One Small Victory Over Leviathan

The son of an FBI agent, Richard Mack attended the Bureau's training academy and aspired to become a G-Man himself. When that career didn't materialize, he ended up in Provo, Utah, the community made famous (after a fashion) in Fletch.

It was the early 1980s; hair was big, ties were skinny, and the “War on Drugs” was just beginning to grind our liberties to dust. Mack, under the nom de guerre “Gary Layton,” worked as an undercover narc, in which capacity he was occasionally required to partake of the demon weed. He got promotions; the people who passed him the bong got prison time. The patent hypocrisy of this exercise was not lost on Mack.

After his undercover gig, Mack was transferred to traffic enforcement, where he experienced an epiphany.

“One day, while on patrol, he parked his police cruiser near an elementary school to review a report,” recounted a 2003 Salt Lake City Weekly profile. “He saw a woman run a stop sign. She saw him see her. She pulled over without instruction from flashing police lights. Mack thought to himself, `This will be easy.' When he approached her car, she handed over her insurance and license information through an open car window without saying a word. Mack thought again, `Good, this will be easy.'”

But as he peered into the car, Mack felt his conscience rebel.

“I looked down at this dilapidated, old, crappy car with this 35- to 40-ish woman going on 85, and she had this dejected stare. Her kids were fighting in the back. They looked unkempt. I knew she did not have the money that this ticket was gonna cost her. I looked at her children and her crappy old car, and then I looked at me.”

At that moment, Richard Mack's priorities were rearranged by the tidal pull of something foreign to most people who wear state-issued costumes: A sense of decent shame over what he was required to do.

Instead of “protecting and serving” this over-worked, financially desperate woman, he was “taxing and harassing” her. As he tells the story, Mack decided on that day he “would never be on the wrong side again.”

This didn't mean leaving law enforcement. Mack moved to Arizona, where he was elected Sheriff of Graham County. In addition to dealing with the sundry and manifold petty crimes that afflict every community, Sheriff Mack confronted the world's largest and most powerful crime syndicate – the US Federal Government – and won, even though that victory cost him his job.

Ten years ago tomorrow (June 27), the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of Sheriff Mack and Jay Printz, the Sheriff of of Montana's Ravalli County (below) , striking down provisions of the so-called Brady Act that required state law enforcement officers to carry out background checks on gun purchases. By the time the ruling was handed down, Mack was out of office.

The first and less important objection offered by Mack and Printz to the Brady Law was that conducting background checks would be inordinately time-consuming.

The second and immeasurably more important objection was that the law impermissibly required state governments (in the words of Justice Scalia's majority opinion) “to enact or enforce a federal regulatory program ... by conscripting the State's officers directly. The Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States' officers, or those of their political subdivisions [such as counties], to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program,” such as the Brady Bill's limitations on firearms purchases. Doing so, Scalia wrote, is “fundamentally incompatible with our constitutional system of dual sovereignty.”

Scalia's conclusion is serviceable, if expressed with only a fraction of the outrage warranted by Wasington's criminal assault on the innate rights of individuals and the reserved powers of the states.

In his concurring opinion, Justice Thomas added an interesting nuance to Scalia's argument, noting that Congress has no authority to regulate “intrastate, point of sale transactions,” including those dealing with firearms. He also pointed out that if the Second Amendment “is read to confer a personal right to `keep and bear arms,' a colorable argument exists that the Federal Government's regulatory scheme, at least as it pertains to the purely intrastate sale or possession of firearms, runs afoul of that Amendment's protections.” (Emphases in original.)

Once again, Thomas comes infuriatingly close to making sense, only to flinch at the last moment.

The Second Amendment “confers” nothing on anybody; instead, it forbids the central government to take any action that would infringe on a pre-existing individual right that had the felicitous side-effect of providing individual states with the ability to muster militias in their defense – against both foreign enemies and, when necessary, the central government itself. Since the Brady Act targeted point-of-sale transactions, it was unconstitutional on its face. But this is also true of purely interstate commerce in firearms, since the Second Amendment forbids Congress to use its power to regulate commerce in a way that would infringe on the individual right to armed self-defense.

Since those opinions were written ten years ago, Scalia and Thomas have shed whatever residual loyalty they had to genuine federalism and become reliable supporters of the Homeland Security State. Scalia, in fact, now worships at the First Church of Jack Bauer, whose chief tenet holds that the powers exercised by the central government are defined by necessity, rather than law.

Just in the last year, the Bush Regime has made the extraordinary if predictable claim that any law enforcement department that receives a farthing of federal support is an affiliate of the federal government, thereby nullifying the good done by the lawsuit filed by Sheriffs Mack and Printz. But this doesn't mean that their effort was a waste of time.

Richard Mack and Jay Printz (who retired in 1998) were constitutionally minded peace officers who represented the last of a dying breed -- and that breed isn't going extinct because of natural causes.

Obiter dicta

Keith Humphrey of the Christian Liberty Party, one of the brightest and bravest people I know, has created an on-line archive of my "Liberty Minute" daily radio commentaries; new segments are posted each weekday. Please check them out.

I ask for your indulgence and your prayers -- your indulgence, because my posting may become somewhat erratic due to a sudden congestion of free-lance projects, which is a blessing; and your prayers, because Korrin is in the throes of another health crisis that may result in yet another hospitalization.

We are working to get another edition of Pro Libertate the e-zine completed as soon as possible.

Please be sure to visit The Right Source.

Mitt Romney and the Teen Torture Industry

George Romney's presidential ambitions were scuttled by his infamous remark that he had been "brainwashed" about Vietnam. It is to be hoped that Mitt Romney's statement that he wants to "double Guantanamo" will prove similarly fatal to his presidential bid:

As I've pointed out before, Romney's credentials as a social and fiscal conservative are as counterfeit as Pamela Anderson's mammalian anatomy (and just as beguiling to the weak-minded).


His only selling point to the Evangelical Nationalist voting bloc -- apart from his forgettably photogenic looks -- is his commitment to the doctrine of presidential omnipotence, particularly with respect to the detention and torture of suspected terrorists and "enemy combatants."


The applause that rewarded Romney's endorsement of Gitmo-plus indicates that for the central core of True Believers within the GOP, nothing is more important than preserving the president's power to detain and torture people at whim.


For several months I have been warning that behind Romney's public image -- he looks and acts like preternaturally well-preserved Osmond Brother -- we can find something very close to absolute evil: A variety of authoritarian "conservatism" that endorses the torture and sexual mistreatment of children. Those warnings have been vindicated by a lawsuit filed against Robert Lichfield, co-chairman of Romney's Utah Finance Committee.

We know what's behind the smiles: Mitt Romney and Pat Robertson strike a pose during Regent University's 2007 Commencement Ceremony.


Lichfield has helped raise $2.7 million for Romney in Utah, including $300,000 at a February event in St. George. Over the past decade, Lichfield has been co-chairman of the Utah-based World-Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS), a corporation that makes $70 million per year running an archipelago of torture camps – many of them located off-shore – in which troubled American youngsters have been subjected to torture as a means of behavior modification (BM).

WWASPS is a major player in the "tough love" industry, which runs camps, retreats, and other private reform institutions for teenagers deemed to be incorrigible. The WWASPS approach is an outgrowth of methods pioneered by Straight, Inc., which operated a similar chain of BM facilities until being overwhelmed by lawsuits. Mel Sembler, the Flordia-based shopping mall magnate who operated Straight, Inc. with his wife Betty, is another key fundraiser for the Romney campaign.

The polluted fountainhead of these programs was a federally funded program called The Seed, which was exposed by a 1974 Senate Judiciary Committee investigation as employing the same “highly refined `brainwashing' techniques employed by the North Koreans” against American POWs. And all of this was an outgrowth of the cynical, murderous fraud called the War on Drugs.

In her indispensable book Help at Any Cost, Maia Szalavitz documented how WWASPS and kindred programs “utilize punishments banned for use on criminals and by the Geneva Convention. Beatings, extended isolation and restraint, public humiliation, food deprivation, sleep deprivation, forced exercise to the point of exhaustion, sensory deprivation, and lengthy maintenance of stress positions are common.”

Some teenagers selected for forced enrollment in BM programs have been treated exactly like terrorist suspects, suffered “extraordinary rendition” at the hands of rented thugs. Many have been kidnapped from their beds (with the consent of parents who had succumbed to a “hard sell” by a BM program pitchman) and taken to an offshore detention facility in the Cayman Islands, Mexico, Costa Rica, Jamaica, American Samoa, Australia, France, or even the Czech Republic; yes, the BM industry, like the CIA's torture gulag, made use of assets in a former Iron Curtain nation.

The methods used by WWASPS personnel are likewise uncannily like the "enhanced interrogation techniques" referred to by Romney. (That phrase, as used by Bush and his minions, is a direct translation of the German expression used by the Nazi Gestapo to describe exactly the same methods.)

At one BM facility in Puerto Rico, “teens were found bound and gagged with nooses around their necks,” observes Szalavitz. At "High Impact," a WWASPS detention center in Mexico, teenage victims were locked in dog cages. (See the photo at left.) One survivor of that facility described how he was nearly drowned to death by a group of older kids who -- made feral through prolonged mistreatment -- hoped that the murder would shut the program down. Amberly Knight, former director of the WWASPS-affiliated Dundee Ranch in Costa Rica, testifies that food deprivation was commonly used to punish inmates, and particularly rebellious kids were taken to a tiny isolation room and forced to kneel on concrete for up to 14 hours a day.

We don't need no stinkin'... well, you get the point: A bathroom facility at the WWASPS "High Impact" gulag in Mexico.

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

More like something from Gollum's diseased mind: This tiny torture cubicle at Spring Creek Lodge, a WWASPS camp in Montana, was called "The Hobbit."


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

Mark Runkle, who spent two and a half years on the staff at the Spring Creek facility, has described how detainees would be rousted in the middle of the night and taken into the nearby woods for "tests of will."

"They take kids down to the Vermilion Bridge at night, blindfold them, and push them off into the river," Runkle recalled. "They take them off into the woods, and they come back hurt. They claim it's a mind-increaser. I think it breaks the kids down -- breaks their will down. Mentally, they do damage. Emotionally, too."


Last December, 133 plaintiffs – survivors of WWASP facilities, along with parents and other loved ones – filed a lawsuit (.pdf) against Richfield in the US District Court for Utah, claiming that inmates of the residential programs were “subjected to physical abuse, emotional abuse and sexual abuse.”

The parents suing Lichfield, notes The Hill, “sent their kids to WWASPS-affiliated schools such as Cross Creek Center for Boys in LaVerkin, Utah; Majestic Ranch Academy in Randolph, Utah; and The Academy at Ivy Ridge in Ogdensburg after they got in trouble for insubordination, drug use or petty theft. The parents learned of the boarding schools through Teen Help, a business owned by Lichfield that matched parents and their children with boarding schools around the country and [abroad] ... Plaintiffs have alleged that Lichfield made millions from the schools.”

Among the allegations of abuse outlined in the lawsuit are the following:

*Placement in isolation for long periods of time, and at times, including being locked in small boxes and cages, and locked up in basements, and forced to assume distorted and painful physical positions for long periods of time;

*Exposure to extreme (hot and cold) temperatures for long periods of time;

*[Being] kicked, beaten, thrown and slammed to the ground;

*[Being] bound and tied by hands and/or feet;

*[Being] chained and locked in dog cages;

*[Being] forced to lie in, or wear, urine and feces as one method of punishment;

*[Being] forced to clean and scrub toilets and floors with their toothbrush and then use the toothbrush afterwards; [...]

*Sexual abuse, which included forced sexual relations and acts of fondling and masturbation performed on them; [...]

*[Being] Threatened with severe punishment, including death, if they told anyone of their abuses and poor living conditions; [...]

*[Being] subjected to [a] buddy system where older students were allowed to physically, mentally, and sexually abuse younger students and manage them as part of a `cleansing' process....

This institutionalized perversion thrived in a program that Lichfield said was intended to combat the "breakdown of the family."

"When the family is not functioning, society suffers," he explained in a 1993 telephone interview. It's not obvious to rational people how officially sanctioned sadism can help fix what's been broken by the family's decline, but Lichfield has found sadism and sanctimony to be a profitable combination.


And there is something utterly horrifying about the fact that Romney tapped not one, but two key people in the Teen Torture Industry to raise money for his presidential campaign. This obviously raises questions about where and how those funds have been raised. But the more serious issue is this: Romney himself has embraced the use of torture, however euphemistically described, as a central function of the presidency.


Why should we doubt the seriousness of Romney's desire to "double Guantanamo," when some of his closest allies have been running a global detention and torture network for troubled American teenagers?


Point of personal privilege....

I first wrote about this subject for The New American magazine in March of last year. Last September, shortly before I was fired by the, ahem, heroes running that magazine's sponsoring organization, I touched upon the subject again in a piece about Mel Sembler published in the JBS News Feed.

Just before I was fired, I published a three-part series describing how the GOP's leadership and much of its rank and file -- the self-anointed Champions Of All That Is Decent -- had embraced torture, both at home (via Sembler's Behavior Modification programs and related efforts) and abroad (at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, and elsewhere). See here, here, and here for that three-part series, as well as here for an essay -- clearly identifiable as a satire, albeit one inspired by a sense of mortal disgust over the repellent spectacle of bullying arrogance the GOP had become -- that serves as a sort of postscript.

Those essays, published on my own time and in a blog for which I alone was liable, figure prominently in the rationalizations used to justify my firing in letters to TNA subscribers. I say "rationalizations" -- plural -- because the people responsible for that decision have never settled on one clear reason for firing me.

The individual who took the initiative in having me fired has said on more than one occasion that the essays referred to above were hampering the organization's fund-raising and recruiting efforts, which prompts me to wonder why he was trawling for money and volunteers in that badly polluted authoritarian pond, rather than doing what Ron Paul has done: Offering an appeal to freedom-focused people irrespective of party label.

Surely, an organization devoted to "Less Government, More Responsibility, and - with God's Help - a Better World" shouldn't be inordinately concerned about offending the kind of people who can countenance child torture. You might want to ask that fellow about this, but only if you're not particular about being told the truth.

Please be sure to drop by The Right Source.

Flesh For War Fantasies

One significant problem with being an Empire: Everything is supposedly "our" business.

To my considerable shame, I just realized that it had been a long time since I had thought of Angola. In fact, it occurs to me that I really don't have a feeling toward that country one way or another.

How utterly scandalous this is. I obviously suffer from a severely parochial worldview, if not outright bigotry. All decent people are required to take an interest in Angolan affairs, and to work on behalf of that nation's survival.

Whoops – I made a mistake. It was Austria I had forgotten, not Angola – an easy mistake, I suppose, given that the names of those countries are similar, if little else about them is. Austria is the nation that is supposed to hold captive all of my waking thoughts, and dominate the dreams that come once my eyes surrender to weariness at day's end.

Oh. Sorry. My bad.

It turns out that the small foreign country I'm morally obliged to care about is Guatemala, where I lived for a little more than a year in the 1980s --

Now, this has become simply obnoxious. Sierra Leone, that tragic land, scene of some of the most horrific atrocities of recent memory, is the country that should always be uppermost in my thoughts, lest I be accused of indifference to genocide.

Admittedly, it's difficult to keep track of which distant, unfamiliar country should by the focus of my concerns – to such an extent that I would be willing to surrender the blood of my children in its defense.

Perhaps the issue could be clarified if the regime running that country could stage a PR campaign in which its government shamelessly pimps several young female military veterans by having them pose in borderline pornographic photo spreads for Maxim magazine.

We have a winner! The nation in question is, of course, Israel.

Like much of the evil done in this world, the idea of a Maxim photo feature on Israeli women (starring former Miss Israel Gal Gadot) originated in New York, more specifically at the Israeli consulate, “where research showed that Israel meant little to young American men” in the all-important 18-35 demographic, reports the AP.

Former Miss Israel Gal Gadot, featured in the Israeli regime's quasi-porn propaganda campaign, seen here in suitable attire.

“Males that age have no feeling toward Israel one way or another, and we view that as a problem, so we came up with an idea that would be appealing to them,” explains an Israeli government media adviser named David Dorfman. Thus Maxim was contacted by the Israeli consulate and asked to take part in “reshaping Israel's public image.”

What neither the Dorfster nor any of his allies in this effort would explain is this: Why is it obligatory for American males of any age -- let alone those in an age bracket targeted for military recruitment -- to have feelings of any sort about a country to which they have no organic connection or moral responsibility?

Israel can expect the allegiance of its citizens, and for understandable reasons Jews in every nation take an interest in its survival. But I cannot think of a compelling reason why the typical American should take a greater interest in Israel than he does in Angola, Austria, Guatemala, or Sierra Leone.

Ecclesio-Leninists of John Hagee's ilk would insist that Christians have a God-prescribed duty to support the Israeli government, to the point of mass bloodshed, if necessary. Since Hagee considers it just and meet to kill on Israel's behalf, I wonder if he would consider it appropriate to peddle quasi-porn, and consume the same, in that cause. (I'm suddenly afflicted with a mental image of Hagee poring over the pages of the July installment of Maxim, his wattles quivering and his eyes distended as he succumbs to a combination of sanctimony and salacity).

Hagee is precisely the kind of "friend to Israel" whose preferred policies would kill a lot of Israelis and other innocent people. He really should pause and ask himself if a government that would exploit prurient interests in this fashion (not to mention sponsoring "Gay Pride" parades) is really the Zion longed for by prophets and saints of ages past. From where I sit, that government appears no better or worse than any of a dozen others I could name, our own most definitely included.

While the Israeli consulate in New York prepares to fire the Maxim gun in its propaganda arsenal, the War Party is pursuing a somewhat subtler approach in preparing the public for a US/Israeli attack on Iran. Yesterday (June 20) the House of Representatives passed a resolution demanding that the UN Security Council “charge Iranian President Maumoud Ahmadinejad with violating the 1948 Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide,” and that the Council consider unspecified “measures” to “prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons....”

The resolution regurgitates the claim, which has been canonized through repetition although patently and demonstrably false, that Ahmadinejad “called for Israel to be `wiped off the map'.” While the Iranian president is a certifiable maniac guilty of many crimes against decency, that phrase was not uttered by him: He was, in fact, calling for what is now “regime change” by calling for an end to the Israeli government, not the annihilation of the Israeli people. If calling for “regime change” is now to be considered an incitement to genocide, the entire staff of the American Enterprise Institute should be seized and extradited to stand trial before the UN International Criminal Court in the Hague.

Only two congressmen, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), voted against the resolution. Kucinich “attempted to have read into the record alternate translations of Ahmadinejad's remarks that suggest the Iranian leader was calling Israel to come to an end through democratic means, and not through violence,” reported the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

While describing himself as “unequivocal in my support for the security and survival of Israel” and possessed of “serious concerns with the remarks made by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,” Kucinich denounced the resolution, correctly describing it as an attempt to “lay the groundwork for an offensive, unprovoked war” -- one in which Israelis, as well as Americans and Iranians, would be killed, and that will probably ignite a broader conflict lasting for years or even decades.

And that is an obscenity far greater than anything available in the pages of Maxim.

Please be sure to visit The Right Source.

10,000 Ways To Die

“It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?...

Every new regulation ... presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace its consequences; a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow-citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the FEW, not for the MANY.”

James Madison, Federalist Paper 62*

In 1791, when the republic Madison and his colleagues created was new and the Constitution enjoyed a decent chance of survival, there were 17 federal criminal statutes on the books. Two hundred years later, that figure had grown to several thousand.

Given the protean nature of the federal criminal code, more specificity about that figure is impossible: Every congressional session results in a new set of legal instruments intended for use in the corrupt “harvest” referred to by Madison. The Federalist essay containing that figure of speech, incidentally, argued that the federal legislative branch would be a check against the heedless proliferation of recondite laws. If only it were so.

More than half of the countless thousands of federal laws enacted since the War Between the States, notes Ted Gest of the University of Pennsylvania, were passed after 1970. Delaware Senator Joe Biden, who has done more than his share to abet the malignant growth of the federal criminal code, proudly explains: “We federalize everything that walks, talks, and moves,”

In his book Crime & Politics: Big Government's Erratic Campaign for Law and Order, Gest points out that since “it's possible to identify some interstate nexus with virtually any crime, just about anything goes when it comes to making a theoretical federal case for some category of violations.”

Obviously, this represents an inversion of the constitutional order described by Madison in Federalist number 45, in which the central government would have “few and defined” powers, and the “numerous and indefinite”powers reserved to the states would include practically everything having to do with criminal justice and law enforcement.

Of course, States, counties, and municipalities emit countless laws as well, most of them quite foolish, almost all of them unnecessary. But their chief purpose today is to serve as administrative units of the all-powerful central government, with their law enforcement agencies increasingly funded and controlled by Washington.

Gest (who doesn't object in principle to this subversion of the constitutional system) points out that the process through which “local” police became militarized instruments of the central government began in the late 1960s with the advent of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), through which States and cities received “large infusions of federal aid” as part of a supposed effort to “reduce local crime.”

The LEAA was headed by a triumvirate, the composition of which reflected the partisan affiliation of the incumbent president: Under LBJ and Jimmy Carter, it was staffed by two Democrats and a Republican, with that alignment reversing under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

From its inception, the LEAA encouraged the militarization of police departments (among its first police grants were funds for paramilitary riot suppression gear and the purchase of “Big Bertha” vehicles – tanks modified for inner-city patrols) and plied them with subsidies of every description as a way of redefining their loyalties.

At the same time, the agency also dispensed huge sums “to improve the criminal justice system across the board,” notes Gest. Such “improvements” inevitably made local courts subject to federal control. If judges wanted aid, explained on LEAA triumvir, “they shouldn't be able to dictate the terms and say, `I'm the chief judge of the criminal court, and I'll run my court the way I want to.' Our message was, `Judge, you can't do that anymore.... The system has to improve.' We forced people to work together through the carrot and stick approach.”

People were to “work together” toward what end? Norval Morris, who was nominated serve as an LEAA administrator during the Carter administration, offered a glimpse of one potential destination in a 1969 book called The Honest Politician's Guide to Crime Control, in which he called for a “disarmed populace” -- a universal ban on civilian handgun ownership, and severe limitations even on the use of firearms in hunting.

Many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle regarded the LEAA with suspicion, and by 1979 the agency was mired in well-earned disrepute. Accordingly, it was disbanded, its entire staff banished from government employment, and the concept of federal control over local police was abjured by penitent legislative and executive branch officials in a solemn ceremony of official repudiation.

Yeah, right. And that's William Shatner's real hair.

Like many other parasites, the LEAA reproduced through fission, dividing itself into similiarly self-replicating bureaus within the Justice Department – the most prominent being the Bureau of Justice Assistance -- the ever-helpful agency in charge of handing out largesse in the form of Byrne Grants and other lethal federal subsidies.

Of the more than 800 chair-moisteners “working” at LEAA's Washington office at the time of its formal dissolution in 1982, only 18 suffered the “indignity” of being forced to find relatively honest employment.

The rest of them insinuated themselves into the law enforcement bureaucracy, where they encouraged the metastatic growth of the federal criminal code. They eagerly promoted the Reagan-era escalation in the “War on Drugs,” and enthusiastically backed federally dictated mandatory minimum prison sentences for various trendy offenses. LEAA vets (including Ed Meese) were also heavily involved in promoting the Reagan-era prison-building boom: The Reagan administration spent some $2 billion on prison construction, even as Congress devised increasingly inventive ways to fill them up.

The late 1980s introduced an ominous new trend that could be called “therapeutic law” -- statutes like “hate crimes” laws intended to punish incorrect attitudes, rather than offenses against persons and property. In the early 1990s that trend expanded to include measures like Joe Biden's Violence Against Women Act, under which domestic violence became a federal concern.

All of this followed a path that had been blazed by the LEAA, and more than a few veterans of that agency's spoils system played important roles in both conceiving and implementing those proto-totalitarian measures.

It must never be forgotten that every law carries with it the implicit threat of lethal force; this is particularly true of those enacted by the central government. To reasonable people, 17 such laws is more than half again too many, given that the only Being entitled to dictate laws thought that 10 was quite sufficient.

Under our present system, Americans are burdened with at least 10,000 federal “laws,” most of which they've never heard of. That represents, in principle, at least 10,000 ways to die at the hands of the State's enforcers.

*My thanks to the incomparable Joseph Sobran for bringing this passage to my attention.

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The Real Drug War Kingpins

Not a scene from a movie, or from the streets of Baghdad: "Police" -- that is, Pentagon-equipped and federally-funded occupation troops -- conduct a raid in Detroit.

Mike Nifong's career as the Torquemada of Raleigh, North Carolina is over, although the self-enraptured prosecutor couldn't resist one final lachrymose moment in the spotlight. But Nifong the Good – also known as Nifong the Wise, and Nifong the Misunderstood – deserves some company. He shouldn't be allowed to Bogart that pity pipe.

There are plenty of other corrupt and abusive prosecutors – US Attorneys, State Attorneys General, District Attorneys, and the like -- who deserve to be bathed in the same disrepute, and subject to the same professional ruin, that Nifong must now endure. Andrew Payton Thomas of Phoenix is one. Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker, who insists on prolonging the utterly insane imprisonment of Genarlow Wilson, is another.

But today let's focus on the case of John Paschall, one unfathomably vicious little distaff canine.

No photograph of John Paschall is available, so I offer this artist's conception of the prosecutor, seen here "drumming up" drug cases in Robertson County, Texas.

Paschall is District Attorney for Robertson County in Texas, in which capacity he has long been the local Narcotics Kingpin.

No, he doesn't synthesize, sell, or consume the contraband, at least as far as is publicly known.

Paschall is not in charge of drug manufacturing or distribution, but rather what could be called the “fulfillment” department: He heads up the local counter-narcotics task force, which – until quite recently – conducted an annual raid on the local black population in order to produce arrests in sufficient abundance to keep federal Byrne Grant money flowing.

A class-action suit (.pdf) filed against Paschall and the Task Force by the ACLU (insert standard disclaimer here) plausibly alleged that the DA and his associates “have for many years recruited confidential informants, facing criminal charges, by threatening them with extraordinarily lengthy prison terms unless they will implicate numerous named African-American residents in drug sales.... [T]he informant is required to fill a large quota or else he faces lengthy imprisonment.”

Starting in the mid-1980s, the Task Force would conduct an annual raid in Hearne, a Texas town of about 5,000 people. Paschall, according to witness accounts cited in the lawsuit, “publicly and openly joked about the sweeps, saying that it was `time to round up the n*****s,' and laughed about watching African-American residents run in fear during the sweeps. Paschall described the fleeing residents as cockroaches.”

Some of the raids would focus on a housing complex called Columbus Village, a federally subsidized complex housing many black residents. Paschall reportedly expressed the opinion that it would be better for the community if Columbus Village residents “were removed from Hearne by incarceration or other means,” specifically suggesting that the project should be “bombed” and “burned.” But this wouldn't be as profitable as drawing up rosters of Columbus Village residents to be hauled in during the annual paramilitary sweep, so Paschall didn't pull the trigger on his “Destroy Columbus Village to save the town” strategy.

In late 1999, Paschall hauled in a recently paroled petty criminal – a small-time thief with a recurring drug addiction named Derrick Megress -- and blackmailed him into acting as a confidential informant. Paschall had a long history with Megress, and in the following detail of that history we see the unique viciousness that distinguishes Paschall even in the detestable company of Nifong, Thomas, and Baker, the abusive prosecutors mentioned above.

As a juvenile, Megress was hospitalized for serious mental illness, a fact well known to Paschall, who was the one who had the youngster committed. Paschall exploited that vulnerability when the time came to recruit him as an informant, making use of his victim's fears and anxieties: The prosecutor threatened to send Megress to prison for “60 to 99 years,” and to prosecute members of his family who were innocent of any wrongdoing, if the young parolee didn't cooperate. While Megress was incarcerated, some Task Force members allegedly provided additional inducements by beating him regularly and threatening his life.

Megress was specifically required to implicate at least twenty suspects, and would receive a $100 cash payment for each additional name. He was given a tape recorder to document his alleged purchases. He eventually implicated 27 local residents, almost all of whom knew him, and all but one of whom were black. But the only “evidence” offered “that Megress purchased drugs from anyone ... was his own self-serving word,” contends the lawsuit.

In late October and early November, the “sweep” took place as planned, and police detained nearly the entire black population of Hearne. One young man with Down's Syndrome was thrown “onto the ground, handcuffed, and forced ... to lie immobile. They never asked him for his name or identification during his entire detention.” Clifford Runoalds was arrested while on his way to the funeral of his 18-month-old daughter.

Many were arrested and charged with drug dealing despite their ability to provide airtight alibis corroborated with time cards and even security camera footage proving they were at work at the time of the supposed deals.

When the police showed up at the Chelsea Street Pub and Grill in pursuit of Regina Kelly, the young single mother assumed that she was in trouble because of unpaid parking tickets. She went along peacefully, only to learn to her horror that she was accused of narcotics trafficking. She spent two nights in jail, wearing her waitress uniform, on a $70,000 bond. Regina would eventually spend almost a month in jail before the bail was reduced to a sum her mother could afford (she mortgaged her land to pay $1,000 bond).

The indictment “listed Kelly's first name as Jennifer,” notes an account in the Village Voice. That alone should have been sufficient reason to dismiss the case. In addition, “The secret audiotape allegedly incriminating her did not have a single female voice on it. Her prosecution rested on the uncorroborated word of Derrick Megress....”

With no money, no help from distracted court-appointed defenders, and nobody at home to care for her children, Regina's cellmate, another single mother named Erma Faye Stewart, took a deal, pleading guilty to distributing narcotics in a drug-free zone. She received 10 years' probation and was required to pay $1,800 in fines. “Those who refused to take a plea and couldn't post bond, spent five months in prison awaiting trial,” observes a Frontline documentary on the case.

Victims of a "war" against victimless "crimes": Erma Faye Stewat (l.) and Regina Kelly.

About four months after the arrests, the first trial began, and the case disintegrated like cotton candy in an acid bath. Megress was exposed for all to see as a spectacularly worthless witness. So the charges against all of the defendants were dropped – except those who, like Erma Stewart, from whom a plea bargain had been extorted.

Describing Erma's plight three years ago, Frontline reported:

“Three years after she pleaded guilty in order to go home and take care of her children, she is destitute. Because of the plea, she is not eligible for food stamps for herself or federal grant money for education. She can't vote until two years after she completes her 10-year probation. And she has been evicted from her public housing for not paying rent. Her children sleep in various homes and she spends her nights outside the housing project, waiting for the morning when she can go to work as a cook – a job that pays $5.25 an hour. She owes a $1,000 fine, court costs and late probation fees which she says she has been pressured to pay. `They see it like, as long as I have a job, I can pay them.... I already told them, I'm having a hard time, buying my son medicine. I have to have his medicine for his asthma. They don't really care about that. All they want is, you know, the money.'”

That's what this is all about: The money.

Getting a quota of arrests was necessary in order to qualify for continuing Byrne Grants – which are a form of welfare for local police. This meant treating the local federally subsidized housing project as a hunting ground for the usual suspects, and anybody else who looked like a suitable candidate for arrest. And Paschall and his cronies didn't scruple to steal the money honestly earned by one of their victims, even if it meant depriving one of her kids of medicine he needed in order to breathe.

After the Frontline special was broadcast, people from across the country donated over $18,000 to Erma. Unfortunately, she found herself in trouble with her probation officer after she tested positive for marijuana and cocaine use; this means she has a weakness, just like anyone who throws back one or a dozen brewskis too many. (If she's been spending some of her meager earnings on drugs while her asthmatic son goes without medicine, Erma's got some serious problems that only God can fix.) But she wasn't convicted of mere possession; she was forced to plead guilty to first-degree felony distribution, a charge for which no evidence was ever produced.

Oh, and Paschall, always the quintessence of class, offered this reaction regarding the humanitarian outpouring toward Erma: "She can get on TV and she can cry all she wants to, but she’s her own worst enemy because she continues using drugs. She’s going to have to get her act clean or suffer the consequences — TV show or not.”

Paschall, of course, is just the person to lecture others about accepting the "consequences" of their actions.

The lawsuit against him was settled in 2005. The terms of that settlement are confidential, but probably fairly lucrative to the ACLU (which does quite well for itself in cases of this sort – another issue I have with the “war on drugs”: It helps subsidize the ACLU, which has never gotten out of the business of brow-beating local communities over traditional religious displays and other cultural conventions the organization doesn't like).

Of course, before agreeing to a settlement, Paschall filed a motion asserting – I am not making this up – three different kinds of immunity: “prosecutorial immunity,” “qualified immunity,” and “official immunity.” US District Judge Walter S. Smith Jr. rejected all of Paschall's claims with the same thoughtless ease Tim Duncan would display in stuffing my flat-footed “jump” shot. This no doubt explains Paschall's eagerness to settle the case.

And yet – there he sits, still clothed in whatever dignity and prestige his office confers upon him, while the victims of his corrupt ambition do what they can to keep body and soul, and families, together.

Video Extra

Regina Kelly recounts her experience to Radley Balko, senior editor for Reason magazine:



Former Texas counter-narcotics police officer Barry Cooper describes how police become addicted to the "war on drugs"; no, seriously:




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Siege in New Hampshire: Operation "This Will End Badly” Is Well Underway

Quick, call the ADL: A skinhead carrying an assault weapon has been spotted outside the home of a peaceful New Hampshire couple!


Ed and Elaine Brown, middle-aged residents of Plainfield, New Hampshire who have never done any material harm to any living being, are being surrounded by heavily armed berserkers who will almost certainly kill them.

One unmistakable clue about the lethal intentions of the armed gang surrounding the Brown residence – a polyglot gathering of “heavily armed New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts State Police, a N.H. State Police Explosives Disposal Unit, state and regional SWAT teams” -- can be found in the vocabulary used to describe that dwelling.

Press accounts refer to the Brown home, a large but not prepossessing house, as a “fortress,” a “concrete castle,” or by some other expression worthy of the inaccessible secure location where Dick Cheney retires during daylight hours, lest his pallid, undead flesh spontaneously combust from exposure to pitiless daylight.

We can take it as an axiom that any residence targeted for a lethal government raid will be described in that fashion. The party targeted in the raid might live in a lean-to, a wikiup, a tar-paper shack, or a geographically displaced Central Asian yurt, but as soon as it falls under the gun-sights of government goons, that structure -- however flimsy -- is transformed into an “armed compound.”

In this case, the Browns – who have never committed a crime against persons or property, the only offenses over which government has moral jurisdiction – have been targeted for annihilation because they refuse to report for imprisonment. Their purported offense is to refuse to permit the Regime to steal from them the wealth they have earned through their peaceful, productive exertions.

Here is how the local media describes the “criminal” actions of the Browns:

“The Browns were convicted of plotting to hide their income to avoid paying federal income taxes on Elaine Brown's income of $1.9 million between 1996 and 2003. They also were convicted of using $215,890 in postal money orders, cashed in smaller amounts to avoid tax-reporting levels, to pay for their home and her dental office.”

This supposed crime is referred to as “tax evasion.” We learn everything we need to know about our political system from this fact: Helots who refuse to surrender their wealth to government are prosecuted as criminals; criminals in public office who plunder that wealth and spend it illegally cannot be prosecuted as “Constitution evaders.”

In sum and substance, the Browns are guilty of using money they lawfully earned to purchase goods and services honestly rendered. There is no crime here. Yes, there are violations of “laws” enacted by a criminal Regime that even now is engaged in the armed robbery of Iraq, and plotting nuclear aggression against Iran. But the Browns have done nothing to injure anybody – including the federal government, which exnihilates fiat “money” as needed and doesn't require tax revenue to sustain its malignant enterprises.

This is not to say that no crimes have been committed in the confrontation between the Browns and their federal persecutors. On June 7, an armed gang seized Elaine Brown's dental office in Lebanon. Brandishing firearms in the course of theft is aggravated armed robbery, and has been prosecuted as such in New Hampshire. Were it still a state worthy of its motto, New Hampshire would file and prosecute those charges against the knuckle-dragging cretins who invaded Dr. Brown's office, and the effete bureaucratic crooks who sent them there.

But, as noted earlier, the Feds have worse things in mind for the Browns than armed robbery. Were it not for a chance encounter between Danny Riley -- a house guest who was out for a stroll with his dog on June 7 -- and a knot of camouflaged Federal hit-men, the deadly deed would likely have been done already. Riley was shot at and tasered by a "Special Operations Unit" of the U.S. Marshals Service.

“We have no intention of assaulting the house,” lied Stephen Monier, a U.S. Marhsal in New Hampshire, even as his comrades cut off telephone service, Internet access, and electricity to the Borwns' home. This is a form of escalation, a military tactic that worked so well in bringing about the peaceful, bloodless end to the 1993 siege at Waco and last December's stand-off in Maryland that ended with the needless death of troubled veteran Jaime Dean.

For the benefit of Hannitization victims and others deprived of sophisticated mental functions: My last comment was intended to be sarcastic.

Whatever else happens as a result of the escalating ugliness in New Hampshire, the educable public should learn at least one useful lesson from the conspicuous involvement of so many State and local police units in the siege: We no longer have State and local police, but rather State and local affiliates of a unitary, militarized Homeland Security Leviathan.

Remember this: When the ATF, and then the FBI, attacked the Branch Davidian congregation in 1993 (the pretext then, as now, was tax evasion – specifically David Koresh's supposed failure to pay various firearms fees), the local Sheriff, Jack Harwell, attempted (albeit too timidly) to interpose himself in the interests of a peaceful solution. The Feds had other plans, of course.

Today, rather than seeing themselves as representatives of local communities, even in conflicts of this sort, most (not all, but most) police are indecently eager to treat such stand-offs as public works projects – sources of lucrative overtime and an excuse to swan about in paramilitary drag and play with all the bitchin' toys they've gotten from the Pentagon.

Despite all of this, I hope and pray that the Browns are not killed. But this situation displays all of the symptoms of something that will end very badly indeed.

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