Incremental Civilian Disarmament: Strip-Tease of the Liberties

A gun in the wrong hands: Chuck Schumer, seen here compensating for some hidden shortcoming (but not for all of his obvious ones).

“When the NRA and I agree on legislation,” oozed the incarnate glob of viscous evil known as Senator Chuck Schumer, “you know that it's going to get through, become law, and do some good.”

Schumer was referring to the measure passed in the House yesterday (June 13) -- by an unrecorded voice vote! -- that will expand the scope and funding of a national database used in background checks of prospective gun buyers.

The Quisling outfit called the National Rifle Association, ever eager to see that patently unconstitutional gun laws are faithfully enforced, supported the measure. Gun Owners of America -- which, like the estimable Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, is a national gun rights group worthy of that description* -- did not. As GOA's Erich Pratt told the New York Times, this system is designed to force “law-abiding people ... to prove their innocence to a bureaucrat before they exercise their constitutional rights” to purchase and own a firearm.

The putative purpose of the measure is to prevent deranged people and other “mental defectives” like the Virginia Tech mass murderer Seung-Hui Cho from buying firearms. But this law, like every other gun law, will give criminals of that sort an additional competitive advantage over the law-abiding.

This, Schumer would insist, falls under the heading of doing “good.”

One must keep in mind that from Schumer's perspective, which differs from that of the Khmer Rouge only in relatively trivial matters of detail, doing “good” involves denuding individuals of their privacy and the means to resist the government.

To understand more fully Schumer's passion to reduce Americans to servitude, it's useful to picture him not as a Senator, freshly groomed and swaddled in an expensive, well-tailored suit, but rather as a grimy, unshaven patron of a malodorous strip club, his beady eyes fixed with unblinking, predatory lust on the hapless Chinese immigrant girl forced to perform for his amusement (her career as an “exotic dancer” being written into the contract with the Snakehead that brought her to the U.S.).

As the dancer, trembling from the effort to suppress her disgust, discards each layer of clothing, Schumer (the version in our example) becomes more agitated, his illicit appetites growing more insistent. He will not relent until that unfortunate girl is deprived of any modesty or decency, fully exposed to his inspection and subject to his whims.

In this respect, Schumer is not significantly different from most representatives of our political class, irrespective of the political brand name under which they conduct their assault on our liberties. In dealing with Americans who insist on defending their rights, Schumer emits a dense musk of unfiltered malice; his arrogance is palpable, as is his desire to reduce Americans to helotry. During the 1995 congressional hearings into the Waco Holocaust, Schumer gave the impression that he was disappointed that the federal mass murder at Mt. Carmel was a one-off event, rather than the opening shots of a campaign to annihilate gun owners nation-wide.

Schumer's demeanor and tactics in that hearing left me with the strong impression that he was somehow the product of a genetic experiment combining the salient traits of Soviet gulag master Lazar Kaganovich with those of the equally repellent Roland Freisler, the histrionic Communist-turned National Socialist who presided over Nazi Germany's “People's Court”:

At the risk of sounding reactionary, I must say that any legislation that would receive Schumer's approval should be rejected for that reason alone. But this is just one of numerous reasons why the bill passed by the House yesterday must be defeated.

Schumer's ideological ancestor Lazar Kaganovich, the "Wolf of the Kremlin" (left) and Nazi Judge Roland Freisler (below, right), whose demeanor and comportment uncannily matched those of New York's senior Senator.

The purpose of the Second Amendment, as I've pointed out before, is not merely to protect a clearly articulated individual right to armed self-defense, although this is certainly one of its important function. Its central purpose, I believe, is to make it clear that in the republic the Founders created (how I wish it were still in operation), the government did not have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

The people who wrote that Amendment, we should never forget, were pretty much the same group that took part in history's noblest act of sedition by signing a document setting out some of the conditions under which it was proper and necessary to “alter or abolish” the government that ruled them. The right to keep and bear arms must be viewed in that context: When the time comes for an oppressive government to be confronted and, if necessary, abolished, the people must be armed.

(A quick digression: Why is sedition – a word directly related to “separation” or “secession” -- considered a crime? It seems to me that when a government attempts to criminalize sedition, becoming a seditionist is the moral duty of every citizen.)

On the other hand, the reason why the Regime is intent on collecting as much information as it can on law-abiding gun owners is to make gun confiscation possible. This is theoretical only as it applies to the Regime's actions domestically: As I've documented elsewhere, the Regime has eagerly conducted gun confiscation programs as part of “peacekeeping” missions in Haiti, Somalia, and elsewhere. We shouldn't forget the effort to disarm victims of Hurricane Katrina.

And those who don't think that our rulers are capable of systematically destroying their disarmed victims really should acquaint themselves with the Federal Government's treatment of American Indians during the 19^th Century. Once again, we're not discussing this issue in an abstract, theoretical realm.

Schumer and his loathsome ilk seek to strip us of all of our rights. They would love to denude us in a single paroxysm of violence, of course, but from their perspective a forced strip-tease works just as well. The outcome would be the same in either case.

*The original version of this essay inexplicably, and perhaps unforgivably, omitted mention of JPFO. I sincerely regret that oversight, and thank Henry Bowman for correcting it.

Make sure to check in at The Right Source.

"Punking" The Fourth Amendment

... or maybe not. I'm betting on "not."

“Criminal means, once tolerated, are soon preferred.”

Edmund Burke, from Reflections on the Revolution in France

Ascencion Alvarez-Tejada probably swore in frustration as he pulled up behind a disabled car at the intersection of Highway 97 and Veteran's Way near La Pine, Oregon. And there's no reason to believe that his mood improved a second later when his Ford Focus was gently but firmly rear-ended by a truck with Minnesota license plates.

As Alvarez inspected the damage, a patrol car arrived carrying Deschutes County Sheriff's Deputy Robert Short. After examining the scene for a minute or two, Deputy Short told Alvarez and his passenger, Diana Maria Volerio-Perez, that the driver of the truck was intoxicated. Alvarez was instructed to drive his car over to a parking lot in front of a nearby restaurant. As Alvarez complied, a second policeman, Officer Jeff Pullig, arrived. Pullig ordered Alvarez and Volerio out of the car, and didn't permit them to turn off the motor or to remove the keys.

Alvarez and Volerio were both ordered to show their driver's licenses. Volerio tried to get back into the car to retrieve her purse, but Deputy Short refused to permit this. Both the driver and passenger underwent a pat-down search and were told to sit in the patrol car; they were sitting there when they were informed that someone had stolen the Ford Focus. Deputy Short evicted them from the patrol car and gave chase.

About twenty minutes later, Officer Pullig materialized with Alvarez's cell phone and Volerio's purse, explaining that for some reason the carjacker had thrown them out the window. Volerio was so upset by the news that she became violently ill. A short while later, Deputy Short and Officer Pullig drove Alvarez and Volerio to a nearby motel, where they spent the night.

Meanwhile, Pullig and Short – along with Tom Sullivan, the man who drove the truck that rear-ended Alvarez's car, and carjacker Sean Cummings – were probably at a watering hole nearby toasting their own cleverness. Pullig, Sullivan, and Cummings work for the Drug Enforcement Administration, and together with Deputy Short they had “punk'd” Alvarez, a suspected narcotics courier.

A subsequent search of the Focus turned up a fairly large quantity of cocaine and methamphetamine. For reasons that defy the understanding of honest and rational people, the DEA, in collaboration with the Deschutes County Sheriff's Department, decided to mount an elaborate, multi-bank-shot deception in order to facilitate an “administrative seizure” -- that is, government theft – of the Ford Focus. The play-acting was utterly gratuitous, given that all of it occurred after the suspect and his vehicle were in police custody.

Investigators had discovered the previous August that the Focus had been used to ferry drug shipments on a route from California to Washington State. At any subsequent time they could have obtained a warrant and conduct a routine seizure and search of the vehicle. Why, then, did they carry out this needlessly complex little scheme – sort of an idiot child's version of a “Mission: Impossible” sting – apart from the adolescent thrills it provided to the tax-engorged predators who carried it out?

The law enforcement agencies involved in this little mini-drama, which took place on December 18, 2004, insisted that it was necessary in order to preserve the “confidentiality” of their investigation into a suspected drug ring. I suspect that its real purpose was to backstop the investigation in the event the Ford Focus had been clean. In that event, the “stolen” car could simply have disappeared, or narcotics could have been planted therein.

Asset forfeiture is a routine form of highway robbery in which law enforcement agencies seize forms of personal property – generally cars, but also cash and homes – on the theory that they are “guilty” of involvement in narcotics trafficking. The charade conducted at La Pine – let's call it the La Pine Maneuver – adds a small but significant additional dimension to this corrupt practice: Outright theft through deception.

Thanks to the Ninth Circuit Court, (.pdf) we can expect this variety of officially sanctioned crime to proliferate: On Friday a three-judge panel, in a decision written by the generally sensible Judge Alex Kozinski, overturned a lower court decision and ruled that the DEA-conceived carjacking was not a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

In his concurring opinion, Judge Raymond C. Fisher seemed to display a tremor of equivocal remorse about the inevitable abuses the ruling will unleash: “I do not ... mean to endorse this police action as a model for future creative seizures.”

Why not? If this operation was utterly copasetic from a constitutional point of view, why shouldn't it serve as the template for countless others just like it?

In any case, Ray baby, it's too late: You and your comrades have just green-lit countless similar projects to be carried out by the Feds and their local franchisees, who are in pre-production as we speak: Storylines are being broken, scripts are taking form, and auditions are underway, casting couches are being defiled....

In a way, the La Pine Incident is a microcosm of the drug war: It was an elaborate and pointless ruse funded by taxpayer dollars and staged solely for the benefit of the State-employed protagonists – and their indispensable symbiont partners, the narcotics traffickers. The only material benefit it produced for anyone was a tiny, perhaps immeasurably small, increase in the street value of the drugs that were confiscated from the Ford Focus. This is a tiny but telling illustration of the fact that the War on Drugs should be called the Federal Narcotics Price Support Program.

The mimicry bound to result from this case will be bad enough, but through the miracle called the downward-ratcheting effect things will get much worse very soon.

If you doubt this, here's a reminder of how the process works.

When SWAT teams were introduced in the late 1960s, they were intended to be used only in hostage rescues and similar extraordinary circumstances, and those recruited for such duty were taught that the mission was a failure if innocent people were endangered. Today, SWAT teams are entirely useless in hostage situations, and are promiscuously used to carry out routine police duties. And SWAT operators who kill innocent people enjoy nearly bullet-proof immunity.

We can anticipate that the use of police carjackings and similar deceptions will follow a similar trajectory.

One critical disclosure shaken loose by this case involves the extent to which the dishonestly named USA PATRIOT act has become embedded in our law enforcement system.

It its earlier, and subsequently overturned, ruling (.pdf) suppressing the evidence obtained through the carjacking the US District Court for Eastern Washington chided the DEA agents and Deputy Short for acting as if there were some “exigency” involved in seizing the Ford Focus: “There was ample time to seek approval for a covert search and seizure [of the car] under the Patriot Act.” It was only the “tactics” used in this particular theft that “were not authorized by the USA Patriot Act,” according to the Federal District Court.

As bad as the “Patriot” Act has proven to be, the Ninth Circuit Court has just ruled, in effect, that federal law enforcement agencies and their state/local hangers-on can amend that act in practice as they see fit – even in cases, like the one examined above, that have no colorable connection to terrorism.

Video extra

Yes, I know: This video is ancient history, as time is measured in the blogosphere, and it has little to do with the subject addressed above. But we should exploit every opportunity to underscore the arrogance and often lethal incompetence of those who wield lethal force on behalf of the State.

Mea Culpa....

In a previous installment, which has now been republished at the indispensable LewRockwell.com, I misidentified Umar Abdullah (a name that's the equivalent of John Smith among Muslims) as the leader of the Jamaat al-Muslimeen (JAM) in Trinidad & Tobago. Mr. Abdullah is the head of another radical Muslim group that may, or may not, overlap with JAM's membership. My apologies for the error.

Be sure to check out The Right Source.

Bad Company: Yet Another "Terrorist Plot" Orchestrated by the CIA?

He's a Company man: Russell DeFreitas, a former employee of the CIA's Evergreen Airlines, appears in court.

When asked what he thought of Western Civilization, Ghandi reportedly replied that he thought it would be a good idea.*

One could very well speak in the same vein of the entity called the Central Intelligence Agency. It might be useful if the federal government (once thrown back into its constitutional cage, of course) had an agency devoted to collecting relevant intelligence, rather than what it has now – a body involved in propagating turmoil, terror, and subversion throughout most of the world.

He who sows the wind, we're told, reaps the whirlwind, and the CIA's directorate of operations is staffed with people who play a role best described as “Johnny Appleseeds of the global jihad,” sowing and nurturing the seeds of terrorism, nourishing them by fomenting unrest, and helping to bring in the murderous harvest of “blowback.” We can see a potent reminder of this fact in the alleged plot to blow up JFK Airport.

According to Newsday, Russell DeFreitas, commonly identified as a former “baggage handler” at JFK, actually worked as a baggage handler and/or a “trainee supervisor” in the employ of Evergreen International Airlines, a CIA front company based in McMinnville, Oregon. A TV news report out of Oregon revealed that DeFreitas “trained” at Evergreen's McMinnville facility between July 2000 and May 2001.

As this observant fellow points out, it's odd for a man in his mid-50s to spend the better part of a year “training” for a job he'd already done for a number of years.

Evergreen, in fact, is a direct descendant of the infamous Air America, the CIA proprietary outfit that has been implicated in drug smuggling, covert arms shipments (according to this former Evergreen pilot, the CIA was providing weapons to both sides in various Cold War brushfires), and – more recently -- “extraordinary rendition” flights. More than a few Evergreen flights have served as “torture taxis,” shuttling detainees to various destinations in the CIA-operated global torture archipelago.

DeFreitas left Evergreen's employ in May 2001. It's not clear whether he worked at JFK between May 2001 and his arrest last week. But it is clear he worked at the airport in the late 1990s.

According to former Customs Department Special Agent Diane Kleiman, DeFreitas's background means one thing: “He was working at JFK doing drug smuggling.”

“The CIA has always been involved in drug smuggling, and Evergreen or Air America has played a big role in it,” Kleiman told me in a recent phone interview. “When I was working Customs at JFK, we had this huge problem with airline personnel using their secure keys to give unauthorized access to `sterile corridors' that bypassed Customs inspection. Quite often this involved drug smuggling, and I've got ample reason to believe that Evergreen and other CIA assets were involved in it.”

It's worth remembering that the “confidential informant” who infiltrated the supposed plot to blow up JFK was a convicted drug smuggler. Significant as well is the fact that Jamaat al Muslimeen (JAM), the Trinidad & Tobago-based radical Sunni group implicated in the alleged JFK plot, has been implicated in drug smuggling.

Making matters that much more interesting is the reported fact that JAM leader Umar Abdullah reportedly fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan, a fact that raises the possibility that he, too, was on the CIA's payroll at one time.

I find myself irresistibly reminded of the fact that several members of the terrorist cell responsible for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 had been funded, trained, or otherwise aided by the US federal government. The “spiritual leader” of that cell, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, was permitted to come to the US in 1990 despite the fact that he was on a State Department terrorism watch list, suspected of involvement in the plot to assassinate Anwar Sadat.

It was Abdel-Rahman's great good fortune that on the particular day he visited the US Consulate in Khartoum in search of a visa, the consular official was absent – and in his place was a CIA operative eager and willing to issue the requested visa.

Funny, isn't it, how things of this kind happen? And isn't it just as remarkable to see that in the alleged plot to bomb JFK, both the putative ringleader and the Confidential Informant had connections to the CIA-haunted narcotics underworld?

*(Thanks to Anonymous for catching, and correcting, a slip-up in my paraphrase of the quote attributed to Ghandi.)

Be sure to visit The Right Source.

"Because We Want To"

“Sir, what did I do to deserve handcuffs?”

“It's law enforcement's view you used foul language, and because we want to. I told you to give me your boarding pass.”

“I tried to give you my boarding pass, sir.”

“You tried to be a jerk.”

A few seconds after that exchange, which took place on March 10 at Las Vegas's McCarran Airport, Mark T. England was severely beaten by his interlocutor, a Las Vegas Metro Policeman identified as Officer Jennings.

“I was struck on the left hand and left leg,” England recalls in his account of the assault. “I was in complete disbelief. I stood with my hands extended out to my side ... with open palms. Officer Jennings again swung his baton at me. I brought my arms inward perceiving where the baton was going to strike me. Officer Jennings struck me on my left side around the 5^th and 6^th intercostal ribs. This baton strike made me double over. Officer Jennings swung his baton at me yet again and struck me behind the left ear. This caused me to stagger. I backed away from him and again placed my hands out to my side with open palms and asked him why he was doing this. At no time did I give Officer Jennings reason to believe I was going to harm or assault him.”

As Jennings inflicted this unprovoked beating on England, a second officer scurried to the scene, armed with a Taser. The Las Vegas Metro Police guidelines covering Taser use specify that this often lethal device is to be used only against suspects who aggressively resist the police; England was entirely passive as he underwent the beating. Nonetheless, the second officer fired his Taser at England.

The effect of the Taser blast caused England to slam his head against the corner of a door frame, severely injuring his eye. Prone on the floor, bleeding from his eye, and still reeling from the baton strike to the head, England was ordered to roll to his stomach – which was impossible, since he was still paralyzed from the Taser strike. So he was Tased again. And again. While this was happening, another police officer stood at a distance, mocking and laughing at England as he fell to the floor.

Eventually, Tucker was handcuffed and taken to a police substation in the airport, where Officer Jennings told him that the brutal beating he had suffered was appropriate, because he was “being uncooperative.” He was booked into jail on "suspicion of violating airport rules and resisting arrest," but no charges were filed.

While incidents of this sort have become infuriatingly common, this specific episode is remarkable for the fact that it involved potentially lethal violence from one element of the Warfare/Homeland Security State against another: England, a Sergeant and Medic in the U.S. Army, had traveled to Las Vegas from Orange County, California to enjoy “NASCAR Weekend” before being re-deployed to Iraq.

England had indeed used foul language earlier that evening, in dealing with a Transportation Security Administration supervisor. England was surprised to learn that it was forbidden to take a soft drink through TSA checkpoint. He pressed the issue, believing that it was permitted to take beverages through the checkpoint as long as they were purchased in the airport, only to be told that this wasn't so. He took up the matter with a supervisor, who claimed to be a Lieutenant in the US Army and “spoke to me as if giving me a military order from a superior.”

This was when Officer Jennings materialized and demanded to see England's military ID and boarding pass. Curious about the TSA supervisor's claim, England requested to see that individual's military ID; that request was turned down, prompting England to make the ill-advised comment, “with all due respect sir, that's f****d up.” After the supervisor admonished England to watch his language, Officer Jennings materialized, handed England his ID and boarding pass, and told him to board his flight – which by that time had already taken off.

To this point, England – who admits to consuming a couple of beers, but insists that his conduct was generally respectful – had done nothing more than make persistent but polite inquiries of the tax-fattened TSA drones loitering around the security checkpoint, apart from the one unfortunate use of the Anglo-Saxon vulgarism for illicit carnal union. He had obviously done nothing to justify being treated as a security threat or a criminal suspect, or else he would not have been permitted to board his flight, or at least attempt to.

After missing his flight, England decided to renew his inquiry with the TSA supervisor. Jennings intervened, asking England to walk about 50 feet from the checkpoint. The officer again demanded to see the boarding pass; England fumbled through his pockets, mistakenly pulling out a dollar bill that the officer pulled from his hand and threw to the floor.

“Would you mind picking up that dollar bill from the floor?” England politely asked. This provoked Jennings to pull out his handcuffs and order England to turn around. As Jennings issued that order, he placed a hand on England's shoulder. Asking why he was being handcuffed, England instinctively rolled his shoulder away. At that point Jennings withdrew his baton and ordered England to “get down”; it was while England was complying with that order that Jennings began his assault.

What I find interesting about the prelude to England's beating is the explanation he offered for his persistence in seeking an explanation from the TSA supervisor.

“I know it sounds weird, but I have a problem with being in the military and having some civilian tell me I'm wrong when I actually thought I was right,” he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “If I'm wrong, I'll admit I'm wrong. But it was their attitude” that set him off.

What a coincidence: It was England's uncooperative “attitude” that led to the assault he suffered at the hands of Officer Jennings and his Taser-toting comrade. England had already been positively identified as a soldier. But unlike the police, England wasn't wearing his State-issued costume at the time of this confrontation; if he had been, I suspect things would have turned out differently.

It appears clear to me that both England and his assailants simply took for granted the idea that their status as uniformed executors of State violence conferred on them privileges not extended to hoi polloi.

Also noteworthy is Sgt. England's view regarding the latitude given to American police officers in carrying out discretionary violence against unarmed people.

“If I was in Iraq, and I was talking to a suspected insurgent, and he did something to upset me, and I pulled out a baton and started beating him like that – if I hit him like I was hit in Las Vegas – I would have been relieved of duty,” England commented during an interview with Las Vegas's ABC affiliate, KNTV.

While there's reason to believe that the standards of battlefield comportment aren't quite that strict, Sgt. England's assessment brings to mind a fascinating – and troubling – anecdote contained in Evan Wright's book Generation Kill, a memoir of his experiences while embedded in Iraq with a Marine Corps Company.

"These young men represent what is more or less America's first generation of disposable children," Wright observes. "More than half of the guys in the platoon come from broken homes and were raised by absentee, single, working parents. Many are on more intimate terms with video games, reality TV shows and Internet porn than they are with their own parents." "We're like America's little pit bull," one Marine told Wright. "They beat it, starve it, mistreat it, and once in a while they let it out to attack somebody."

Another lieutenant commented to Wright that during World War II, when the Marines hit the beaches in the Pacific campaign, “a surprisingly high percentage of them didn't fire their weapons, even when faced with direct enemy contact," one lieutenant told Wright. "Not these guys. Did you see what they did to that town? They f*****g destroyed it. These guys have no problem with killing."

Even so, as Wright points out, these full-time killers had much higher standards than their colleagues in the part-time military – Reservists and Guardsmen, many of them drawn from stateside law enforcement agencies, both local and federal.

Roughly three quarters of the way into the book, relates Radley Balko in a review, “Wright explains how the full-time Marines were getting increasingly irritated with a reserve unit traveling with them. The reserve unit was mostly made up people who in their civilian lives were law enforcement, `from LAPD cops to DEA agents to air marshals,' and were acting like idiot renegades”:

"Some of the cops in Delta started doing this cowboy stuff. They put cattle horns on their Humvees. They'd roll into these hamlets, doing shows of force—kicking down doors, doing sweeps—just for the f**k of it. There was this little clique of them. Their ringleader was this beat cop.... He's like five feet tall, talks like Joe Friday and everybody calls him 'Napoleon.'"

“The unit ends up firebombing a village of Iraqis who'd been helping the Marines with intelligence about insurgents and Iraqi troops,” continues Balko. That episode “suggests that to say some of our domestic police units are getting increasing militaristic probably does a disservice to the military.”

Question: Is this a terrorist, or a US law enforcement agent? Answer: Yes.

Here's a thought certain to chase away sleep: Iraq is a training academy not only for Jihadists who go there for on-the-job training, but also for many American personnel who will fill positions in the Homeland Security apparatus that supposedly exists to protect us from terrorism.

Obiter Dicta

This Friday night (June 8) I will be on Dr. Stanley Monteith's "Radio Liberty" program from 9:00-10:00 PM.


I will be a guest next Tuesday from 3:00-4:00 PM Eastern Time on Chris Arnzen's program "Iron Sharpens Iron" on WNYG in New York City.

Make sure to stop in at The Right Source.

The Regime's Liturgy of Terror

The process is as predictable as a Jay Leno punchline -- or, put another way, as familiar as a liturgy:

The Feds will announce that they have aborted a terrorist plot, one that, if allowed to come to term, would have been more devastating that 9-11; the claim is retailed uncritically by the media, and lovingly embroidered by the Regime's assets in talk radio and the blogosphere.

While an easily distracted public absorbs the lesson taught in the headlines – to wit, that there are people constantly plotting to murder Americans by the thousands – a few detail-obsessed people will notice the fundamental implausibilities in the official account. One critical detail will quickly be acknowledged, and just as quickly ignored by the media: At the center of the supposed plot is found a “Confidential Informant” (a snitch/provocateur) of highly dubious character.

What appeared to be a deadly terrorist cell, on closer (or even cursory) inspection, now appears to be a tiny knot of untrained and inept radicals who displayed no interest in terrorism or ambition to carry out such crimes until the Federal Informant arrived and provided a catalyst. But before the implications of this discovery can be widely understood or appreciated, the Regime's opinion-molding apparatus has moved on, leaving behind another sedimentary layer of official disinformation.

As the immortal H.L. Mencken famously put it: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Although terrorism isn't an imaginary menace, it is a grotesquely over-rated one: Among causes of death for ordinary Americans, terrorism ranks somewhere south of peanut allergies, lightning strikes, rogue deer on highways, and – this is an important point – armed law enforcement agents. Terrorism has become the defining anxiety of our age through the combined mendacity of the rulers, the cravenness of the media, and the credulity of the public.

Of all the potential threats at an airport, these guys are by far the deadliest.

All of this is splendidly illustrated by the supposed threat to blow up JFK International Airport.

Four Islamic radicals, led by a retired cargo worker, supposedly planned to ignite subterranean fuel supply lines, thereby causing a chain reaction that would destroy the airport and much of Queens, New York in a gotterdammerung worthy of a Die Hard film.

Russell “Mohamed” Defreitas, the 63-year-old alleged mastermind of the supposed plot, reportedly told the Federal Informant/Provocateur that detonating the fuel tanks and supply lines would lead to a cataclysm so huge “even the Twin Towers can't touch it.... [T]his can destroy the economy of America for some time if it falls into the right hands.”

The chief problem with this alleged plot – apart from the fact that those involved in it had none of the training, technical skills, or connections to carry it out – is that it wouldn't have worked. As technical experts and security analysts point out, jet fuel is difficult to ignite, and the fire itself would have been contained. The result would not have been a huge explosion, but the equivalent of a damp squib.

The criminal complaint (.pdf) outlining the alleged conspiracy offers a very small bag of bones from which to construct a T-Rex. Defreitas, a former baggage handler at JFK, is a believing Muslim with a number of grievances against the US:

“DEFREITAS claimed that, while working at JFK airport, he saw military parts being shipped to Israel, including missiles, that he felt would be used to kill Muslims. According to DEFREITAS, as a result, he `wanted to do something to get those bastards.'”

While working at the airport, Defreitas recalled in talking with the Informant, “these things used to come into my brain – well, I could blow this place up.... I could make a bomb. I could knock this place – I ain't getting' nothin' for it. So I would just wipe it out of my head. And then I would go some place again, and I would see the same thing. And I would sit and see a plane taxiing up the runway. And I would say, if I could get a rocket, then I could do a hit. By myself, I am thinking these things. But I had no connections with no Arabs or anybody – I'm a Muslim working in the airport for so many years..... [N]obody ever approached me.”

In 2004, someone did approach Defreitas: The Federal “Source,” identified in a footnote to the complaint as an individual “convicted on federal drug trafficking and RICO charges ... in 1996. The Source was also convicted on drug trafficking charges in New York Supreme Court in 2003. His sentence in that case is pending as part of his cooperation agreement with the government. In addition to the expectation of a reduced sentence in exchange for his cooperation, the Source also receives financial assistance.”

So the “hero” in this scenario is a twice-convicted drug trafficker who worked as a paid informant for the Feds, an individual subject to potent incentives to tell his handlers whatever they wanted, and needed, to “know.” The complaint also specifies that it was the “Source” -- the Informant/Provocateur – who purchased the video camera with which Defreitas “performed physical surveillance [and] made video recordings of JFK and its buildings and facilities,” which was the key overt act in furtherance of the supposed bombing conspiracy. This is to say that the complaint itself documents that the “Source” materially abetted the alleged crime.

It must be acknowledged that the complaint offers at least one critical disclosure about a long-extant security threat at JFK:

“DEFREITAS told the Source that years earlier he had conducted multiple tests of the security at JFK. He explained that he had previously been able to access restricted areas while visiting friends who worked at the airport, but that now identification was needed.”

Former Customs investigator Diane Kleiman is very familiar with the situation Defreitas describes. Before being assigned to work at JFK in 1999, Kleiman had been an assistant prosecutor in New York, put in time at the Immigration and Naturalization Service and BATF, and – to her considerable credit – done volunteer work for the Innocence Project.

As a rookie Special Agent working for Customs at JFK, which she describes as “the biggest border crossing for the United States,” Kleiman discovered a culture of corruption and cronyism that resulted in severely compromised security. For example: Shortly after Kleiman began working with Customs at JFK, a drug bust netted $750,000 in cash. Very quickly, she recalls, the official figure was reduced to $492,000, of which she was told to report $452,000. Where did the missing amount – either $44,000, or as much as $258,000 – end up? Somebody knew, and nobody was telling, and her supervisors made it clear that they weren't going to let some “junior Jew bitch” (their pet nickname for Kleiman) make an issue of it.

Within a very short time, Kleiman discovered other causes for alarm, such as the fact that “countless people, including minimum-wage employees who'd probably never had a background check and were sometimes even in this country illegally, had unfettered access to the planes while they were being cleaned and refueled between flights,” summarized a New York magazine account: “Once they got on the ramps – the supposedly restricted area where the planes sit parked at the gates – baggage handlers, maintenance workers, food-service employees, and ground personnel all had unmolested access to the aircraft. They could walk onto a plane, hide a weapon or place a bomb somewhere, and walk off without being questioned.” They had only to show an ID at one security checkpoint, without going through any of the invasive security searches to which airline passengers must now submit.

Kleiman had a hands-on role in a second drug bust, this one involving more than 46 pounds of cocaine, revealed that some airline personnel at JFK were using their secure keys to sneak smugglers though “sterile” corridors without passing through Customs. According to Kleiman, her superiors released all of the suspects except for the “mule,” destroyed her case notes, falsified records, and warned her not to publicize her discovery. The idea was to make it look as if Kleiman's arrest was a random event, rather than something akin to standard operating procedure for Customs. She says that her immediate superior, Tom Flood, made less-than-subtle threat against her mother as a way of shutting her up.

Identified as something other than a “team player,” Kleiman was frozen out of assignments, subjected to incredibly degrading treatment (a fact confirmed by a second employee at JFK Customs), saw her official evaluations re-written to denigrate her job performance (she had taken the precaution of photocopying the originals), and eventually fired. All of this happened long before 9-11, an event that shocked but did not surprise her. At the time the Towers fell, Kleiman was living just a few blocks away.

In a 2004 radio interview, Kleiman expressed her disillusionment over the various “wars” -- the “war” on drugs, the “war” on terror – that are staged by the Regime to consolidate its power. The “war” on drugs, she points out, is a cynical exercise in which a virtual quota system exists: The traffic is interrupted by an occasional high-profile bust to provide pretexts for funding increases and bureaucratic promotions. “All they're after is the stats,” Kleiman observes.

The “war” on terror is even worse, by a couple of orders of magnitude: “Government is simply exploiting it [terrorism] to take power from the middle class, more than anything else.” She doesn't flinch from using the “F word” -- fascism – to describe the system under which we are now living.

Our version of that system eschews the lurid pageantry that typified its German and Italian predecessors. But as the most recent installment of its official melodrama indicates, uncovering terrorist plots serves a central role in the Regime's liturgy of total power.

Video Extra

Keith Olbermann offers some well-crafted insights regarding the Regime's Official Melodrama:

Please drop by The Right Source for non-regime-sanctioned news and commentary.

Watching The Detectives ... Can Land You In Jail

Once may be an anomaly, twice a coincidence, but three or more instances constitute a pattern.

Bear that axiom in mind as we review some cases in which citizens have been charged with illegal “wiretapping” -- a felony – for the supposed offense of recording their encounters with law enforcement personnel.

Police in Rochester, New Hampshire found 48-year-old Christopher A. Power sitting in his car while apparently inebriated. The engine was running, and Power was sitting behind the wheel, but a good attorney could make a case that he was not “operating” the vehicle for the purpose of being charged with a DUI. He told the police that he was “stressed” and upset, and was listening to his stereo in the hope of dispelling his foul mood.

After the police removed Power from his vehicle, they discovered a mini-cassette recorder he had used to document the entire incident. In addition to being charged with driving while intoxicated, Power was slapped with a wiretapping charge, which is a Class B felony.

Power's case is somewhat similar to that of Nashua, New Hampshire resident Michael Gannon, who was arrested and charged with illegal wiretapping last June 27. Gannon's fifteen-year-old son was suspected of involvement in a very serious crime, an armed mugging that had taken place outside a restaurant a few days earlier. The police were very persistent in pressing Michael and his wife Janet for information regarding their son's whereabouts – an attitude that contrasted sharply with their previous performance when Michael, a disabled veteran, was on the receiving end of violent crime.

“We've had four break-ins,” Janet told the Nashua Telegraph. “One guy came right up our stairs and started beating on my husband, and we called the cops.” Following a subsequent break-in involving a camper on their property, an officer told the Gannons they were “too rich” for the neighborhood and should move out.

Without reasonable hope for help from the police, the Gannons purchased a closed-circuit audio and video security system and posted a sign on their house warning visitors that their actions were being recorded.

After their son ran afoul of the law, the police became a constant and, unfortunately, intimidating presence in the neighborhood.

Michael Gannon (r.) with his wife Janet and their troubled fifteen-year-old son, who was charged with involvement in a mugging. That is a serious crime; video- and audio-taping police interviews is not a crime of any sort. (Nashua Telegraph photo.)

“There were six cops in the yard” after the 15-year-old son was identified as a suspect, Janet recalls. Detective Andrew Karlis made repeated visits to the home at times seemingly chosen for their inconvenience – late at night, or during dinner. “He made several rude remarks about Mike being a disabled vet and about the taxes we pay on the house,” Janet declares. “He ... also put his foot in the door as Mike tried to close it and we asked him to leave, but he wouldn't.”

The Gannons' neighbors in the four-unit building took note of the number of police visits the Gannons were forced to endure, and the less-than-professional conduct of the officers involved.

“They said they were going to keep coming back every night,” recounts Trisha Lessard, a neighbor. “They were keeping us up. They scared me, and I have two police officers in my family.”

At one point a young mother, her small child in tow and very pregnant with another, arrived at the building and couldn't get into her parking space, which was blocked by two police cars. A resident politely asked an officer if the cars could be moved to accommodate the young mother. The officer brusquely replied: “I'll move when I'm done.”

Lessard, who witnessed the exchange, leaned in the direction of another officer to read his name or badge number.

“He said, `What are you looking at?'... I said, `I'm looking for your badge number.' He said, `It's none of your G—damned business.'... I was just taken aback by their rudeness.”

Michael Gannon, bearing the full brunt of that rudeness, eventually lost his composure. He recalls telling the investigators “`Goodnight, gentlemen' about forty times” in a futile effort to dismiss Detective Karlis and his comrades, before finally snapping and ordering them to “get the F**K out of my house.” During a subsequent visit, Mr. Gannon drew attention to the home security system by inviting Karlis to “smile” for the camera.

Finally, in exasperation, the Gannons went to the local police station to file a misconduct complaint against Karlis. Significantly, that complaint was eventually upheld by Police Chief Timothy Hufferan, who admitted that “one of our detectives [presumably Karlis] did not afford a member of the public the level of courtesy that they expect and deserve, regardless of how provocative, uncooperative or disrespectful that individual may have been to the officer during the same encounter.”

However, this vindication came only after Michael Gannon – along with Janet and their 18-year-old son Shawn -- were all arrested. (.pdf) He was booked on two felony counts of eavesdropping and wiretapping; Janet and Shawn were both charged with disorderly conduct (which most likely means that they volubly expressed their incredulous disgust over Michael's spurious arrest), and Shawn was also charged with “resisting detention.”

A search warrant (.pdf) was obtained and the police ransacked the Gannon home, seizing videotapes and tearing the cameras from their fixtures. The Gannons were kept outside their home for several hours while this act of vandalism was underway.

Janet eventually had to post $10,000 in bail to get her husband out of jail. He faced a possible 21-year-prison sentence.

“I don't want to run him through the wringer here,” insisted Chief Hefferan, his hand steadily turning the crank on the wringer through which he was feeding the hapless 39-year-old man. The Chief and Hillsborough County Attorney Marguerite Wageling offered Gannon a deal: Plead guilty to one misdemeanor charge of evidence tampering, and he'd receive a 30-day suspended jail sentence.

To his credit, Gannon rejected the deal, and the wiretapping charges – which were palpably fraudulent to begin with – were dropped. His fifteen-year-old son was arrested and charged in connection with the mugging, but it's difficult to see how any other family member had done anything to merit the treatment they had received.

So we have two examples of citizens facing wiretapping charges for the supposed offense of recording their interactions with police. I'm confident to the point of a moral certainty that at least a few more cases of this kind can be turned up.

In fact, I'm surprised that charges of this sort weren't filed against Eugene Siler and his wife after they secretly recorded the two-hour torture session Eugene endured at the hands of police in Franklin County, Tennessee, or against Denver CopWatch activist Evan Herzoff for recording his conversation with the officer who arrested Herzoff after being asked for his business card.

I maintain that, to the extent it's possible, citizens should always record their encounters with police – just as police record them -- for the safety of both parties. As the technology to do so becomes nearly ubiquitous, police are apparently learning to use wiretapping laws to counteract citizen efforts to document police encounters.

Unlike many other forms of abusive conduct by law enforcement officers, this particular tactic admits of a relatively simple remedy: State legislatures can amend eavesdropping statutes and wiretapping laws to specify that they do not apply to those bearing police credentials and acting in an official capacity. Accepting those credentials should constitute implied consent to having one's official actions recorded at any time.

The logic of this suggestion seems unassailable to me. But then again, this doesn't address the fundamental assumption of privilege that tacitly undergirds the actions of those who act in the name of the State: They're the Government, and we're not.

Remember to keep checking in at The Right Source!