The Terror Cartel Strikes in Idaho

During a May 15 visit to Stockholm, Secretary of State John Kerry warned Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad that if he doesn’t begin preparations to abdicate his office, “the opposition will be receiving additional support … and unfortunately the violence will not end.”

Under the rhetorical conventions governing the cynical profession called “diplomacy,” Kerry wasn’t allowed to make his threat explicit. Fortunately, Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker labors under no such restrictions.

“I do think we’ll be arming the opposition shortly,” Corker told CBS News on May 7, referring to a measure that will be put before the Senate next week. 

While alluding to the fact that Washington is already covertly arming the Syrian insurgents, Corker made it clear that the military aid wouldn’t be restricted to rebel groups that have already been housebroken, explaining that “we have to change the equation” because “the moderate opposition groups we support are not as good at fighting” as the more ruthless factions that specialize in terrorizing non-combatants, executing prisoners, and whose leaders mutilate and cannibalize the dead bodies of their enemies.

It is impossible for Washington to provide military or “humanitarian” assistance to the Syrian insurgency without materially aiding hyper-violent factions such as the Jabhat al-Nursah, which is listed on the State Department’s roster of terrorist organizations. 

Under federal law, providing material aid of any kind – from money to shaving cream to ammunition – to a listed terrorist group is a felonious offense. A few years ago, the regime sentenced a Long Island cable TV operator named Javed Iqbal to 69 months in prison because his cable system broadcast programs produced by a network owned by Hezbollah. 

Iqbal was imprisoned as punishment for allowing words spoken in support of a listed terrorist group to be broadcast through his cable system – yet high-ranking officials in the same regime that sent him to prison are openly discussing their plans to arm Syrian Jihadists.

On May 16, the same regime that is providing support to Syrian terrorists conducted a raid in Boise to arrest an Uzbek national named Fazluddin Kurbanov, who has been accused of providing material support to a listed terrorist group called the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). As headline bait, the Feds also charged Kurbanov with possessing components of a “weapon of mass destruction,” which in this case appears to be a homemade hand grenade. 

Federal prosecutors, including Wendy Olson, the hyper-ambitious legal commissarina assigned to Idaho, insist that the public was never at danger, because Kurbanov had been under surveillance for a long time, and the threat he posed had been contained. This means we should anticipate the all-but-inevitable disclosure that Kurbanov was being manipulated by an undercover operative working as a “terrorism facilitator” on behalf of the regime.

As we should expect, the IMU is a violent group whose objectives are not entirely laudable. This doesn’t make them a threat to our country, however. In fact, their chief grievance is one most Americans would find understandable: They want to overthrow a fetid police state run by a Communist gangster.

A profile of the group published by the Foreign Military Studies Office at Ft. Leavenworth recounts how the IMU grew out of a private security group that was created by Uzbek businessmen in the early 1990s. It was originally a non-ideological, non-sectarian self-defense organization that protected citizens and business owners against criminal syndicates that grew out of the Communist nomenklatura. 

By 1991, the group had fallen under the leadership of a young mullah named Tahir Yuldashev, who gave it an explicitly Muslim character and – with the help of a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan – organized it into a private police force. In December of that year, the group occupied the local Communist Party headquarters in Namagan. 

Thinking he could intimidate the group into dispersing, Uzbek Communist Party leader Islam Karimov paid a personal visit to Namagan – only to be publicly humiliated by Yuldashev, who refused to back down. This earned the IMU the undying enmity of Karimov, who banned the group and declared war on it when he became the ruler of Uzbekistan following the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Karimov, a Stalin-grade despot, remains in power today. As one would expect from a product of the Soviet ruling elite, Karimov is sustained in his rule by secret police who were trained by the Soviet KGB. This has made Karimov’s regime a very useful subcontractor for Washington in its war against – well, anybody impudent enough to challenge its claims to unqualified global supremacy. Terrorists willing to serve Washington's interests -- whether they are Syrian insurrectionists or practitioners of state terrorism, like Karimov -- enjoy protection as part of Washington's official terror cartel

The KGB-constructed dungeons in Uzbekistan have been – and, for all we know, continue to be – prime destinations for people abducted by the CIA for the purpose of prolonged detention and torture. 

During the reign of Bush the Lesser, Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Tashkent, exposed his government’s collaboration in the CIA’s torture program in Uzbekistan. This led to Murray losing his job and enduring the kind of focused persecution reserved for public servants who publicly condemn the criminal actions of their employers.

“If you are put into prison in Uzbekistan,” wrote Murray after he was purged by his government, “the chances of coming out again alive are less than even. And most of the prisons are still the old Soviet gulags in the most literal sense.” 

A few weeks into his term as British ambassador, Murray attended a show trial of an elderly man who had been tortured into confessing involvement with al-Qaeda, and implicating his nephew as well. This totalitarian auto-da-fe, he recalls, was staged “for the benefit of the American embassy to demonstrate the strength of the U.S.-Uzbek alliance against terrorism.”

To Karimov’s embarrassment, and the discomfiture of his invited guests, the victim refused to follow the script. Summoning the heroic strength of an innocent man with nothing to lose, the frail defendant defiantly told the tribunal: “This is not true. This is not true. They tortured my children in front of me until I signed this. I had never heard of al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden.”

Karimov and his comrades had hoped to offer a gift to their new patrons in Washington in the form of a broken and contrite “terrorist” whose confession would demonstrate the efficiency of their interrogation program. Instead they had to be content with dragging this pitiful old man outside the courtroom to be shot.

According to Ambassador Murray, Karimov’s secret police frequently make use of beatings, whippings, and genital mutilation. Asphyxiation, “usually by putting a gas mask on people and blocking the air vents until they suffocated,” is another favorite method, Murray reports as well as  “rape with objects, rape with bottles, anal rape, homosexual rape, heterosexual rape, and mutilation of children in front of their parents.”

Murray has described the case of a man named Muzafar Avazzov, who was submerged in boiling liquid after being beaten and having his fingernails ripped from his hands by Karimov’s CIA-allied secret police. He was hardly the only detainee who was murdered by being boiled alive. 

After learning of these atrocities, Murray compiled a large dossier and expressed his outrage to his superiors – only to be rebuked for being “over-focused on human rights.” This led the ambassador to send a deputy to the CIA station chief to deliver a formal protest. The U.S. functionary deflected criticisms by boasting about the quality of the “intelligence that had been extracted through torture, and by reciting the familiar claim that torture is a trivial concern “in the context of the war on terror.”

Significantly, the U.S. government designated the IMU a terrorist group in 2005 – at the height (or depth) of official cooperation with Karimov’s torture-state, which in that year conducted a bloody operation to suppress dissent that left several hundred people dead. 

None of the U.S. officials who collaborated with Karimov’s KGB-trained torturers has been punished. It’s not clear whether that collaboration continues today. Now that the regime in Washington simply assassinates people through drone strikes, it may no longer have use for such crude methods of intelligence collection. 

The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is a violent and dangerous group, but it has never posed a measurable threat to the safety of Americans. The same is probably true of Fazladdin Kurbanov. However, this is emphatically not true of the regime whose secret police operatives kept Kurbanov under surveillance in his Boise apartment.

Following Kurbanov’s arrest, Boise-area talk radio programs resounded with ritualistic recitals of the prescribed talking points: We must remain “vigilant” and incurably suspicious of our neighbors – especially dusky-skinned people with exotic surnames – because our enemies are implacable, endlessly devious, and incurably determined to dominate us or murder everyone who resists. We don’t yet have reason to believe this description applies to Kurbanov. However, it does make a perfect fit for the government that is prosecuting him for the crime of seeking to undermine a ruler who is a prominent member of Washington's officially sanctioned terror cartel.

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Persecution of Rita Hutchens

Midnight Knock: Bonner County Sheriff's Deputies invade the home of Rita Hutchens.

Sandpoint, Idaho resident Rita Hutchens is an opinionated 57-year-old quilt artist whose work has earned her international notoriety. Given that Hutchens is also an outspoken proponent of constitutionalist views, it’s possible that some people have taken issue with her political opinions. 

Hutchens has never harmed or threatened another human being. Yet local officials, led by Bonner County Deputy Prosecutor Shane Greenbank -- an inventively dishonest official -- are trying to make a criminal out of her. Failing that, they might simply seek to have her imprisoned indefinitely in a psych ward. 

Around midnight on April 16, three Bonner County Sheriff’s Deputies invaded Rita’s home while she was asleep and half-clothed on her living room sofa. The deputies were enforcing a bench warrant issued several weeks earlier after Hutchens had failed to appear for a preliminary hearing on a misdemeanor charge. 

In Idaho, as elsewhere, it is exceptionally rare for police to serve warrants after sundown. In its ruling in the 2011 case Idaho v. Skurlock, the Idaho Supreme Court recognized that at night time people “have a heightened expectation of privacy that should not be disturbed by a knock on the door and the presentation of a search warrant.” In addition, executing a warrant at night “increases the likelihood of violence because nighttime searches cause an abrupt intrusion on sleeping occupants in a home, thus increasing the potential for a violent reaction from the occupants.” 

The bold and valiant deputies who kicked in Rita Hutchens’s door at midnight acted in the serene confidence that they had no reason to expect a violent reaction on the part of their terrified victim. 

The officials responsible for the Stasi-style midnight raid maintain that there was an element of urgency because she is suspected of a violent crime, to wit: battery on a city official at Sandpoint City Hall last August 12. If they are in a particularly creative mood, city authorities might embellish that charge by saying that it involved an impact weapon.

The implement of mayhem allegedly employed by Hutchens in the supposed assault on Deputy Clerk Melissa Ward was not a club, a set of brass knuckles, or throwing stars. It was a ballpoint pen.

No, really. 

Furthermore, according to the sober and dutiful public servants who witnessed the attack, Hutchens did not hurl that potentially death-dealing projectile at Ward; instead, she threw it down on a tabletop, and the terrorized agent of the public weal was injured by a ricochet.

Somehow, Ward stoically fought through her trauma and finished her shift without being treated by paramedics. Significantly, although she did fill out a police report, Ward never swore out a criminal complaint. 

 

Sandpoint City Attorney Scott Campbell (l.).

Hutchens filed a subpoena demanding that Ward, the alleged victim, provide a sworn and signed criminal complaint. 

Last November 14, the Idaho First District Court granted a motion by Sandpoint City Attorney Scott Campbell to quash that subpoena, ruling that “requiring Ms. Ward, the victim in this matter, to provide a signed complaint is unreasonable.” 

What this means is that there is no victim of record in the August 12 “battery” incident, and no criminal intent behind Hutchens’s actions – unless, of course, Greenbank wants to pretend that this middle-aged woman deviously set up a bank-shot for the purpose of wounding the clerk. On the basis of his behavior toward Hutchens – another example of which we will examine anon -- I’m convinced that Greenbank and his comrades possess sufficient cynicism to make that claim. 

 

Two of Sandpoint's (snicker) "Finest."

The patently spurious nature of the charge against Hutchens is brought into focus once it’s understood why she had visited City Hall: She was there to review public records related to an incident in 2011 in which she was assaulted and illegally arrested by Sandpoint police officer Theresa Heberer.

At the time of her encounter with Officer Heberer, Hutchens was in the middle of evicting a deadbeat tenant (who, as it happened, had been arrested the previous day on outstanding warrants). She visited her property to determine if the power and water had been shut off. When Hutchens drove by the property – making two passes when she saw the renter talking with Officer Heberer – the tenant claimed that Hutchens had been “stalking” or “harassing” her. On the basis of that complaint from a manifestly unreliable source, Heberer got into her patrol vehicle and followed Hutchens to her home.

Heberer demanded that Hutchens submit to an interrogation. Hutchens, who didn’t want to be bothered by a police officer – what decent and rational person would? – replied that she had nothing to say, invoked the Fifth Amendment, and turned to enter her home. Heberer responded by committing criminal trespass, then compounded that crime by seizing Hutchens and violently throwing her to the ground. 

When her supervisor arrived on the scene, Heberer claimed that the encounter began with a traffic stop dealing with an expired registration. This was a lie, of course. Seeking to find some charge to justify the criminal violence inflicted on Hutchens, Heberer and her supervisor pored over the statute book and eventually decided to charge the victim with “resisting and obstructing” a police officer.

That charge was entirely without merit – a fact recognized by Magistrate Judge Barbara Buchanan when she threw it out of court.

“There was no reason to touch her,” Judge Buchanan observed. “She did not have to answer [Officer Heberer’s] questions. She has a Fifth Amendment right not to do that…. You can’t be charged with resisting and obstructing for exercising your Fifth Amendment right, and she did have every right to say, `I don’t want to answer your questions, I want to go in my house.’ There is no basis for an arrest, there is no reason for a search warrant.”

Unlike Melissa Ward, Hutchens was physically harmed by Heberer’s assault, in addition to suffering the indelible injury of being handcuffed and unlawfully detained. She filed a $250,000 damage claim with the City of Sandpoint, which was rejected by Idaho Counties Risk Management Program. So she filed a notice of tort claim announcing her intention to sue the city for violating her civil rights.

It was in preparation for that lawsuit that Hutchens was researching public records at City Hall on August. As she did so, she was followed by a city official who carried a digital recorder and may well have been trying to bait her into some kind of actionable misconduct. 

As Sgt. Riffel noted in his official report of the incident, “Rita Hutchens… has a fairly tense relationship with the City, and has pending lawsuits against them.”

Had he possessed a particle of moral discernment and a rudimentary sense of honor, Riffel would have recognized that the battery complaint was an act of petty retaliation against a citizen regarded as an irritant. His reaction should have been to shake his head in disgust, put away his notebook, and tell the “victim” and her cronies to behave like adults. But this would have meant defending the rights of a Mundane, which would be impermissible. 

Accordingly, Riffel – acting in the interests of Tax Feeder solidarity – filed his report and swore out the probable cause affidavit.

The criminal complaint against Hutchens, which was composed by Greenbank, is a masterpiece of bureaucratic hyperbole. It claims that Hutchens “did willfully and unlawfully use force or violence upon the person of Melissa Ward by striking Ward with a pen, or, in the alternative, did actually, intentionally, and unlawfully touch or strike the person of Melissa Ward against her will by striking Ward with a pen.” This, sniffs Greenbank with the practiced pomposity of a pampered parasite, was a grave offense “against the peace and dignity of the State of Idaho.”

 

Public menace? Rita Hutchens.

Ward suffered no injury. There is no evidence that Hutchens intended to do her any harm. By way of contrast, judicial notice has been taken of the incontrovertible fact that Officer Theresa Heberer did “willfully and unlawfully use force or violence” upon the person of Rita Hutchens in an assault that did injure the victim.

It is precisely because Hutchens is seeking redress for the criminal violence she suffered at the hands of Heberer and her comrades that Greenbank – acting on behalf of the local political class – is seeking to imprison her.

As his florid description of Hutchens’s purported offense demonstrates, Greenbank is a bit of a drama queen. This got him into trouble in his last gig, during which he afflicted the residents of neighboring Kootenai County. During opening arguments in a September 2008 domestic violence trial, Greenbank – who at the time was Deputy Prosecutor for Kootenai County – broke down in tears and theatrically asked for a tissue as he recounted the alleged crimes of the defendant. 

This display left First District Judge Fred Gilber thoroughly unimpressed. Chastising Greenbank for trying to manipulate the jury, Gilber declared a mistrial. Predictably, Greenbank’s initial reaction was to lie, insisting that he hadn’t been crying and certainly had “no intent to appeal to the passions of the jury.” However, the trial transcript documents that he admitted, “I did have tears running down my face, I did have snot running down my face.”

Nor was this the first time that Greenback or his colleagues had sought to manipulate a jury. As he declared a mistrial, Judge Gilber pointed out: “In [a] recent case the Court of Appeals has singled out the Kootenai County Prosecutor’s Office for appealing to the passions or prejudice of the jury.”

For the last six months, Hutchens has been acting as her own attorney. 

Greenbank, who has no appropriate credentials, claims that she has exhibited “unusually behaviors and affects – both in court and in her filings. It is evident that her mood is changeable, and her thoughts are disorganized.” He filed, and was granted, a motion ordering Hutchens to undergo a mandatory psychological evaluation.

 

Judge Buchanan is on the left; Judge Heise is on the right.

Embedded in that May 2 order is a remarkable claim that was introduced by Magistrate Judge Debra Heise without a particle of supporting evidence. Listed among the examples of Hutchens’s “unusual behaviors and affects” was the act of “battering the assigned prosecuting attorney [Greenbank] outside of court when he served papers to her in the clerk’s office….”

That description would lead the untutored reader to assume that Rita Hutchens, a 57-year-old woman who stands about 5’1” and weighs all of 110 pounds, boldly attacked the intrepid paladin of the public weal in full view of witnesses, and somehow managed to avoid being dragged away in chains.

What actually happened was that Greenbank shoved a sheaf of legal papers in Hutchens’s face – and she replied in kind by shoving them right back at him. In other words, just as she had “battered” Melissa Ward by accidentally striking her in the arm with a ballpoint pen, she “battered” Shane Greenbank by pushing papers at him. Although this would hardly be enough to injure a child, it should be acknowledged that on Greenbank’s previous performance, trivial contact of this kind would be quite enough to make him cry.

It should also be noted that Greenbank’s sense of moral outrage over crimes of violence is oddly adaptable. While he is treating Rita Hutchens as if she were a public menace, last August he agreed to a plea bargain by a man accused of hog-tying one handicapped 12-year-old child, and choking another one.  The assailant in that case agreed to misdemeanor charges that led to a total of two weeks in jail. 

The May 2 order for Hutchens to undergo a mental evaluation specifies that Dr. Carl Haugan, a “designated licensed psychiatrist,” will file a report on Hutchens’s mental condition by May 23. If she refuses to cooperate, the order explains, “the report shall so state and shall include, if possible, an opinion as to whether such unwillingness of the defendant was the result of mental disease or defect.” 

Judge Heise – whose trough is filled with a $107,043 annual salary plundered from more honest people in the private sector -- clearly sought to prejudice the evaluation by imputing to Hutchens, as a matter of record, “unusual behaviors and affects” as well as a tendency toward “violence” – as supposedly demonstrated in the two instances of “battery.” If, on the other hand, Hutchens refused to submit to an evaluation foreordained to find her incompetent, her refusal is to be taken as proof of her mental incapacity. 

Not surprisingly, Hutchens has refused to play her scripted role in this cynical charade – in defiance of threats to have her arrested and jailed for defying the court order. If Hutchens were taken into state custody, it’s entirely possible that Greenbank would seek to have her involuntarily committed for psychiatric treatment. While thus detained, she would be unable to pursue her lawsuit against the City of Sandpoint – which is almost certainly the point of this entire campaign of official persecution.

Thanks again -- and an update

 

My family and I continue to be blessed by your generosity, and we are deeply grateful. I'm still being treated for my infection, which is in remission but remains a frustratingly tenacious adversary. Hopefully I'll see an official end to my IV treatments next Tuesday. Thank you, once again, for your kindness. It means more to us than I can adequately express. 

Dum spiro, pugno!

Sheriff Bradshaw and the Palm Beach County Psihuska

"What's the worst that can happen?" asks Bradshaw about targeting "anti-government extremists"....

“What does it hurt,” asked Sheriff Ric Bradshaw of Florida’s Palm Beach County, “to have somebody knock on the door and ask, `Hey, is everything OK?’”

The answer to that question obviously depends on the identity of the “Somebody” who is making that inquiry. What Sheriff Bradshaw had in mind was a strike force composed of deputies, social workers, and “mental health” professionals from a “Behavioral Sciences Unit” (BSU) who would be on-call twenty-four hours a day, ready to be deployed to visit the homes of what the Soviets used to call “socially dangerous people.” In the Soviet Union, such people would often be involuntarily committed to a psihuska, or psychiatric prison.

“We want people to call us if the guy down the street says he hates the government, hates the mayor and he’s gonna shoot him,” Bradhsaw told the Palm Beach Post in describing the BSU, which would be funded through a $1 million grant from the state government. That grant hasn’t been formalized, but if the state legislature balks, it’s quite likely the Feds will chip in: In a speech last February 6 to the Alliance of DelRay Residential Organizations, Bradshaw said that he would prefer to fund the unit “through a federal grant.”

This is precisely the kind of pilot program the Feds would find worthwhile – indeed, it represents a model of “preventive intervention” that the federal government has been promoting for at least two decades.

In 1993, another law enforcement personality with roots in Florida, then-Attorney General Janet Reno, proposed the creation of specialized units composed of police and social workers who would fan out in troubled urban regions, knocking on doors, conducting “safety” evaluations, and connecting residents to government “services.”

 

... well, this is one possible answer.

During her reign of terror as Dade County Prosecutor – in which she displayed unalloyed viciousness in tearing children from their homes and persecuting innocent parents – Reno created “Neighborhood Resource Teams” teams composed of “community-friendly, highly respected police officers, social workers, public health nurses, [and] community organizers, working full time within a narrow neighborhood,” she recalled in a May 1993 speech to the National Forum on Prevention of Crime and Violence.

Reno had the temerity to offer her program as a national model just weeks after presiding over the April 19 holocaust at Waco, where she and her underlings provided the indispensable service of annihilating dozens of innocent children after torturing them for fifty-one days.

Like Reno, Bradshaw describes the purpose of his proposed Behavioral Science Unit in therapeutic terms. The objective, he insists, is “violence prevention” and “referral to services,” rather than an arrest. To those on the receiving end of that intervention, this distinction is entirely theoretical: Being taken into custody by armed strangers is an arrest, irrespective of the semantic camouflage, and every encounter between the public and the State’s costumed enforcers is pregnant with life-threatening violence against the innocent.

It should also be understood that Bradshaw’s real objective is not “violence prevention,” but rather civilian disarmament. This was also explained by the sheriff in his February 6 address. The purpose of the BSU, the sheriff said, is to “identify people with a propensity and inclination to go do violent things and stop them from accessing firearms.” A system of preemptive disarmament of people considered to be psychologically unstable or otherwise “dangerous” has actually been in place in Connecticut since 1999. Although it has resulted in the confiscation of firearms from thousands of innocent people, it did nothing to prevent the horror that unfolded last December at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Employing the services of “mental health professionals” to certify that people are dangerous to themselves or others would negate the need for an actual criminal prosecution. And for Bradshaw, the most potent indicator that a given individual is a “socially dangerous person” is a hatred for the institutionalized affliction called “government.”

The man accused of shooting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords “was telling other people about how much he hated government and government officials,” Bradshaw told his audience. The assumption here is that such opinions are symptoms of incipient criminal behavior. This is why the sheriff intends to create a 24-hour tipline through which neighbors, family, friends, and others can inform on people who display such dangerous attitudes.

“It’s the same principle that’s used by the Secret Service that’s very successful,” he insisted. The S.S. has a hotline that can be used to report impious and supposedly threatening comments about the murderous bureaucrat who occupies the Oval Office, on the assumption that blasphemy against the divine person of the Dear Leader is itself a criminal act.

While Bradshaw and others of his ilk regard idle words to be dangerous, if not criminal, they can’t see how people could perceive a threat in the sudden, unsolicited presence of armed state functionaries on their doorstep. After all, asks the sheriff, what would it hurt to send his deputies to confront people who aren’t suspected of a crime?

If he possessed a particle of honesty, Sheriff Bradshaw would pose that question to Dennis Gaydos, and listen carefully to the answer. Because of the kind ministrations of Bradshaw’s deputies, Gaydos is now missing an ear and an eye.

What makes his case an even more compelling precautionary example is the fact that, according to a lawsuit he filed against Bradshaw, Gaydos – a homeless man -- had “contacted a local assistance agency by telephone for the purpose of a referral for residential resources, financial aid, and general counseling.” While he was on the phone, the helpful social workers with whom he was speaking made a “referral” of their own to Bradshaw’s agency, which responded by dispatching a SWAT team.

Gaydos had established a shelter on a parcel of land behind a church. The pastor in charge of the congregation had given Gaydos permission to be there. Shortly after Gaydos called for help, a combined tactical force composed of deputies from the sheriff’s office and officers from the Palm Springs Police Department -- kitted out in paramilitary drag, carrying the familiar assortment of weapons, and supplemented with a helicopter -- set up a staging area near Gaydos’s shelter.

Although they were dealing with a sickly, unarmed homeless man who was not a criminal suspect, the Berserkers treated the incident as a combat situation. As they approached the encampment, Gaydos – who was holding his cell phone – stood up. Without a word of warning, he was shot twice in the head with rubber bullets. The first round damaged an ear; the second one destroyed his left eye. The assailants later tried to justify the head shots by claiming that they had seen a knife in Gaydos’s hand – but since no knife was ever recovered, this can be dismissed as a self-serving lie of the kind routinely offered by police officers after they kill or mutilate an innocent person.

Apparently satisfied merely to leave their victim partially deaf and partially blinded, the officers never arrested Gaydos. At the time of this March 2007 incident, the PBSO SWAT team was under the command of Lt. Dan Burrows, an oxycontin addict who was accused of stealing pain medicine and a rifle from a terminally ill former deputy.

About a year before the PBSO participated in the assault that mutilated Gaydos, Captain David Carhart, the head of the department’s violent crimes division, was purged from the force following multiple incidents in which he broke into the home of former girlfriends. One of them, Tracey Seberg, filed a complaint with the sheriff’s office – and Carhart responded by threatening to kill her if she didn’t retract it. According to Seberg, Carhart told her that he “felt like God when in uniform” and thus didn’t believe that he was subject to the rules that apply to mere Mundanes.

Although Carhart faced up to 15 years in prison for burglary and stalking, he was demoted to lieutenant and then quietly dismissed from the department in a mass layoff, receiving a $120,000 severance package.

Neither Burrows nor Carhart is presently available for duty with the Behavioral Science Unit. However, Sheriff Bradshaw will be able to make use of the services of Sgt. Brent Raban, a sociopath who was discharged from the force after boasting about his habit of beating suspects – and then reinstated, with the expectation of $150,000 in back pay, through the intervention of the police union.

Like the members of a hyper-violent police gang in Milwaukee, Sgt. Raban has an adolescent fixation on a comic book character called the Punisher. This wouldn’t be a problem to anybody else if Raban hadn’t been given a state-issued costume and official permission to act out his violent fantasies on helpless people. He advertised his intentions by accessorizing his costume with a camouflage-colored skullcap displaying the word “Punishment.”

“It’s not crime-fighting – I’m dealing out PUNISHMENT!” observed Raban in a 2009 Facebook post written while he was patrolling Belle Glade, a city whose residents are besieged by both private crime and officially-sanctioned police violence. Raban wasn’t concerned about facing charges, he gloated, because “Like a good batterer, I know the areas that hide the marks well.”  In another post he complained that it had been at least two weeks since he had beaten somebody, and that this prolonged dry spell had left him “itchy.”

When on-shift opportunities to beat handcuffed suspects became scarce, Raban found other ways to indulge what his boss calls a “propensity and inclination to go do violent things.” On one occasion he parked his squad car behind a school bus that was decanting young children, turned on his blue lights, and used his PA system to insult and upbraid parents who were picking up their kids – most likely in the hope that one of them would be provoked into offering him an excuse to inflict “punishment.”

From Sgt. Raban's Facebook page.

He was eventually fired after a woman in his neighborhood complained that he had parked his patrol car on the sidewalk in front of her home and used his position as a deputy to harass her family. 

By that time, Sheriff Bradshaw – who had reluctantly been forced to have Raban sign a “last-chance contract” – was compelled to fire Raban. But in Florida, as is the case in most other states, it is practically impossible to fire a law enforcement officer.

In April of this year, an arbitrator ordered Bradshaw to reinstate Raban and pay him back wages. According to the people responsible for imposing “accountability” on law enforcement officers, Raban’s sociopathic behavior does not disqualify him for service as a Palm Beach County Deputy – which may well include working with the BSU to visit and take into custody people anonymously accused of “hating the government.” After all, what other personality type would be interested in a job of that kind? 

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

My friends, I am indebted beyond measure for your unfathomably generous response to the appeal I posted a couple of weeks ago. During that interval I have  spent most of my time flat on my back while undergoing daily (for a while, twice-daily) antibiotic treatments.

I'm still facing weeks of treatment, but things are looking immeasurably better now than they did two weeks ago, and our prospects have been made much brighter through the immense and Providential generosity you have displayed to me and my family. Thank you so much for your help; your kindness has literally reduced me to tears on several occasions.

Without intending to slight anybody who has helped us, I want to make special public mention of Lew Rockwell, Ernie Hancock, Scott Horton, and Dr. Stan Monteith, each of whom used his influence to let many other people know about my plight. I intend to express personal thanks to everybody who has donated to help us out in this crisis, as well. God bless all of you -- and thank you, once again, on behalf of my entire family. 

Dum spiro, pugno!