"The Future is Too Good to Waste on Lies": Bowe Bergdahl's Moral Odyssey

 

Bowe Bergdahl and his mother, Jani.

“I can’t make up my mind to put the damn thing on again. I feel so clean and free. It’s like voluntarily taking up filth and slavery again….I think I’ll just walk off naked across the fields.”

John Andrews, a U.S. soldier in World War I who went AWOL, discusses his uniform in Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos

Trying to find their footing amid a gale-force outpouring of largely manufactured outrage, officials in Hailey, Idaho canceled their long-planned homecoming for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. They were understandably intimidated by the prospect of dealing with thousands of protesters who planned to besiege the tiny central Idaho town to demand the blood of a young man they now regard to be a deserter, and a father they consider a terrorist sympathizer.

To understand the kind of welcome the War Party has been preparing for Bowe and his family, it’s useful to consider the treatment given to the family of World War I-era conscientious objector John Witmer.

A Mennonite from Colombiana, Ohio who was denied a deferment by the local draft board, Witmer died from the Spanish Flu while stationed at Camp Sherman, Ohio. Witmer's lifeless body was returned to his hometown on October 10, 1918, where the family – his father Dan, his siblings, and his fiancee, Nola – was greeted by a silent crowd heavy with sullen disapproval for the “slacker” and his family.

Like thousands of others who shared his faith, John had been kidnapped at gunpoint from his family farm through the evil practice of conscription. The local draft board had turned down John's appeal for Conscientious Objector status, dishonestly assuring him that once he had taken the oath of enlistment he would be recognized as a CO and be given a non-combat assignment.

As with everything else of consequence that emerges from the lips, pen, or keyboard of a government functionary, those assurances were lies.

During wartime, explained Bernard Baruch, the head of the Wilson Regime’s War Industry Board, all “men, money and things” within the government’s claimed jurisdiction “suddenly become a compact instrument of destruction…. [T]he entire population must suddenly cease to be a congeries of individuals, each following a self-appointed course, and become a vast unitary mechanism." John Witmer, like many thousands of others, was designated a “slacker” because he persisted in the belief that he was not the property of the State. His refusal to  undergo military training forbidden by his religious convictions provoked violent reactions from his fellow conscripts, and led to a punitive re-assignment to a CO camp – a detention facility that was also used as a holding pen for German prisoners of war.

The weather turned colder, and influenza – one of the government's chief wartime imports from Europe – propagated itself throughout Camp Sherman.  John pleaded for adequate bedding and dry clothes, to no avail. The isolated, terrified young man contracted the Spanish Flu, from which he soon died.

John's body was returned in a flag-shrouded coffin. While most Americans would regard this as an honor, the Witmer family's convictions didn't allow them to make acts of allegiance to anyone or anything but God. There is a sense in which wrapping John's body in the US flag was one final proprietary gesture by the government that had stolen the young man from the family who loved him, the religious fellowship that had raised him, and the young woman who wanted to be his wife.

The crowd that had congealed at the train station to witness the arrival of John Witmer's body was acutely interested in the reaction of his Mennonite family. Most of the spectators knew that the Mennonites didn't support the war; their principled pacifism had provoked both curiosity and suspicion.

For a brief period, the Witmers enjoyed what could be called probationary sympathy from the crowd. But they quickly learned that few things are likelier to provoke sanctimonious violence from war-maddened Americans than a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm for killing foreigners whom the State has designated the “enemy.”

Slumping beneath a burden no parent should ever bear, Dan Witmer approached the coffin containing his son's body and carefully removed the flag. In doing so, he committed an act regarded as a sacrilege by adherents of the omnivorous idol called the State: Either out of innocent ignorance of, or commendable indifference to, the ritual called “flag etiquette,” Dan folded the banner as he would a blanket.

The crowd, deep in the throes of the psychosis called “war patriotism,” erupted in pious outrage.

“The mood of the onlookers turned from one of sympathy to hostility,” recounts Lily A. Bear in her book Report for Duty.

“Mennonites!” hissed one disgusted onlooker.

“Got what he deserved!” declared another of Dan's dead son.

“Traitor!” bellowed yet another outraged pseudo-patriot.

Someone hurled a stone that hit John's younger brother in the shoulder. A second stone, missing its target, landed at the feet of the mourning father. John's young sister Mary, puzzled and hurt by this display of murderous hatred, began to cry. After making arrangements for his son's funeral, Dan took his family home. This crowd, deprived of the hate objects that had given it cohesion, quickly dissipated.

This repellent spectacle, recall, occurred in a tiny Ohio town nearly one hundred years ago. In this age of saturation media and online social networking, the “homecoming” given the Bergdahl family would likely have been worse by several orders of magnitude.

“I will push for Bowe Bergdahl’s execution during the next Republican administration,” fumed South Carolina Republican agitator Todd Kincannon. “And his dad too. Those who commit treason need to die.” Kincannon’s sentiments are not an aberration.

Bowe’s detractors claim that his desertion cost the lives of U.S. soldiers sent to rescue him – a claim that plays well on talk radio but cannot be substantiated by casualty records. Given the fact that Bowe had expressed his growing misgivings to his superiors, the effort to locate him might have been less a rescue mission that an attempt to locate and re-assimilate a wayward drone who had exhibited troubling symptoms of resurgent individualism.

Like John Witmer, Bowe Bergdahl was raised in a deeply religious home. Unlike Witmer, Bergdahl was not a conscript. Like countless other young men, Bowe was lured into enlisting by a recruiter who cynically appealed to his idealistic and patriotic impulses, and offered lying assurances about the missions he would be required to carry out. Bowe was a committed and disciplined soldier who devoted what private time he had to refining his skills, conditioning his body, and feeding his mind, rather than indulging in recreational vice.
Once he arrived in Afghanistan, Bowe was immediately disillusioned by the corruption and cluelessness displayed by his superiors, the laxity and unprofessionalism of his fellow soldiers, and the criminal indifference to innocent lives that characterized the mission.

“The few good [sergeants] are getting out as soon as they can, and they are telling us privates to do the same,” Bowe informed his father in an e-mail. He decided to act on that advice immediately, explaining to his parents that “The future is too good to waste on lies.”

Bowe’s parents are Christians of the Calvinist persuasion who home-schooled him, instructed him in Christian ethics, and respected his independence of mind and sense of personal responsibility.

“Bowe was a young man with all the dangers of home-schooling – a brilliant and inquisitive mind, a crisp thinker, and someone who had never really been exposed to evil in the world,” recalls Phil Proctor, who was pastor of the Presbyterian Church attended by the Bergdahl family. “He [wanted] to determine whether the Christian faith was his own, or his parents’ and was doing a lot of exploring of ideas – never drugs or alcohol, but trying to be an outdoors/Renaissance type figure.”

When Bowe announced his enlistment in the US Army, Bob didn’t approve but also didn’t discourage him. When Bowe expressed his terminal disgust with the mission in Afghanistan, Bob offered the admonition: “Obey your conscience.”

By offering that advice, rather than rebuking his son or turning him in to his superiors as a potential “shirker,” Bob Bergdahl committed treason, according to his detractors, who insist that loyalty to the Warfare State trumps all other moral commitments.

Bowe’s parents never relented in their efforts to bring their son home. Now their relief over their son’s liberation, and their expressions of unconditional love toward him, are being depicted as evidence of disloyalty to the Regime and even hatred forAmerica.

“Bob felt (with some justification) that the US government was not going to engage with diplomatic efforts and so decided to try to free his son himself,” recounts Pastor Proctor. “He learned Pashtun and developed a lot of contacts in the Middle East. The Qatar connection is one that either originated with Bob or, at the very least, became very personally connected to Bob. Bob has, for quite some time, been saying that the closure of Guantanamo is integrally connected to the release of his son.”

In addition to placing his duty to his son above loyalty to the State, Bob Bergdahl’s offenses include learning the language of his captors and expressing the heretical view that God disapproves of death of Afghan children. Even Bob’s beard is presented as evidence of his supposed affinity for Islamic jihad, a charge that – if applied even-handedly – could justify a drone strike targeting the cast of Duck Dynasty.

Rather than being a jihadist sleeper cell, as they are being portrayed by War Party dead-enders, the Bergdahls are Christian individualists. Their moral universe is defined by the Two Great Commandments (that we love our Creator and love our neighbors as ourselves ) and biblical teachings regarding the reciprocal moral duties of parents and children. They do not place allegiance to the State above loyalty to their family – which to a statist is an unforgivable heresy.

Speaking on FoxNews, Dr. Keith Ablow – displaying the ideologically inspired certitude of a Brezhev-era Soviet psychiatrist – discerned “narcissistic” tendencies in the entire Bergdahl family. Bowe’s desire for adventure and self-directed nature indicate that “he can’t really serve the nation … because he’s serving himself.” Bowe’s individualism was a form of “addiction,” insisted Commissar Ablow, eliciting coos of thoughtful assent from the Fox News personalities interviewing him, one of whom was prompted to underscore the importance of “obey[ing] your commander, rather than your conscience,” which is a decidedly a pre-Nuremberg order of moral priorities .

Bowe’s incorrigible commitment to his conscience is to be expected, Commissar Ablow continued, given that Bowe was raised in a family displaying a tendency “to distance one’s self from institutions, to diminish the rule of law and to elevate the individual above all else.” The problem with the Bergdahls, Ablow suggested, was that they “don’t feel part of our country.” The exchange of five Gitmo detainees for “somebody who didn’t feel very American” resulted in “a tremendously psychologically dispiriting moment for our people,” summarized the putative doctor, who strikes me as the kind of person who would consider the public execution of the entire Bergdahl family to be a moment of communal healing.

For people in the grip of war patriotism, the proper role for Bob and Jani Bergdahl was described in Livy’s account of the Horatti, or sons of Horace. During one of the countless conflicts in Rome's early expansion, Horace's triplet sons volunteered to engage three brothers from a rival tribe on the battlefield. The victors would win, on behalf of their city-state, possession of a strategically crucial – and now long-forgotten -- village.

Rome’s opponents were killed in a battle that also claimed two of Horace’s sons. In the subsequent victory celebration Horace lost one of his daughters as well: She was killed by the surviving brother as punishment for her romantic dalliance with an enemy of Rome. Horace bore the losses stoically, as befitting a father who sought above all things the greater glory of the government that claimed him.

Under that model of “patriotism” – which inspired the totalitarian French Jacobins, as well as their ideological offspring in Italy and Germany – Bob Bergdahl’s duty was to chastise his errant son, and exhort him to be true and faithful in carrying out the State’s murderous errand. If Bowe were to be killed by Afghans defending their country, his parents were expected to regard their son as an exalted hero, and their irreplaceable loss as a holy privilege.

Bowe was hardly the first American soldier whose understandable disillusionment led him to quit while deployed overseas.

                                                              

“I cannot support a mission that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars,” wrote

Colonel Ted Westhusing, a West Point Graduate, Special Forces veteran, and devout Catholic husband and father, in a despairing e-mail to his family. “I am sullied. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. Death before being dishonored any more.”

A few hours later Col. Westhusing shot himself in the head, ending his life less than a month before his tour of duty was scheduled to end. In the fashion of “Doctor” Ablow, an Army psychologist who reviewed Westhusing's e-mails following his suicide determined that the Colonel was “unusually rigid in his thinking” and unreasonably committed to his moral code.

 Army Specialist Alyssa Peterson was also devoutly religious, a former Mormon missionary from Flagstaff, Arizona. Like Bowe and Bob Bergdahl, Peterson had what one friend described as an “amazing” ability to learn languages, an aptitude that helped her learn Arabic at the Army's Defense Language Institute. Spec. Peterson volunteered for duty in Iraq, where she was sent to help interrogate prisoners and translate captured documents at an air base in Tal-Afar.

And, like Ted Westhusing, Alyssa Peterson was driven to suicidal depression as a result of the role the regime forced her to play in Iraq.

“Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners,” summarized Reporter Kevin Elston, who was using the official euphemism for “torture.” “She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokesmen for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed.”

Immediately after lodging her objections, Alyssa was reassigned and sent to suicide prevention training; her suicide note took ironic notice of the fact that the “prevention” training actually instructed her in the best way to kill herself.

“What right had a man to exist who was too cowardly to stand up for what he thought and felt … for everything that made him an individual apart from his fellows, and not a slave to stand cap in hand waiting for someone of stronger will to act?” asked John Andrews, a WWI-era deserter, in John Dos Passos’ novel Three Soldiers. It’s quite likely that Ted Westhusing and Alyssa Peterson asked that question of themselves. Bowe Bergdahl’s emails to his father make it clear that he was pondering that question at the time of his desertion.

Implicated in grotesque crimes against decency, Col. Westhusing and Spec. Peterson “deserted” through suicide. They were buried with honors, and their bereaved families received sympathy, rather than scorn. Rather than ending his life, or allowing it to be wasted in the service of lies, Bowe Bergdahl sought to reclaim it on his own terms – and this is why War Party fundamentalists are seeking to not only to imprison him, but to destroy his entire family.

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Baby-Burning Stormtroopers of Habersham County, Georgia

For the love of God, stop the insane drug war.

“I stand behind what our team did,” insists Habersham, Georgia County Sheriff Joey Terrell, referring to a 3:00 a.m. no-knock SWAT raid in which a 19-month-old child was severely burned by a flash-bang grenade. “There’s nothing to investigate, there’s nothing to look at,” continued the sheriff, relaying the conclusions of the County DA’s office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. “Bad things can happen. That’s just the world we live in.”

The world Terrell inhabits is one in which police – acting as righteousness incarnate – kick in doors at 3:00 am and hurl incendiary devices into homes in order to arrest people on suspicion of non-violent drug offenses. If an infant receives life-altering burns as a result of that incursion, this can't be laid at the jackbooted feet of his officers, the sheriff maintains. The fault resides with the alleged drug dealers, whom the sheriff denounced as people “who want to do the domestic terrorism and sell dope and make the money.”

An unnamed petty criminal who acted as an informant told Terrell’s task force that drug commerce had occurred at the targeted residence in Cornelia, and that armed men were acting as “guards.” However, the stormtroopers found no drugs in the house. The suspect they sought wasn’t present when the raiders kicked in the door. Nineteen-month-old Boukham “Bou-Bou” Phonesavankh and his parents were visiting from Wisconsin after their own home had been burned down. 

The informant whose “controlled buy” provided the pretext for the subsequent atrocity supposedly reported that there were no children at the residence. Having lost their home in Wisconsin in a fire, the family was in Cornelia visiting relatives in the hope of rebuilding their lives – only to find themselves on the receiving end of an act of state-sponsored terrorism.

“Everyone’s sleeping,” recalled Alecia Phonesavanh, the mother of the infant victim, describing her family’s encounter with Terrell’s ministering angels of divine justice. “There’s a loud bang and a bright light. The cops threw that grenade in the door without looking first, and it landed right in the playpen and exploded on his pillow right in his face.”

The Sheriff has indicated that any criminal charges arising from the burning of the infant would be added to the indictment against the alleged drug dealer. He has also insinuated that the parents are responsible for the near-fatal injuries suffered by their baby. This is in keeping with the “Collateral Murder” model of deflected responsibility: When the Regime’s hired killers slaughter or mutilate children, it’s the fault of the parents for living in a targeted neighborhood.

Terrell's pious condemnation of drug-derived profits conceals his role as a kingpin in a criminal syndicate that exists in murderous symbiosis with Georgia's criminal underworld: Sheriff Terrell is the key figure in the Mountain Judicial Circuit Narcotics Criminal Investigation and Suppression Team (NCIS), a federally funded task force that prowls a three-county region in search of cash and property that can be seized in the name of “asset forfeiture.”

Like other federally funded einsatzgruppen of its kind, the NCIS liaises with small-caliber criminals, such as the “confidential informant” who allegedly conducted a meth transaction at the home where Terrell's minions later carried out the raid. Funding for the NCIS comes from a federal Byrne Grant, which is administered by the Habersham County Commissioners' office.

Terrell, along with Stephens County Sheriff Randy Shirley, is responsible for hiring, training, and deploying undercover NCIS officers, and bears command responsibility for the actions of the task force's tactical team. When the raiders carried out the 3:00 am raid in which 19-month-old “Bou-Bou” was nearly burned to death – the grenade “blew open his face and chest,” his anguished mother recalled – they acted as extensions of his will, and he shares culpability for their crimes.

In his first public comments following the attack that nearly killed Bou-Bou, Sheriff Terrell emphasized that the County DA and Georgia Bureau of Investigation had already “investigated” the incident and ruled that the actions of the SWAT team were “justified.”  While the sheriff offered perfunctory and grudging expressions of sympathy for the infant victim and his family (“I don’t think [the burns] cover a significant amount of the face or the chest,” Terrell said of an infant who was in a medically induced coma), he described in detail the trauma he insists was suffered by his stormtroopers, the people he obviously considers the real victims.

The officer who threw the grenade “is basically upside down,” relates the sheriff. “He’s gone and talked to his pastor, trying to get some counseling and some debriefing just to help him get through what has happened.” If that pastor is a man of God, rather than an agent of Leviathan, he will prescribe abject repentance in sackcloth and ashes.

Matt Wurtz, the on-site commander of the goon squad that raided the home, was similarly devastated, Terrell continues, but in a “trembling” voice expressed his determination to continue kicking in doors at 3:00 a.m. “because children are getting involved in situations they don’t need to be.”

That’s right: The on-site commander whose subordinates nearly burned a child to death in a raid the likes of which the Gestapo might have regarded excessive did it For The Children.

Sheriff Terrell likewise remains committed to pursuing the path of righteousness:

"We’re called for a purpose. The members of this team want to be here… We’re getting more and more information about children, 14-15 years of age, getting into methamphetamine. Who is going to stand up for them? Who is going to do the right thing? We are! We are! And we are not going to stop what we do.”

One wonders if the “information” to which Sheriff Terrell refers is as reliable as that provided by the “confidential informant” who told police that there were no children at the home prior to the SWAT raid.

Although Bou-Bou's prospects for survival are improving, it's quite likely he will be permanently disfigured as a result of the ministrations he received from Terrell's angelic emissaries of justice. The son of former Livonia, Georgia resident Jonathan Ayers, however, suffered an injury that cannot be repaired: He hadn't been born when NCIS officers murdered his father, a 28-year-old Baptist minister, on September 1, 2009.

Ayers was shot and killed by Officer Billy Shane Harrison outside a convenience store in Toccoa, Georgia. Harrison was one of three undercover NCIS operatives who pulled up in an unmarked black SUV and – with guns drawn – surrounded Ayers’ vehicle after the pastor had made a withdrawal at a nearby ATM.  The undercover cops looked like private sector thugs, and Ayers understandably thought he was dealing with carjackers His dying words at a local hospital made it clear that he didn’t know that the gun-wielding, disreputable figures who accosted him belonged to a criminal caste that is protected by “qualified immunity.”

Ayers, in a panic, hit the gas, and his vehicle made brief and harmless contact with Officer Chance Oxner. Harrison later claimed that he opened fire to protect his partner in state-sanctioned crime, but this doesn’t explain why he continued firing once Ayers had driven away and the supposed threat had ended.

The victim wasn’t aware that just a few hours earlier, Oxner – who had been hired by Sheriff Terrell – had conducted a $50 drug transaction with a woman named Kayla Barrett, a prostitute and alleged drug dealer. Ayers had been observed giving Barrett money and a ride to the extended-stay hotel where she lived with her boyfriend. 

The pastor’s family and close friends insist that Ayers was ministering to the prostitute; his detractors claimed that those roles were reversed. In either case, Ayers wasn’t a criminal suspect. The officers claimed that their intent in approaching him at the gas station was to question him about Barrett, but that doesn’t explain why they swarmed him with their guns drawn. 

As in the case of the recent atrocity in Cornelia, the killing of Ayers was the subject of a perfunctory internal investigation that exonerated the officers. The victim’s widow, Abigail Ayers, filed a lawsuit, and Harrison – along with sheriffs Terrell and Shirley – moved for summary judgment on the basis of “qualified immunity.”

In February of last year, a federal judge ruled that Harrison and his comrades had “no probable cause to believe Ayers had committed a crime when Officer Harrison first approached Ayers’s car with his gun drawn,” which means that the use of deadly force could not be considered “objectively reasonable.” In February of this year, a federal court awarded Abigail and her son more than $2 million for the unlawful killing of Jonathan by Harrison.

Jonathan Ayers died believing that he was a victim of an attempted armed robbery. He was correct. The behavior of Harrison and his comrades was illegal even under the emancipated definitions of “lawful” conduct that govern the state’s plunderbund: At the time of the shooting, the lawsuit pointed out, Harrison “was not authorized under Georgia law to perform the duties of a law enforcement officer and had no legal right to demand [Ayers’s] compliance with his directives.”

Harrison had not completed a mandatory course of instruction on firearms and the use of deadly force. In addition, he was “known to the Mountain Judicial Circuit NCIS and Sheriff Shirley to have illegally used marijuana on multiple occasions and was further known to have committed acts of dishonesty including stealing from a prior employer,” reports the lawsuit. Officer Oxner “had been convicted of the criminal offense of Theft by Taking and had a reported history of alcohol abuse and suspected (by the Habersham County Sheriff’s Office) participation in illegal drug activities.” 

Officer Kyle Brandt, the supervisor on the scene when Ayers was murdered, was aware of the dubious background of his underlings. In fact, he had previously worked with Harrison and was the one who recommended him to Sheriff Shirley as a member of the NCIS undercover task force. Media attention generated by Abigail Ayers’ lawsuit shamed the GBI – which had initially performed the expected cover-up of the crime -- into conducting an actual investigation. This resulted in the arrest of Lt. Edwin Wilson of the Stephens County Sheriff’s Office, who falsified Harrison’s training records. 

Like others engaged in the cynical exercise called the “War on Drugs,” Sheriff Terrell likes to pretend that he and his comrades areseeking an end to the narcotics trade. The unadorned truth is that his narco-stormtroopers subsist on narcotics proceeds, and their federal Memorandum of Understanding – a species of Pirate’s Constitution – assumes that the “war” in which they are engaged will carry on in perpetuity.

The MOU specifies that the federal Byrne Grant will pay one hundred percent of “commander salaries” for the NCIS, and that the team itself “will pay 100% of [its] Operational Expenses from previously seized funds.” Under its deal with the Feds, the NCIS will receive “100% of revenues generated” though asset forfeiture and property confiscation. This provides the task force’s criminally inclined rank-and-file with an incentive to stage sting operations, “pretext stops,” and door-kicks in order to find money and property they can steal.

For their part, the task force commanders are instructed that “continued sustainability beyond grant funding is a basis for initial grant fund approval.” In other words: Your federally guaranteed salaries depend on the productivity of the predators under your command. 

According to the Institute for Justice, “Georgia has some of the nation’s worst civil forfeiture laws,” and its law enforcement agencies are among the most aggressive in the entire soyuz in practicing that form of state-sanctioned robbery. 

Not surprisingly, police in Georgia are also among the worst with respect to record-keeping and public reporting of seizures. Reports on forfeiture proceeds typically “lack even basic details necessary for proper public oversight, such as what was taken and when, how much it was worth and what was done with the proceeds.”

In 1993, Georgia law enforcement agencies took in $6 million in civil forfeiture proceeds. In 2003 – the last year for which comprehensive accounting figures were available – that amount had increased to $33 million. 

It should be recalled that Sheriff Terrell described drug dealers as people who “who want to do the domestic terrorism and sell dope and make the money.” His NCIS task force is a murderous, tax-subsidized, predatory criminal clique composed of violent, addiction-prone men who are immeasurably more dangerous than the drug dealers they pursue. Whatever else can truthfully be said about narcotics dealers in Georgia, they don’t kick in doors at 3:00 am and burn infants in their cribs.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Silly Mundane -- "Civil Rights" are for Killer Cops

The United States Constitution, as Seattle police officers pretend to understand it, extends to police an unqualified right to the discretionary use of aggressive force, and prohibits “second-guessing” by those who are not members of the State's coercive caste. 

Inhibiting the exercise of that entitlement, the officers claim in a lawsuit filed against the U.S. Justice Department and the City of Seattle, would be a “violation of the Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution.”

In 2012, after a Justice Department investigation concluded that Seattle police officers routinely use unnecessary force, the City of Seattle implemented a new use-of-force policy and agreed to the creation of an independent police monitor. The current lawsuit, which was filed on behalf of more than 100 Seattle cops, complains that those trivial and inadequate restrictions created “vaguely defined, newly protected classes of suspects” and violate the officers' supposed “right not to be required to take unnecessary risks.”

An “unnecessary” risk, on this construction, would occur any time a police officer is required to use “significantly less force than is being threatened against them by suspects … [who] appear to be or are engaged in threatening and dangerous conduct.” (Emphasis added.) Police are trained to believe that they put their lives at risk  in every encounter with a citizen, and to regard any gesture of non-compliance as an immediate and impermissible risk to that most sacred of all considerations, “officer safety.”

At present, in most of the country a police officer who brutalizes or kills somebody without moral justification can take refuge in the “totality of circumstances” test. In practice, this is nothing less than an unalloyed entitlement to kill first, and devise a suitable rationale after the fact. 

Seattle's new use-of-force guidelines, the police lawsuit objects, require officers – who, as a class, are selected on the basis of limited intellectual agility – “to engage in mental gymnastics wholly unreasonable in the light of the dangerous and evolving circumstances we face every day. This creates unnecessary and, therefore, unconstitutional risks to Plaintiffs' safety.”

Just as unconscionable, from the cops' perspective, is the fact that their violent actions would be subject to what they call “the very second-guessing prohibited by the Constitution” – that is, their actions would be scrutinized by people who are not part of their privileged class. This distant possibility of accountability “places unconstitutional risks and burdens on the Plaintiffs' lives and livelihood,” pouts the civil complaint.

Those unacceptable risks can be avoided, of course, if police officers unwilling to deal with the modest dangers associated with that vocation would pursue other employment. The vexatious and complicated conditions imposed by official “use-of-force” guidelines would be unnecessary if police officers were subject to the same non-aggression standard that applies to everybody else. But extracting aggressive violence from law enforcement would be as futile as attempting to dehydrate water. 

 

John T. Williams, prior to being "protected and served."

The use-of-force approach preferred by the Seattle police plaintiffs was displayed in the August 30, 2010 murder of John T. Williams on a street corner by Officer Ian Birk. 

Williams, a partially deaf, 50-year-old alcoholic woodcarver who suffered from psychological problems, was shot four times by Birk within a few seconds of the encounter.

Birk claimed that he had been "threatened" by Williams, who was carrying two small, closed knives at the time of the incident. The autopsy, however, documented that Williams wasn't facing Birk when he was shot: The officer approached him from behind and to the right, and Williams was shot in the right side of his body from an estimated distance of about ten feet. In addition to being partially deaf, Williams was wearing headphones at the time he was killed. 

The victim’s non-cooperation, which was interpreted by Birk as hostility, most likely meant that he never heard the demand to drop his carving knife. Since the knives were legal under Seattle’s municipal code, Birk’s demand was not a “lawful order” in any sense. 

In his testimony, Birk mentioned that he and other police are taught the "21-foot rule," which dictates that a knife-wielding subject should be considered a lethal threat within the prescribed distance. Williams was carrying two small knives, but he wasn’t “wielding” them.  Rather than moving aggressively toward Birk, Williams was walking away from the officer: Birk said under oath that "I motioned for him to come over and talk to me. He walked away.”

During the January 2011 inquest into the shooting, Birk stated that he gunned down John T. Williams on a Seattle street corner because he didn't like the way the 50-year-old chronic alcoholic looked at him.

 

Play-acting and perjury: Birk on the stand.

"He had a very stern, very serious, very confrontational look on his face," Birk testified during the inquest. “His brow was furrowed.... His jaws were set.” 

Birk’s description of Williams as displaying a countenance like that of the legendary Celtic warrior Cu Chulain (whose “eyes were dark, his expression sullen”) wasn’t confirmed by any of the several non-police eyewitnesses. 

Although Birk and his defenders invoked the “reasonable officer” standard to justify the killing, no reasonable person would have considered Williams a threat to Birk. We know this because there were several reasonable people who witnessed the incident, none of whom perceived the pathetic man to pose a risk to anybody. This is because none of them had ben indoctrinated to perceive even a momentary lack of cooperation by a Mundane as a "pre-attack indicator," or marinated in the conceit that officer safety always and everywhere trumps every other moral or practical consideration.

 “Why did you shoot him? He wasn’t doing anything!” exclaimed one woman after Birk killed Williams.

It took just seconds for Birk to escalate an incidental encounter to the point of homicide. His reflexive reaction was to kill someone who was demonstrably harmless – and the programmed response of the first fellow officer on the scene was to commend Birk for doing so. Officer William Collins, who arrived in response to Birk’s “shots fired” report, told him, seconds after the killing, that he had done a "good job." All that Collins knew at the time was that a fellow member of the punitive caste had just killed a Mundane -- and that's all he needed to know. No “second-guessing” would be necessary, or allowed.

During the January shooting inquest, Seattle police brutality lawyer Tim Ford asked Collins if a closed knife constitutes a threat to "officer safety." A closed knife is "a major threat," Collins insisted, "just as big as an open knife.... It's extremely dangerous, and you have to treat the person with utmost caution.... [I]f you don't drop it, you may be shot" -- even if it is closed at the time, the officer maintained. 

“We don't get paid enough to be hurt,” simpered Collins on the witness stand.

Detective Jeff Mudd, who also testified at the inquest, also applauded Birk's decision: "We're trained to shoot people who pose a threat to us."

The alleged “threat” posed by Williams consisted of a dirty look the decrepit old alcoholic had supposedly given a young, healthy, but lethally craven police officer. 

 

Birk resigned after the Seattle PD’s firearms review board ruled that the killing of Williams was “unjustified and out of policy.” Police Chief John Diaz referred to Birk’s actions as unjustified and “egregious.” Therefore it was an act of criminal homicide, correct? Not according to King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, who declined to file charges. Significantly, the Obama-Holder Justice Department, which devised the new use-of-force standard that is supposedly suffocating the bold and valiant officers of the Seattle Police Department, also refused to file civil rights charges against Birk.

Seattle-area tax victims were forced to pay a $1.5 million settlement to the family of John T. Williams. The only “punishment” Birk received for the unlawful killing was his compelled resignation from the police force. According to the plaintiffs in the Seattle police lawsuit – who, remarkably, are not being supported by the local police union – this was an atrocious violation of Birk’s civil rights.

Most people believe that the purpose of the Bill of Rights is to protect citizens against abuses of their rights by government officials. The incurably self-preoccupied people behind the Seattle police lawsuit apparently believe that the Bill of Rights exists to emancipate law enforcement officers from restrictions on the use of lethal force, and immunize them against legal, civil, and professional accountability when they kill people without legal justification. 

Dum spiro, pugno!