From "Surge" to Slavery

If you want a good measure of how little the Regime cares for its subjects, consider this fact:

Members of local draft boards, who would be given the power to make life and death decisions regarding deferments or exemptions in the likely event that Congress decides to create a slave army, are required to receive only four hours of training each year.

Our nation is afflicted with 2,000 of the five-member draft boards – I prefer to call them Selective Slavery Soviets (SSS). Their members are appointed by the president, and the selection criteria aren't particularly demanding. And to judge from comments made by members of various boards to the press, the most important qualification is an eagerness to serve the interests of the State, rather than its victims.

“If there is a draft,” comments Steve Zurawski, who belongs to a draft board in Chicago, “we go into action. It's a necessary evil.”

That description is exactly half right. To fight a defensive war, a draft is never necessary. Conscription only becomes “necessary” when policy-makers are pursuing evil objectives.

Another draft board member, Jack McInerey Jr., insists that it's wise to keep the SSS network up and running, because otherwise “it would take a minimum of six weeks to organize a draft.”

“Do you want to give your enemy a month and a half to attack your nation?” asks McInerey. “I don't think so.”

Notes the Chicago Sun-Times: “The idea of mandatory military service in the United States can be traced back as far as the Revolutionary War, but the concept of panels of community members to help with the process did not appear until World War I.”

Note how subtly the author of that sentence misleads the reader by tracing the “idea” -- but not the practice – of conscription back to the founding era. The idea of a military draft was considered and rejected by those who drafted the U.S. Constitution.

On May 29, 1787 -- the first working session of the Philadelphia Convention -- Virginia Governor Edmund Randolph presented a detailed dissection of the Articles of Confederation and its deficiencies. The very first liability listed by Randolph, as recorded in James Madison’s Notes, was the fact that the Articles “produced no security against foreign invasion; congress not being permitted to prevent a war nor to support it by their own authority….”

With respect to matters of national defense, the chief weakness of Congress under the Articles of Confederation was its inability to raise money to pay recruits, by Randolph's reckoning.

Where it was necessary to muster troops to defend the Confederation, Randolph continued, with “neither militia nor draughts [drafts] being fit for defense on such occasions, enlistments only could be successful and these could not be executed without money."

Note this well: Randolph, a figure of no small consequence at the Convention, acknowledged that drafts are not “fit for defense” in the event of a sudden attack on our nation.

While Randolph and other Federalists at the Convention insisted that a stronger central government was necessary in order to defend the infant American republic from foreign aggression, their proposed remedy was to provide Congress with the means to raise money to pay a small professional army. Not once during the debates at the Convention was it suggested that the central government should have the authority to conduct a draft of the general population. Agreement was reached that the federal government – through Congress – could call state militia to the active defense of the union, but that the states would not completely surrender control over the militia.

The session of August 18 dealt with that question in some detail. A compromise was proposed by George Mason empowering the central government to create a “select militia,” which he considered “as much as the General Government could advantageously be charged with.” This suggestion failed to find favor with many of the delegates, as was referred to a select committee for further study.

When the issue was taken up again on August 23, the discussion focused on the power of Congress to regulate and discipline militia called to defend the union.

From those discussions emerged the congressional power to “raise armies” (with a two-year limitation on appropriations for the army) and to call the militia into the service of the United States when necessary for the common defense. Once again, none of the delegates suggested that Congress, or any other branch of the federal government, would be permitted to conscript citizens into a national army.

“After circumscribing the central government’s power to draw the militia into federal service with such careful restrictions, the delegates could not possibly have allowed the federal government to exercise direct control over the citizens by permitting a draft into the regular army,” observed legal scholar Leon Friedman in a 1969 Michigan Law Review article. “The matter was so impossible to imagine, given the circumstances and ideological climate of the times, that no voice was raised against it…. All that was given by the grant [to Congress of limited power to raise armies, and call out the state militia], was the power to organize and enlist a federal, professional army which – the delegates thought – would consist of a limited number of garrison troops. That power was given grudgingly, only in the light of the severe hardship Congress had experienced through the Revolution in depending solely on the states for manpower and military supplies.”

The idea that citizens could be compelled “to bear arms for a national authority, and work against their most profound interests, never occurred to the framers,” continues Friedman. To endorse that concept “would have been a contradiction to their entire political heritage, manifestly inconsistent with their sense of the delicate balance between liberty and power, between the appetite for oppression and the instinct for resistance. If the citizen had any military obligation, it was to his local militia.

Many of the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence were inspired by abuses of military power by the British Government at expense of the rights of the colonists. Similarly, many of the provisions inscribed in the Constitution and Bill of Rights (such as the limitation of appropriations for the Army to two years, and the Third Amendment’s prohibition of the quartering of troops in private homes) were inspired by well-entrenched, and amply validated, American concerns about the potential danger of military establishments being employed against the people as occupation forces.

Given the care with which the Framers of the Constitution hedged and qualified congressional power to create military establishments, it is untenable to believe that they granted Congress the power of conscription.

It is true that several of the states had mechanisms to conscript citizens into militias. The chief purpose of those bodies, however, was not to fight on behalf of the union, but rather to defend each state in the event of internal insurrection or other crises (such as conflicts with Indians). While Congress had the power to call militias into service of the union, it was clearly understood that the militias could also be called into service to defend individual states from a rogue central government – a form of interposition explicitly endorsed by Madison in Federalist essay 46.

Once again, this fact is impossible to reconcile with the idea that the central government had the power under the Constitution to conscript the very militiamen upon whom the states would rely as an ultimate check against that same central government.

The War of 1812 came about, in large measure, because of the British government’s practice of “impressing” American citizens – that is, abducting American sailors on the high seas, accusing them of being deserters from the British Navy, and forcing them to serve aboard British ships. Thus it’s reasonable to say that the war was, to some extent, based on a profound opposition to conscription, albeit in this case conducted by a foreign regime.

In our nation’s republican infancy, the citizens of most states looked on the federal government in Washington as something akin to a potentially hostile foreign power (an attitude desperately in need of revival, in my view). Despite misgivings about the necessity and ultimate purposes of the war, Americans – even those in restive New England -- were willing to enlist in both militia units and the regular Army in order to defend the union from Great Britain.

However, widespread disaffection and mutiny spread through both the militia and the Army after it became clear that the “War Hawks” in the Madison administration sought to expand the war into Canada. Governors of New England states refused to act on requisitions of militia for a march on Montreal, and “guardhouse lawyers” descended on militia camps to inform soldiers that the federal government had no constitutional authority to deploy them in foreign wars.

“Rigid Republican doctrine, apart from party loyalty, also harmed the war effort,” records historian Robert Allen Rutland. “Republican views concerning the use of the state militia proved to be a genuine albatross [to President Madison and his administration]. In 1798 Republicans had argued that the Constitution limited the use of the militia (today’s National Guard) to executing federal laws within its borders, suppressing insurrections, and repelling invasions. Could the president call on the militia to invade Canada or the Floridas [at the time not part of the United States]? No, said doctrinaire Republicans and Federalists alike….”

This consensus against using the militia as a foreign expeditionary force was complemented with an equally widespread rejection of conscription – even after the land war against Great Britain took a disastrous turn.

By June 1814, the U.S. Treasury was depleted, the federal government’s credit lines were stretched tauter than a Hollywood face-lift, Napoleon had been neutralized by a British-led coalition (meaning that London would soon be able to turn its attentions toward the U.S.), and peace negotiations were stalling. Madison instructed his negotiators at the peace table to drop the U.S. demand that British end the practice of impressment .

Ironically, the U.S. peace negotiators who had previously demanded an end to impressment operated under the authority of Secretary of State James Monroe – who, as Secretary of War, would later submit the proposal for a U.S. military draft.

Within weeks, this diplomatic retreat was matched by a literal retreat after Washington, D.C. came under British naval bombardment. On August 24, President Madison fled into the woods as British troops burned the White House. First Lady Dolley Madison, seeking to protect official papers, household china, and a portrait of George Washington, left the presidential residence literally minutes ahead of advancing British troops. (A freak – or perhaps providential – tornado, coupled with the explosion of a nearby powder magazine, deterred British troops from actually sacking the White House.)

Losing ground in a desperate war with the world’s most powerful empire, suffering the indignity of an attack on our Capitol City and its most visible symbol, the United States faced a crisis unlike any it has experienced either before or since.

Indeed, the situation in which our nation found itself in late 1814-early 1815 provides an ideal test case for one of the arguments favored by some reluctant proponents of the draft: The claim that in the event of a foreign attack that literally threatens our national survival, conscription may be necessary as an ultimate means of national self-defense.

Compelling as that argument may seem to those who consider it hypothetically, the remarkable fact is that it was rejected by Congress when our nation actually confronted the possibility of losing the war to Great Britain.

The Monroe conscription proposal was placed before Congress in December 1814. The immediate congressional reaction – primarily from Republicans, but also from some Federalists – was one of astonished outrage.

“The power claimed is, doubtless, vastly greater and more dangerous than any other possessed by the Government,” protested Senator Jeremiah Mason of New Hampshire. “It subjects the personal freedom of every citizen, in comparison with which the rights of property are insignificant, to the arbitrary discretion [of government]. Had there been the intention of granting such power, would there not have been some attempt to guard against the unjust and oppressive exercise of it, as was done in the granting of power less important?”

Mason scored a telling point by recalling that the Madison administration had described impressment – which he described as a form of naval conscription -- as “utterly repugnant to our constitution and laws.” “The honorable Secretary [James Monroe] when he drafted those instructions, knew not how soon he should be directed to contend for the contrary doctrine.”

Easily the most eloquent and forceful opponent of the conscription proposal was Congressman Daniel Webster of Massachusetts.

“It was `usurpation’ pure and simple, cried Webster,” recalls biographer Robert Remini. “If such as bill is attempted, he warned, `it will cause a storm such as was never witnessed before.’ But the government was desperate. It had no money, and its army was slowly evaporating. In addition, many states had refused repeated requests for militia troops.

One version of Monroe’s plan did pass the Senate (remarkable, in light of the fact that the Senate as then constituted was intended to represent the interests of the state governments). Describing the plan as “wicked and violent,” Webster warned that it “will be a dead letter in New England.” Angered that proponents of the draft insisted that it was authorized by “implied powers,” rather than by any specific grant of power in the Constitution, Webster eviscerated the proposed draft in a lengthy speech on December 9:

“Is this, sir, consistent with the character of a free government? Is this civil liberty? Is this the real character of our Constitution? No sir, indeed it is not. The Constitution is libeled, foully libeled. The people of this country have not established for themselves such a fabric of despotism…. Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly or the wickedness of government may engage it?…. If the Secretary of War has proved the right of Congress to enact a law enforcing a draft of men out of the militia and into the regular army, he will at any time be able to prove, quite as clearly, that Congress has the power to create a Dictator.”(Spelling in the original.)

If Congress approved this patently unconstitutional and undeniably despotic measure, Webster continued, “It will be the solemn duty of the State Governments to protect their own authority over their own militia, and interpose between their citizens and arbitrary power. These are among the objects for which the State Governments exist; and their highest obligations bind them to the preservation of their own rights and the liberties of their people.”

The conscription proposal was conspicuous on the agenda of the Hartford Convention, which met shortly after Webster delivered his speech. Far from contributing to the defense of the Union, the proposed draft helped fuel a movement that very nearly tore it apart.


A little more than a week ago, Congressman Charles Rangel of New York introduced the "Universal National Service Act of 2007," which would not only re-instate the draft, it would extend it to all Americans of both sexes from ages 18 to 42. This measure is a transliteration of the eighth plank of the Communist Manifesto, which dictates a universal liability for all to serve as the state directs.


Rangel's bill would make all Americans from ages 18 to 42 the property of the President, to use as he sees fit in either military, homeland security, or other "national service" functions. The bill is written in such a fashion that it would provide a new pool of conscripts for immediate use in Iraq and Afghanistan if -- make that when -- the "surge" results in a larger and bloodier mess in the Middle East.


Who are the five people in your community who would have life-and-death power over the future of your children? Now is a good time to find out.

For news and views from a liberty-focused perspective, please be sure to visit The Right Source -- a news portal for information carnivores (but milk-drinkers are welcome, too).

UPDATED -- Set Nacho Libre!, or: Ramos and Compean: Casualties of the Bogus "War on Drugs"

Ignacio "Nacho" Ramos comforts his wife before heading to prison.

To the surprise of nobody – at least, no sober and serious observer of the case -- Former Border Patrol Agent of the Year nominee Ignacio “Nacho” Ramos has been attacked and seriously injured in prison. Ramos and his partner, Jose Alonso Compean, are serving 11 and 12 year terms, respectively, for trying to arrest a Mexican drug smuggler on the Texas border almost exactly two years ago.

The smuggler, Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, was driving a van laden with 800 pounds of marijuana when he was stopped by Agent Compean. A brief scuffle ended with Compean bloodied and in the dirt, and Aldrete fleeing on foot for Mexico. Ramos gave chase. When Aldrete appeared to assuming a shooter's stance, Ramos and Compean fired, wounding the smuggler in his Cheney.

Acting in tandem with the criminal syndicate ruling Mexico, the Bush regime spared no effort to imprison Ramos and Compean – seizing the exemplary Border Patrol Agents in paramilitary raids on their homes, concealing vital evidence, lying about purported confessions by the agents, and extending extraordinary immunity to Aldrete to use him as the star witness in the trial. Ramos and Compean were accused of violating Aldrete's rights by shooting him in the back as he fled.

The “Justice” Department, it should be pointed out, displayed no similar zeal in prosecuting the federal agents who shot and killed Sammy Weaver when the youngster was fleeing into his family's shanty (oh, forgive me -- “armed compound”) at Ruby Ridge. Federal sniper Lon Horiuchi, who admitted to blowing off the head of Vicky Weaver when she was “armed” only with a nursing baby, not only escaped prosecution, he was taken under federal protection.

Strikingly different priorities were at work in the case of Ramos and Compean.

The “Justice” Department and Department of Homeland Security even helped Aldrete file a $5 million civil suit against the Border Patrol, claiming that he was shot while unarmed, despite Ramos and Compean's insistence that he was carrying a gun. The suit, coupled with the federal prosecution of Ramos and Compean, created a unique condition of moral hazard: Aldrete's success in the lawsuit required that Ramos and Compean be found guilty, and the testimony offered by the plaintiff in the suit was the only evidence against the agents.

What this amounted to was federal witness-tampering, through the use of a $5 million bribe offered to a Mexican drug smuggler.

Mexican narcotics smuggler Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila: A favored pet of both Washington and Mexico City.

Adding insufferable insult to unbearable injury, Emperor Bush has pardoned numerous drug traffickers while stolidly refusing widespread requests (from both the public and political allies in Congress) to pardon Ramos and Compean. (William F. Jasper, whose work is a good and sufficient reason to subscribe to The New American, has compiled the relevant details in digestible form here.)

This case has understandably riled millions of conservatives who are just now tumbling to the fact that George W. Bush isn't the pillar of right-wing rectitude they had believed him to be. The rant-radio airwaves and right blogosphere resound with denunciations of Bush for yet another betrayal of our national sovereignty and those who defend it. That indictment is sound, as far as it goes, which isn't far enough.

The treatment of Ramos and Compean is typical of what we can expect as the cartelization of North America continues. This new architecture – officially called the Security and Prosperity Partnership, and unofficially called the North American Union – would fuse the US, Mexico, and Canada in one economic and political bloc, under the plenary authority of a single ruling elite that unites the criminal underworld and the political “overworld.”

As I pointed out just a few days ago, the Bush family has deep and significant connections to Mexico's dominant political criminal cliques. That relationship was described quite tidily in a 2000 expose by Julie Reynolds in El Andar:

“Those who say that George W. Bush has scant knowledge of foreign affairs don’t understand his family’s relationship with Mexico. If one event could be said to make that relationship visible, it had to be the state dinner given eleven years ago by President Bush for Mexico’s president, Carlos Salinas. It was an elegant yet boisterous gala, where the biggest movers and shakers in Texas and Mexico congregated and celebrated. This group was to become W’s Mexican legacy, a gift of ties and connections passed on from the father to his son. What was not visible was that the group included two men with numerous links to drug cartel figures. These men helped George W. Bush win the Latino vote in Texas.”

According to Reynolds, the mobbed-up figures were “the loyal `Amigos de Bush' from San Antonio: criminal defense lawyer Roy Barrera Jr. and car dealer Ernesto Ancira Jr.”

That same meeting, convened to celebrate progress toward the NAFTA pact (also known as the “Magna Carta for the drug cartels”) was Gary Jacobs of Laredo Bank. Jacobs became the chief US representative of Carlos Hank Rhon, the son of Carlos Hank Gonzalez – the John D. Rockefeller of Mexico. Carlos and his brother Jorge, the former mayor of Tijuana and aspiring governor of northern Baja, are deeply enmeshed in Mexico's narcotics industry. Jorge reportedly had something close to a hands-on role in the 1993 murder of Juan Jesus Posadas, the Bishop of Tijuana, on behalf of the Gulf Cartel. (He was seen sharing a first-class Aeromexico section with the murderers, Juan and Javier Arellano Felix, during their flight home immediately after Posadas was killed.)

While Jorge is an unreconstructed thug, Carlos is the relatively housebroken Hank brother, the one who knows which fork to use when dining with representatives of Citibank and Goldman Sachs. Carlos's minion, Gary Jacobs was a key contributor and advisor to George W. Bush during his Texas gubernatorial bids and his and presidential campaigns. Hank also retains the services of former Republican Senator Warren Rudman as a Capitol Hill lobbyist.

Bush's links to Mexico's ruling elites help explain his indifference to the plight of Ramos and Compean. There are other compromising connections at work here, such as those said to exist between Border Patrol Agent Rene Sanchez -- a naturalized American born in Mexico – and his childhood friend, Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila. It was reportedly Agent Sanchez who suggested to Aldrete that he file a lawsuit against the Border Patrol.

But for sheer, unalloyed, audacious corruption, nothing in the case of Ramos and Compean eclipses the role played by Johnny Sutton, the US Attorney for San Antonio who presided over the vindictive prosecution of the Border Patrol Agents.

Sutton served on the Bush-Cheney transition team and was Criminal Justice Policy Director for Texas during Bush's two terms as Governor. Before becoming the impassioned avenger of the wounded drug smuggler Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, Sutton – according to DEA whistle-blower Sandalio Gonzalez, recently retired as Special Agent in Charge of the Agency's El Paso office – helped cover up the “House of Death” mass murders in Ciudad Juarez.

“Between August 2003 and mid-January 2004, about a dozen people were tortured, murdered, and then buried in the yard of a house in the Mexican border town” of Ciudad Juarez, recounts the Narco News, which broke the story. One of those directly involved in the murders was Jesus “Lalo” Contreras, a former Mexican Federal Police officer who infiltrated the Juarez Cartel as an informant for the US Department of Homeland Security (the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees the Border Patrol).

“The informant's handlers, agents and supervisors with the El Paso office of ICE were allegedly fully aware of Contreras's complicity in the murders, yet did nothing to stop the killing,” supposedly out of fear that they would ruin ongoing investigations. Each of the murder sessions was referred to as a carne asada, or barbecue.

Although “Lalo”'s handlers and supervisors – all the way up to Sutton – were aware that people were being murdered by their informant, they did nothing until the killings were discovered by a DEA agent on the ground in Juarez. This resulted in a hasty evacuation of all DEA employees and their families from the area.

Had the DEA agent not made that timely discovery, it's possible that he or one of his colleagues – or perhaps one of their dependents – would have been the featured entree at the next carne asada.

In a January 24, 2004 letter, Sandalio Gonzalez – then in charge of the DEA's San Antonio office -- confronted Sutton about his role in the cover-up. Predictably, his professional reputation was soon ruined and he was driven to an “early retirement.”

Given what Sutton, acting on behalf of his masters, did to Ramos and Compean, Sandalio Gonzalez could consider himself blessed.

Despite all the justified outrage generated by the patent injustice inflicted on Ramos and Compean and their families, I've yet to see anyone articulate the obvious lesson taught in this mess, which is: The "War on Drugs" is an unambiguous fraud.

Agent Jose Compean poses with confiscated marijuana. He's a good man, but trying to stop the flow of narcotics from Mexico is a bit like trying to dig the Grand Canyon with a thimble.

Even if diligent, incorruptible agents like Ramos and Compean were able to shut down the supply of narcotics coming into our country from Mexico (this would be like emptying the Rio Grande with an eyedropper), the criminal elites they serve wouldn't permit them to do so. Their mission is one of FedGov PR and price support for a commodity that's already the world's leading cash crop.

[Incidentally, and for what it's worth, today's installment is the 100th essay published in this space since August 16, 2006.]

Update (2/8) --

Some Republican lawmakers are reportedly discussing the possibility that George W. Bush could be impeached over the imprisonment of Agents Ramos and Compean. This case does offer ample cause for an impeachment proceeding. It should be remembered, however, that the Bushling and his adult handler Dick Cheney commit a half-dozen impeachable offenses before breakfast every day, and most of them involve offenses against people who are not government employees.

It's typical of the Republican leadership, and the activist groups who are content to bob in the GOP's wake like rubber ducks, to fixate on an injustice done to members of the tax-consuming class, rather than on the manifold and ever-increasing offenses committed by the Bush regime against the rights of those facing the "business end of government."

Aggressive war by presidential decree? Using presidential "signing statements" to nullify laws? Summary detention and torture of innocent suspects? Destruction of the foundation principle of due process, habeas corpus? All of this is unexceptionable -- as long as the President doesn't countenance, or connive in, the mistreatment of Border Patrol Agents. Or so it would seem to the GOP leadership and those seeking to curry favor with them.

If we're looking for an exemplary case on which to build an impeachment campaign, how about that of the innocent Canadian citizen Mahrer Arar, who was "rendered" by the Bush Regime into Syrian custody for nearly a year of imprisonment and torture?

Make sure to visit The Right Source, a genuinely independent news portal for freedom-minded people.

I'm From The Government, So I Get To Kill You

Right Now, justice is being perverted in a court of law...

Right Now, the truth is being obscured...

Right Now, a mad man is wandering the streets of the town you live in...

Right Now, our government is doing things we think only other countries do....

Right Now, a thuggish policeman in a country like China or Cuba is grinding a hapless victim's face in the dirt and then dragging another off to jail. En route to the detention center, the victim starts to pray, asking God to help him and to forgive his captor. This gesture is greeted with a contemptuous belch and a sneering question: “Who's this God you're praying to? Let's see your God get you out of jail.”

"Once you're behind bars," the uniformed thug taunts, his features twisted into a sadistic smirk, "you'll be beaten and most likely raped."

It's not difficult to imagine something of this sort happening in some wretched Communist of Muslim country. Most Americans couldn't imagine this happening in the United States. This could be considered a failure of imagination, except for one thing: What I describe above actually happened in 1997. The assailant was a police officer in Prince George's County, Maryland, an Army veteran named Keith Washington (and a graduate of the Army's Command and General Staff College).

In the decade since that incident – which I'll describe in more detail anon – Officer Washington compiled a lengthy list of complaints for his behavior both on- and off-duty, distinguishing himself even among members of a law enforcement agency notorious for its lawlessness and corruption. On the strength of that job record, as well as fraternity ties to the County Executive, Washington was appointed Deputy Homeland Security Chief for Prince George's County.

That was the rank Washington held when he was involved in a January 24 dispute with furniture delivery men over a scratched headboard. That dispute ended with Washington drawing a gun and shooting the delivery men. The department, in keeping with the Homeland Security ethos, initially charged the men Washington had shot with assault, but withdrew the charges in the interest of public relations shortly before one of the officer's victims died. Washington remains on administrative leave, rather than behind bars, which is where he would be if he weren't employed by the Regime.

The Face of the Enemy: From all appearances a decent and respectable man, Keith Washington embodies the arrogant corruption of the emerging American Reich.

In the weeks leading up to that fatal shooting, Washington had been involved in several arguments with officers of his Homeowners Association, assaulting at least two of them.

None of these developments should be a surprise to those involved in a 1997 traffic accident involving Washington and an attorney named Paul Essex.

In court testimony recounted by the Washington Post, Essex recalled the post-accident confrontation with Washington.

“You caused this accident!” snarled the officer.

“That's a decision for the court to to make,” Essex reasonably replied.

“Out here, I am the court,” declared Washington.

When Essex disagreed, Washington placed him under arrest.

“He grabbed my arm and ... jacked my arm up and pulled me back over to the driver's side front fender,” Essex recalled.

A mechanic named David Paul Maslousky, who was a passenger in Essex's car, was thrown to the ground and arrested for “hindering” Washington in the performance of his duties, a charge that was later dropped.

During the drive to the police station, amid a constant stream of threats and invective from Washington, Maslousky began to pray. It was at that point that the officer slipped into the persona of a Soviet commissar, mocking the man's religious convictions and promising that “Bubba” would soon “have his way with you.”

Maslousky later took Washington to court, winning a $210,000 damage award that was eventually overturned on appeal. The officer's defense strategy was to defend arrogance, pomposity, and aggressive hostility to the civilian public as indispensable traits for a successful law enforcement officer.

“No one has a right to a polite and cordial police officer,” insisted County Attorney Andrew Murray, who represented Washington. Of the behavior on display when he was needlessly provoking Essex and grinding Maslousky into the dirt, Murray insisted: “[T]hese are characteristics that he employs ... so that he can make order out of chaos – these are characteristics that enable him to survive his day-to-day contact with citizens so he can go home and see his family.” (Emphasis added.)

Note this well: Washington's defense assumes that the citizenry is a threat to be subdued, and civilian life a form of chaos to which he must bring order. This is what they're teaching at the US Army's Command and General Staff College, and most likely in police academies across the nation.

Washington's ascent to prominence in Prince George's County is hardly surprising to those who have chronicled the bloody, corrupt exploits of its police department.

In 2001, to cite one example, Howard University student Prince Jones was killed in an execution-style police shooting, his body riddled with four bullets. The police described the incident as a “surveillance operation gone bad,” insisting that Prince – a clean-cut, well-respected man with plans to marry and enlist in the Navy – was mistaken for a dreadlocked drug dealer nearly a foot shorter and substantially heavier.

This incident was regrettably representative of law enforcement in Prince George's county, which “could boast a healthy cross-section of shootings, maimings, and thrashings that would easily make the Blue Beatdowns Hall of Fame,” lamented The Washington Monthly.

Last September, the County was hit with a verdict awarding $6.4 million in damages to Keith Longtin, whose wife Donna was kidnapped, raped, and murdered in 1999. The police took Longtin into custody and subjected him to a 38-hour “coercive interrogation”; he was allowed roughly one hour of sleep and infrequent bathroom breaks as officers worked shifts in the hope of extorting a confession. Eventually the detectives reported that the husband had confessed; he insisted that this was a lie. On the strength of that supposed confession Longtin was held in jail for 8 months – roughly seven months after DNA evidence extracted from his murdered wife's remains exonerated him.

During the 1990s, writes the indispensable James Bovard, the Prince George's County police department “killed and maimed more people than the Unabomber and the Aryan Nation combined. They have a worse human rights record than the Federal Bureau of Investigation [which was involved in the Ruby Ridge and Waco massacres]. If they were a foreign-based entity classified as terrorists (such as Hamas), and you contributed to their cause, you would face up to 10 years in jail for supporting terrorism. Instead, they are supported with your tax dollars. They are the 1400 members of the Prince George's County police department.”

“Among the shootings the police department ruled as justified: `An unarmed construction worker was shot in the back after he was detained in a fast-food restaurant. An unarmed suspect died in a fusillade of 66 bullets as he tried to flee in a car from police. A homeless man was shot when police mistook his portable radio for a gun. And an unarmed man was killed after he pulled off the road to relieve himself.'”

In Maryland, as elsewhere, police officers enjoy immunity from questioning for 10 days following the use of deadly force; this interval can be, and often is, exploited by corrupt police to collude in creating a cover story.

Prince George's County abuts the Imperial Capital, and at the beginning of the decade the odor of corruption became so pervasive that the Justice Department put the police under FBI scrutiny. The elevation of Officer Washington – whose reputation was hardly a secret -- to second in command of the County's Homeland Security office apparently raised no eyebrows in Washington. He's most likely just the sort of hero the Feds had in mind when they created the Heimatsiecherheitsdienst.

Make sure to visit The Right Source to listen to Kevin Shannon's Right Source radio program -- available via streaming or on-line archives.

A Genocidal War to "Prevent" Genocide?

-- if by "the job" one refers to demolishing what remains of America's liberty, prosperity, and international reputation.

If the Bush regime, which clearly lusts for war with Iran, isn't able to confect a casus belli out of dubious claims about Teheran's nuclear program or its role in fomenting insurgency in Iraq, it may embrace a justification for aggressive war: An attack on Iran would be necessary in order to arraign its president on a charge of incitement to genocide.

Last December 14, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations held a symposium to inaugurate an “international effort to prosecute President Ahmadinejad for violating the 1948 Genocide Convention provisions of the UN Charter and other international conventions.”

For "international effort" we should read: "A campaign involving the familiar cast of war-intoxicated neo-Trotskyites from North America and Israel."

The roster includes former Israeli prime minister Bienjamin Netanyahu, Natan Sharansky, General Staff Lt. Gen. (ret.) Moshe Ya'alon, the IDF's former chief of general staff, former Israeli UN ambassador Dore Gold, former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler, and, of course, Harvard's Alan Dershowitz (who never met a guilty, rich murderer he couldn't exonerate, or an innocent Arab he wouldn't obliterate).

According to this “august” group, an indictment should be submitted to the UN's International Criminal Court at The Hague accusing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of violating the Genocide Convention by making public statements allegedly calling for the obliteration of Israel.

For Cotler and Dershowitz, a trial would be a mere formality, since Ahmadinejad's guilt is apodictic.

“Ahmadinejad’s genocidal criminality is as clear and compelling as any I’ve ever seen,” insists Cotler. “This is advocacy of the most horrific of crimes, genocide; embedded in the most virulent of hatreds, anti-Semitism; propelled by a publicly avowed intent to acquire nuclear weapons for that purpose, and dramatized by the parading in the streets of Teheran of Shihab-3 missiles draped in the emblem `Wipe Israel Off the Map.'”

The execrable Alan Dershowitz: The love-child of Shylock and Bozo the Clown? (Actually, this is entirely unfair; Bozo has much more charisma, and Shylock -- who, along with his daughter, was treated horribly -- wasn't a cynical grievance-peddler like Dershowitz).

In an address that unambiguously called for military action – up to an including nuclear strikes – against Iran, Dershowitz insists that Iran has actually “succeeded at the beginnings of genocide” through its alleged role in the bombing of an Argentine synagogue in 1994.

Given his eagerness to cultivate favor with the Israel-centric Evangelical Right, it's not surprising that Mitt Romney has eagerly enlisted in this campaign. A position statement issued by the Romney campaign calls for “an indictment of Ahmadinejad for incitement to genocide under the Genocide Convention. The United States should lead this effort.”

In an argument almost certain to become a mantra chanted by Bu'ushist media mullahs, Romney suggests that the Genocide Convention not only permits, but requires, pre-emptive war.

"The full title of the Genocide Convention is the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” observes the Romney campaign's position statement. “Remember that word: Prevention. Article III of that treaty establishes that 'public incitement to commit genocide' is a punishable crime. Every signatory to this treaty, including the U.S. and most European countries, shares an obligation to enforce it. So do human rights groups that care about international humanitarian law.”

What would “enforcement” of an indictment against Ahmadenijad look like in practical terms? To answer that question we turn to Dershowitz, a comprehensively loathsome figure who seems to have made acting out the worst anti-Semitic caricatures his mission in life.

“If the international community fails, if this challenge is not met, we reserve [the] right of self-defense,” brayed Dershowitz at the December 14 symposium. “We pledge to do everything it takes, and anything it takes, to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. We will stop at nothing in satisfying that pledge.”

When Dershowitz says “nothing,” that is exactly what he means. As I pointed out several months ago, during the most recent Israeli-Lebanese war, Dershowitz declared that the entire nation of Lebanon could be liquidated if the Israeli government deemed such action necessary. So it's reasonable to believe that “everything it takes, and anything it takes” to forestall Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons, as defined by Dershowitz, would include nuclear genocide of the Iranian people.

So here's the reasoning (if that word can be tortured into applying here) being followed by Dershowitz and his comrades:

The President of Iran has given speeches endorsing the destruction of Israel with theoretical nuclear weapons. This entitles Israel and/or the United States to use their very real nuclear arsenals to annihilate the entire Iranian population. And this unprecedented atrocity would not only be compatible with the UN's Genocide Convention, it is all but mandated by it.

If we're going to get into the business of dragging people off to The Hague to stand trial for incitement to genocide, Dershowitz really should be among the first in the dock. Another suitable defendant would be Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the Baghdad-born, Cairo-educated Rabbi who serves as “spiritual leader” to the Shas Party, the third-largest in Israel.

Among the reasons Iran's president Ahmadenijad is being depicted as an avatar of Adolf Hitler are the Iranian figurehead's skepticism about the Holocaust. Rabbi Yosef, from the perspective of at least some who survived that episode, has committed what could be considered an even more serious offense by denying the humanity of those who were killed at the death camps, insisting that they "were reincarnations of the souls of sinners, people who transgressed and did all sorts of things that should not be done. They had been reincarnated in order to atone."

Genocide advocate Rabbi Ovadia Yosef meets with Israeli President (and accused rapist) Moshe Katsav (left) and British Prime Minister Tony Blair (right).

Yosef has also called for Israel to “annihilate” Arabs as the opportunity presents itself. “It is forbidden to be merciful to them,” insisted the Rabbi in a Saturday night sermon broadcast by radio in 2000. “You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.”

Much attention (in my view, hardly enough) has been paid to the growing efforts of Saudi Arabia to propagate Whabbi Islam in the United States and Europe. But Rabbi Yosef is easily the match of any Whabbist Mullah in propagating genocidal doctrines – not necessarily among his Israeli followers and Jewish disciples in other nations, but among a large and growing community of Dispensationalist Christians. His most effective emissary has been Benny Elon, an Israeli Knesset member and former Israeli Minister of Tourism.

Joel Rosenberg, a former Israeli government adviser turned “novelist” (his books are ineptly written and badly plotted war propaganda) points out that Elon “was at the forefront of Israel's campaign over the last several years to team up with Evangelical Christian supporters around the world.” In the Knesset Elon heads the “ increasingly influential Christian Allies Caucus, which was established nearly two years ago and now has 14 parliamentarians from across the political spectrum, [and which] aims to garner the support of pro-Israel Christians around the world.”

At last December's Jerusalem Summit, Elon presented an award to San Antonio preacher John C. Hagee, founder of the Christian Lobby for Israel – a self-described “Christian AIPAC” devoted to representing the interests of the Israeli government. Like Rosenberg, Hagee is an indefatigable advocate for war; rather than novels, however, Hagee prefers to use religious tracts as his propaganda delivery system.

The people seeking a UN "genocide" indictment of Ahmadenijad are conjuring up yet another Golem that they believe -- with entirely unwarranted confidence -- will always be under their control. They really need to refresh their memories regarding the way most versions of that story ended.

Make sure to visit The Right Source -- the news portal of choice for the freedom-fixated!

The Soviet States of North America (pt. II): The Criminal Nomenklatura

Tijuana Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon, bloody-handed scion of a Mexican crime family.

As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him. Amos 5:19

No matter which way they've turned, the inhabitants of Tijuana, Mexico have found nothing but violence and corruption.

During 2006, at least 300 people were murdered in Tijuana, most of them slaughtered by gangsters in the employ of the narcotics cartels. Those who turned to the local police for protection discovered that their situation had not improved, since the police were little more than a subsidiary of the cartel.

Earlier this year, Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched “Operation Tijuana,” sending 3,300 soldiers and heavily armed Federal Police to occupy the city and disarm the local police, some of whom were sent on patrol armed only with slingshots. Not surprisingly, this resulted in a noticeable reduction in random violent crime, although the trade-off was the imposition of martial law, enforced through street checkpoints and the omnipresent threat of lethal violence.

On January 27, the troops and Federales departed after re-arming the local cops. They gave the corrupt Tijuana police a going-away present: Six federal police officers involved in the counter-narcotics deployment were videotaped extorting money from a motorist. That's a role usually carried out by the Tijuana police themselves.

Meanwhile, Tijuana Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon -- who, like George W. Bush is the stupidest scion of a multi-generational political crime family (each of them is the Fredo Corleone of his respective clan) -- is preparing to campaign for Governor of Baja, California. This means stepping down with eight months left in his term as mayor, but as the nominee of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Hank would have no effective competition.

“My city is still secure,” Hank declared recently, last year's body count and the recent federal military occupation notwithstanding. “It's not a secure city,” he continued, displaying a gift for language remarkably similar to that of George W. Bush. “It's less insecure, let's call it that way, than two or three years ago.”

Before resigning to place his foot on the next rung on Mexico's political ladder, Hank introduced his successor to the San Diego Association of Governments, a regional body that deals with political, economic, and environmental matters on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. The border crossing in San Diego is the busiest in the world, for both legal and illegal commerce and immigration.

Here's a hypothetical question:

If you were a law-abiding, hard-working, reasonably bright citizen of Tijuana, and you had the means to get to the United States, wouldn't you be powerfully tempted to do so, whether or not you had official permission?

Recent developments in Tijuana offer a microcosm of Mexico's incurably degenerate political system and a foreshadowing of what we can expect if the campaign to merge that nation with ours unfolds as planned.

Mexico's “government” -- a congealed crust of official corruption atop a roiling mass of unofficial corruption – entirely vindicates Alfred J. Nock's observation that the State is merely the dominant criminal syndicate in any society. President Calderon, the U.S.-educated successor to Vicente Fox, is a member of the “conservative” National Action Party (PAN), an upstart rival gang to the long-entrenched PRI. Calderon, with the support of Washington, came to power through widespread voter fraud. Because of threats of revolutionary violence from Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, presidential candidate of the Marxist Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD), Calderon's inauguration took place under contrapuntal threats of martial law.

Since assuming power, Calderon has dispatched more than 24,000 troops to states plagued by narcotics-related violence, which last year took thousands of lives (some by way of Iraq-style be-headings) as various drug syndicates fought over smuggling routes and cropland. Not surprisingly, given their strategic significance, two cities abutting the border – Tijuana and Neuvo Laredo – have been particularly afflicted.

Some of the troops dispatched by Calderon were used to destroy opium and marijuana harvests. A friend of mine, a Special Forces veteran who did the same kind of work in Latin America during the 1980s, calls this the “narcotics price support program.” Mexico's drug cartels will enjoy a corresponding windfall. So will the Mexican government, since Washington is prepared to reward Calderon with more counter-narcotics funding. And as it happens, Mexico's narco-elite and its political class are more or less the same group of people.

(De-criminalizing drug use, by way of contrast, would end this price support program and mitigate much of the violence. Which is precisely why that option is not seriously considered.)

Nothing illustrates this fact better than the Hank dynasty, sometimes referred to as Mexico's “Rockefellers.”

The dynasty was founded Carlos Hank Gonzalez, who died in August 2001. Barred by the country's constitution from running for the presidency (Hank's father was German), Carlos embodied the Mexican Dream: He amassed a huge fortune by “serving” in government while directing business to nominally private interests he owned and operated. A politician who is poor, Carlos famously remarked, “is a poor politician.”

Carlos Hank became a kingmaker, serving as something of a Colonel House to Carlos Salinas de Gortari – the “reformist” Mexican president who was indispensable to completion of the NAFTA treaty. Salinas and his brother Raul followed the Hank formula for wealth, with one significant refinement: They embedded themselves at the junction of high finance and the international narcotics trade.

Former DEA agent Mike Levine, the most decorated undercover operative in the agency's history, unearthed evidence of this connection in the late 1980s. As he explained in his book Deep Cover (and elaborated to me in an August 2001 interview), that evidence was suppressed by the Reagan administration in the interest of protecting the then-embryonic NAFTA accord.

DEA Whistleblower Mike Levine.

Raul is currently in prison. His brother Carlos, the subject of an interpol warrant, has spent much of his retirement in self-imposed exile in Ireland – but for some reason he hasn't missed his meetings as a member of the Dow Jones board of directors.

NAFTA was the first stage of a full-scale merger between Mexico's nomenklatura and its American counterpart. While it's done nothing to make ordinary people freer or more prosperous on either side of the border, it has been tremendously profitable for the elite.

Julia Reynolds of El Andar (a bold California journal of Latino culture) summarizes:

“The architects of NAFTA on both sides of the Rio Bravo have allowed a new, immensely profitable system to flourish – sometimes creating millionaires overnight – based on a river of cash from drug sales that flows through the banking industry and into business expansions and acquisitions.”

The genteel face of the Hank criminal dynasty: Banking mogul Carlos Hank Rhon

Several years ago, a preliminary report from the National Center for Drug Intelligence (NCDI) described Carlos Hank Rhon – the elder and more sober son of dynasty founder Carlos Hank Gonzalez -- as a “significant criminal threat to the United States.” Carlos Hank the Younger -- with Jorge's help, such as it is -- presides over a multi-billion-dollar bi-national business empire (“Grupo Hank”) that reportedly is deeply intertwined with the drug trade. Of particular interest was the Grupo Hank-owned Laredo Bank in Texas.

After the “law-enforcement sensitive” report was leaked to the press in July 2000, Grupo Hank's reply was to sic its lawyers on its author, an unassuming academic named Donald Schulz, who denied leaking the material. A lawsuit filed by Laredo Bank President Gary Jacobs, acting as a surrogate for Carlos Hank Rhon, accused Schulz of violated the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act (RICO) by supposedly creating an “enterprise ... [to] unlawfully acquire, use, and disseminate top secret, predecisional [sic], law enforcement information” in ways that injured the plaintiffs.

RICO was created for use against organized crime. In this case it was used by an alleged multi-national crime syndicate to punish a law enforcement consultant who was investigating the same alleged syndicate.

While targeting Schulz with a lawsuit, Grupo Hank deployed its chief Capitol Hill asset – former Senator Warren Rudman – to pressure the Clinton administration into retracting the accusations. At roughly the same time, Laredo President Jacobs was threatening lawsuits and other actions that would cause the “cockroaches” in Washington to scatter, a variation on the old “If I go down, I'm taking you with me” trope.

In short order, then-Attorney General Janet Reno conspicuously disavowed the NCDI report. Since that time, Washington has done nothing to disturb Carlos Hank Rhon's tranquility. The Hank Brothers, notes El Andar, “pulls political and economic strings in Mexico at every level,” and – obviously – exercises growing influence on the U.S. Side of the border. The Hanks, claims the publication, aspire to nothing less than “running the financial affairs of this hemisphere.”

What kind of people are the Hanks? Consider:

In 1993, Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas, the bishop of Tijunana, was murdered by assassins in the hire of the Gulf Cartel, whose operations included the Eme, a vicious prison-based Mexican Mafia. The murder took place at Guadalajara's international airport. Cardinal Posadas had boldly condemned the cartel and its political allies, and his murder was intended to show that nobody who crossed the cartel was untouchable.

After the murder, Benjamin and Javier Arellano Felix, the rulers of the Gulf Cartel, “flashed police badges, boarded an Aeromexico flight and were back in Tijuana for dinner,” reports El Andar. “Flight attendants later stated that the saw Jorge Hank Rhon sitting with the Arellanos in the first class section.”

Carlos Hank Rhon, sometimes called “Professor Hank,” is the genteel face of El Grupo Hank – the face it shows at meetings with Citibank officials and in lobbying visits to Washington. Jorge Hank Rhon shows little interest in disguising his criminal nature.

And the Hank criminal syndicate has substantial ties to America's most powerful crime family, the Bushes.

“Those who say that George W. Bush has scant knowledge of foreign affairs don’t understand his family’s relationship with Mexico,” wrote El Andar's Julie Reynolds in a 2000 expose. “If one event could be said to make that relationship visible, it had to be the state dinner given eleven years ago by President Bush for Mexico’s president, Carlos Salinas. It was an elegant yet boisterous gala, where the biggest movers and shakers in Texas and Mexico congregated and celebrated. This group was to become W’s Mexican legacy, a gift of ties and connections passed on from the father to his son. What was not visible was that the group included two men with numerous links to drug cartel figures. These men helped George W. Bush win the Latino vote in Texas.”

The drug cartel-linked figures identified by Reynolds were “the loyal `Amigos de Bush' from San Antonio: criminal defense lawyer Roy Barrera Jr. and car dealer Ernesto Ancira Jr.,” both of whom reportedly had strong business ties to Mexico's narcotics cartels.

And also present at that 1989 meeting, which was intended to celebrate and deepen the ties being forged through the impending NAFTA accord, was Gary Jacobs of Laredo Bank, Carlos Hank Rhon's surrogate. Jacobs, reported Reynolds, went on to become a key contributor and adviser to George W. Bush during both his gubernatorial and presidential campaigns.

What these people plan to do, should they succeed in building their tri-national Security and Prosperity Partnership -- commonly called the North American Union, and better described as the Soviet States of North America -- is to create one huge Tijuana-style dystopia of violence and official corruption.

Please visit The Right Source for vital news and commentary, and to hear Kevin Shannon's daily radio program.