The Padilla Precedent

"From this point on, you will enjoy no privileges of rank... no privileges of person. From now on, I will refer to you only as 'human.' You have no other identity."

I have no way of knowing whether that pronouncement, or something very much like it, was uttered by Jose Padilla's captors after he was taken into military custody five years ago. But it certainly summarizes the Bush Regime's view of Padilla, an American citizen (however disreputable) who has been stripped of all legal protection, not only of his due process rights but also of the basic integrity of his person.

Padilla, we were told in 2002, was the key operative in an al-Qaeda plot to detonate a radiological bomb. The "evidence" against him was provided by two identified terrorists -- Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah -- who implicated him after being tortured. A third "witness," Ethiopian refugee Binyam Mohammed (right), likewise named Padilla after being tortured extensively by CIA-aligned thugs in Morocco. Among the methods used to break Mohammed was the expert use of razor blades to make tiny but exquisitely painful incisions all over his body -- including his genitals.


After the bloody-handed simian who defiles the Oval Office designated Padilla an "unlawful enemy combatant," the Bush Regime consigned this American citizen to a Naval brig in South Carolina and systematically worked to destroy his will through psychological torture. A "Declaration" filed by a political hack named Michael Mobbs was presented as the functional equivalent of a grand jury indictment, and a separate "declaration" by Defense Intelligence Agency head Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby was offered to explain why Padilla could not be permitted due process of any kind, including conventional legal representation.

"Any interruption of the intelligence gathering process, especially from an external source [such as legal counsel], risks mission failure," insisted Jacoby. The key to extracting intelligence from Padilla, he continued, was "creating an atmosphere of dependency and trust between the subject and interrogator.... Anything that threatens the perceived dependency and trust between the subject and interrogator directly threatens the value of interrogation as an intelligence-gathering tool."

How are we to know that Padilla was a valuable intelligence source about al-Qaeda, rather than, say, a trivial gang-banger from Chicago whose only serious professional training came at Taco Bell? According to Jacoby, it is enough for us to know that the Grand and Glorious Decider -- and let all stand hushed in awe-struck reverence at the mention of his name -- has "determined" that this is so.

Furthermore, according to Jacoby, "Padilla's capture and detention were the direct result of [similar] effective intelligence gathering efforts" -- you know, like the time those greasy perverts in Morocco took a scalpel to Binyam Mohammed's penis, prompting the victim to say that he would sign anything put in front of him, including a statement implicating a U.S. citizen he didn't know.

Until late 2005, the Regime insisted that Padilla had to be held in military custody indefinitely, because permitting him to be tried in our court system would (let's say it all together) undermine national security. But Bush and his comrades eventually released Padilla for trial when it became clear that the matter was headed for the Supreme Court, and it was possible that the administration could lose. This would imperil the asserted presidential power to designate any U.S. citizen an "enemy combatant" and imprison him in perpetuity.

So the Regime condescended to permit Padilla to have a trial -- on charges that had nothing to do with any of the matters supposedly verified by their "effective intelligence gathering efforts" -- you know, waterboarding, sexual mutilation, that kind of wholesome stuff.

Padilla's trial in Miami is winding down. There has been no mention of a "dirty bomb" plot. Prosecutors have made no mention of Padilla's personal involvement in any terrorist plot of any kind. He may be -- should be -- acquitted.

If so, notes the Christian Science Monitor, the Regime may very well "try to return him to the brig"; if that were to happen, armed insurrection for the purpose of extracting Bush and Cheney from power would not be an inappropriate response. After all, what other recourse would remain if our rulers can simply ignore an acquittal, and imprison a citizen found innocent by his peers?

The former -- seizure of Padilla despite an acquittal -- may happen. The latter -- a righteous armed uprising -- will not, precisely because it is the course of action that would be chosen in such circumstances by the patriots who created our republic. With a scant handful of worthy exceptions, we are not worthy heirs to the Founders' legacy. As the Monitor observed: "Although civil libertarians protested Padilla's detention without charge, there was no significant public outcry."

A likelier outcome would be a guilty verdict of some kind, with the jury thereby validating the Imperious Commander Guy's claim that he can declare any of us to be an un-person outside the law's protection.

This is what the entire exercise has been about all along, and it's why the Regime is determined to keep Padilla imprisoned for life. It would be completely horrifying, and utterly typical of our degenerate culture, if this crucial victory for the cause of Fuhrerprinzip were delivered not by a court or by Congress, but by a jury of common Americans.

I have no brief for Jose Padilla as an individual; he appears to be a standard-issue street thug who got the standard prison-upgrade to minor league Muslim fanatic. But there are gravities of loathsomeness, and Padilla is being used by people immeasurably more evil than he is to accomplish unspeakably vile ends.


Video Extra

The lengthy clip below is from the second part of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode entitled "Chain of Command." In it we see Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) captured by the militaristic Cardassians, undergoing "enhanced interrogation techniques" intended to help him develop a sense of "dependency and trust" toward his interrogator, the urbane Cardassian Gul (commander) Muldred (David Warner, doing magnificent work through ridiculous make-up).

Patrick Stewart, who played Captain Picard, has long been active in Amnesty International and other groups working against torture. At the time this episode debuted in 1992, some critics reacted with variations on the theme of: "Oh, torture is evil, you say? Well, duh."

It is a cause for sober reflection that a moral conclusion that seemed numbingly obvious in 1992 is now considered akin to sedition when spoken aloud -- and that the Regime ruling us today brazenly employs methods more barbarous than those used by the "Cardassians," who are among the most savage races ever depicted in science fiction.

Building a Better Beast : "Homeland Security" in the US and the PRC

Made in the USA: When Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky was arrested by the KGB about 40 years ago, his guards told him the handcuffs he was wearing were made in America. US investment capital is helping China's thuggish gerontocracy keep its rising entrepreneurial population under surveillance.


Let it not be said that the disastrous and unjustifiable Iraq war has failed to yield commercial spin-offs.

Just as the first Gulf War famously prompted the Chinese General Staff to begin a crash modernization of the People's Liberation Army, the garrison state technology on display in the ongoing occupation of Iraq has inspired Lin Jianghuai, the 38-year-old tech tycoon heading China Public Security Technology, Inc -- a key contractor for the Ministry of Public Security (MSP), Beijing's version of the Department of Homeland Security.

Lin amassed a considerable fortune manufacturing a key component for DVD players. As he followed the progress of the Iraq war, Lin was impressed with the police-oriented hardware deployed by occupation troops, such as the HIIDE (Hand-held Interagency Identity Detection Equipment) system, which is simiar to the Mobilisa "Sentry" identity check device described in this space some months ago.

"I really felt strongly that the police [in China] would absolutely benefit from such technology," Lin recalls. "Bush helped me get my vision."

That's our Bush: Inspiring tyrants from Harare to Beijing.

In pursuit of that "vision," Lin purchased an undistinguished e-commerce business, fused it to a minuscule publicly traded Florida printing company via a "reverse merger," and then renamed the consolidated enterprise "China Public Security," or CPS. Currently traded only in limited fashion, CPS will be traded on the NASDAQ next year, if Lin's ambitions come to fruition. There's no denying that it is a growth stock.

Within a very short time of its creation, CPS attracted capital from two large investment funds in Plano, Texas: Pinnacle Fund and Pinnacle China Fund. Also on board were Roth Capital Partners of Newport Beach, California, New York's Oppenheimer & Company, and First Asia Finance Group of Hong Kong.

China's Ministry of Public Security then awarded Lin's company a contract for developing and deploying a pilot hi-tech surveillance program in Shenzen, a city next to Hong Kong that serves as a computer manufacturing center. At the center of CPS's surveillance system is a "residency card," which is very close kindred to the emerging REAL ID system here in the US.

The computer-readable chip in the Shenzen identity card, reports the New York Times, "will include not just the citizen's name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord's phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China's controversial `one child' policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card."

If the State objects to any element of the individual's life and background, as documented in the card, that individual will not be able to earn a living or participate in the economy.

This system is being described by Chinese authorities as a "pilot program" for a future nation-wide human inventory control apparatus. I can't help but suspect that it's likewise intended to provide a shakedown for the deployment of a very similar system in our own Homeland Security State.

The Pinnacle Fund, as it happens, is a significant investor in US Homeland Security contractors, among them GVI Security Solutions, Inc, which specializes in large-scale surveillance. Not long ago, former Under Secretary of Homeland Security Asa Hutchinson was named to the GVIS board of directors, joining such dubious luminaries as former New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir and Nazzareno Paciotti, formerly of Pinkerton Investigations.

GVIS is just one of numerous corporatist entities looking for easy and secure subsidized profits by building the garrison state both at home and abroad. There will be plenty of work to go around as the Regime builds its own version of the Shenzen Residence Card Information Management System.

The embryo of the U.S. version of that program is the proposed Employment Eligibility Verification System (EEVS) or E-Verify. Adam Thomas of Press Esc offers a tidy summation of how this initiative -- highlighted in a recent White House press release -- will work:

"[E-Verify] will initially require more than 200,000 companies doing Federal business to use the system to establish employment eligibility of new hires and the validity of their Social Security Numbers. Later this system will be expanded to cover all companies and will include photo screening features through agreements to allow E-Verify access to the repository of photographs in the State Department of Motor Vehicles databases."

At the risk of making myself obnoxious on this point as on so many others, I'm constrained to observe that the envisioned role in this scheme played by the State DMVs illustrates yet again that local, independent police agencies have gone the way of the vinyl LP: They're not quite extinct, but might as well be.

Much as it grieves me to do so, I must quote the ACLU's analysis of EEVS/E-Verify: "Under this already flawed program no one would be able to work in the U.S. without DHS [Department of Homeland Security] approval -- creating a `No Work List' similar to the government's `No Fly List.'"



This is being done, of course, as an immigration control measure, and it's propelled by the kind of people -- such as these charming folks -- whose determination to keep Mexicans out of the country is on par with their indifference to the emergence of a garrison state within our country.
Oh, and that's hardly the end of the undertakings outlined by the White House:


*“The Department of Homeland Security will continue to explore effective and cost-efficient means of establishing biometric exit requirements at land border crossings.” (Emphasis added.) As I warned about a year ago, the real point of "border security" under the Homeland Security Regime is to keep us in, not to keep "them" out.

*“Starting January 31, 2008, DHS will phase in a requirement for passports or other secure documents for sea and land ports of entry.” The most tacit but unmistakable intent here is to compel any American who leaves the country for any reason to obtain a "secure" federal ID document; as others have pointed out, this is a necessary step toward the eventual creation of a Soviet-style system of internal passports and checkpoints.

*“The Administration is training hundreds of state and local law enforcement officers to address illegal immigration in their communities.” Wonderful! Allow me to find a bucket to hold my joy. This underscores, yet again, the fact that the entire immigration "crisis" has been exploited as a way to build a police state, with the support -- sometimes grudging, but often enthusiastic -- of the very people who would ordinarily put up at least some resistance.

Following the defeat of the immigration "reform" bill in the Senate last June, Michael Savage -- who helped himself to a large portion of the credit for that result -- shared a provocative thought with his audience. Dr. Savage reported that his evening walks regularly take him by a branch office of the Department of Homeland Security, a facility that includes a large motor pool. Recently, he continued, he has seen row after row of newly painted black buses with blacked-out windows. Those buses, Savage gleefully predicted, are being prepared for the day when illegal immigrants will be gathered by the thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, and forcibly deported.

Wanna bet?


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The Coldest Monster, The Cruelest Slavemaster

Abigail Burroughs, seen here before cancer ravaged her body, died at age 21 after pleading unsuccessfully to use a promising drug called Erbitux, then in final clinical trials but not yet approved by the FDA. Months after Abigail's death, the FDA granted approval amid geysers of self-laudatory praise for making the "life-saving" drug available. Rather than tracking down and beating the tax-fattened bureaucrats who helped kill his daughter -- as he was morally entitled to do -- Abigail's father Frank created the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs.



It's not that often that we can say with perfect confidence that a judicial ruling will lead directly to the needless agonizing deaths of innocent people. The U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C. handed down just such a ruling (.pdf) in a case brought against the FDA by the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs.

Bobbing in the porridge of intellectual perversity served by the court is this particularly unpalatable morsel: "[C]reating constitutional rights to be free from regulation based solely upon a prior lack of regulation would undermine much of the modern administrative state, which, like drug regulation, has increased in scope as changing conditions have warranted."

From this single observation we can extract the logic (if that word can be tortured into applying here) of the entire ruling:

*Constitutional rights are a government artifact, "created" primarily by the courts.

*Since "rights" are creations of the State, they can be summoned into existence, summarily abolished, or modified as the government sees fit, in order to serve the State's "compelling interests."

*The fact that certain freedoms have been historically exercised by Americans -- such as the right to seek alternative treatments for life-threatening conditions, a right exercised by Americans without qualification for most of our nation's history (from the colonial period until 1962) -- is of no consequence when the State decides to expand its own regulatory mandate.

*If, in defiance of the foregoing assumptions, terminally ill patients are permitted to exercise ownership over their health by seeking treatments not approved by government, then the entire rationale for the "administrative" State will be fatally undermined. It is better that we let a few innocent people die in agony, than to permit the State's regulatory powers to be undermined in any way.

Not surprisingly, the court tried to buttress this argument by invoking that all-purpose exterminator of liberties, the "War on Drugs."

If there is a "deeply rooted" right to experimental drugs and other treatment, the court sneers, shouldn't there likewise be a "deeply rooted" right to use marijuana and other narcotics, which weren't subject to federal regulation until 1937?


Well, now that you mention it, the constitutional case for regulating drugs of any kind is thin enough to make Keira Knightley look zaftig by comparison. Operating on such a slender pretext, the State has grown obese and murderous. And the war on narcotics, predictably, has expanded into a war on non-sanctioned medical treatment.

For the DC Appeals Court, the default setting is "paternalistic authoritarianism," which is why sees nothing amiss in decanting lines such as this:

"A prior lack of regulation suggests that we must exercise care in evaluating the untested assertions of a constitutional right to be free from new regulation."

The only way this can make sense if one assumes -- contrary to the text and history of the Constitution (particularly the Ninth Amendment), the commentaries of those who drafted it, the recorded debates of those who ratified it, and the common sense invested in each of us by our Creator -- that individual rights, rather than grants of government power, must be specifically enumerated.

In that mental universe, it is freedom, rather than power, that must be justified. This includes the liberty of peaceful, law-abiding people who suffer terminal illnesses, acting with full knowledge of the risks, to make use of promising experimental drugs that haven't yet earned the unqualified approval of the regulatory bureaucracy.

The court complains that, in essence, "the Alliance insists on a constitutional right to assume any level of risk." Well, why the hell not? If someone confronts the prospect of a lingering, painful death from a terminal disease, doesn't that person have the right to take any risk he deems appropriate in seeking to defeat the disease?

According to the court, the answer is "no" -- because it is the State, acting through the legislature and the regulatory apparatus, that makes "value judgments" of this sort, and the suffering individual has no "constitutional right to override the collective judgment of the scientific and medical communities expressed through the FDA's clinical testing process."

The candor with which the court emits such collectivist nostrums is amazing. And undergirding them is the tacit but unmistakable understanding that from the court's perspective, the State owns each of us, and as slaves, we must defer to the State's power to do as it sees fit -- no matter what needless cruelty results.

In a dissent that is as intellectually taut as the majority opinion is flaccid, Judge Judith Rogers italicizes the obvious -- namely, that the "right of a person to save [his] own life," which was entirely ignored in the decision, is the fundamental human liberty. An illustration of the court's alienation from reality is found in the fact that Rogers considered it necessary to fortify this "Well, duh" proposition by supplying quotes from Blackstone and Samuel Adams on the subject.

It is because of the centrality of this right that "the Alliance's liberty claims are not grounded in the abstract notion of personal autonomy, but rather in the specific right to act to save one's life," Rogers observes. "While the potential cures [that haven't completed FDA testing] may not prove sufficient to save the life of a terminally ill patient, they are surely necessary if there is to be any possibility" of doing so, she contends.

The basic defense of the institution of government is that it is necessary to protect the life and liberties of the individual. Yet in this case, the State is found "interposing itself between a terminally ill patient and [that patient's] only means of prolonging [his] life," a practice that "runs counter to the common law's historical prohibition on interfering with rescue."

Interposition, in the Common Law tradition, was a practice intended to protect the innocent from the lawless violence of others -- not to forbid the innocent to take action to save themselves.

Rogers' dissent is already justly famous for its meditation on the lethal irony of contemporary judicial doctrine regarding "rights":

"In the end, it is startling that the oft-limited rights to marry, to fornicate, to have children, to control the education and upbringing of children, to perform varied sexual acts in private, and to control one's own body even if it results in one's own death or the death of a fetus have all been deemed fundamental rights ... but the right to try to save one's life is left out in the cold despite its textual anchor in the right to life."

The problem here is one not properly perceived by either party in this case, or by either faction on the court: The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision effectively nullified the right to life, not just for human individuals within the womb, but for any class of people who can be written off as non-"viable." Roe did not specify that human "personhood" begins at birth; it simply said that it doesn't occur anytime prior to birth:

"We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer."

In 1982, the lethal logic of Roe was used to justify the eugenic murder of "Baby Doe," an infant born with Down's Syndrome and a defect of the esophagus who was allowed to starve to death rather than undergo rudimentary surgery that would have saved his life. The assumption was that the newborn -- who was unambiguously a human person -- was not "viable" because he would suffer from severe retardation unless he was murdered.

A similar approach was taken in the case of Baby Jane Doe, a New York infant born with spina bifida whose parents declined to seek relatively simple surgery to close the spinal lacuna -- and then set about the task of killing the girl by degrees through calculated, and State-authorized, lethal neglect. The girl's spinal column later healed itself, prompting the parents to seek appropriate medical treatment. But in those cases, a clear precedent was established expanding Roe's license to kill to include vulnerable people who are fully born.

Given this history, it beggars comprehension that the Abigail Alliance's legal strategy in seeking to vindicate the right to life was based on a novel reading of Roe and its (if you'll excuse the expression) offspring: The intention was to demonstrate that (in Judge Rogers' words) the Supreme Court "has developed a sizable body of law regarding the right to a potentially life-saving medical procedure" -- that is, "therapeutic" abortion -- "when the life or health of a pregnant woman is on the line."

Trying to extract a life-affirming line of reasoning from Roe is like seeking to obtain grapes from thorns, figs from thistles, or wisdom from Sean Hannity. It simply cannot happen,because everything reproduces after its kind, and Roe was the grand ancestor of every contemporary manifestation of the Culture of Death, including the capricious denial of medicine to desperate, terminally ill people.


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