Any Cost for more details.)

Please indulge me as I repeat the summary at the end of my profile of Sembler:

“These BM programs are an outgrowth of the murderous fraud called the War on Drugs, and they developed and employed many of the methods of physical and psychological abuse now being used in the even more murderous fraud called the War on Terror. Sembler – a perverted little lump of arrogant corruption – is a human bridge connecting those two enterprises. And he's one of the most powerful figures at the highest echelon of the Grand Old (Torture) Party.

This is what those people do. It is who those people are. It is why they are Just Plain Evil.”

I see no reason to modify that assessment, except perhaps to add the critical detail that in the photogenic and apparently pious figure of Mitt Romney the most unregenerate element of the GOP elite may have found their ideal front man.

In this, as in so much else, The Bard nailed the truth flush to the plank centuries ago:

“The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. An evil soul, producing holy witness, is like a villain with a smiling cheek; A goodly apple rotten at the heart; O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!”

The Christian Right and the "Fatal Embrace"

No, these aren't out-takes from a "Tommy Boy" sequel; they're snapshots of tomorrow's Christian conservative GOP leaders. (Tip of the sombrero to The Gaelic Starover.)

It's ironic that Vladimir Lenin, notorious for the length and tedium of his pronouncements, coined what may be the world's briefest and most potent political truism: kto kogo, “who/whom,” understood to mean “who does what to whom.”

This is the defining question of modern politics, according to Lenin and those who subscribe to his insights – a category that includes pretty much everybody who aspires to political power.

Lenin's who/whom dichotomy has come to define democratic politics, in which a roiling mass of collectivist constituencies contend to be the “whos,” as it were, rather than the “whoms.”

Among the most tragic and dangerous developments to occur during the reign of King George the Second was his success in luring much of the Evangelical Christian church into an active alliance with the State. In assessing the influence and priorities of the self-designated Christian Right, it's useful to ask whether its leadership displays more fidelity to the Golden Rule or to Lenin's maxim, which is its direct antithesis.

In addition to being “God's perfect law of liberty” (James 1:25), the Golden Rule is the only basis on which humans can construct a political order compatible with freedom and peace. It is to be expected that those who profess the name of Jesus Christ would understand this principle and act on it in the political realm, as in every other sphere of life.

In practical terms this would mean contracting the role of the State rather than expanding it. But once again, since the emergence of the Religious Right in the late 1970s, the defining ambition of most politically conservative Christians has been to seize control over the State and occupy its “commanding heights” -- an expression associated with one of Lenin's most astute disciples, Antonio Gramsci – rather than reducing its size, power, and influence.

In 1988, as Kevin Phillips has documented, George W. Bush, the indolent wastrel son of the family dynasty, was chosen to become its emissary to the Christian Right. After taking control of the presidency, Bush became its leader ex officio. In ways both subtle and gross – and few things are more vulgar than the outright bribery practiced through the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives – the Bush Regime has seduced most of the Christian Right's leadership caste into active collaboration.

And tens of millions of Christians who displayed a sensible loathing for the State during the reign of Emperor Clintigula have dispensed with such concerns under the reign of Bush the Blessed, on the assumption that at long last they have joined the “do unto others” crowd.

These developments have led many on the Left to conclude that the alliance between the Bush administration and the Christian Right has begotten an embryonic version of American Fascism. This is the view presented by Harvard Divinity School graduate and former New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges in his new, unimaginatively titled book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.

Thinly researched and oddly pedestrian, Hedges' new book is largely barren of the unexpected insights that adorned his most recent previous offering, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

An even more serious defect in American Fascists is the author's reflexive embrace of the same who/whom dichotomy he correctly discerns as the Christian Right's organizing principle (even though he doesn't use that specific expression).

This is quite lamentable, given that Hedges does manage to provide some timely and useful insights, although they are lost on some who prefer to “review” the book without actually reading it.

Surveying the often nauseating opulence found among top-tier televangelists and moolah-mooching mega-church mullahs, Hedges writes that where Christian Right activism intersects with the “prosperity gospel” movement, the result is a really nasty form of collectivist materialism.

“The movement offers ... the absurd but seductive promise that those who are right with God will rise to become spiritual and material oligarchs," he opines. "They will become the new class.”

Hedges defines the “new class” as a product of a “strange fusion between this new, flamboyant gospel of prosperity and America's celebrity-driven culture,” which is a subdivision of a transnational elite “creating a global marketplace where all workers, to compete, will have to become like workers in dictatorships such as China.... [T]his new class seeks to reduce the American working class to the levels of this global serfdom.”

Handicapped by Marxist assumptions about the economy, Hedges insists that the emerging global economic system is a form of untrammeled capitalism, when in fact it is a particularly brutal form of corporatism, in which politically favored corporate interests are allied with the State.

Despite his economic misunderstandings, Hedges does seem to understand that the system he describes has an immense capacity for lethal oppression, since he laments that the Christian Right's rank and file, seeing themselves “empowered by faith,” are oblivious to “the gross injustices and repression that could well boomerang back on most of them” once the present political alignment changes.

Unfortunately, Hedges, despite all of his anguish over the Christian Right's role in building the Leviathan State, seeks not to dismantle that monstrosity, but rather to turn it against conservative Christians.

“The radical Christian Right must be forced to include other points of view to counter their hate talk in their own broadcasts,” Hedges insists, obliquely referring to Orwellian measures such as “hate crimes” laws and the so-called “Fairness Doctrine.” “They must be denied the right to demonize whole segments of American society, saying they are manipulated by Satan and worthy only of conversion or eradication. They must be made to treat their opponents with respect and acknowledge the right of a fair hearing even as they exercise their own freedom to disagree with their opponents.”

“Passivity in the face of the rise of the Christian Right,” Hedges concludes, “threatens the democratic state.”

But the State -- in whatever form it takes -- is the problem and chief source of danger, not supposed abuses of individual rights by people who express "intolerant" viewpoints. As someone suckled on statist assumptions, Hedges simply cannot see and understand this.

Similar Marxist-derived myopia can be found throughout Hedges' book. For instance: Hedges consistently denigrates those who would replace State-imposed redistribution programs with private charity, apparently on the assumption that material aid not sanctified through the exercise of State coercion is somehow an abomination.

Just like those he volubly condemns, Hedges believes that the State should exploit religion in order to accomplish ideologically dictated designs – an arrangement described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lenin's intellectual ancestor, as the “civil religion.” Hedges' enthusiasm for this arrangement is bizarre, given that as a long-time war correspondent he was a witness to the hideous things wrought in the name of various contending versions of the civil religion.

One of the strengths of his current book can be found in the often shocking descriptions of the militarist bloodlust that has come to define most of the Christian Right. “War is the final aesthetic of the movement,” Hedges writes, and I find it difficult to disagree – even as I find myself puzzled by his eagerness to use the State to wage war against “intolerance.”

If there is one redeeming quality to Hedges' book, it can be found in the possibility that its prescription for regimenting the Christian Right may help at least some within the movement to repent of their potentially fatal embrace of the State.

The Earth is the State's, and the Fullness Thereof

Armed revenue farmers harvest a crop at a DUI checkpoint.

When George W. Bush signed the death warrant for the habeas corpus guarantee last October, he was consummating a process that has been underway for decades in our law enforcement and "justice" system.

Bush's destruction of habeas corpus, which took place when he signed the Military Commissions Act (better described as the Death of the Republic Act of 2006), is kindred to other developments in which the Regime – both the central government and its state and local franchises – acts on the assumption that the earth is the State's, and the fullness thereof, and that its domain includes ownership rights over all of us.

The most important function of the habeas corpus guarantee -- the “Great Writ” that serves as the foundation of the Anglo-Saxon concept of liberty under law – is to protect individuals from summary imprisonment at the ruler's whim: Within a specified time of arrest, the State must “present the body” of the suspect and justify the detention to a judge.

This is an indispensable guarantee of individual liberty. It is also, in a very real sense, the most important guarantee of property rights, since control over one's person is the fundamental property rights issue. Classic libertarians extol the concept of self-ownership; a Christian libertarian perspective would define the question as one of self-stewardship under God's sovereignty.

In either case, the State does not own the individual. That, in my view, is the whole point of habeas corpus.

Totalitarian regimes are built on the assumption that the State owns its subjects.

A corollary of that premise is that anything can be taken from the subjects as the State's supervisors see fit.

Here's a very suitable recent illustration of those assumptions in action.

The Santa Fe City Council has enacted “a tough, anti-drunken-driving ordinance that would empower city police to seize vehicles driven by repeat offenders and sell them at auction," reports the Free New Mexican. “The ordinance would allow police to sell the vehicles of those arrested on a third or subsequent drunken-driving charge if they already have two convictions. Likewise, those caught drinking and driving on a license suspended for driving while intoxicated might have their vehicle forfeited and sold immediately.”

That is to say, the property would be forfeited and sold upon arrest, not following conviction. This ordinance appears to be patterned after one imposed on New York City in 1999.

City Councilor Patti Bushee describes this confiscation-without-conviction measure as “the ultimate hammer. It's not like they had an innocent slip-up. These are people who're just not doing the right thing and have a real problem.”

That description comes from a political official, so it's safe to assume that it's a lie. It is certainly a misrepresentation, since as the Free New Mexican points out, the ordinance wouldn't require for authorities to wait “for offenders to accumulate multiple convictions to enact municipal sanctions. Upon a first arrest -- before conviction in a court of law -- suspected drunken drivers could have their vehicles immobilized for up to six months unless they agree to install an ignition-interlock device.

As with every measure enacted by the criminal syndicate called government, an engine of corrupt enrichment lurks behind the facade of humanitarian necessity:

“The Police Department is requesting $119,250 to start the program and believes it can realize revenues of up to $150,000 during the first six months of operations. Funds from the program, above its operating costs, would go into DWI education and drunken-driving prevention efforts, said City Councilor Karen Heldmeyer, chairwoman of the city Finance Committee.”

Given that the revenue estimates are already in, and parasite constituencies are already lining up at the trough, assurances from City Attorney Frank Katz that “suspects would be given the right to an administrative hearing promptly following their arrest to contest whether the police had a probable cause to arrest them and take their vehicle” are just so much verbal flatulence. Odds are pretty good that the “administrative hearing” would be conducted by a municipal functionary, rather than a judge.

Katz insists that conviction isn't necessary to justify seizure and sale of an automobile from a suspected recidivist drunk driver; mere “probable cause” is sufficient: "It's enough to throw them in jail; it's enough to take their car."

Here's where Katz's cute analogy breaks down:

A criminal suspect can indeed be thrown in jail based on probable cause – but habeas corpus requires that the State justify that incarceration, and before the sentence is carried out, the State has to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Under Santa Fe's seize-it-and-sell-it ordinance, an innocent driver's automobile can be stolen and pawned by the police, and the proceeds spent by the city on – oh, I don't know, something worthwhile like an office beer bust -- long before a trial.

One small victory: With the help of the Institute for Justice, Carol Thomas of Millville, New Jersey, was able to get back her 1990 Ford Thunderbird after it had been stolen by the local police under the pretext of "civil asset forfeiture."




While not meaning to minimize the seriousness of drunk driving – an often lethal act of irresponsibility that should be severely punished when it results in crimes against persons or property – the anti-DUI campaign is a malignant racket.

Financial writer Christopher Solomon points out: “In several states ... your license may be suspended for 90 days simply upon your arrest for DUI, regardless of whether you end up being convicted.” For many people, loss of a driver's license can mean immediate unemployment.

To understand just how the DUI enforcement system has been engineered to extort guilty pleas – and, of course, revenue – from the innocent, consider the case of Stan Willcutt, an unassuming construction worker from Lee's Summit, Kansas.

In his early 40s, Willcutt is a walking collection of chronic injuries received from a long career in construction. His back, for example, is so infirm that a good sneeze can throw it out. This is what happened to Willcutt on April 7 of last year, as he was driving home from a doctor's appointment. The sneeze, and the resulting back pain, caused Willcutt momentarily to lose control of his car. His vehicle clipped a highway median, puncturing the front-left tire.

As Willcutt changed his tire, the Lee's Summit Police materialized, telling him they'd received reports of a drunk driver. Willcutt, who had a 20-year-old DUI conviction on his record, had given up all alcohol consumption.

When the officers demanded that he take a field sobriety test, Willcutt warned them that his injuries – dentures that caused him to slur his speech, two ankles left weak and unsteady from multiple breaks, and bad back – would make it difficult for him to pass the test. He complied, nonetheless, with predictable results.

(It should be pointed out that there are sound and compelling reasons to regard standard field sobriety tests as little more than a bizarre variety of compelled performance art.)

After his performance was deemed unsatisfactory, Willcutt requested a breathalyzer test, which measured his blood-alcohol content at 0.00 percent.

He was arrested anyway. Once in jail, he was required to provide a urine sample, which likewise produced a 0.00 percent reading for alcohol, amphetamines, barbituates, benzodiazepine, cannabinoids (Marijuana), cocaine, methadone, opiates, phencylidine and proxyphene.

Nonetheless, Rachel Brown, the vindictive, careerist shrike who serves as city prosecutor, went ahead and filed charges against Willcutt anyway – on the assumption that the complete lack of evidence against Willcutt didn't validate his innocence.

“You have people driving under the influence [of substances] that don't show up on the initial panel,” Brown insisted, maintaining that the judgment of the arresting officers was more important than the scientific evidence.

If Brown's reaction strikes you as kindred to the bizarre rationales used by the Bush junta and its supporters to justify the Iraq war despite the absence of Saddam's fearsome WMD arsenal, you're very perceptive.

Within weeks, Willcutt – who had few financial resources to draw upon – had spent over $1,000 on legal counsel. After the case received local publicity, Brown grudgingly dropped the DUI charges, only to press careless and imprudent driving charges against the long-suffering construction worker.

“I'm frustrated and mad,” Willcutt told a local magazine. “I'm wondering why the town I grew up in is raking me over the coals.”

The answer to Willcutt's implied question – why is the government doing this to me? -- is quite simple: Because it can, since those running the State consider us to be its property.

"This Time For Sure!"

“Character is fate, the Greeks believed. A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which the seed of self-destruction lay embedded, waiting for its hour. The voice was Schlieffen's but the hand was the hand of Fichte who saw the German people chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe, of Hegel who saw them leading the world to a glorious destiny of compulsory Kultur, of Nietzsche who told them that Supermen were above ordinary controls, of Treitschke who set the increase of power as the highest moral duty of the state, of the whole German people, who called their temporal ruler the `All-Highest.' What made the Schlieffen plan was ... the body of accumulated egoism which suckled the German people and created a nation fed on `the desperate delusion of the will that deems itself absolute.'”

Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August



German youths marinated in the delusional ideology described above marched giddily to war in August 1914 wearing belt buckles adorned with the slogan Gott Mit Uns (“God is with us”). The Schlieffen Plan envisioned a rapid strike by the German right wing through Belgium, with the last man on the right “brush[ing] the Channel with his sleeve.” German troops anticipated that they would be on the Boulevard in Paris in a matter of weeks.

Yes, this would be an aggressive war in violation of every civilized notion of international relations. But von Moltke had long since dispensed with such trivial concerns. “We must put aside all commonplaces as to the responsibility of the aggressor,” he stated in 1913. “Success alone justifies war.”

Besides, Kaiser Wilhelm II – hailed by the Germans as the “All-Highest,” perceived by himself to be “The Finger of God” -- had given Belgium a chance to collaborate in the unfolding of Germany's providential destiny, and their monarch had turned him down.

In 1904, Germany's “All-Highest” paid a visit to Belgium's King Leopold II, seeking to inveigle him into an alliance with promises of snatching territory from France. Leopold was hardly a model of probity, emitting what Tuchman calls an “aura of wickedness composed of mistresses, money, Congo cruelties, and other scandals.”

Although Leopold was many reprehensible things, “fool” was not found on that list. He pointed out to Wilhelm, whose foolishness was a match for his ambition, that the Belgian monarch didn't dispose of the same powers exercised by his 15th Century forebears. The King told the Kaiser that his Ministers and Parliament wouldn't approve of the alliance.

“That was the wrong thing to say,” notes Tuchman, “for the Kaiser flew into one of his rages and scolded the King for putting respect for Parliament and Ministers above respect for the Finger of God....”

“I told him I could not be played with,” the Kaiser told Chancellor von Bulow. “Whoever in the case of European war was not with me was against me.”

It's difficult to read those lines without thinking of the curdled little man-child in the White House, his own delusions of divine destiny (surely, George W. Bush could only be the “Finger of God” if The Almighty were treating humanity to an obscene gesture), his lunatic “global democratic revolution” -- and his determination to emulate the worst elements of WWI-era statecraft by reinforcing the his failure in Iraq at the cost of additional thousands of lives.

The formal announcement of the planned “surge” in Iraq will be what I call a “Bullwinkle Moment.” Many recall how the beloved dim-wit cartoon moose, consistently thwarted in his efforts to pull a rabbit out of his hat, exclaimed, “This time for sure!” -- before failing again.

“This time for sure!” pretty much encapsulates what passes for the White House strategy behind Bush's intention to dispatch tens of thousands of additional US soldiers to Iraq. The same could have been said of the demented rulers who refused to reconsider their course in World War I once the Western Front had become the scene of a pointlessly bloody stalemate: As long as they had a steady supply of young men to throw into the abattoir, the rulers would insist, “This time for sure!”

US intervention broke the stalemate, but it also led to a vindictive post-war settlement that engendered totalitarian movements in Germany, Italy, and Russia, thereby ensuring a bloody conflict less than a generation later. One enduring legacy of that war – the murder-suicide of the Christian West – is the modern Middle East, including the spurious nation called Iraq.

In defending the Bush Regime's plan to reinforce failure in Iraq, my local newspaper offered, without any ironic intention I can detect, the following assessment:

“An infusion of reinforcements will create a decent interval of stability to help kick-start economic aid projects and provide the Iraqi government with time and space to be successful.”

I doubt the author of those words caught the historic resonance, or had any inkling of the way that phrase had been used to justify several pointless years of bloodshed in our last misbegotten foreign war.

So Washington is once again the in business of requiring young soldiers and Marines – and not-so-young Reservists and Guardsmen – to kill and die on behalf of a “decent interval.”

Because our ruling class is confined in the intellectual prison called the “bi-partisan foreign policy consensus,” our soldiers will remain mired in Mesopotamia – unless George W. Bush and the adults who surround him decide to expand the war into Syria, Iran, or both. But as the Wall Street Journal (subscription req.) points out, the elements are in place for a disastrous regional war, even if the Bush Regime doesn't deliberately expand the conflict, as it clearly lusts to do.

The region is likely to erupt even if we were to remove our troops from Iraq now. This would be a catastrophe, but one we could survive.

Under the Constitution's allotment of war powers, it is possible for Congress to order the Bushling to get our troops out of Iraq immediately; doing so is a moral and patriotic necessity.

But our rulers esteem the interventionist “consensus” -- and its related doctrine of imperial presidential war powers -- more than their perjured oaths to the Constitution, and are hopeless hostages to the crusading ideology that has defined Washington's foreign policy since World War I.

Count Sergei Witte, the Russian Premier during the abortive Revolution of 1905, described the Imperial Russian government on the eve of World War I as an “insane regime ... [a] tangle of cowardice, blindness, craftiness, and stupidity.”

A better description cannot be found of the regime ruling us today, as well. And it's impossible to read Barbara Tuchman's description of Russia under Czar Nicholas II (who, it must be said, did not deserve what the Bolsheviks did to him and his family) without thinking of the petulant little figure in the Oval Office, and the incurably corrupt political system over which he presides:

“The regime was ruled from the top by a sovereign who had but one idea of government – to preserve intact the absolute monarchy bequeathed to him by his father – and who, lacking the intellect, energy, or training for his job, fell back on personal favorites, whim, simple mulishness, and other devices of the empty-headed autocrat.”

Nicholas II was widely seen as stoic and serene, when in fact his capacity to maintain his composure in the face of disaster was a reflection of “the indifference of a mind so shallow as to be all surface.”

George W. Bush's priorities and intellectual tool-kit are remarkably similar to those of the vapid Russian autocrat. And he's willing to send thousands of people to death needlessly in order to preserve his legacy against an ignominious – but imperative – withdrawal from Iraq.

Video music bonus

Thanks to Stephen Carson on Lew Rockwell's blog for pointing out this new cover of "One More Parade" by They Might Be Giants.

For those whose taste in anti-war anthems runs toward harder rock, I recommend this version of "Out In The Fields" by Gary Moore and the late Phil Lynott. Even more timely now than when it was recorded in 1985, this video is worth catching if only to see Moore -- perhaps the most elegantly visceral fretboard Jedi in the business -- tearing to shreds an Ibanez Roadstar II just like the one I had at the time.

A Totalitarian Tableau

The frail, middle-aged man splayed awkwardly on the ground in the middle of this photograph is Tufts historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. On Friday, while attending the annual conference of the American Historical Association, the former Oxford don was arrested and assaulted by several police officers after committing the grievous offense of jaywalking.

"I come from a country where you can cross the road where you like," Fernandez-Armesto later recounted in a videotaped interview. (Follow this link, scroll down, and you'll find that interview.) Earlier in the day, the mild-mannered professor ("nebbishy" would be a suitable term) had seen scores of people crossing the street between the Hyatt and Hilton hotels, displaying complete indifference to the crosswalks.

Jaywalking is the proverbial trivial offense; Steve Martin once extorted laughs from the ludicrous suggestion that the crime rate could be dramatically reduced by making it a capital crime. It is perhaps the best example of a malum prohibitum -- an act made illegal only by a posivitist law, as opposed to a malum in se, or a crime against the natural law (meaning an offense against persons or property).

Professor Fernandez-Armesto certainly had no intention to violate the law, since he is "pathologically law-abiding ... it is alien to my nature to transgress the law, especially as a guest in this country."

Like altogether too many people, Fernandez-Armesto made the mistake of assuming that the function of the police under our current regime is to protect individuals and maintain decent order. Thus when a young man wearing a "bomber jacket" yelled at him not to cross the road in the middle of the street, the professor ignored the admonition. After all, peace officers are supposed to make themselves conspicuous, aren't they?

After the officer accosted the professor, he was infuriated when asked to produce identification -- a reasonable and rational request.

"I think I caused the young policeman offense," recalled the historian. "He didn't take kindly" to the request, angrily insisting that as a "policeman on duty he wasn't obliged to show me identification" -- which could only be true if his credentials were visible, which they weren't.

The officer then demanded identification from Fernandez-Armesto, who -- naively believing that the United States remains a relatively free society, rather than one in which the directive "Your Papers, Please" is becoming ubiquitous. Not anticipating an encounter with an armed representative of the State, the professor had left his hotel room without his papers.

On this pretext, he recalled, he was "subjected to terrible, terrible violence."

"This young man kicked my legs out from under me, wrenching me around in what I think was a sort of Judo move," recalled Fernandez-Armesto.

You just know that this young uniformed thug had been lusting and aching to try that move; what better uke could he hope for than an ectomorphic, bespectacled, middle-aged history professor?

After attacking the unresisting professor, our Hero in Blue called for backup, and a half-dozen of his colleagues raced to the scene, helping to pin the hapless and terrified academic to the ground. The traumatized professor's body was left a "mass of contusions" -- but that was not the most serious injury inflicted upon him.

"One of the more professional of the policemen who assaulted me told me that they really now had to continue with the process, because if they admitted their mistake, I would be able to sue the City of Atlanta."

Consider that logic for just a second.

If you are an armed agent of the State, and you needlessly arrest and physically assault an innocent individual, your duty is not to see that the victim receives redress, but to protect your employer from liability.

In this case, Atlanta's Finest -- who were temporarily out of elderly women to use for lethal target practice -- hauled Professor Fernandez-Armesto down to a detention center, where he spent more than eight hours incarcerated with people accused of actual criminal offenses. Booked on charges of jaywalking, failure to obey a police officer, and obstruction of justice, the professor was confronted with a demand for $1,371.00 in bail -- a sum that is facially "unreasonable."

During his time in jail, the professor spoke at length with the other inmates, and found that they were, "on the whole, much better-mannered than the police."

The representatives of the Thin Blue Line responsible for his ordeal, commented Fernandez-Armesto, exhibited what he was tempted to call "hominid values -- except that would be an injustice to hominids."

By professor Fernandez-Armesto's reckoning, this guy would be over-qualified to serve on the Atlanta Police Force.


During his ordeal -- the arrest, detention, and court hearing that followed -- the professor was "tortured inside by the fear I'd end up with a criminal conviction," which would mean the failure of his Green Card application and the loss of his livelihood.

Fortunately, the Judge who heard his case was able to arrange with the prosecution to dismiss the matter.

Welcome to George W. Bush's Amerika, Professor Fernandez-Armesto. In a way, you could consider yourself fortunate: If the Feds had wanted to recruit you as an intelligence asset, you might have ended up like Jose Padilla.

As a result of more than two years of undergoing sensory deprivation, psychological and physical torture, and (allegedly) the use of psychoactive drugs at the hands of his captors, Padilla "is so mentally damaged that he is unable to assist in his own defense," his defense counsel and two psychologists informed NPR. The putative "enemy combatant" by presidential decree "is so passive and fearful now ... that he is `like a piece of furniture.'"

"Even at this late stage, after dozens of meetings with his lawyers, Padilla suspects that they are government agents, says Andrew Patel, who is on the legal team," continues the NPR report. "Padilla may believe that the lawyers assigned to represent him are in fact `part of a continuing interrogation program.'"

The Regime, for its part, does not dispute the "particulars" of abuse and torture compiled by Padilla's defense team; it "maintains that whatever happened to Padilla during his detention is irrelevant, since no information obtained during that time is being used in the criminal case against him."

This is kindred to the argument used by the Atlanta police to justify arresting Fernandez-Armesto: In that case, the police had to book him on multiple criminal charges -- even if he had done nothing to justify that treatment -- to protect themselves from a lawsuit; in Padilla's case, the Feds claim that they were free to abuse Padilla, because the torture didn't result in evidence of his guilt.

Most chilling of all in the case of Jose Padilla is the closing observation in NPR's report:

"Indeed, there are even some within the government who think it might be best if Padilla were declared incompetent and sent to a psychiatric prison facility. As one high-ranking official put it, `the objective of the government always has been to incapacitate this person.'"

The point bears repeating:

Just as Fernandez-Armesto was arrested to protect the City of Atlanta from a lawsuit, the mind of Jose Padilla -- who was seized and detained on a presidential whim -- was deliberately destroyed simply to protect the Regime.

While it's difficult to identify a precise point at which a society ceases to be free and becomes a despotism, one good definition of the latter would be this: A despotism exists when agents of the State can arrest you without cause, steal your property under color of official authority, kill you without consequence, torture you with impunity, and deprive you of your sanity simply for grins and giggles.



"Are we there yet?"

We've been "there" for a while.

(Thanks to The Free World Informer for the closing illustration, and to Wendy McElroy at Lew Rockwell's blog for tipping us off to Professor Fernandez-Armesto's story.)

Torture and the "Goodness of America"

Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends… [I]n periods when millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy, as at present over a large part of the world, and as it has often been in the past, it must be at the behest of very many good people, and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object.

Isabel Patterson, “The Humanitarian With the Guillotine,” from The God of the Machine, 1943 (emphasis added)

Talk radio and cable television personality Glenn Beck postures as the Heartland's media surrogate, a champion of the common, decent American.

He often describes himself as a “rodeo clown,” which is less an act of self-deprecation than an attempt to create a viral marketing meme. I grant that Beck does remind me of something one can find at a rodeo, if one is foolish enough to lift the tail of the nearest equine.

Several months ago, during what passed for the congressional debate over torture, Beck's radio program featured a call from a husky-voiced man with a Deep South accent identifying himself as “Mitch.” This individual explained to Beck that he was a professional torturer – or, as he preferred to describe his profession, an “intelligence extractor.”

Intrigued, Beck – his voice filled with the same giddy eagerness one would expect from a pubescent boy invited to look for the first time at dirty pictures – asked “Mitch” to elaborate on the techniques he had used.

“Well, with simple masking tape or duct tape, you dilate the eyes, and they you use halogen lamps, and a person is placed in a rigid position where they cannot move,” the torturer related. “Their eyes are opened and the halogen lamps, you know, they're producing 40,000 watts. It's intense. And that breaks them down. High-pressure water -- I mean, you've heard the term `drinking from a fire hose.' I wouldn't do that. That generally wouldn't extract what you want, and usually would drown somebody quickly. But you can use high-water pressure into one ear, and when that first ear drum is broken with, you know, 14 or 15 hundred pounds of water pressure going in, the don't -- they will talk before that second ear drum is broken.”

All of this was stated with arid professional detachment. This clearly wasn't someone overwrought with moral ambivalence.

“I did know a contractor that [sic] did drilling on live teeth,” “Mitch” continued. “You know, well teeth. And you've seen that before in different movies.”


Good enough for government work, then and now: Nazi dentist Christian Szell (Sir Laurence Olivier) tortures Thomas Levy (Dustin Hoffman) in a scene from the 1976 film "Marathon Man."

Presumably, “Mitch” was referring to "Dr. Christian Szell," the Nazi war criminal played by the late Sir Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man. Which means that he was implicitly – and quite correctly – drawing a parallel between the Bush Regime's torturers and those who plied that trade on behalf of National Socialist Germany.

“Did you ever accidentally kill somebody?” asked Beck in the same Flounder-from-Animal House-squealing- “Oh, boy is this great!” voice.

“No -- I made them wish they were dead,” “Mitch” replied. “You know ... my most successful use of any technique was high-pressure air. You just think of a small [high] velocity hose with 1,200 PSI [pounds per square inch] of air coming through it. I don't know if you've ever heard a hose with that much pressure go off, but once -- your ears immediately bleed. One ear blown completely out, and you don't have to do the other one.... It's like your head exploding inside is what we always thought....”

Although “Mitch” didn't ask for it, Beck was willing to offer him absolution.

“Do you ever have a hard time sleeping at night?” asked the self-described Rodeo Clown.

“No,” replied the serial mangler.

“Good for you,” Beck exclaimed. “I mean, good for you. Is it because you did it for the country?”

After “Mitch” replied in the affirmative, Beck pronounced the expected benediction:

“Mitch, I've got to tell you I appreciate your service.... I have to tell you, when all is said and done, I'm glad people like you are on our side.”



What I have to say is this:

There is no sense in which someone who commits atrocities of the sort “Mitch” described is serving me or my family, or my country, for that matter. There is no sense in which someone who studies and practices the art of torturing helpless human beings – however loathsome the victims may be – is on my “side.”

“Mitch” is a war criminal, and he should be prosecuted as such, along with the executive branch officials who cut his orders, and the “Justice” Department lawyers who wove the web of sophistry supporting those orders. (Yes, we're coming for Yoo, John.)

Is “Mitch” what we would call a “good” man (bearing in mind, of course, that we are authoritatively told that there is no Good save One)? Probably. He sounds like any one of several hundred people I have met at football games or in similar settings. Most likely he goes to church when he can, maybe works as a volunteer Scout leader, shovels snow from his neighbor's steps – and then flies off to Gitmo or Abu Ghraib or the Salt Pit or heaven only knows where else to mutilate the retinas and ear drums of people who most likely have done nothing to harm us in any way.

Where does “Mitch” hail from? His accent and inflection, as I noted above, suggest the Deep South, perhaps North Carolina. This would fit very well with the findings of Trevor Paglen and A.C. Thompson, authors of Torture Taxi – a study of the Regime's far-flung torture network, particularly the clandestine airlines that ferry victims to various “black sites.”

In an interview promoting their book, the authors make note of two rural towns in North Carolina, Smithfield and Kinston. These small towns host many of those involved in the “extraordinary rendition” of people abroad to be tortured, and it's likely that at least some of those residing in the area have hands-on experience of the sort “Mitch” described.

"We went there and talked to a pilot who had worked for Aero [a CIA-operated rendition airline] about exactly what they did and how the program worked,” they recall. “There's nothing random about the CIA using this rural area in North Carolina. If you wanted to shut up a secret operation, this is where you would do it. It's a God, guns and guts area.”

Which is to say it's full of “good Americans” (I use that expression, alas, in the same way the phrase “good Germans” was once used – yes, it's come to that) of the sort who react to torture with the same thoughtless, reflexive approval Glenn Beck displayed.

“What you start to figure out by spending time in Smithfield is that a lot of people know about the company and have at least an inkling of what goes on at the airport,” continued the authors of Torture Taxi. “Most don't want to talk about it and don't take a critical view of it.”

This is not to say that the inhabitants of Smithfield and Kinston were of one accord regarding the supposed merits of torture.

“Folks we met there framed the debate within this religious discourse,” the authors recount. “The [anti-torture] activists that we talked to were God-fearing devout Christians who felt like this was not what they signed up for as religious people, that it violates the religious tenets they adhere to. Interestingly, folks on the other side of the debate seem to be coming from a similar place, but just coming to a different conclusion. The subject of whether or not torture was permitted by the Bible was discussed in church there--and many congregants believed it was.”

I would find it interesting – if only in an anthropological sense – to hear a sermon or Sunday School lesson devoted to the theme of what the Bible says in favor of torture.

This would be a formidable challenge, given that the dominant Figure in the New Testament was One who urged His followers to turn the other cheek, who (with the exception of the time He cleansed the temple) never lifted His hand except to bless or heal another, and – here's the most important consideration – who was subjected to every variety of torture the depraved human mind could devise before being nailed to a cross to die. And crucifixion, of course, was a form of death-by-torture.

I'm not saying it's impossible to find people capable of the feats of eisegesis necessary to find a "biblical" rationale for torture. I am saying that people of that sort couldn't possibly be genuine believers in Jesus of Nazareth.

These small North Carolina communities, the writers of Torture Taxi observe, are burdened “with this open secret that nobody wants to talk about. It shows what's going on culturally. When a country starts doing things like torturing and disappearing people, it's not just a policy question, it's also a cultural question.”

This is exactly right: We are contemplating a sickness that transcends mere politics, and it can't be cured simply through political means.

Which is why this prescription offered by my former employer is both tardily offered, and inadequate to deal with the affliction that was documented, most recently, by horrifying disclosures from Guantanamo Bay:

“Until 2001, the United States was an outspoken critic of torture and prisoner abuse in other nations. This was because the concept of torture runs counter to the moral compass of the American people, not to mention being at odds with the nation's Christian understanding [of individual dignity]....Now, unfortunately, it has been the U.S. that has engaged in these practices. It falls now to the citizens of the Republic to reassert the goodness of America through pressure on Congress to repeal inappropriate and unconstitutional legislation, to investigate crimes conducted by government officials and to put right the abuses of the last few years.” (Emphasis added)

This oddly structured (and factually infirm -- the U.S. Government was in the torture business long before 2001) quasi-admission of shared responsibility reminds me of George W. Bush's reaction to the first disclosures from Abu Ghraib. Standing next to Jordan's King Abdullah II, Bush expressed sorrow for the “humiliations” of the Iraqi victims and their families, but said he was ''equally sorry that people seeing these pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America.''

The problem with that statement, and the one from my former employer cited above, is this: The acts of torture – physical mutilation, psychological torment, sexual debasement – have been carried out by “good” Americans; they were authorized by officials elected or appointed by “good” Americans; and they have been, and continue to be, countenanced by tens of millions of “good” Americans.

As things stand, these acts do not appear to be alien to the “true nature and heart” of at least much of America. Which means that there is something seriously defective in the “moral compass” of the same American public upon which we are to rely for a political remedy.

Nothing of any consequence can be done to rectify the political problems that have led to the creation of an American Torture State until the underlying cultural and moral problems are dealt with.

This will require something robustly unpopular in every age, an activity for which nobody has any appetite at all: Repentance.


A brief postscript:

“[T]he torture of any human being for any reason - as is now so widely practiced by the beasts who call themselves Communists - is morally far worse than even cold-blooded murder.”

Robert Welch, founder of the much-maligned John Birch Society, from his 1970 essay "The John Birch Resolutions."

Another quick note --

I have been honored to receive a brief comment from Ramon Perez, the outstanding former Austin Police Officer fired for his "unsuitable" Christian and constitutionalist convictions. Please keep Perez and his beautiful family in your prayers.

Snapshots of a Sadean State

One of Sean Hannity's "great Americans" in action.


On two occasions I can recall, a book has disgusted me so thoroughly that rather than setting it aside lightly, I threw it away with great force.

The first volume to go airborne in that fashion was the Satyricon of Petronius Aribter; the second was Juliette by the Marquis de Sade. Both of them were assigned reading. I made it through neither. Beyond its opening sixty or seventy pages, Juliette remains entirely unknown to me.

What I did read in that book, unfortunately, made an indelible impression. Some of it reads very much like this:

“[An] interrogator bragged about doing lap dance on a d [detainee at the Guantanamo military base].... [We learned of] another making d listen to satanic black metal music for hours then dressing as a Priest and baptizing d to save him.... [M]ale d was dressed in female clothing, made up and given a lap dance by female prison guard. [Investigator] was told that this was a tactic to break the d and get cooperation..... [We learned of another incident] in which d alleged female guard removed her blouse and, while pressing her body against a shackled and restrained d from behind, handled his genitalia and wiped menstrual blood on his head and face as punishment for lack of cooperation.”

In these Gitmo glimpses – culled from FBI reports pried from the Bureau through a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU -- we see a refined application of the methods described by Sade in Juliette – the co-mingling of sexual perversion with brutal violence against the helpless, the profanation of Christian ritual and symbolism, and the unabashed embrace of satanic imagery.

All of these acts fell within legal guidelines handed down from Donald Rumsfeld's office. They were carried out by military and intelligence operatives paid with our tax dollars (some of the latter most likely were private contractors, and from what we know of Abu Ghraib, Israelis and other foreign nationals may have participated as well).

Those entrusted with these chores weren't inhibited with a normal capacity for shame. FBI accounts describe female interrogators tittering with glee as they described the sexual debasement of detainees; on one occasion, interrogators were laughing as they described wrapping a detainee's head in duct tape as punishment for reciting the Koran.

These tactics weren't improvised at Gitmo, although heaven knows our depraved popular culture would provide suitable inspiration. They were the result of long, detailed study by people who specialize in this kind of thing, and were eager to try their skills out on anybody who fell into their hands.

As O'Brien pointed out to Winston Smith, the purpose of torture is torture. Granted, it may have ancillary benefits to those who carry it out – such as extracting useful information, or gratifying the prurient interests of the State servants charged with the task. But its central function is simply to reduce a victim to something worse than a corpse. This is why torture, in some ways, is morally worse than murder.

The FBI, which collected the Sadean snapshots from Gitmo, displayed its own expertise at Mt. Carmel outside Waco nearly 14 years ago. With the able assistance of Igor Smirmov of Moscow's Institute for Psycho-Correction, the FBI mounted a 50-day psy-war campaign against the Branch Davidians that was designed (in the words of one horrified law enforcement analyst) to torture the Davidian children into forcing their parents to surrender. When that failed, the FBI simply attacked the Davidian sanctuary with tanks, poison gas, and incendiary rounds.

I bring up the Waco holocaust again in order to emphasize this fact: The conduct of military and intelligence interrogators at Gitmo was found to be unacceptably sadistic by agents of the same FBI that tortured and then incinerated the Branch Davidians.

This is how the Regime that rules us operates when nobody but those in its employ are watching. And lest we think it only authorizes such indulgences when the subject is a foreign detainee, we should focus our attention once again on the pathetic figure of Jose Padilla, a U.S. Citizen (albeit hardly an exemplary one) who was held for roughly three years in military confinement as an “enemy combatant.”



The purpose of that designation was to induce Padilla to become an intelligence asset – either an informant or a provocateur. But as a result of being confined and tortured, Padilla was deprived of his sanity. He is now a human wreck, his mind destroyed by the Regime.

Like its Soviet predecessor, the Regime that rules us will occasionally destroy an individual and then allow the result to be paraded before the public to illustrate what can be done to those upon whom the State visits its wrath.

Leviathan's Web

The most critical disclosure offered by the Washington Post's report on the “OneDOJ” database being built by the Department of “Justice” is found buried near the end of the piece – as we'll see anon.

Although the Post refers to the database as OneDOJ, it is also known as the National Data Exchange, or N-DEx. However we refer to it, the system would allow “state and local police officers around the country to search millions of cases from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal law enforcement agencies,” as well as information compiled by state and local police agencies. The system, which a present is limited to a pilot program involving a small number of agencies, “will be a central mechanism for sharing federal law enforcement information with local and state investigators,” observes the Post.

“The goal is that all of U.S. Law enforcement will be able to look at each other's records to solve cases and protect U.S. Citizens,” insists Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty. (.pdf) “With OneDOJ, we will essentially hook them up to a pipe that will taken them into its records.”

Michael Hampton, a diligent investigator of the Homeland Security State, points out that within the next three years, the N-DEx/OneDOJ system “will provide local and state law enforcement with access to each other's data. N-DEx will contain incident/case reports, arrest, booking and incarceration data, and parole/probation data contributed by DOJ and participating law enforcement agencies.”

A “Justice” Department PowerPoint briefing found by Hampton points out: “Ideally, N-DEx would obtain its data from the 50 States' repositories, however, this model is not occurring nationwide and as such, N-DEx must be able to obtain its data through a variety of options as permitted by policy.”

Those “options” would likely involve data streams carrying huge volumes of personal data about people who have never seen the inside of a jail cell or courtroom. All of that information would be passed along the federal pipeline to officers making traffic stops, or conducting checkpoints. That pipeline will not be equipped to filter out unproven or baseless allegations. As the Post points out, through the system “tens of thousands of local police officers could gain access to personal details about people who have not been arrested or charged with crimes.”

While the database will include details harvested from proctoscope-level scrutiny of the public at large, however, it will demurely refrain from intruding into the affairs of the State's loyal servants. Notes the Post:

“Much information will be kept out of the system, including data about public corruption cases, classified or sensitive topics, confidential informants, administrative cases and civil rights probes involving allegations of wrongdoing by police....”

This is the above-mentioned “critical disclosure” offered in the Post story. In the omissions we can see, once again, the true priorities that govern the Homeland Security State: Protect the Regime and its servants uber alles, while treating the public at large as criminals who are free only by the grace of the Almighty State.




It's worth noting as well that the development of this huge database has proceeded without so much as a syllable of protest from the Republican-aligned conservatives who, a decade ago, rent the air with anguished cries over the Clinton White House's illegal acquisition of “raw” FBI files on hundreds of Republican officials.

GOP fellow travelers charged – quite plausibly – that the 8-900 files – each of which was an omnium gatherum of personal information, some of it little better than gossip – would be used as what the Russians call compromat against the Clinton administration's political enemies.

Last May, Republican-allied media critic L. Brent Bozell III condemned the mainstream media for offering more critical coverage of the Bush regime's illegal electronic surveillance program than it did for the Clinton administration's “Filegate” scandal.

“It's only when Republicans hold the White House that the networks fear an `imperial presidency,'” whined Bozell. This may be true. It's also entirely irrelevant to those of us who, like myself (I was a spokesman for the National Impeach Clinton ACTION Committee) have nothing but contempt for both of the Ruling Party's retail outlets.




Ten years ago, Republicans were in a lather over the fact that Party leaders and operatives were vulnerable to political blackmail. One year ago, many of the same Republicans insisted that only “terrorists” needed to worry about their telephone and e-mail communications being intercepted by the NSA.

Now we see the “Justice” Department rolling out the first stage of what they hope will be a seamless data network connecting every police agency and officer, giving them access to what eventually could be every recorded personal detail about every U.S. Citizen.

They'll "Find A Reason" To Lock You Up

"Checkpoint Charlie," the notorious gateway to Communist East Germany. Germany is now united, and Soviet-style checkpoints are now common in the U.S.


“You better stop runnin' your mouth, or the other officer will find a reason to lock you up tonight.”

In those words, recorded by Missouri resident Bret Darrow (my nominee for 2006 Whistleblower of the Year), we find perhaps the definitive snapshot of the Regime under which we live: Any armed agent of the Regime can contrive a reason to lock any of us up at whim.

Darrow, a shrewd but unassuming 19-year-old motorist, was stopped at a DUI roadblock in St. Louis last November. He was cooperative and non-confrontational when the officers enforcing that unconstitutional mass detention instructed him to provide his driver's license and proof of insurance. But he was singled out for exceptional detention when he presumed to behave as a free, law-abiding citizen.

(For a transcript of the episode, go here. For the video, go here.)

Specifically, when asked by an officer, “Where are you headed tonight?” Darrow replied: “I don't wish to discuss my personal life with you, officer.”

Ordered out of the car and forced to surrender his car keys, Darrow was told by an officer that he had to submit to an “interview ... because you didn't want to interview. You didn't want to sit down and have a talk with me.”

While this was happening, a second officer unlocked Darrow's 1997 Maxima and conducted an illegal warrantless search. A third tax-fattened hero, for whom manual transmission is a mystery as impenetrable as Fermat's Last Theorem, then got behind the wheel and attempted to move Darrow's car (the driver hadn't been permitted to move it out of traffic). In doing so, this good-enough-for-government-work drudge stalled the car repeatedly, seriously burning the clutch.

As the cops were illegally rifling through his property and vandalizing his car, Darrow was threatened with arrest for the supposed offense of asking why he was being detained.

“You're saying you're going to make up a reason to arrest me?” Darrow asked.

“No I didn't,” lied the officer. “I said we would find a reason.” He repeated that phrase a few seconds later. When Darrow asked again why he was being detained, the officer replied, “Because you don't have a driver's license” -- which was true only in the sense that it had been taken from Darrow by another officer.

Note this well: The mindset of the officers involved in this incident dictates that they can “find a reason” to send anybody to jail. It isn't necessary for an individual to commit a crime against persons or property, or even an offense against what is considered good public order. All that is necessary is for an agent of the State to decide that an individual is insufficiently submissive.

This symbolic function of a checkpoint -- providing a tangible reminder to the public that anybody can be deprived of his freedom at any time -- is its chief practical value to the Regime (although there are ancillary benefits for local franchises of the Homeland Security State, the most obvious being easily obtained revenue).

I've made this point before, adverting to the observation by author Richard Ben Cramer referring to the use and purpose of security checkpoints in Israel and the Palestinian Territories: "The function of the checkpoints is to show who's boss." In his book How Israel Lost, Cramer describes a conversation with an Israeli soldier newly arrived from Russia (and who, like most such immigrants, is almost certainly not Jewish). Cramer inquired why checkpoint guards routinely stop people who are obviously neither criminals nor potential terrorists.

The guard replied: "Because the bad attitude -- you know? If they are acting like they are good, and we are the bad one. Then, you must show them control."

This is the mantra of the checkpoint guard:

You must show them control.

You must make them submit.

You must force them to recognize the innate superiority of those who represent the Almighty State.

This is the real function of checkpoints, wherever they exist. And the mindset of checkpoint guards is the same, whether in Israel, your nearby airport, or your local sobriety stop.

One motorist in Elgin, Illinois collided with that mindset a few days ago. Angry over being stopped without cause and issued a $20 ticket for a seatbelt violation, the motorist honked his horn and began “blasting his tunes.”

This act of defiance – understandable to those of us on the receiving end of the State's harassment – provoked the officer issuing a ticket to “find a reason” for additional deprivations of liberty and property.

Elgin Police Officer Matt Udelhoven, who “often runs patrols looking for cars violating Elgin's loud music ordinance, went and got a laser gun that measures distance, walked about 150 feet away, and determined he could still hear the man's stereo,” reported the Elgin Courier News. Accordingly, he slapped the protesting motorist with a $250 fine and confiscated his car, which most likely means that the driver will be stuck with $250 in towing and impound fees.

“He got home in a hurry – on foot,” smirked Lt. Jeff Adam, who – like any other bully who taunts a helpless victim – really deserves to lose a few teeth.

TheNewspaper.com, a truly indispensable resource, points out that the seizure of the motorist's car was entirely illegal:

“Elgin Police cited the city's noise ordinance which applies to those who are `operating' a vehicle – the motorist was parked – and is designed to protect citizens against `excessive noise endangers physical and emotional health and well-being.'”

So the seizure of the car was an act of armed robbery, just as the damage to Bret Darrow's Maxima was the result of armed vandalism.

The Elgin motorist, continues TheNewspaper.com, “can only challenge the seizure by first arguing his case before the deputy police chief in a hearing where `the formal rules of evidence will not apply.' The next hearing happens up to 45 days later under civil procedures that are used so that Elgin can escape the due process protections of the Constitution such as the Eighth Amendment prohibition on excessive fines.”

Notice a family resemblance to the “extraordinary” judicial procedures developed to deal with the “war on terror” -- special courts that can write their own rules, and ignore those rules altogether when it suits them?

These are not “extraordinary” measures. This is standard operating procedure for the Regime that rules us.

What do we do about it?

First of all – to reiterate a point I've made earlier – people have to understand that we no longer have local police. We have local affiliates of a centralized Internal Security force. Many have warned for decades that this process was underway, but they shrink from admitting now that it's a fait accompli.

At some point, after the churn has operated long enough, what was once milk has become butter.

Secondly, all of us need to investigate the strands of subsidy binding our state and local police to the Feds – for sobriety checkpoints, seatbelt and child safety seat inspections, and – particularly – for narcotics enforcement. At least some of the same people who are stolidly indifferent to large-scale abuses of civil liberties (extraordinary rendition, the Military Commissions Act, and the like) committed by the Regime's apex authority can be riled up very easily over more commonplace abuses of the sort inflicted by the Regime's local appendages.

Political remedies for these outrages – assuming that such exist -- will have to be obtained at the Statehouse and at City Hall, and will only come when a sufficient number of sufficiently angry people are mobilized to deal with specific policies. Find the nexus between local police harassment and federal money; use local media to educate the public about the fact that these policies aren't being driven by local problems, but rather by federal subsidy and the corrupt opportunism of local authorities.


Third, Bret Darrow's experience – like the horrifying UCLA Taser incident – illustrates the value of documenting every encounter with law enforcement officers (LEOs). As we've seen, LEOs are indoctrinated to see the public as a pool of criminals, whose daily behavior offers plentiful reasons for imprisonment.

We should reciprocate by assuming that every LEO, every day, commits offenses against the civil liberties of the law-abiding – and be prepared to document the fact if the opportunity presents itself.

Should this happen – and we shouldn't be out borrowing trouble – we should display the same polite composure exhibited by Darrow during his unfortunate encounter.

This approach is complicated somewhat by the fact that at least some police agencies are willing to arrest people for “obstruction of justice” when they use cell phones or other devices to record police activity. Witness the case of Philadelphia resident Neftaly (Neffy) Cruz, whose home was invaded and who was arrested when he used his cell phone to take a picture of a police roadblock.

“[The arresting officer] opened up the gate and ... he went out to Neffy, pulled him down, had Neffy on the car and was telling him, `You should have just went in the house and minded your own business instead of trying to take pictures off your picture phone,'” recalled neighbor Gerrell Martin.

Cruz later recalled that the police “threatened to charge me with conspiracy, impeding an investigation, obstruction of an investigation ... They said, `You were impeding an investigation.' [I asked] `By doing what?' [The officer said] `By taking a picture of the police officers with a camera phone.'”

Of course, no law prohibits anybody from taking a photograph of a police officer, or anyone else.

But as Darrow was pointedly warned, if LEOs want to do so, they can “find a reason” to put you in jail.

A tragic postscript, courtesy of the redoubtable Radley Balko:

U.S. Army Reserve Corporal James Dean was killed last Tuesday by a sharpshooter from a southeast Maryland SWAT team. Despondent over the prospect of being redeployed to Iraq, Dean became suicidal. So the Regime's local affiliate dispatched a paramilitary team to ensure that Dean got his wish.

It should be obvious, but I'll say it anyway: This kind of thing just doesn't happen in a genuinely free country.