Stormtroopers and Child-Snatchers (Update, April 14)

The Nanny State Goes to War: Paramilitary Police lay siege to Maryanne Goldbodo's Detroit Home.

Ariana Goldboldo, a mentally handicapped 13-year-old, was abducted from her home at gunpoint on March 24. Her captors have systematically poisoned her through injections of a dangerous psychoactive drug. There is also reason to believe that Ariana, who has reportedly tested positive for an STD, has been molested during her time in captivity.


Ariana's mother, Maryanne, made a valiant but futile effort to protect her daughter. As a result, she may end up in prison. If this happens, Ariana almost certainly won't survive.

Godboldo, a college dance instructor, had attempted to school her daughter at home, but eventually decided to place the youngster in a local government school. This meant that the girl would have to undergo a government-dictated suite of vaccinations. 

Shortly after receiving the injections, the girl experienced severe side-effects, including behavioral problems she hadn’t previously experienced. 

When Godboldo consulted with local health and welfare officials, she was told that her daughter would have to receive regular injections of Risperdal, supposedly to counteract the effects of the other government-mandated vaccinations. This is a bit like prescribing cancer to treat diabetes. Among the documented side-effects of that drug are tardive dyskinesia (difficulty with basic motor skills) and severe emotional problems – including suicidal thoughts. When Godboldo’s long-suffering child began to display those symptoms, the mother refused to continue with the injections.

The local “child protection” bureaucracy – which, like all other agencies of its kind, subscribes to the totalitarian assumption that children are the property of the state – decreed that Godboldo was "in denial about her daughter's mental health issue." 

There's no evidence that Godboldo disputed the seriousness of her daughter's condition; as Ariana's primary caretaker, she understood it very well. She had very reasonable doubts about the competence of the therapeutic officials who were forcing Ariana to undergo injections of a potentially lethal drug. But it is impermissible for parents to entertain such reservations about the wisdom of those clothed in the purported authority of the State, or to resist their prescriptions, whatever their efficacy. 

Sure, Ariana might die or be driven irretrievably mad as a result of government-mandated treatment -- but this was a decision for the Anointed Ones to make, and for parents to accept with proper docility. Accordingly, the CPS authorized itself to “liberate” Godboldo’s daughter in order to continue poisoning her with Risperdal injections. A small team of government kidnappers – CPS workers and Detroit Police officers – materialized on Godboldo’s doorstep, demanding that she surrender the child. 

Nied preens in Iraq.

"They broke into my home illegally in an effort to take my daughter," Godboldo recalls. "They had no documentation that said they were allowed to enter my home."

Godboldo, acting on her natural authority as a parent to protect her child, refused to let the kidnappers take her daughter. 

When Godboldo refused to let CPS take her daughter, a home invasion team -- led, appropriately, by a veteran of the Iraq occupation, Lt. Michael Nied -- forced its way into the home.  Nied claims that Godboldo fired a gunshot that sprayed him with drywall residue and made his little heart quiver. He and his fellow heroes retreated and called in a "barricaded gunman situation." A ten-hour siege then ensued.

Prudential considerations aside, Godboldo would have been within her rights to gun down the kidnappers, had she possessed the means to do so. She hadn't committed a criminal offense, and the police didn't bother to bring along one of those cunning little permission slips judges reflexively issue any time police want to invade a home. In moral and legal terms they were no better than any other gang of armed intruders.

Eventually a paramilitary SWAT team – complete with automatic weapons, armored personnel carriers, and helicopters – was dispatched to surround Godboldo’s home. The mother eventually surrendered and was put in jail on a $500,000 bond. Although Maryanne was released on bail, her daughter remains in the custody of her abductors, undergoing forcible injections of a drug that is slowly destroying her body and mind -- and, quite possibly, being subjected to sexual violation as well.

Godboldo can take a small measure of comfort in the fact that Ariana -- unlike Aiyana Jones, who was murdered by a Detroit SWAT team in a gratuitous raid staged for a "reality TV" program a year ago -- is still alive. But the risk to that child increases with every minute she remains in the custody of Michigan's child "protection" service.

Last year, Detroit ABC affiliate WXYZ presented a detailed report on the murder of 10-year-old Johnny Andron, a child suffering from epilepsy and cerebral palsy who was seized by the state and starved to death in what was referred to as a "foster care facility." Johnny's mother Elena, a single parent, devoted most of her free time to caring for her wheelchair-bound son. 

After she lost her factory job, Elena made the tragic error of seeking "help" from the child "welfare" system, which makes a federally subsidized profit each time it steals a child from his parents. Johnny was made a "temporary ward of the state," a judicial designation that was tantamount to a death sentence. The same was true of Elena's parental rights, since the same ruling placed her on a central registry of "abusive" and "neglectful" parents. She was placed inside the hamster wheel of government-approved "parenting classes" taught by profiteering busybodies who've attached themselves like boxcars to the federal gravy train.

For months, Elena struggled to find and keep a new job while dutifully attending classes that did nothing but clutter her schedule. During the same period she watched her son, who had been a hefty child but -- considering his disabilities -- a healthy one, slowly waste away through deliberate criminal neglect. 

Infuriated that her child was being tortured to death through starvation, Elena dared to complain. This action was taken as evidence of her unsuitability to be a parent. She was summoned to court and informed by a black-robed functionary that she wouldn't be permitted any further visits with her son. She had no further contact with Johnny, and no updates on his status until a representative of the criminal syndicate that had taken him hostage announced to her that he had died.

Mike Ratte nearly lost his seven-year-old son into Michigan's foster-care gulag after mistakenly allowing the child to take a sip from a beverage called Mike's Hard Lemonade during a Tigers game in 2008. Ratte, a professor of archeology at the University of Michigan, didn't know that the product contained alcohol. Since the sign advertising the drink described it only as "Mike's Lemonade," Ratte assumed that it was merely an overpriced soft drink.

Leo took a sip of the beverage, immediately found it distasteful, and place the bottle on the floor near his bleacher seat. Shortly before the game ended a Comerica Park security guard waddled over, picked up the bottle, and asked Ratte if his son had been drinking from it. 


Although Reed was puzzled by the question, he replied in the affirmative. His puzzlement mutated into alarm when he was told that the "lemonade" was actually an alcoholic drink. The guard demanded that Ratte and his son remain seated while a scrum of his buddies assembled to escort them to a police substation located in the stadium.


When questioned by the police, Ratte admitted -- once again -- that Leo had taken a swig of the drink, repeating as well his insistence that this was an innocent mistake. Anybody burdened with even a particle of common sense would recognize this as the truth. If Mike Ratte were perversely determined to get his son drunk, would he do so in public? If questioned about this, would such a person admit that his son had sampled the forbidden libation?

Anybody capable of making an EEG needle twitch would recognize that this was an honest mistake, not a crime. (Another Michigan family recently had a similar but scarier experience, due to a mix-up at an Applebee's restaurant.) This was made all the more obvious when an exam confirmed that Leo wasn't intoxicated. But this didn't prevent the police from doing what they are programmed to do in such circumstances, which is to use any available pretext to kidnap the child.


As described in a civil complaint filed on behalf of the family, Mike and Leo were forced to take an ambulance ride to a nearby hospital, where Leo was forced to endure a blood test that confirmed the absence of alcohol in his body. While his son was being needlessly bled and perforated, Mike was taken to a separate room and questioned by Officer Celeste Reed of the Detroit Police Department's Child Abuse Division. This wasn't an investigation; it was a dilatory maneuver. Reed was simply waiting until the child-snatchers had worked out the details of the abduction. 


When she finally acknowledged to Ratte that she and her comrades were going to steal his son, Reed played the Nuremberg Defense card, blaming a superior who was "pushing this case to impress her new boss." Once Leo was in custody, however, Reed took the initiative, perjuriously claiming in her report that officers had "observed [Leo] to be intoxicated." 


Leo was sequestered from his family and put into temporary foster care while the CPS bureaucracy labored to find some way to make their abduction permanent. The "referee" assigned to the case announced that she would keep it open for a week. However, Mike and his wife -- unlike most of the families victimized by the child-snatchers -- were people of means and influence. With the help of a capable attorney they were able to free their son after a mere two days' captivity. 

 "Class has something to do with the fact that the child was only in care for two days," points out Don Duquette, a law professor at the University of Michigan and director of the university's child advocacy center said. "If you're not sophisticated, the system isn't set up to give you very much of a chance to work against the ritual that's ordinarily done."

The "ritual" Duquette refers to is a form of bureaucratic child sacrifice: Families are destroyed, and children are abused under the color of supposed government authority, in order to placate the demands of the tax-feeding class. That ritual can commence at any time, for any reason. And any family can be selected as sacrificial victims. All that is required is the conjunction of an anonymous complaint and a willing bureaucrat. I write those words as a father who has confronted that prospect face-to-face.

Damn straight.

 The kidnapping of Leo Ratte occurred because his father made a trivial mistake involving a government-restricted mood-altering substance that inflicted no measurable harm on the child. 

By way of contrast, Elena Andron and Maryanne Godboldo have been traduced as "neglectful" parents because they sought to preserve their handicapped children from state-sanctioned harm. As a result, Elena's son Johnny is dead, and the same people responsible for that atrocity will quite possibly kill Ariana unless Maryanne is able to rescue her from the child "protection" system.





If Maryanne goes to prison, her daughter will die. At present, her prosecution on assault charges is being held in abeyance pending a ruling from the Michigan State Supreme Court in a case "that will determine if residents have the right to defend themselves from police officers entering a home without proper authority," reports the Detroit News. 

Embedded in this delay is a critical admission by the prosecution -- namely, that Godboldo is correct in claiming that the CPS raid was conducted without legal authority. Unfortunately -- albeit predictably -- the Michigan Court of Appeals has ruled that it is, in all circumstances, a "felony" for a Mundane to obstruct or resist the aggressive violence of a police officer acting without lawful authority. 


In a 1999 ruling (People v. Wess), the Michigan Court of Appeals, citing the state legal code, admitted that citizens had a right, explicitly protected by state statute, "to use such reasonable force as is necessary to prevent an illegal attachment and to resist an illegal arrest." However, in the dicta of that ruling the court all but begged for either the legislature or the state Supreme Court to change the law:


"We share the concerns of other jurisdictions that the right to resist an illegal arrest is an outmoded and dangerous doctrine, and we urge our Supreme Court to reconsider this doctrine at the first available opportunity.... we see no benefit to continuing the right to resist an otherwise peaceful arrest made by a law enforcement officer, merely because the arrestee believes the arrest is illegal. Given modern procedural safeguards for criminal defendants, the `right' only preserves the possibility that harm will come to the arresting officer or the defendant."

The line about "procedural safeguards" is unfiltered codswallop, of course -- but remember it, because we'll return to it anon. 


In 2002, the Michigan state legislature modified the relevant section of the state code (MCL 705.81d) by removing the clause recognizing the common law right to "use such reasonable force as is necessary to prevent" an unlawful arrest (that is, an armed kidnapping) by a police officer.  

 In a 2004 ruling (People v. Ventura) that dealt with a self-defense claim against an unlawful arrest, the Court of Appeals, in a perfectly nauseating display of mock humility, proclaimed that "it is not within our province to disturb our Legislature's obvious affirmative choice to modify the traditional common-law rule that a person may resist an unlawful arrest." 

Of course, the legislature made that "choice" after being invited to do so by the same Court of Appeals.

Maryanne Godboldo (center) with liturgical dancers at her church.

In the 2008 case headed for the state Supreme Court (People v. Moreno), the Appeals Court observed that "we find no reference to the lawfulness of the arrest or detaining act" in the statute, which "states only that an individual who resists a person the individual knows or has reason to know is performing his duties is guilty of a felony."


As the Michigan Court of Appeals acknowledged, the Common Law recognizes an unqualified right to resist an unlawful arrest. The Constitution -- for whatever it's worth -- reinforces that right by placing due process impediments (such as the necessity of obtaining search warrants) on the ability of armed hirelings in government-issued costumes to inflict themselves on their betters. But the Court of Appeals -- like every statist body of its kind -- insists that the costume trumps the Common Law and the Constitution. 


Now let's return to the notion that the right to resist arrest has become "outmoded" because of the "procedural safeguards" that supposedly protect criminal defendants. Ariana Godboldo has never been charged with a crime; neither had her mother, until she engaged in a heroic but doomed effort to protect her child from an assault on their home that the prosecution now tacitly admits was unlawful. 

As Elena Andron and countless other parents have learned, there are no procedural safeguards for parental rights or the individual rights of children once the CPS intervenes. 

The federally subsidized child "protection" universe is a joint production of Lenin, Kafka and Salvador Dali in which power means everything, facts and law mean nothing, and the contours of "reality" are warped in the service of  self-enraptured bureaucrats. 

Unless a parent is a person of means and influence, like Mike Ratte, active resistance
may be the only way to keep his child or children from disappearing into the CPS Archipelago once the family comes to the attention of the child-snatchers. Ideally, this would mean pro-active measures to conceal a targeted child, or to provide for the child's escape in the event the child-nappers arrive.

As the abduction of Ariana Godboldo demonstrates, the child "protection" apparatus is literally at war with American parents, and police are prepared to murder any parent determined to keep his children out of the hands of those who can drug them, starve them, and molest them with impunity.  

Update: No crisis, no crime, but the prosecution will proceed

"Authorities have determined there is no emergency need for [13-year-old Ariana Godboldo] ... to be on medication, after the girl's mother was accused of medically neglecting her by not giving her a psychotropic drug," reports the Detroit Free Press. "Though officials said Wednesday that there was no immediate need to give the girl medication, Michigan Assistant Attorney General David Law said he may reintroduce the issue later if the need arises."


Assistant Commissar for Official Persecution Law is not referring to any "need" on the part of Ariana. This entire exercise never had anything to do with her welfare. This official determination has validated Maryanne's refusal to poison her daughter with Risperdal -- but that doesn't matter, either: She is scheduled to go on trial June 8 for the supposed offense of refusing to permit her daughter to be seized at gunpoint and forcibly injected with a drug the state now admits did her no good.

 Thanks so much for your generous help to keep Pro Libertate on-line! God bless. 

Dum spiro, pugno!

Heads Up, Mexico: You May be Next

The time has come, insists Representative Michael McCaul (R-Texas), "for the U.S. to show serious commitment to war in our own backyard." 

It's shamefully narrow-minded of Washington to confer the blessings of humanitarian mass murder on distant Bedouins while ignoring our Mestizo neighbors to the South. McCaul, a former federal prosecutor who now chairs the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, is eager to help rectify that inequity by designating six Mexican drug syndicates -- including Los Zetas, which is led by U.S.-trained military personnel -- as "foreign terrorist organizations."

The War Down South:  U.S.-funded Mexican paramilitary police.

This would permit deportation or prosecution of anyone providing "support" to the narcotics syndicates. Of course, this wouldn't apply to the public officials in the United States responsible for the huge narcotics price support program called the "War on Drugs."

Over the past five years, an estimated 37,000 people have been killed as a result of the U.S.-funded war between the administration of Mexican President Felipe Calderon and various narcotics syndicates. Several months ago, Texas Governor Rick Perry suggested that Washington should invade Mexico for the supposed purpose of ending the violence.  The only trivial impediment to that plan, Perry observed, is that Mexico's government would have to "approve" of the invasion.

As if to answer the question, "What kind of Latin American political figure would `approve' of a U.S. invasion and occupation of his country?" Colombian-born Washington Post columnist Edward Schumacher-Matos offered a very public endorsement of the proposal. 

It's worth pointing out that between positions with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and his present gig at the Post, Schumacher-Matos taught a course at Harvard's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American studies, which is one of several academic nurseries in which the Establishment cultivates tomorrow's Quislings.

Schumacher-Matos piously chastises Mexico's political class for being "too proud to do what they immediately should: Call in the Marines." Only if Mexican somehow emerge from "their nationalistic stupor" will they see the light of reason and welcome the presence of  their new overlords -- "American military specialists stationed within [their] borders to help the country build powerful electronic intelligence systems and train modern military and police forces to replace its suffocatingly hierarchical, outdated ones."

Although Mexico "is our neighbor and supposed longtime ally, the Mexican army has never -- never -- participated in a joint military exercise with the U.S. military," Schumacher-Matos points out, inviting us to sorrowful contemplation of the shame of it all. To substantiate the point, he cites a recent study by Roderic Ai Camp of the Woodrow Wilson Center, oblivious to the irony of mentioning Wilson's name in connection with proposed U.S. military intervention in Mexico.

"What is getting in the way of deeper cooperation with the U.S. military is that the Mexican military, political and intellectual leaders, abetted by U.S. intellectuals, still have their heads in the Mexican and American wars for the 19th century and the Cold War of the 20th," Schumacher-Matos scolds. "They talk of imperialism and hegemony -- which are irrelevant today."

This isn't "imperialism" that we're discussing, insists this Rockefeller-suckled sock puppet: It's applied humanitarianism of the kind that has turned places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Kosovo, and Libya into havens of peace and prosperity.

Elements of Schumacher-Matos's prescription are a bit outdated.  The "electronic intelligence systems" he describes are already operating in Mexico; huge amounts of money are being poured into training and equipping Mexican military and police; and U.S.-trained paramilitaries are actively involved in the Drug War -- on both sides of the conflict.

U.S.-trained Mexican Stormtroopers.

 "The U.S. agents generally provide intelligence and training, while Mexicans do the hands-on work," explains a recent AP dispatch from Mexico City. Brad Barker, president of a "private" mercenary firm called HALO Corporation, told the AP: "Yes, we're tracking vehicles, yes, we're tracking people.... There's been a huge spike in agents down here."

For the nonce, however, the huge and growing population of U.S. military and intelligence "advisers" infesting Mexico have to "play down" their role, in order "to avoid rubbing nationalist raw spots."

The division of labor used to maintain the fiction of Mexican independence was displayed in joint operations staged to murder Arturo Beltran-Leyva, the admittedly vicious head of a narcotics operation (an offshoot of the Sinaloa Cartel) he co-founded with his four brothers. On December 11, 2009, a team of U.S.-trained Mexican Special Forces operators, acting on intelligence gathered by their American "advisers," attacked a Christmas party, slaughtering several guests, wounding numerous others, and terrorizing scores more while Beltran-Leyva fled.

Name the "good guy" in this photo. Yes, this is a trick question.

Several days later, U.S. agents tracked the fugitive to an apartment in Cuernavaca. This time 200 special forces troops laid siege to the building, surrounding it with tanks and helicopter gunships.

The outcome was predictable, and proudly memorialized in trophy photos of Beltran-Leyva's dead, mutilated body that were given wide circulation by the Mexican government.


This assassination was hailed as a significant "victory" in Washington's drug war in Mexico. Indeed, from the perspective of the people who manage that war, it was an ideal victory -- the kind that helps perpetuate the conflict, rather than bringing it to an end. As the AP points out, in the year following the killing of Beltran-Leyva, arrests of drug cartel leaders were up, cocaine seizures expanded, and extraditions of drug suspects to the U.S.  increased -- "and yet, killings jumped to a record high ... and more heroin and marijuana are being produced in Mexico and smuggled into the U.S." 

As with all other "successful" government programs, Washington's narco-war in Mexico is a breeder reactor for larger and even more profitable problems. The escalating violence by Washington and its puppet government in Mexico City is provoking retaliatory violence against American assets.

Washington's proxy war in Mexico has killed tens of thousands of Mexicans, as well as a small but growing number of U.S. citizens. What really prompted the ire of Rep. McCaul, however, was the murder last February of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata by a hit team employed by Los Zetas. This episode, in which a Federal Agent was assassinated by a cartel led by U.S.-trained Mexican paramilitaries that led McCaul to demand that Mexican drug syndicates be classified as "foreign terrorist organizations."

(Courtesy of Sipsey Street Irregulars.)

 While Mexican President Calderon has “boldly declared war against the cartels," McCaul declares, "the Mexicans are losing the war – and so are we.”

Of course, the most effective way to destroy the criminal syndicates -- as a growing number of war-weary Mexicans understand -- would be to de-criminalize narcotics, which would mean an immediate end to the grotesquely inflated profits that sustain the cartels. 

McCaul and his ilk, however, prefer to take the contrary approach -- continued escalation of the conflict with no imaginable end. "We can't afford a failed state in Mexico, and we must secure our borders," intones McCaul.

Let's briefly examine this familiar piece of thought-stopping boilerplate.

Since the housing bubble burst four years ago, immigration from Mexico is down dramatically. The chief threat to "border security" at present is the violence being churned up in Mexico through Washington's drug war. If the threat of "spillover" narcotics violence is the main problem, ending the drug war is the obvious solution -- yet ideologues like McCaul have a way of resisting the obvious.

For those who understand that the state is always and everywhere the chief enemy of liberty, prosperity, and peace, the term "failed state" is a pleonasm. When employed by spokesmen for the Imperial power elite, however, the term is invoked as a prelude to military intervention in order to impose a government-exercised monopoly on force -- which in practice has meant becoming local franchises of a U.S.-dominated global political system. 

Interventions of this kind are justified as a form of preventive counter-terrorism. Accordingly, whenever U.S. politicians and policy-makers suggest that Mexico is in danger of becoming a "failed state," they are tuning the atmosphere for even more forceful intervention in that country's domestic affairs.

It shouldn't surprise us to learn that a growing number of Mexicans are weary of being on the receiving end of Washington's armed benevolence.

"We are fed up with this war that nobody asked for," exclaimed Ciudad Juarez resident Leticia Ruiz, one of thousands of Mexicans who attended protests on April 6 demanding an end to Washington's drug war in Mexico. 

"We're sick of you politicians," declared Javier Sicilia, a noted Mexican author whose 24-year-old son was murdered by cartel hit-men. "In this badly planned, badly executed and badly led war, you have put the country into a state of emergency."

The horrors being visited on Mexicans in this unnecessary war are of little concern to the ruling elite on either side of the border. As Hillary Clinton admitted in a moment of stunning candor, de-criminalization of narcotics and de-escalation in the drug war simply aren't possible, because there is "too much money" to be made through prohibition. One illustration of this can be seen in the fact that when the global finance system went into cardiac arrest in 2008, laundered narcotics proceeds were the only liquid capital available for inter-bank loans. 

Many law enforcement agencies in the United States have become addicted to drug war subsidies, both in the form of funds stolen and redistributed through taxation and in the form of direct highway robbery by way of "asset forfeiture." The Texas legislature has sought to expand that symbiosis between the criminal underworld and the even more disreputable political "overworld" by expanding the use of highway checkpoints -- for seatbelt enforcement, license and insurance inspections, and drug and weapons searches -- in order to harvest revenue to make up for shortfalls in tax revenue. 

Significantly, Rep. McCaul points out that his proposal to designate drug cartels as "terrorist" organizations would "intensify southbound inspections to seize weapons and cash." In practice this would mean an escalation in Washington's unremitting war against privacy and private property.

Rep. McCaul himself illustrates another reason why there is no official interest in ending the drug war. As the Houston Chronicle points out, McCaul "unveiled [his] legislation as he raises his profile in Washington for a possible bid for statewide office" -- specifically, the Senate seat being vacated next year by Kay Bailey Hutchison.  Being a dutiful drug war drone is a prescription for job security -- and in many cases, the key to a lucrative political career. Despite growing public disenchantment with this murderous charade, there is no political profit in working to bring it to an end.

No hyperbole is involved in describing Mexico as another front in the Regime's war with -- well, practically everybody. This is illustrated by the fact that several months ago, beginning with a September 2010 installment of Oliver North's "War Stories" agitprop series, the Fox News Channel has been referring to the proxy conflict in Mexico as America's "Third War" (which would mean, of course, that the ongoing campaign in Libya would be the Regime's fourth war).

Like other spokesmen for the War Party, Rep. McCaul has promoted a unified field theory of global conflict in which Mexico is emerging as a haven for Islamic terrorists bent on destroying the U.S. Although there's no evidence of an Islamist/Narco-terrorist alliance, undisguised U.S. military intervention in Mexico could conceivably provoke a nationalist backlash that would serve the War Party's propaganda needs nearly as well.

The Empire's Clone Army: Mexican narcotics troops.

For decades, some elements of the Right (occasionally abetted by people who should have known better) have peddled the notion that Mexico has created a vast and well-organized "fifth column" within the United States dedicated to La Reconquista -- the re-conquest of territories seized by the U.S. during the Mexican-American War.

In this scenario, non-assimilated Mexicans by the millions join in a campaign of violence orchestrated by the Mexican government with the help of foundation-funded anti-American groups on this side of the border.

Whatever revanchist sentiments may exist in Mexico are the residue of Washington's seizure of roughly half the country through a war of aggression. Washington's proxy narco-war has done nothing to palliate those feelings. About the only thing that could vindicate the alarmist fantasy of a nationalistic uprising on the part of Mexicans living on the U.S. side of the border would be direct U.S. military intervention in Mexico. I'm just cynical enough to believe that this would be considered a selling point to the people who profit on the misery inflicted by Washington's drug wars, both here and abroad.

A quick note ....

My apologies, once again, for postponing the  promised Maryanne Godboldo report. The delay reflects the unusual difficulties I'm having in contacting some of the key figures in this story. I appreciate your patience. 

Thank you so much for helping to keep Pro Libertate on-line! God bless.

Dum spiro, pugno!

War is Holy, This I Know -- For Dear Leader Tells Me So

Ed Schultz's ancestor, celebrating the Anschluss? "He's my Leader! That's all I need to know!"

 "I take President Obama's word for it that troops will not be engaged on the ground," eructated MSNBC's Ed Schultz, rebuking investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill for fomenting doubts about the wisdom of the Dear Leader's war in Libya. When Scahill made a passing reference to "your President Obama," Schultz morphed into a portlier, more articulate version of Sean Hannity: "`My' President Obama? Is he your president, too? Jeremy, is he your president, too?"

 

A suitable response to hectoring of this kind from a certified cultist would be the following:


"I am not a member of the U.S. military, which means that I do not have a commander-in-chief. I am not an employee of the executive branch of the federal government, which means that the occupant of the White House is not my supervisor. Mr. Obama does not preside over me in any sense that I recognize. To the extent we have any relationship at all, Mr. Obama should be considered my subordinate, one of the hired help. He certainly doesn't have any moral or legal standing to pretend that he can order me to do anything, and if I had the opportunity I would place him under citizen's arrest for his crimes against the Constitution, individual liberty, and the peace of nations -- of which his criminal assault on Libya is the most recent but hardly the only example."
 
There was a time, perhaps five of six years ago, when Ed Schultz was a genuinely independent radio commentator of a left-leaning populist bent. I doubt that the Ed Schultz of 2005 would recognize the triple-jointed sycophant who began the segment with Scahill by utterling the following homily on the theme of the Leader Principle: "This isn't Bush-talk, this is totally different from Iraq.... The president has gone on record saying that Libyan agents have killed Americans -- that's all as an American I need to hear; let's get it done."



The doctrine of citizenship-as-submission to the Dear Leader's divine will is indeed "Bush talk" of the most obnoxious variety. It was preached with remarkable clarity during a July 11, 2006 exchange between Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) and Steven Bradbury, at the time head of the Office of Legal Counsel for the "Justice" Department.

At issue was the Wee Emperor's deliberate misrepresentation of the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision, which did impose some trivial (and largely ignored) restrictions on the treatment of the detainees who are held illegally at the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay. Bradbury insisted that because the Hamdan ruling "does implicitly recognize we're in a war," it effectively authorizes the president to do anything he wants to anyone of his choosing, since such decisions are supposedly permissible "under the law of war."

Leahy pointed out that the Hamdan decision -- whatever its faults -- explicitly rejected the Bush administration's claim of illimitable war powers, and upbraided the OLC for giving Bush the "cockamamie idea" that such a claim had been validated in that ruling.

"Was the president right or was he wrong?" Leahy demanded of Bradbury.

"The president is always right," oozed Bradbury in reply.

The Leader speaks, the Leader lies.

 The instrument has yet to be invented that can identify a substantive difference between Bradbury's statement and Ed Schultz's insistence that an unsupported presidential assertion is sufficient authority to justify an aggressive war. 

A slightly less acute version of the same leader-cult mentality was exhibited by Kevin Drum of Mother Jones magazine. Drum's endorsement of Obama's illegal war in Libya rests heavily on what I've come to call the Gnostic Fallacy -- namely, that the president is invested with prophetic powers giving him wisdom and insight mere mortals don't possess:


"If it had been my call, I wouldn't have gone into Libya. But the reason I voted for Obama in 2008 is because I trust his judgment. And not in any merely abstract way, either: I mean that if he and I were in a room and disagreed about some issue on which I had any doubt at all, I'd literally trust his judgment over my own. I think he's smarter than me, better informed, better able to understand the consequences of his actions, and more farsighted. I voted for him because I trust his judgment, and I still do."

In matters of power, Thomas Jefferson advised, "let us hear no more of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." Modern collectivists, of both the Red State Fascist and Blue State Bombardier varieties, insist that the president himself is the Living Constitution, and that our duty is to make his will our law -- as long as their respective faction controls the White House, of course.

Bradbury, Schultz, and Drum reiterated a doctrine of executive authority under which the Leader "shapes the collective will of the people within himself," and his subjects are "bound to [him] in loyalty and obedience. The authority of the [Leader] is not limited by checks and controls ... but it is free and independent, all-inclusive and unlimited."

Leader Worship, circa 2003...

This, of course, was the official definition of Fuhrerprinzip -- the "Leader Principle," as found in The Organization Book of the National Socialist Workers Party. It is also a bedrock organizing principle of the National (or, since 2002, the Homeland) Security State.



John Yoo, the unindicted war criminal who composed most of the key memoranda outlining the Bush administration's doctrine of unlimited presidential war powers, has conferred his blessing on Obama's war in Libya. It is Yoo's position is that while it is wise for a president to seek political support from Congress, he doesn't need that body's "constitutional permission" to commit the U.S. government to war.

A few days after Yoo endorsed Obama's war, Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, suggested that Congress should consider a resolution "authorizing" the war. Unless Levin has access to Doc Brown's flux capacitor-equipped DeLorean, what he is proposing is a purely Orwellian exercise in "rectifying" the record to conform to Dear Leader's will.

“I’m interested in a vote authorizing military action,” Levin said on March 29 — a week and a half after the missiles had started to fly, and most likely months after CIA and Special Forces operators had been insinuated into Libya, Ed Schultz's ingenuous faith in Obama's assurances to the contrary notwithstanding. “The president said he’d welcome it and I think it would be helpful," Levin continued. "It’d show public support for the effort. And that’s always useful."

The Constitution doesn’t describe a congressional declaration of war as a “useful” gesture to ratify an ongoing military campaign; it dictates that such a declaration is mandatory before the government of the United States commits itself to military action against another country.

Were this an actual constitutional republic, public support for a formally declared war, expressed through an appropriate vote by elected representatives before the war began, would be mandatory. This is something both Obama and Biden acknowledged as Senators; in fact, Biden went so far as to describe presidential usurpation of congressional war powers as an impeachable offense. Now we’re told that a useless resolution issued well after the fact would be taken as a binding statement of “public support,” which is “useful” but materially irrelevant to the actions of our rulers.

... Leader Worship, circa 2009.

 The only material check on presidential war-making ability, according to John Yoo and people of his repulsive ilk, is the power of the purse: Congress has the ability to de-fund military operations once they have begun. 

 Of course, this creates a perverse incentive for presidents to use military personnel as hostages -- deploying them in a war zone and then indignantly accusing Congress of betraying "our gallant and intrepid heroes on the front lines, oh may they be blessed forever" if the body moves to de-fund the war. 

As if in anticipation of such action by Congress, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- who seems to be channeling Dick Cheney --told Rep. Brad Sherman (D-California) during a classified briefing that the administration would ignore any congressional effort intended to end, restrain, or limit the war in Libya. Some of the administration's critics have described this as a threat to violate the War Powers Act of 1973, a peculiar little enactment intended to "restrain" the power of the president to do something he isn't authorized to do at all in the first place -- namely, to wage undeclared wars abroad.

Clinton displayed a certain forthright arrogance in telling congressmen that they wouldn't be permitted to end Mr. Obama's war. However, her statement is firmly rooted in a bipartisan doctrine of totalitarian presidential war powers -- one that would likely withstand a Supreme Court challenge, given that the current Chief Justice, John Roberts, has explicitly endorsed it.

On February 19, 1984, Roberts -- at the time a special assistant to White House Counsel Fred Fielding -- wrote a memo entitled "War Powers Problem" that examined a bill conferring benefits on veterans of the Reagan administration's disastrous military venture in Lebanon. The time of service covered by that bill would run from August 20, 1982, until "the date the operation ends" -- with the latter date to be determined either by presidential proclamation or by a concurrent resolution in Congress.

 For Roberts, the idea of Congress acting to end a military conflict would be an impermissible encroachment on what he considered to be the plenary war powers of the president. "I do not think we would want to concede any definite role for Congress in termination [of] the Lebanon operation, even by joint resolution presented to the president," he wrote.

"Your memo suggests that Congress is powerless to stop a president who is going to conduct an unauthorized war," observed Senator Leahy during Roberts's September 2005 confirmation hearings. "You're saying you don't want to concede any ability to let Congress stop a war."

"Do we have the power to terminate a war?" persisted Leahy (whose zeal to restrain the imperial presidency dimmed perceptibly after January 20, 2009). "We have the power to declare war. Do we have the power to terminate war?"

Roberts took refuge in dissimulation:

"Senator, that's a question that I don't think can be answered in the abstract. You need to know the particular circumstances and exactly what the facts are and what the legislation would be like.... The argument on the executive side will rely on authority as commander in chief and whatever authorities derive from that."

Of course, under the Constitution -- which, admittedly, has no tangible relationship to the exercise of governmental power in our current system -- all of the president's war powers are derivative. This includes his temporary role as commander-in-chief of the U.S. government's military forces when called into service by Congress, which has the sole and exclusive power to declare war and to issue regulations governing the military. 

That's what the Constitution says on the matter. However, Roberts -- like all other proponents of Fuhrerprinzip -- insists that the president's war powers are "not limited by checks and controls," as the definitive expression of that doctrine put it (albeit in the original German). In fact, the Bush administration -- building on a string of precedents going back to the Vietnam War -- actually held that the president has the authority to spend un-allocated funds to continue military operations even after Congress refuses to continue appropriating money for a war.

In 2007, Congress and the White House were at loggerheads over a "supplemental" spending bill to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Insisting that "We expect there to be no strings on our commanders," Bush threatened to veto a spending measure that called for an end to the Iraq war by no later than September 2008. 

As the impasse deepened, a fascinating proposal was offered by economics pundit Stan Collender, an executive vice president for the PR firm Burson-Marsteller -- which received some very lucrative Iraq War agitprop contracts (and, appropriately, has made a fortune  sanitizing some of the world's most hideous dictatorships). Writing in the National Journal, Collender suggested that the administration could invoke the "Feed and Forage Act of 1861" in order to permit the Pentagon to continue procuring war materiel in the absence of an actual congressional appropriation.

The Lincoln-era Feed and Forage Act, Collender insisted, "turns the federal budget world on its head. The standard procurement process is for obligations to be incurred by a federal department or agency only after an appropriation is enacted. Food [sic] and Forage allows funds to be obligated before the appropriation is in place. In other words, the deadlines the White House keeps using for the Iraq war supplemental are irrelevant. Indeed, the Pentagon may have already begun to obligate funds for this purpose while the debate on the supplemental is continuing."

An analysis of the issue published by OMB Watch pointed out that on at least a half-dozen occasions since 1968, the Feed and Forage Act was used to fund ongoing military operations. "The act gives the military, at its own discretion and in the absence of appropriations, some power to obligate the federal government to purchase goods and services during emergencies for use through the end of the fiscal year," explained the analysis. 

None of the "emergencies" described in the report involved an actual threat to the United States -- but this is entirely proper, since the text of the measure "does not expand upon conditions or circumstances that would constitute an `emergency,' relying instead on case-by-case determinations." A 1994 GAO Report entitled "Analysis of Options for Funding Contingency Operations" concluded that the Feed and Forage Act endows the Pentagon with "virtually unlimited contract authority" to purchase whatever it deems necessary to continue a war.

"With this understanding, it seems more than plausible that President Bush could use the powers in the Feed and Forage Act to sustain U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan once other sources of funding have run out," concludes the report. This is to say that thanks to this measure -- an legacy of Abraham Lincoln's war to conquer the independent South -- the president and the Pentagon can continue to spend money in defiance of a congressional decision to de-fund a military operation.

What this means is that under present arrangements, Congress is not only denied a role in declaring war, it has no effective means of ending an undeclared war.  But this is troubling only to those heresy-riddled souls who refuse to submit to the infallible judgment of our Blessed Leader.

Obiter Dicta

My apologies for delaying the promised report on the outrageous Maryanne Godboldo case in Detroit; I'm still working on the piece, and hopefully I'll be able to publish it within the next several days.

I should acknowledge that the expression "triple-jointed sycophant," used above to describe the wretched Ed Schultz, was inspired by a line from Eric Metaxas's superb biography, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, which I would love to review if the opportunity presents itself.

My sincere thanks for your help in keeping Pro Libertate on-line! God bless.

Dum spiro, pugno!