Six Decades of the "Condor": Washington's "Counter-insurgency" Strategy Goes Domestic

 

Under William Bradford's legal scheme, posting this photo would make me a "fifth columnist."

 

"Our morality has no precedent, and our humanity is absolute, because it rests on a new ideal. Our aim is to destroy all forms of oppression and violence. To us, everything is permitted, for we are the first to raise the sword not to oppress races and reduce them to slavery, but to liberate humanity from its shackles .... Blood? Let blood flow like water . .. for only through the death of the old world can we liberate ourselves forever."

From a 1920 editorial in Krasni Mech (The Red Sword), a publication of the Soviet Checka secret police; quoted in The Black Book of Communism by Stephane Courtois, et al, pg. 102.

Under the legal regime proposed by attorney and law professor William C. Bradford, who until recently was an instructor at West Point, lawyers and legal scholars who criticize or impede the Regime's endless “war on terror” could be designated “fifth columnists” and “enemy combatants” subject to indefinite detention or summary execution.

“Fighting total war demands a mental reconfiguration” on the part of the public by resolving “arguments over how to balance security and liberty in favor of security,” insists Bradford in a 185-page diatribe entitled “Trahsion des Professeurs: The Critical Law of Armed Conflict Academy as an Islamist Fifth Column,” which was published in the Spring/Summer issue of the National Security Law Journal. This will mean “acculturating the necessary fighting spirit” in the population through mass propaganda and, where possible, conspicuous punishment of dissidents. 

 

Bradford

“Spartanization of the West will require the deepening of the concept of citizenship to include duties as well as rights," Bradford pontificates. "Rights are attended by corresponding duties, and the state may obligate citizens – even academics – to contribute to to the struggle in those ways they are able.” Refusal “to acknowledge the Islamist threat as an existential challenge to Western Civilization, and to … unite to defeat that threat, would be the greatest dereliction of duty in history.

In confronting an existential crisis, Bradford asserts, “survival is its own justification.” There is no room for “legal fetishists” who are skeptical of decisions by the executive or military leadership: “Americans are entitled not only to political leaders who employ and and all necessary measures but to the strong presumption such measures are legal, and to the salutary effects of this presumption upon their belief in the virtue of their cause and their will to fight for it.”

That virtue, according to Bradford, is sufficient to justify the eradication not only of “Islamists,” but all Muslims who are suspected of sympathizing with them – and, if deemed necessary, Americans who are delinquent in their “duty” to support that objective.

“The West must shatter Islamists' political will and eradicate those who do not renounce Islamism,” he declares “All instruments of national power – including convention and nuclear force and PSYOPs [psychological warfare operations] – must be harnessed … to capture the hearts and minds of Islamic peoples, break their will to fight for Islamism, and leave them prepared to coexist with the West or be utterly eradicated....”

To wage “total war” against a tenacious and all-but-omnipresent enemy, all restrictions on government power must be supplanted by what he calls the Law Of Armed Conflict (LOAC), in which the executive is emancipated from checks and balances and the constitutional subordination of the military to civilian control is reversed: “[I]t is the military upon whom the constitutional duty to defend Americans is incumbent, and in whom Americans repose trust.”

Bradford refers to scholarly critics of Washington's open-ended war against Islamism as the Critical Law of Armed Conflict Academy, an awkward and contrived expression created to justify the pungently dismissive acronym CLOACA (which is a relatively high-brown surrogate for themore familiar adolescent vulgarity referring to the emunctory aperture). While admitting that “no membership roll exists” of that intellectual cohort, and declining to name specific examples (most likely out of a desire to avoid civil liability), Bradford insists that scholars who fit within that amorphous category constitute an “Islamist Fifth Column,” even when no evidence of conscious collaboration exists.

Scholarship that challenges the “autonomy” of the Pentagon, or “dismiss[es] military wisdom” by questioning the legality, constitutionality, or morality of foreign wars, indefinite detention of terrorism suspects, or the use of torture as an interrogation technique are not mere academic exercises. Instead, they are a form of advocacy that “attenuates U.S. arms and undermines American will, [and] are PSYOPs. Which are combatant acts,” Bradford insists.

As “propaganda inciting others to war crimes, such acts are prosecutable..... CLOACA members are thus combatants who, like all other combatants, can be targeted at any time and place and captured and detained until termination of hostilities” – without judicial recourse. Assuming that “CLOACA members” would be treated in the same fashion as their supposed Islamist comrades, they would be subject to “judicial execution post-interrogation” if this were considered justifiable as a matter of military necessity.

The threshold for such treatment is astonishingly low. Academic dissenters who publicly describe the U.S. government as “an `aggressor' or employer of illegal methods and means, or [cast] aspersions on U.S. motives” for carrying out military operations display “an intent to betray the United States” or to give aid and comfort to the enemy, Bradford contends. Those thus identified would be subject to what Bradford calls a “counterattack” involving a range of options drawn from a continuum of “increasing coercion” – including mandatory loyalty oaths, termination from employment, formal criminal charges for “material support of terrorism” or even “treason” – a capital offense.

Ominously, in the wake of the summary execution, via drone strikes, of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and his American-born, 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, Bradford insists that scholarly critics of Washington's terror war who “commit treason, or otherwise engage in unlawful combatancy … must answer for their delicts just as any others do. The perversity inherent in countenancing intellectual elitism as a basis for a defense against prosecution and a grant of immunity from targeting in war is astonishing.” (Emphasis added.)

Earlier in the essay, Bradford observes that “enemy combatants may be targeted and killed wherever and whenever they can be found” and that “UAVs [that is, missile-bearing drones], as with other weapons systems, do not require that targets of targeting killing be afforded a warning or judicial process before use.”

The coercive “counterattack” against so-called “CLOACA members” would not be limited to lawyers or scholars who express critical views.

“[The] infrastructure used to create and disseminate CLOACA propaganda – law school facilities, scholars' home offices, and media outlets where they give interviews – are also lawful targets given the causal connection between the content disseminated and the Islamist crimes incited. Shocking and extreme as this option might seem, CLOACA scholars, and the law schools that employ them, are – at least in theory – targetable so long as attacks are proportional, distinguish noncombatants from combatants, employ nonprohibited weapons, and contribute to the defeat of Islamism.”

In assessing the legitimacy of an envisioned punitive strike against a “Fifth Columnist,” the last consideration – supposed military necessity – trumps all of the others. Bradford's blithe recommendation that the military target the institutional “infrastructure” – including media outlets – used to disseminate “CLOACA propaganda” offers a portentous counterpoint to the recently publicized Pentagon “Law of War” manual outlining circumstances under which journalists could be treated as “unprivileged belligerents.”

 In previous armed conflicts, the U.S. government has authorized lethal strikes against media facilities used to broadcast critical coverage of American military actions: During the 1999 Kosovo conflict, the office of Radio Television Serbia suffered a U.S. missile strike that killed sixteen people.

"Targeted killing" of Serbian journalists (above and below, right).

In April 2003, Al-Jazeera correspondent Tarek Ayoob was killed when a U.S. warplane bombed the network's Baghdad office. An employee of the Reuters news agency was killed, and several of his colleagues were wounded, in the notorious July 12, 2007 “collateral murder” airstrike in Baghdad. Chelsea Manning, then known as Private Bradley Manning, was criminally charged, subjected to abusive detention for 112 days, and eventually sentenced to prison for providing the video record of that atrocity to the Wikileaks organization. Those who preside over the empire's "Disposition Matrix" are prepared not only to arrest and detain but also to kill people accused of using Twitter to express solidarity with Islamists.

"Shoot off your mouth all you want," an unnamed "senior counter-terrorism official" told ABC News regarding social media comments seen as sympathetic to radical Muslims. "Eventually we are going to kill you." Under Bradford's definitions, this approach would be taken not only with social media pests and provocateurs, but with lawyers and law professors as well.

Invoking war suras from the Koran, and imputing treasonous motives to all outspoken critics of the unending war on terror, Bradford insists that Western civilization has been seized, encompassed, and ambushed “by a Fifth Column, and will be vanquished, subsumed within the Caliphate, and ruled by Shari'a if a trahison des professeurs [treason of the professors] goes unchecked.” Just as he scruples at no means to “wipe Islamism and if need be its adherents … from the earth,” Bradford rules nothing out in his proposed campaign to bring so-called CLOACA adherents “to heel via criminal law or force of arms.”

Anticipating critics, Bradford acknowledges that some might complain that his overwrought essay “incites authoritarianism insofar as it counsels militarization, withdraws debates over the enemy from the political arena, vilifies those who fail to acknowledge a grave threat, punishes disloyalty, and takes up law as sword and shield to defend and destroy political will.” Rather than explaining how that critique is inaccurate, Bradford parries such objections by insisting that “mobilization on all fronts is as necessary as a response to the current threat condition as it was during World War II.”

Bradford's disdain for dissent, due process, and the rule of law do summon comparisons with a World War II-era legal revolution. In his study Hitler's Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich, Ingo Mueller describes how the Nazified German legal system was founded on the assumption that “the `national aim'” was the central organizing principle of society, and all guarantees of rights and limitations of state power yielded before the doctrine of “national emergency.”

Citing the rulings of the German Supreme Court and the writings of influential Party-aligned jurists, Mueller writes that the Nazi-era equivalent of Bradford's Law Of Armed Conflict dictated that “objectivity finds its limits … when the national security is placed in doubt.” Every judge and lawyer was required to be “a son of his country” who would “place the vital interests of the nation unconditionally above what is formally the law.”

Bradford spent several years teaching law to West Point cadets before being forced to resign in early August. Significantly, he wasn't terminated for his advocacy of a genocidal foreign policy or a totalitarian campaign to suppress domestic dissent, but rather for inflating his military resume by falsely claiming to have received a Silver Star for combat duty in Desert Storm.

Not surprisingly, Bradford blames his forced resignation on critics of his essay who hadn't read it, but had only seen a handful of inflammatory statements orphaned of their context. Reasonably well-informed readers who manage to plow through the entire paper should recognize that it is a commendably candid effort to provide a legal argument for domesticating practices that have been employed abroad by the United States Government for at least six decades.

Beginning in the late 1950s or early 1960s, U.S.-aligned militarist regimes in Latin America, with the help of the Pentagon and the CIA, “shared intelligence and seized, tortured, and executed political opponents in one another's territory,” recounts historian and author J. Patrick McSherry in his book Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America. “Counterinsurgency militaries organized massive new state and parastatal apparatuses for intelligence, surveillance, and social control, including secret torture-disappearance-killing systems and new technologies of violence to terrorize who populations.”

This coordinated venture in international state terrorism was eventually known as “Operation Condor,” a name derived from the national symbol of Uruguay --whose national police agency was among the bloodiest participants.

Owing to the existence of “an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination,” insisted the CIA's 1954 Doolittle Report, “hitherto acceptable norms of conduct do not apply.” By that time, Communist regimes had slaughtered tens of millions of people, and the architects of Washington's Cold War strategy assumed that the best way to defeat the Communists was to echo their claim of plenary moral immunity (see the statement from the Krasni Mech editorial above) and emulate some of their most reprehensible behavior, including the state-ordered disposal of what the Soviets called “socially dangerous persons.”

“Increasingly, a person's ideas – not illegal acts – were the criteria used in decisions to detain or disappear him,” McSherry points out. “Counterinsurgency specialists also re-engineered police forces and changed their mission from a law enforcement to a militarized model.”

In the name of counter-insurgency warfare, these “Spartanized” states – to use Bradford's entirely appropriate term – slaughtered millions of people throughout Latin America, and conducted extra-territorial kidnappings and murders in Europe and the United States. Nor were they content to focus on armed guerrillas and people who provably offered them material support.

“First we will kill all the subversives; then we will kill their collaborators; then their sympathizers; then those who remain indifferent,” explained Argentine General Iberico St. Jean, speaking on behalf of a U.S.-supported junta that “disappeared” countless thousands of people in that fashion. General St. Jean's formula was originally presented in Spanish, but he and professor Bradford speak the same language.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Your "Duty" to Protect and Serve the Police

If you say something that hurts their feelings, you're no better than a "cop-killer."

Glenn Beck, acting in his self-appointed role as a punitive populist prophet, has urged his audience to join “hand-in-hand, arm-in-arm,” and “ring” their local police departments in prayer. The local police are “under siege,” Beck tremulously insists, and divine intervention on their behalf is necessary. 
 

Beck hasn't yet urged Americans to act as human shields on behalf of the heavily armed, body armor-clad functionaries who are supposedly paid to protect them. Some police union officials haven't shied away from suggesting that the public has a moral duty to protect the police, despite the fact that police have no reciprocal obligation to protect individuals threatened with criminal violence.

Residents of Huntsville, Alabama who declined to intervene to help a police officer subdue a suspect could face criminal prosecution under a state statute requiring them to assist an officer in trouble. Had the situation been reversed, however, police officers would face neither criminal nor civil prosecution for declining to aid a citizen under assault by a suspect.

A man named Devonte Conerly who was suspected in a hit and run incident, allegedly tried to disarm the police officer who stopped him. Several officers responded to a call for assistance and eventually subdued and handcuffed Conerly. They then rebuked several bystanders who had declined to intervene.

“I wouldn't ask anybody in the public [sic] sector to get involved in a shootout or anything like that,” commented Bill Davis, the immediate past president of Alabama's Fraternal Order of Police. However, he continued, “if it's just an altercation where someone is wrestling with the officer and it looks like they're getting the best of the officer, yes you need to help.”

FOP spokesman Davis.

In fact, under the Alabama state legal code (Section 13A-10-5), “A person commits the crime of refusing to aid a peace officer if, upon command by a peace officer identified to him as such, he fails or refuses to aid” the officer in effecting a “lawful arrest” or preventing “the commission by another person of any offense.” This dereliction of a supposed duty is described as a Class C misdemeanor.

This power of summary verbal conscription by police, as liberty activist Matt Agorist has noted, is written into law in 44 of the 50 of the state-level subdivisions within the American soyuz. Davis is hardly the first police official to express disgust and outrage over the reluctance of the public to intervene on behalf of an officer during an altercation.

“I was horrified,” quavered Philadelphia SEPTA Police Chief Thomas Nestel, commenting on an incident in which Philadelphia transit officer Samuel Washington was thrown to the ground and pinned under a bench by a suspect. “I'm frightened for my cops..... To go out every day they work really hard and try to … make people feel safe but they rely on people to help.”

Like most people in his profession, Nestel apparently suffers from occupational tone-deafness: Police make people “feel safe,” he observes, but they rely on the public to protect them. Nestel expects the public to be governed by the assumption that anytime a police officer is involved in a violent encounter, the officer is in the right – and that if the target of the officer's attention is resisting, bystanders have a legal obligation to help subdue the “suspect.”

"I'm frightened for my cops": Chief Nestel.

Under Alabama's statute, onlookers are not liable to prosecution if the failure to render aid “was reasonable under the circumstances,” but the burden of demonstrating that this is the case is placed upon the accused: 

 "A person is not liable under this section if the failure or refusal to aid the officer was reasonable under the circumstances. The burden of injecting this issue is on the defendant but this does not shift the burden of proof." (Emphasis added.)

While this formulation doesn't require that a defendant prove his innocence during a trial, it assumes that a "refusal to aid" an officer is unreasonable, and places on the accused the "burden" of overcoming that presumption. The default assumption is that the accused committed an offense by doing nothing. 

Of course, in the event that a citizen obeys a police officer's command to intervene, and is unable to help subdue the suspect, he could conceivably find himself charged with obstruction, which is a Class A misdemeanor. This means that a police officer can charge an onlooker who declines to participate in an arrest, or – conceivably – one who makes an unsuccessful bid to help. It should also be remembered that a citizen, unlike a police officer, is not protected by "qualified immunity" in the event the subject of an arrest is injured without justification.

In any case, citizens are told that they have a legal duty to come to the aid of an embattled police officer – but police have no corresponding duty to intervene on behalf of a citizen. 
 
It is a well-established legal principle that police officers are not criminally nor civilly liable when they fail to protect individual citizens from specific acts of criminal violence. The seminal 1981 decision Warren v. District of Columbia held that it is a “fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen.” (Emphasis added.)

In that case, two women reported an assault on a friend to the police. Officers were dispatched to the scene of the crime, but declined to enter the building. The desperate women called again, and this time the department didn't even bother to respond. The attackers overheard the second call, and punished the women who had sought police assistance by detaining and assaulting them for 14 hours.
 

Coward cop with killer: Howell (l.) with Gelman.

Police have “no special duty” to aid a citizen facing an immediate lethal threat, contended David Santoro, City Attorney for New York, in a successful bid to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Philadelphia native Joe Lozito. Lozito was nearly killed while subduing a slasher-killer named Maxim Gelman during a 2011 subway attack. Lozito, an unarmed man trained in mixed martial arts, tackled and subdued Gelman, who was being sought for the murder of three people.

As Lozito desperately sank a chokehold on Gelman, the maniac cleaved open the back of Lozito's head. Bleeding and struggling to retain consciousness, Lozito pleaded for help from NYPD Officer Terrance Howell, who was cowering behind a locked partition and refusing to get involved. It wasn't until Lozito managed to pin Gelman down and disarm him that Howell emerged from his secure location, officiously telling Lozito, “You can get up now.”

Howell did nothing to detain or subdue the murderer, but he was the one photographed triumphantly escorting Gelman away from the scene in handcuffs, and was hailed as a “hero cop” in the media. He later admitted to a member of a grand jury that he hid from the suspect out of fear for his safety -- and no moral or policy consideration is more important than the sacred principle of "officer safety."

The unqualified duty to protect the police extends from the streets to the jury room. Nowhere is this assumption more deeply entrenched than Harris County, Texas, where Sheriff's Deputy Darren Goforth was murdered last week. 
 
In a multi-part investigative series published a year ago, the Houston Chronicle found that Harris County grand juries “have cleared HPD officers in shootings 288consecutive times.”
This reflects the fact that the Harris County Courts use a board of commissioners to select grand jurors, a process that tends to fill grand juries with older, more conservative panelists – retirees who are “elite members of the community,” in the assessment of District Judge Denise Collins. The ideal Harris County juror would be sort of person who nods along with, or chuckles approvingly over, Bill O'Reilly's authoritarian monologues.

A second filter for police shooting inquests has been the official in charge of reviewing police shootings on behalf of the District Attorney, Clint Greenwood, a police officer. Last year, Greenwood was hired as a major at the Harris County Sheriff's Office, a position he most likely wouldn't have landed had be pursued police shootings with vigorous impartiality.

The most significant factor behind the long string of police exonerations, however, has been the DA's practice of having jurors “play the role of police officer” in a training simulator as part of their deliberations.


Terri Burke of the Texas state ACLU describes this procedure as a form of “brainwashing” that “all but guarantees immunity for the cops.” Former grand jury foreman Tom Kennedy stoutly disagrees, insisting that the experience is “extremely beneficial” for jury members, because it helps them empathize with the officer who used lethal force by showing them “the split second he or she needs to make sometimes a life or death decision.”

It is not incidental to this discussion that Kennedy “edits the Houston Police Officers' Union publication,” the Chronicle reported. Not surprisingly, criminal indictments of police officers who use lethal force are all but unheard of in Harris County. This would suggest either that police officers within that jurisdiction are beings untainted by human weakness, or beyond human accountability. 
 
“We heard `black lives matter,'” complained Sheriff Ron Hickman following the murder of Deputy Goforth. “All lives matter. Well, cops' lives matter too, so why don't we drop the qualified and say `lives matter' and take that to the bank.”

Sheriff Hickman's anger was genuine and understandable, but his exhortation was either insincere or not fully thought through. The official view of the caste to which he belongs is that police lives matter more than those of mere Mundanes – because every police officer is an incarnation of the divine state, to whom reflexive obedience is to be given, and whose sanctified personage is owed protection by the lesser beings who surround him. 

This means shielding police not only from violence directed against them, and the legal consequences of violence used by them, but also from the “rhetorical violence” supposedly committed by people who scrutinize their conduct and condemn their abuses.

Authoritarian herd-poisoners of all varieties claim that the murder of Deputy Goforth demonstrates a dramatic escalation in the purported “war on police” that is supposedly propelled by “anti-police rhetoric.” 
 
During the thirty-day period in which Deputy Goforth was murdered, the number of people shot by police (at least 84 -- remember, the killings of Mundanes are not officially tallied) was roughly equal to the total number of police killed on-duty by all causes – including traffic mishaps, work-related accidents, heart attacks, and other non-violent episodes – through September 2. Firearms-related line-of-duty police deaths are down by 13 percent so far this year.

Police union officials and the pundits who regurgitate their pre-chewed soundbites are pretending that "anti-police rhetoric" is inhibiting cops and emboldening cop-killers. The available use of force statistics suggest that something akin to the reverse may be true. That possibility hasn't occurred to those who urge the public to form a protective barricade around their armed overseers.

(This essay has been slightly expanded to include more details about Alabama's "Refusal to Aid" statute.)

Dum spiro, pugno!

Vester Lee Flanagan, Social Justice Avenger

A Communist is merely a socialist in a hurry. Vester Lee Flanagan, by his own description, was an impatient social justice warrior. The murderous means he employed to punish those he accused of bigotry made visible the latent lethal violence that resides in State policies oriented toward the same objective.

Flanagan, also known by the professional name Bryce Williams, was a promiscuous petitioner to the EEOC. After apparently growing weary of seeking to bureaucratize the violence he wanted to inflict on his former colleague, he chose a more direct approach, one we could call retail-level Leninism. As a representative of the "Who" -- presumptive victims of discrimination -- Flanagan exercised "power without limit" by killing two individuals numbered among the "Whom" -- those presumed to be motivated by prejudice. 

In calculating the moral price of the murders in Roanoke, psychologist James Garbarino of Loyola University – like most of the Custodians of Correct Opinion – gave the Social Justice Avenger an identity-based discount, and passed the costs on to others who don't belong to a specially protected category.

"The culture that we live in that supports and fosters violence that has such a strong theme of racism and homophobia all of that obviously was building up inside this man's head,” Garbarino pontificated.

Assuming that Garbarino intended to convey an intelligible argument, rather than leaving the air clotted with thought-stopping buzzwords, his statement actually ratified Flanagan's rampage as an understandable reaction to private bigotry. On this construction, the amorphous abstraction called “society” is implicated in Flanagan's consummately anti-social act – and his victims own at least a portion of the blame for the criminal violence that ended their lives.

A more reasonable assessment is that he was an apt pupil of the Regime – “the potent, the omnipresent teacher,” in the words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.

“Crime is contagious,” observed Brandeis in the Olmstead v. U.S. decision nearly a century ago, when the surveillance state was in its larval stage and wiretapping by police was looked upon with horror. “If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it invites every man to become a law unto himself.... To declare in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means – to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal – would bring terrible retribution.”

In the deranged outpouring that has inevitably been christened a “manifesto,” Flanagan name-checked prior mass murderers and claimed that “what sent me over the top” was the murder spree in Charleston by the similarly demented bigot Dylann Roof. Acknowledging that it is perilous to seek a thread of rationality in the tapestry of delusion woven by Flanagan, I would suggest that he clearly regarded the “nasty racist things” he supposedly experienced as a “gay black man” as offenses worthy of violent reprisal.

On those occasions when someone of Dylann Roof's persuasion – broadly defined – engages in an act of large-scale criminal violence, somebody in the State's stable of collectivist chin-pullers will issue an indictment against the “authoritarian personality,” which is supposedly found only on the rightward end of the political spectrum. Authoritarians are supposedly characterized by rigidity in thinking, deep distrust of diversity, and an irrepressible urge to punish those who deviate from traditional norms.

It's hardly a novel observation that many conservatives live down to that description – but any honest observer will admit that there is a plethora of punitive progressives, as well. One key distinction between authoritarian conservatives and their progressive counterparts is the fact that people in the latter category expect the targets of punitive intervention to be not only penitent, but grateful, for State-administered correction that can destroy reputations, ruin businesses, and rend families asunder.

Those refractory, incorrigible people who simply resist the chastening hand of progressive correction must be banished from “respectable” society. During the Obama Era, this familiar doctrine of totalitarian “tolerance” has expanded to include actual bloodshed – not yet of the official variety, at least domestically, but as part of a breathtakingly cynical political trade-off.

Divine dispenser of lethal violence: Obama at hate crimes bill signing.

In 2009 – as previously noted in this space – the Obama administration attached federal hate crimes legislation to a $680 billion military appropriation bill, thereby creating a remarkable hybrid – a measure that would authorize unremitting slaughter abroad and aggressive pursuit of thought criminals at home.

Chris Hedges, a political progressive burdened with a conscience and blessed with a gift for astringent honesty, dispelled the self-enraptured rhetoric of the “tolerance” coalition by describing how they had implicated themselves in the ultimate “hate crime”:

"It was a clever piece of marketing. It blunted debate about new funding for war. And behind the closed doors of the caucus rooms, the Democratic leadership told Blue Dog Democrats, who are squeamish about defending gays or lesbians from hate crimes, that they could justify the vote as support for the war. They told liberal Democrats, who are squeamish about unlimited funding for war, that they could defend the vote as a step forward in the battle for civil rights. Gender equality groups, by selfishly narrowing their concern to themselves, participated in the dirty game."

Yes, the war funding meant, as a moral certainty, that innocent “people of color” – including women and children – would suffer violent, unnecessary death or permanent disfigurement. This would, in turn, expand the recruiting pool for anti-American terrorists, given that every time a drone-fired missile kills a child it simultaneously creates several dozen potential suicide bombers. But of such broken eggs are policy omelets made.

Besides, they're not all that important, you know.

Among the groups who endorsed the legislation, thereby taking ownership of the slaughter, were the so-called Anti-Defamation League, the self-styled Human Rights Campaign, the fraudulently named Southern Poverty Law Center, and nearly every other foundation-funded, State-centered “watchdog” group. Because of their involvement, they enjoyed a huge windfall in fund-raising, enhanced stature in Obama's Washington, and expanded influence with domestic law enforcement and administrative agencies. 
 
Yes, brown people overseas would die horribly as a direct result of an arrangement endorsed by the self-anointed leaders of the Tolerance Industry – but this was a tragically unavoidable sacrifice in the service of the larger good. After all, there are racist, homophobic, and misogynist “micro-aggressions” to be dealt with, and surely the traumatized feelings of victims exposed to such cruelty are injuries worthier of immediate attention. 
 

No "micro-aggression" here.

Never forget: Bombs and drones break human bones, but only “hate speech” can truly hurt us. Besides, when indiscriminate drone strikes are carried out by a paladin of progressivism, they're acts of applied tolerance, not violence.

Some commentators, in an ill-advised riff on Barack Obama's familiar and equally wrong-headed observation about Trayvon Martin, have suggested that if Obama had a son, he might look like Vester Lee Flanagan. Much more importantly, if the alliance that created the 2009 federal hate crimes act – call it the Coalition for Progressive Mass Murder and Thought Control – had begotten a child, he would think and act the way Flanagan did. 

Dum spiro, pugno!