Mike Nifong: Your Time Is Coming....

No ceremony that to great ones 'longs, Not the king's crown, nor the deputed sword, The marshal's truncheon, nor the judge's robe, Become them with one half so good a grace as mercy does.

If he had been as you and you as he, You would have slipt like him; but he, like you, Would not have been so stern.... Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once; And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy. How would you be, If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are? O, think on that; And mercy then will breathe within your lips,
Like man new made. ...

O, it is excellent To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous To use it like a giant.

The fair Sister Isabella holds forth on the virtues of mercy to Lord Angelo, who -- preoccupied with "horizontal" thoughts -- isn't listening.

Finally, and not a moment too soon, the North Carolina Bar Association is taking punitive action against the malignant Mike Nifong, the corrupt, mirror-worshiping prosecutor driving the Duke University non-rape case.

Nifong screws his face into a parody of piety while laboring to send innocent young men to prison.

In his lust to bag several specimens of the most elusive of legal prey – the “great white defendant” -- Nifong suppressed exculpatory DNA evidence, misrepresented the fact of the case, and fed a steady diet of misinformation to media flacks eager to join the safari. With malicious calculation he has exploited currents of racial and sexual collectivist grievance in the hope that they could carry him to fame and, perhaps, political fortune.

Needles to say, justice played no role whatsoever, and mercy even less, in Nifong's machinations.

Dr. William Anderson of Frostburg State University, who has diligently cataloged Nifong's offenses against law and decency, points out that the Durham County D.A.'s conduct in this case reflects a maxim cherished by both state and federal prosecutors: “Charges are like spaghetti – throw them against the wall and see what sticks.”

This explains, among other things, why Nifong seeded the media with dark hints that the spoiled, rich white lacrosse players had plied the poor black stripper with the “date rape drug”; why he conspired with corrupt, thuggish cops to arrest a cab driver on a bogus shoplifting charge in an effort to suppress the driver's exculpatory testimony; why, after his “victim”/witness suddenly “couldn't remember” being raped, Nifong dropped the rape charge while keeping the others....

None of this has stuck, but three innocent young men and their families have been put through hell. Which is why Nifong should be thrown against a wall, repeatedly.

I'm not kidding. This is a case in which corporal punishment of some sort is necessary. Professional humiliation and civil penalties are not adequate. Nifong deserves a beating, which – unfortunately – isn't a legal option in our system.

More's the pity, because Nifong is not an anomalous “rogue prosecutor”; he's actually quite representative of his professional caste.

As Dr. Anderson points out, “anyone who has followed the predations of Rudy Giuliani and Elliot Spitzer in their `crusades to clean up Wall Street' knows something about the filing of bogus or questionable charges.” That “something,” of course, is that creative abuse of prosecutorial power offers a fast track to political success.

Just ask Governor Spitzer, or former NYC Mayor and future US President (he hopes) Giuliani.

For decades, Wall Street Journal reporter Dorothy Rabbinowitz has chronicled the legal atrocities wrought by prosecutors who have ripped communities to shreds through bogus child abuse prosecutions.

Like Nifong, this “busy army of prosecutors” has been “uninterested in proofs of innocence, [and] willing to suppress any [that are] found," she writes. "They built case after headline-making case charging the mass molestation of small children, and managed to convict scores of innocent Americans on the basis of testimony no mind could credit. Law officers who routinely violated requirements of due process in their effort to obtain a conviction, they grasped the special advantage that was theirs: that for a prosecutor dealing with molestation, and wearing the mantle of avenger, there was no such thing as excess, no limits to what could be said of the accused. In court, rules could be bent, any charges presented, and nonexistent medical evidence proclaimed as proof positive of the accusation.”

Unduly convinced of their righteousness, unaccountable for all practical purposes, utterly immune to reprisal, the typical crusading prosecutor's attitude toward an innocent defender was akin to that displayed by Lord Angelo, deputy to Duke Vincentio of Vienna, to Isabella in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Angelo, an official of sterling reputation, was temporarily given plenipotentiary authority by the Duke, and with great generosity of soul he proceeded to bless the city with his own abundant virtue.

Or something like that.

“We must not make a scarecrow of the law, setting it up to fear the birds of prey, and let it keep one shape, till custom make it their perch and not their terror,” he explained. So when he learned of a citizen who had impregnated his inamorata without benefit of clergy, Angelo dusted off a law, long fallen into desuetude, making fornication a capital crime.

Isabella, the condemned man's sister, came to plead on his behalf. A pious and virtuous woman, Isabella was also quite lovely. These attributes weren't lost on Angelo, who offered her a fascinating plea bargain: He would commute the death sentence if Isabella would sleep with him.

When Isabella – who easily overmatched Angelo both in intellect and character – told the corrupt magistrate that she would expose his corruption, Angelo smugly gave voice to thoughts akin to those that must animate prosecutors of Nifong's ilk:

Who will believe thee, Isabel? My unsoil'd name, the austereness of my life, My vouch against you, and my place i' the state, Will so your accusation overweigh, That you shall stifle in your own report And smell of calumny.... As for you, Say what you can, my false o'erweighs your true.

Because of his “place in the state,” Angelo insisted, “my false overweighs your true.”

Every single day – perhaps every single hour – officials in this country act on that assumption, stealing the freedom, property, and the very lives of innocent people.

“Prosecutors are like President Bush,” writes Paul Craig Roberts. “They absolutely refuse to admit that they ever make a mistake and have to be forced to disgorge their innocent victims. Nothing makes a prosecutor more angry than to have to give back a wrongfully convicted person's life.”

Nifong's would-be victims have lived under the threat of spending thirty years in prison for a crime they didn't commit. Were this a sane and just society, they would be given an opportunity to confront Nifong in person, and express to him, in any way they see fit, what they think of his behavior.

How to Deal With Taxmen and Other Thieves

Carjacker Cuticello: Knocked flat on his, um, Cheney by a woman. He got off easy.

Last night, a resident of New Haven, Connecticut was approached by C.J. Cuticello, a tax collector bent on seizing her car because of $536 in outstanding taxes and fees. According to the local NBC affiliate, the woman reportedly “pushed Cuticello to the ground, got in her car and ran over his foot, then backed up into the tow truck before speeding away.”

I admire her restraint.

It's entirely appropriate to use lethal force to repel a carjacking. And horse thieves were often used to stretch ropes in the Old West. Cuticello is no better than a carjacker or horse thief and deserves to be treated that way.

Predictably, the TV station – you know, a local outpost of the “liberal” (“statist” is a much more accurate description) media – described the citizen as an assailant and “scofflaw,” and the would-be carjacker as the victim of a “hit-and-run driver.” And just hours earlier, the station had presented a sympathetic profile of Cuticello, who lamented how difficult it was to shake down local motorists, and the sad duties he performs as a government-licensed car thief

Using a sophisticated plate identification device called a Bootfinder, Cuticello identifies and seizes vehicles, which are held in a city-owned lot until the ransom is paid (the tax plus whatever additional fees the syndicate behind this racket can devise). Using a fleet of three tow trucks, Cuticello and his gang have stolen more than 1,000 cars in the last several months; the local crime bosses expect them to track down a total of 10,500 vehicles and plunder a total of $2 million in revenue.

(Cuticello, by the way, also eagerly networks with other parasite privateers eager to get a piece of the plunder.)

As TheNewspaper.com notes, the New Haven city government claims that it can seize cars from those owing as little as $50 in unpaid parking tickets. Cuticello, who richly deserves to be made acquainted with the decorative uses of hot tar and chicken feathers, has been stealing cars for the local government for several years.

Like a child molester seeking vulnerable prey, Cuticello lurks in the shadows of large gatherings of distracted potential victims: He has prowled Wal-Mart parking lots and student parking areas at Yale University (where he targets out-of-state students). He's even swiped cars during Mass at the local Saint Rose of Lima Church, in the process chewing out the local Priest – who was forced to leave the confessional to deal with the carjacker.

I find it inexplicable that Cuticello had gotten away with this for as long as he did before running into someone willing to push back. And it is delicious to the point of rapture that when he finally got his back dirty, it was a woman who put him there.

Centuries ago, our colonial forebears, who suffered under an absolutist government much more civilized and much less intrusive than ours, would occasionally inflict humiliation of various kinds (including, when deemed necessary, physical abuse) on tax collectors and other agents of official injustice.

The treatment given to Cuticello was squarely in that estimable tradition; my only complaints are that it was entirely too mild, and – given how commonplace corrupt abuses of power like Cuticello's have become – altogether too uncommon.

Some would protest that such sentiments are un-American. In fact, they're more properly described as (read this carefully, now) ur-American.

Before he became the ringleader of the uncouth radicals who seized independence from Great Britain, Samuel Adams was a tax collector, his livelihood provided by a share of his collections.

Even in that loathsome occupation, Adams' fundamental decency proved insurmountable: He eventually went broke because he refused to put the screws to people who couldn't pay their assessments; sometimes he paid the tax bills himself. Ironically, his experiences as a tax collector convinced him of the injustice of the Royal tax system, and the social networks he developed in that occupation proved useful in organizing the rebellion that led to our independence. In the words of biographer Mark Puls, from his days as a tax collector, Adams “developed a feel for the pulse of public opinion that no other local leader could match.”

As Puls notes in his excellent book Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution, Adams was among many whose properties were scheduled for seizure by Royal authorities in Boston because of inherited debts arising from the collapse of a land-bank scheme:

“In August 1758, a notice appeared in the Boston Newsletter announcing that the land-bank commissioners ordered a public auction the following day of Adams' father's estate, which included the house in which Samuel still lived, the malt brewery, the wharf dock, flats and other buildings, along with gardens and other adjacent property. The notice was signed by Sheriff Stephen Greenleaf. Adams fired back a letter to the sheriff, pointing out that his predecessor had also tried to divest the family of its property but was unable to do so because the action was deemed `illegal and unwarrantable.'”

Adams blatantly threatened the Sheriff, and visited the auction to threaten and intimidate anyone who set foot on the property.

The Adams property remained unsold, and the inherited debts were never collected. Neither did Adams make up the shortfall in tax collections for which he was legally liable, according to colonial statutes. This isn't because he was a scofflaw and a dead-beat. He was convinced that it was unjust to take his property because his father had been left with debts on account of official chicanery; he was similarly convinced of the injustice of the taxes he had been paid to collect, a fact demonstrating that his motives weren't self-interested.

In his youth, Adams displayed a “dislike for authority of any kind,” by middle age he had come to understand the critical distinction between authority and power.

“Adams believed in the rule of law, that freedom entailed an obligation of moral and rational behavior,” notes Puls. “He sought not to overturn colonial society but to preserve it from British intrusion” -- which meant, when necessary, interdicting the enforcement of unjust laws and policies, frustrating the corrupt collection of public revenue, and eventually taking up arms against the established government.

Which brings us back to the putatively criminal attack on C. J. Cuticello.

Eventually, the police will track down the woman who heroically knocked Cuticello on his tax-fattened Cheney. She will face as many criminal charges as can be conceived by the degenerate mind of the local prosecutor. A trial will be held.

This will present a perfect opportunity for jury nullification – and nothing less than this will suffice.

Should a jury decide that it is not a crime for an otherwise law-abiding citizen to beat down a government-authorized carjacker, New Haven will experience a sudden shortage of the same. This would, in turn, compel the local government to re-examine the merits of a revenue-collection scheme that depends on enforcement measures that are utterly criminal.

If this doesn't happen, esurient municipalities across the country will enact versions of New Haven's carjacking scheme. And just as surely as water will wet us, as surely as fire will burn, some people will eventually find decorative uses for the lifeless bodies of those sent to carry out those seizures.

For the record: I think this is something we should avoid, not just because I don't want to see people (even tax collectors) getting killed, but also because of the even more horrible things that would come thereafter.

A Commissar Arises

Commissar Andrew Thomas addressing his neo-totalitarian comrades at a gathering of the artfully misnamed Federalist Society.

A little more than two years ago, Matthew Bandy of Phoenix, Arizona was a well-mannered and unremarkable 16-year-old boy who displayed a defect common to males of his age: An undisciplined adolescent libido.

A little more than two years ago, Andrew Peyton Thomas of Phoenix, Arizona was a 39-year-old County Attorney who displayed numerous defects common to those who eschew honest work and instead place themselves on a public payroll. For the purpose of this discussion, we'll limit our inventory to just one of those failings: Thomas was indecently eager to use the power of his office to stage high-profile prosecutions for reasons of ambition and ideology.

On December 16, 2004, the Bandy family was rudely awakened by a 6 am knock on the door. Armed policemen, their guns drawn and their game faces on, shouldered their way into the home and handed Greg Bandy a search warrant, telling him that his son Matthew was suspected of possessing child pornography.

Greg adamantly denied any interest in, or possession of, erotic images of children. He did grudgingly admit to downloading more conventional smut from the Web. The police confiscated the computer; a cursory investigation found nine child porn images on the hard drive. This confirmed a report to the Phoenix police from Yahoo monitors, via the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, that nine child porn photos had been uploaded to a chat room from the Bandy family's household computer.

Arizona's child porn laws are draconian and inflexible, and Maricopa County Attorney Thomas, borrowing a favorite trope of Bill O'Reilly, had campaigned as the scourge of child exploiters. He charged 16-year-old Matthew Bandy with nine counts of possession and distribution of child pornography, each of which was a class 2 felony with a mandatory ten-year sentence.

Those sentences would have run consecutively, not concurrently. Which means Matthew Bandy would have died in prison – either of old age, prison violence (most likely involving some form of sexual degradation), or suicide.

Thomas, in effect, was prepared to steal a 16-year-old's life from him as punishment for a sex crime in which he never laid a hand on another human being.

Now, compare the sentences Matt Bandy faced with the wrist-slap – no, more like wrist-caress – given to 18-year-old Clifton Bennett, son of Arizona State Senate President Ken Bennett, for molesting 18 young kids with a broomstick at summer camp. The judge in Bennett's case – with the support of the prosecution – consolidated the 18 counts to one for the express purpose of helping the privileged teenager avoid jail time. Dear young Cliffy's powerful Daddy complained that a felony would prevent his son from serving a mission for the Mormon Church.

In this, as in so much else, we see that in our feudalist system of “justice,” mercy is for the powerful.

Immediately after being charged, Matthew was confined to virtual house arrest and forced to wear an electronic tracking device on his ankle. His family hired a high-octane defense attorney named Ed Novak, who demanded to have the hard drive tested by independent forensic experts. On Novak's initiative, Matt took and passed polygraph tests and psychiatric evaluations.

Thomas's office, instead of providing the hard drive for inspection, offered another deal: Matthew could spent up to 15 years in prison, and be a registered sex offender for life. The latter would mean he could have no contact of any kind with children or be in proximity to minors in any setting.

Novak again demanded to see the hard drive. Thomas again refused to provide it, even ignoring court orders to do so. Eventually the Bandy family took the matter to the state Supreme Court and forced the intransigent Thomas to turn over the drive for examination.

When it was presented for inspection by computer forensic specialist Tammi Loehrs, the hard drive was found to contain more than 200 infected files, including "backdoor Trojans" (I heard that -- stop snickering, Beavis) that apparently permitted a hacker to use the Bandy computer to store the child porn and upload it to the Yahoo chatroom. Remote infestation of home computers by child porn is horrifyingly common.

Even so, prosecutor Thomas, displaying a vicious tenacity that would make Shylock look like the very soul of reasonable compromise by comparison, insisted on a deal in which Matt would plead guilty to one charge of distributing obscene material to minors – by taking a copy of Playboy to school and showing it to three of his friends. No jail time would have resulted from this charge. However, Matthew – unlike, say, those who corrupt youth with the State's blessing via “sex education” -- would still be labeled a sex offender and serve 18 months' probation.

Amazing as it may seem, this matter was heard by a judge who possessed a particle of rationality and a smidgen of common sense. He accepted the guilty plea, but threw out the sex offender designation.

It is not my intention to say that peddling pornography is a victimless act. (There's an interesting discussion of that claim in – of all things – Hundred-Dollar Baby, the current Spenser novel by Robert Parker. The novelist, who is by no means a conservative, appears to believe, as I do, that pornography inflicts severe damage on both the consumers and producers, and that its collateral damage is substantial as well.) The facts of the Matthew Bandy case are these: He was accused of a crime the government couldn't prove, and then blackmailed into pleading guilty to an act that has not been prosecuted as a crime within living memory.

Behind this lurks the smirking, self-satisfied figure of Andrew Peyton Thomas, the bland, artfully coiffed personification of the new totalitarianism (and, perhaps not coincidentally, a near ringer for David Duke when seen from certain angles). After doing his considerable best to steal the life of a predictably misbehaving teenage boy, Thomas still insists that he has done nothing wrong, that he had actually performed some variety of public service by teaching Matt that "you know, these kids really shouldn't be takin' [nervous chuckle] Playboys to school."

If Thomas wants to sermonize, he should resign as prosecutor and pastor a church. In fact, he should resign anyway, or be forced out of office, before he mutates into a more consequential brand of career criminal, on the order of Alberto "Habeas Corpus isn't a fundamental right" Gonzalez, or John "Child Sexual Torture is a presidential prerogative" Yoo.

Before oozing his way into his current office, Thomas wrote extensively about his views of crime, punishment, and public order. He is one of those writers (I suspect I may be another) who confuse prolixity with profundity. The Phoenix New Times dipped a hand into the raging stream of Thomas's literary output and withdrew observations like the following:

*“The root of our crime problem is a rights-happy radical individualism.”

It makes much more sense to say that the root of crime is insufficient respect for the rights of others, but this view isn't easy to reconcile with what Thomas describes as his “Hobbesian view of government.”

Here's another:

* “All able-bodied men without a criminal record should once again be subject to obligatory service for community crime surveillance.... Their sole duty would be to inform police of crimes in progress. Women should not be subject to such conscription for the same reason that they have traditionally been spared combat duty.... Properly strong criminal penalties would deter those who might be tempted to dodge the draft [to serve in these neighborhood patrols] by committing a crime and acquiring a criminal record.”

What Thomas is describing here is hardly novel; it's a system akin to “block committees” set up in National Socialist Germany, as well as similar snitch-and-bully arrangements found in such enlightened societies as Castro's Cuba, Mao's China, Revolutionary Iran, and Saudi Arabia. What is somewhat original in Thomas's version is the idea of conscripting men into such service, on pain of severe criminal penalties should they rebel at the prospect of serving as neighborhood snitches.

In light of Thomas's truly perverse desire to lock up Matt Bandy for the rest of his life, it's worth wondering what "strong criminal penalties" he would prescribe for those who dodged his proposed "draft."

Questions of this sort aren't entirely academic. Thomas is probably fairly typical of the commissars coughed up by the neo-conservative legal culture. He's entirely of a piece with the Bu'ushists who are demolishing our Anglo-Saxon system of liberty under law, and there are doubtless thousands more like him gestating in the movement's womb even now.

Video bonus

As I've admitted elsewhere, I'm an incorrigible sci-fi geek. Among my favorite programs of the past decade was Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (the first reader to identify the connection between that program and the novel mentioned above gets ... well, an enthusiastic "Atta-boy!")

During the its last three seasons, DS9 featured a lengthy war between the Federation and a multi-layered enemy called The Dominion. At the top of The Dominion's power structure was a cunning race of devious shape-shifters called the Founders; their orders were carried out by a genetically engineered warrior race called the Jem'Hadar, who were controlled through their dependence on a narcotic called Ketrecel White.

The Dominion's intermediaries were drawn from a race of unctuous, officious bureaucrats called the Vorta; they control the Jem'Hadar, and defer slavishly to the Founders, whom they revere as "gods." I've come to think of them as a race composed entirely of amoral, vicious lawyers ... you know, people like Andrew Peyton Thomas.

In this clip, two Federation Good Guys -- the valiant Klingon Worf and Ezri Dax -- are offered a plea bargain by a Vorta "prosecutor" named Weyoun. I can't bring myself to disapprove of Worf's reaction.

Submit, Or We'll Kill You

It must never be forgotten that every directive issued by the State and enforced by its agents is coupled with the threat of lethal violence against those who fail to comply. This principle applies to trivial infractions of petty ordinances, such as those dealing with pedestrian conduct and smoking.

Consider the tag-team assault by two policemen on Suren Chukhadzhyan that took place in Pittsburgh a few days ago.

Chukhadzhyan, an Armenian national who resides in Glendale, California, is described as being roughly 6 foot 5 inches in height and weighing in excess of 250 pounds. During a break in a very long bus trip he lit up in what was designated a no-smoking area at a Greyhound bus terminal. This attracted the attention of an employee, who complained to police officer Walter Carlson.

In his report, as related by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Carlson described how he told Chukhadzhyan to move to a designated smoking area. The large man “ignored me and made a cocky smirk to me and was very arrogant,” whined Carlson in his report. “[He] turned away from me an continued to smoke.”

After Carlson ordered him to turn around, Chukhadzhyan did so, blowing smoke “in the direction of the officer” -- hardly a surprising result, since he was now facing that direction. At this point, per the newspaper account, the officer “grabbed the man's arm” -- that is, he caused the situation to escalate to one of physical coercion -- “and said he would be cited.” The Armenian's response – and this is significant – was to de-escalate by extinguishing his cigarette and walking away.

At this point, if Walter Carlson had been a peace officer rather than a juvenile poseur with secret insecurities about the size of his wedding tackle, he would have smiled, shook his head, and walked away. The problem, such as it is, was solved: Chukhadzhyan was no longer smoking in a forbidden zone. That would be the proper reaction of a practicing adult who had chosen to make a living as a peace officer.

Regrettably, nobody fitting that description was on hand at the time. Carlson, like many (quite possibly most) of those now employed by the Homeland Security State, had to assert his Authoritah. He acted on what I've identified as the tacit credo of checkpoint guards and others employed to enforce the State's decrees:

You must show them control.

You must make them submit.

Noticing that Chukhadzhyan had taken a seat inside the terminal and, visibly agitated, was muttering to himself “in what appeared to be Russian,” the officer pursued him inside and “attempted to issue the citation” -- which wasn't necessary to maintain order, and actually created a potential danger to others who hadn't been involved in the matter.

Let's click the pause button on the story at this point to recap and italicize a few things.

Chukhadzhyan's reactions to this point are entirely understandable. He is fifty years old. He was born and lived most of his life in a country ruled by the Soviet secret police. This might explain his contemptuous reaction to Carlson's imperious demand. I know what I would have been thinking: “I lived for decades in the shadow of the KGB, and could have been dragged off to Lubyanka for any of a thousand reasons, and this little gelding thinks he can intimidate me because I'm having a smoke here rather than over there? Well, I'll just take one last drag and then throw the cigarette away; no point in making a big deal out of this.”

I don't know if that's what Chukhadzhyan was thinking, but it would have been in line with his actions, as they were described in Carlson's report.

Chukhadzhyan, confronted by Carlson, walked away peacefully.

By pursuing the matter beyond this point, Carlson is the one who became the aggressor.

That fact is not nullified by the costume he wears or the shiny little shield he was given.

OK – let's hit the “play” button, and resume the Post-Gazette's account:

“Officer Carlson again attempted to issue the citation, but said Mr. Chukhadzhyan stood up suddenly and approached him aggressively. The officer said he pulled out his Taser and warned, `This doesn't have to go this way.'”

Oh, good grief. This guy may not be a “pig,” but he's a Shatner-caliber ham – an honors graduate of the T.J. Hooker Academy for Drama Queens in Blue.

Chukhadzhyan allegedly replied to Carlson's unnecessary threat to use deadly force by saying, “arrest me” and pushing the officer. The Taser was fired by Carlson, but failed to operate because of the Armenian's heavy coat. At this point, according to Carlson, “Chukhadzhyan charged.”

Chad Stevens, an off-duty police officer from out of town, pitched in to help Carlson. Eventually the two of them were able to bull-rush Chukhadzhyan, pinning him against a vending machine, forcing the cuffs on his wrists, and tripping him to the floor. This melee “knocked over seats and sent other travelers scrambling,” notes the paper, offering a rather bland description for a needless episode of violence that placed innocent people at risk. As I noted above, avoiding situations of this sort would be the chief priority of a genuine peace officer.

Chukhadzhyan was placed under arrest for “disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and aggravated assault on Officer Carlson.” How an unarmed man commit “aggravated assault” on a heavily armed individual – who summons his buddy to help him out – is a question that could be profitably pondered by people not hopelessly held hostage by statist assumptions.

He was also reported to the local Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Here's an interesting possibility: If this is treated as a “terrorist” incident, Chukhadzhyan could be held indefinitely, since as a foreign national the habeas corpus guarantee doesn't apply to him as of October 17, 2006 – the day the Bushling signed the Military Commissions Act and the Homeland Security Death Star became fully operational.

Here's something else to consider: Is there any rational reason to doubt that if Carlson the Blue Knight and his equally heroic side-kick hadn't been able to subdue Chukhadzhyan, they would have resorted to lethal force? In fact, given the growing body count racked up by officers using the “non-lethal” Taser, Carlson actually did use potentially lethal force against Chukhadzhyan.

For smoking a cigarette.

After he had put it out and walked away.

And the real outrage is that this episode is not an aberration. This is how law enforcement operates in the era of Homeland Security.

Another beautiful day in the Land of the Free! (Thanks to Infowars.com for the photo.)

Former congressional candidate David Brownlow experienced that reality last December 9 when he and his family (including his 12-year-old daughter) were accosted by Oregon State Trooper Ken Moore and threatened with arrest for the supposed offense of holding up an anti-war protest sign on a sidewalk near a Portland shopping mall.

Brownlow, whose son Jared is serving in Iraq, has described how Trooper Moore was among the motorists who saw the family's sign, which read “Support the Troops – Bring Them Home!” Moore, “visibly agitated,” stomped over to the family, accused them of “breaking the law,” and ordered them to “leave the area immediately.”

Constitution Party of Oregon activist (and suspected Thought Criminal) David Brownlow.

When Brownlow asked politely what law he and his family had broken, Moore bellowed: “When a trooper tells you that you are breaking the law, that's all you need to know,” and that if they didn't move immediately, they would be arrested. Brownlow's wife Suzanne pointed out that they weren't blocking the road or the sidewalk; this prompted the (storm)trooper to jab a finger at her and hiss: “If you do not stop talking, I will arrest both of you for disorderly conduct!”

This would have meant taking into custody the couple's 12-year-old daughter, who by this point was terrified and hiding behind her mother.

The trooper seized the banner – which is to say he stole the family's property at gunpoint – and ordered them to meet him in a nearby parking lot. Once the group had reassembled, the officer – still breathing out various threats to do unpleasant things to the Brownlows – demanded that David produce his driver's license and asked if he was carrying a weapon (he wasn't, despite the fact that he had a concealed carry permit). When Suzanne Brownlow asked where they could “legally” protest if they weren't permitted to do so on a public sidewalk, the officer snarled: “In your front yard.”

At this point, Brownlow recalls, Trooper Moore's rage subsided and he became civil, returning their banner and offering apologies for terrorizing their daughter. “I wondered if this trooper was bipolar or something,” he comments.

While that's a possibility – and an unsettling one at that – I suspect the reason for the officer's change in demeanor is this: He had succeeded in carrying out his mission by controlling the Brownlows and making them submit to his supposed authority.

The Brownlows have filed suit against Trooper Moore, who – like any other armed terrorist – deserves at least to be driven into financial ruin (although his family, if any, would be non-combatants not deserving the same fate).

Thousands or tens of thousands of officious armed bullies like Officer Carlson and Trooper Moore infest our communities. They are not the “local police” who are fondly remembered by many of us (myself emphatically included) with respect and gratitude. Back then, of course, it was possible to find corrupt and abusive police officers, a fact sometimes washed out by the sepia-toned sentimentality that colors our recollections. But we're not dealing with simple corruption, or occasional abuses of power; we confront the product of a social transformation that has taken place over several decades, and that has turned the police into a literal army of occupation.

Law enforcement consultant Tony Cooper, an instructor in terrorism negotiation skills at the University of Texas-Dallas, warned about that transformation more than a decade ago. "I see the formation of a curious crusading mentality among certain law enforcement agencies to stamp out what they see as a threat to government generally,” he told the Washington Post in 1995 “It's an exaggerated concern that they are facing a nationwide conspiracy and that somehow this will get out of control unless it is stamped out at a very early stage."

While Cooper was chiefly concerned with that mindset among federal agents, his students included many state and local officers attached to SWAT teams and other tactical units, who helped propagate that mindset more widely among police units. With the aid of federal subsidies and material aid from the Pentagon, many “local” police agencies are rapidly taking on the traits of occupying armies.

Bad as this situation already is, it can always be made worse by gun-toting adolescents on the State's payroll who are dressed up like Village People wanna-bes and eagerly looking for an opportunity to push people around. What's really alarming is the extent to which that personality type is increasingly over-represented in our Homeland Security Apparatus.

Toward Global Energy Fascism

In 2041 ... Switzerland joined the United Nations*, now a military alliance. What had once been merely a debating society during the twentieth century had turned by the rapprochement of the super powers into ... an active military and economic alliance. An alliance whose purpose ... was to ensure that the less powerful nations of the Southern Hemisphere and Middle East continued to supply them with raw materials.

As their abundant resources propelled [them] to importance, old grudges against the “exploiting” powers radicalized the nations of the Southern Hemisphere. Controlling an ever greater part of the world's dwindling resources, the nations of South America, Africa, and Arabia used the massive wealth they were accumulating to modernize their countries, and their armies. Together they formed the Confederation of States, whose expressed purpose was little less than the domination of their former “oppressors.”

As these nations grew in both economic and military strength, they began looking for ways to flex their newfound muscles. The older countries, fading in both importance and economic strength, sought to reassure themselves by asserting their own power whenever the opportunity to do so safely arose. Soon minor skirmishes, mostly at sea, constantly threatened to erupt into a greater conflict.... By 2032 the world consisted of two mega-nations and a number of backward neutrals who were completely unable to affect the situation.

From the Prologue to The Jupiter War (1991)

Extrapolating from trends visible more than a decade and a half ago, renowned science fiction author Gregory Benford devised the foregoing premise and invited a group of his peers to describe a resource war between those two planet-spanning mega-states. Eager to control the globe without destroying it, the antagonists keep moving the battle lines away from the planet, eventually fighting a full-scale interplanetary war over the Solar System's resources.

In that long and increasingly pointless war of attrition -- “Neither side will surrender, neither will admit it might be wrong” -- the energy- and mineral-rich Jovian system was the grand prize.

Professor Michael T. Klare of Hampshire College avoids sci-fi extravagances in presenting a vision of the coming global resource wars. Klare, author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum, writes that we confront an era of perpetual war, economic regimentation, and garrison state oppression – a system he calls “Energo-fascism.”

“The rise of Energo-fascism can be traced to two overarching phenomena: an imminent collision between energy demand and energy supplies, and the historic migration of the center of gravity of planetary energy output from the global north to the global south,” writes Klare.

As this trend accelerates, Klare foresees the following developments, some of which are already visible in a limited sense:

• “The transformation of the U.S. Military into a global oil protection service”;

• “The transformation of Russia into an energy superpower with control over Eurasia's largest supplies of oil and natural gas”;
  

• “A ruthless scramble among the great powers for the remaining oil, natural gas, and uranium reserves of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia,” with the accompanying wars, proxy wars, client regimes, corruption, and repression;

• “Increased state intrusion into, and surveillance of, public and private life as reliance on nuclear power grows, bringing with it an increased threat of sabotage, accident, and diversion of fissionable materials into the hands of illicit nuclear proliferators.”

“Disparate as [these developments] seem, they all share a common feature: increasing state involvement in the procurement, transportation, and allocation of energy supplies, accompanied by a greater inclination to employ force against those who resist the state's priorities in these areas,” Klare points out.

(Although Klare seems to appreciate the deadly consequences of giving the state a monopoly on the use of force, he unfortunately has yet to re-think the merits of disarming the civilian population through UN-centered efforts to outlaw non-state possession of "small arms.")

Klare's analysis tacitly acknowledges a largely ignored fact that was highlighted by The Economist (subscription required) last August: Most of the world's energy resources are already either state-owned or state-controlled. The world's thirteen largest oil and gas firms, for example, are either partially or wholly nationalized through “state-owned firms through which governments retain profits from oil production.” Exxon, the world's largest private oil company, comes in at number 14 on that list.

All told, 16 of the top 20 oil and gas firms are State-owned and control roughly 90% of the world's oil. These national oil companies (NOCs) are riddled with the corruption and inefficiency that are inescapable symptoms of state ownership or control. As the Economist points out: “Few of the princes, politicians and strongmen who wield ultimate authority over these firms can resist the urge to meddle. At best, that leads to the sort of inefficiencies found at most state-owned firms.... At worst, the business of pumping and selling oil [and natural gas] is entirely subsumed by politics,” as when the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin choked off the flow of natural gas to Ukraine a year ago, in the middle of winter – the time of peak demand.

Klare considers Putin's Russia – which has been using undisguised state violence to consolidate control over the immense energy wealth of Russia and the “near abroad” -- as the paradigmatic “Energo-fascist” regime. Putin himself, in his Ph.D. Dissertation, set forth what could be considered the founding premise of that system: “The state has the right to regulate the process of the acquisition and the use of natural resources, and particularly mineral resources, independent of on whose property they are located. In this regard, the state acts in the interests of society as a whole.”

“No better justification for Energo-fascism can be imagined,” comments Klare. Indeed, Putin is to be commended for his candor; his counterparts in Washington are acting on the same premise while trying to conceal their intentions.

For example, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 contains a provision usurping state and local control over decisions related to energy infrastructure: Specifically, the Act deprived them of the authority to approve placement of natural gas “regasification” facilities.

Some communities had resisted construction of the huge facilities in local ports for various reasons – such as concerns over safety or possible terrorist attacks. This is a splendid example of how federalism should work, since other communities would be eager to exploit the resulting economic opportunities. But the Bush regime now has the power to veto those decisions in the name of acting in “the interests of society as a whole” (as Putin would put it).

Klare makes a plausible case that this could prefigure the wholesale federalization of all decisions having to do with energy resource development and allocation.

It's not unreasonable to see the theft of Iraq's energy resources by Washington (with a limited buy-in from a handful of cohorts) as an application of the same conceit on the international stage, as well as the first of many resource wars.

“By militarizing the energy policies of the consuming nations and enhancing the repressive capacities of client regimes, the foundations are being laid for an Energo-fascist world,” Klare predicts.

If he is right – and I fear he may be – we'll never have to worry about wars erupting in the Asteroid Belt or on the moons of Jupiter. Caught between apocalyptic violence and dystopian tyranny, humanity would never escape earth's gravity well.

*Actually, Switzerland became the 190th member of the United Nations in 2002, alas.

How the War will "Follow Us Home"

Every other rationale for continuing the occupation of Iraq having failed, supporters of the war have taken refuge in what they believe to be an invincible thought-stopper: Iraq differs from Vietnam, because this time the enemy will “follow us home.”

“After the war in Vietnam, we came home and the Vietnamese did not want to follow us,” stated Arizona Senator and presidential aspirant John McCain last Sunday. “Bin Laden, Zarqawi, Mullah Omar, they want to follow us home. Their next target is Saudi Arabia, and the next target is the United States of America."

Didn't the Islamists already hit those targets?

Of course they did.

Haven't we been told by the administration that on 9-11 the Middle East “came home to us”?

Indeed we have.

Like most defenders of the Iraq War, McCain was simply spitting out words to watch them splatter. He's intelligent enough to know that he was making absolutely no sense.

The same is true of Republican congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, who regurgitated the same line during a visit to Naples, Florida last Sunday. As one press account reported, Diaz-Balart told his audience: “The war in Iraq cannot be compared to the long-fought Vietnam War, [because the] Vietnamese weren’t inclined to follow Americans home nor to attack on U.S. Homeland....”

The ranks of the Bu'ushist right, however, are filled with people just as dishonest as McCain and Diaz-Balart. Some of them – free-range chickenhawks like Rush Limbaugh – are smart enough to know that they're retailing a lie. Others are apparently too stupid to realize what they're doing. One useful example of the latter is neo-con slogan-slinger Frank Salvato, who offers this recitation of the Regime's official “follow us home” meme:

“In today's conflict we don't have the luxury of simply leaving and declaring victory. This time our enemy – radical Islamists who employ terrorism as their chief military tactic – want us all to convert to Islam, live under Sharia Law or die.... This time, the enemy won't be satisfied with our soldiers simply leaving the battlefield. This time the enemy is going to follow us home.”

The instrument has yet to be invented that can measure the infinitesimally small odds that the Islamists could impose Sharia Law on the United States. A much more plausible domestic outgrowth of the Iraq war – unless we end the occupation immediately and begin to repair the damage it has done to our institutions here at home – would be an epidemic of urban terrorism here at home carried out not by savagely bearded foreign Muslims, but by disaffected veterans of the war who put to use the tactics they learned from the enemy in Iraq.

Military analyst William S. Lind refers to this as the “Boomerang Effect”:

“One of the things U.S. troops are learning in Iraq is how people with little training and few resources can fight a state. Most American troops will see this within the framework of counterinsurgency. But a minority will apply their new-found knowledge in a very different way. After they return to the U.S. and leave the military, they will take what they learned in Iraq back to the inner cities, to the ethnic groups, gangs, and other alternate loyalties they left when they joined the service. There, they will put their new knowledge to work, in wars with each other and wars against the American state. It will not be long before we see police squad cars getting hit with IEDs and other techniques employed by Iraqi insurgents, right here in the streets of American cities.”

It's worth recalling that the deadliest pre-9-11 terror attack within the US was carried out by a disaffected veteran of the first Gulf War, an Army tank operator named Timothy McVeigh.

Yes, there is intriguing evidence that McVeigh found allies among Islamist elements within the United States, including transplanted members of the Iraqi Republican Guard.

And yes, video footage has emerged suggesting that McVeigh was receiving training from the Army in explosives and demolitions subsequent to his reported discharge date; this would lend credence to at least some of the theories in which McVeigh was a “patsy” or provocateur.

All of this, if true, actually fortifies the point I'm making, since present conditions are quite similar to – and in some ways, worse than – those that led to the 1995 OKC bombing.

The longer we remain mired in Mesopotamia, the larger will be the population of proto-McVeighs among those consigned to occupation duty there. And not all of them would be drawn from among the White Supremacist demimonde.

John Allen Muhammad, the so-called Beltway Sniper, was a fellow Gulf War veteran and convert to Islam who took part in Louis Farrakhan's 1995 “Million Man March.”

Muhammad, in turn, was wired in to a domestic gang underworld that has become organically attached to the military.

As Stars and Stripes reported last December, street gangs of various flavors – including Chicago's Gangster Disciple Nation (which has helped broker federal subsidies to urban gangs across the nation, and whose leadership encourages members to enlist) – “have gained a foothold in the U.S. Military and are using overseas deployments to spread tentacles around the globe....”

Gangster Disciple graffiti can be found on armored vehicles, concrete barricades, and various buildings in Iraq. There are indications that the paramilitary Salvadoran MS-13 gang is actively recruiting among children of military personnel in Europe, and it's reasonable to believe that MS-13 and other Latino gangs could find adherents among non-citizen recruits eager to use military service to acquire citizenship.

In some form or another, the war will follow us home. That's one of the unavoidable consequences of waging demented wars of aggression. When the IEDs start going off in our inner cities, chances are we won't have the Mohammedans to blame.

A quick request:

Immigration reform activist Terry Graham has asked me to pass along an urgent appeal for my readers to call their Republican elected representatives and demand that they vote against Mel Martinez's nomination to be General Chairman of the Republican National Committee. That spurious post was created in 1983 to accommodate the appointment of former Nevada Governor Paul Laxalt, a good friend of Ronald Reagan. Martinez is similarly chummy with Bush the Younger, and shares the Bushling's enthusiasm to extend amnesty to illegal immigrants.