"Sedition" Purges -- Past, Present, and Future

A "British Tar" of a different kind: American patriots of the Revolutionary era carry out an act of criminal sedition against their lawful government.



That persons who are hunting after places, offices and contracts, should be advocates for war, taxes and extravagance, is not to be wondered at..... The country, during the time of the former Administration, was kept in continual agitation and alarm; and that no investigation might be made into its conduct, it entrenched itself within a magic circle of terror, and called it a SEDITION LAW. --


Thomas Paine, Letters to the Citizens of the United States (1802-1803), inspired by his outrage over the Alien and Sedition Acts.



"Hang him, shoot him or lock him up in a concentration camp."


To people not tutored in the nuances of Progressive dogma, those sentiments appear to be high-octane hate speech of the "eliminationist" variety. This Soviet-style prescription for dealing with dissent was offered during a March 1942 meeting of the Overseas Writers Association (OWA) that was attended by numerous high-ranking officials from FDR's administration.



The target of the OWA's Stalinoid hate session was a brace of refractory newspaper publishers -- Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune and Joe Patterson of the New York Daily News.



Utterly contemptuous of the Axis powers and unflinching in their commitment to an "America First" foreign policy, McCormick and Patterson were among those commendable souls whose marrow-deep contempt for fascism encompassed not only Hitler and Mussolini, but also Roosevelt, who would go on to be America's first fascist president-for-life.



Following Pearl Harbor -- an infamous incident in which FDR was, at the very least, a silent accomplice -- Roosevelt mounted an attempt to prosecute his domestic critics for disloyalty.
To that end he began barraging Attorney General Francis Biddle with press clippings from publications critical of his reign.



"Biddle started receiving notes from FDR ... asking `What are you doing to stop this?'" recalled historian Thomas Fleming in his valuable study The New Dealers' War. Had Biddle been serious about his constitutional oath, his one-word reply would have been: "Nothing." This wouldn't have availed much with FDR, who -- even in the dismal company of his fellow chief executives -- distinguished himself by his disdain for the Constitution. Roosevelt, observes Fleming, "was not much interested in the theory of sedition or in the constitutional right to criticize the government during wartime. He just wanted this anti-war talk stopped."



Even at that relatively early stage of America's descent into executive dictatorship, those belonging to the Washington/New York press corps -- and those composing the larger community of literati -- aligned themselves to the presidency like iron filings to a magnet. So it's not surprising that a large number of journalists and other writers who should have rallied to the defense of FDR's critics eagerly helped to compile rosters of heretics, and went about gathering the wood to burn them at the stake.


Shortly after the OWA hate session, a "journalistic lynch mob" met with Attorney General Biddle "and requested that he find grounds, any grounds, for indicting McCormick and Patterson," recalls Justin Raimondo in his indispensable book Reclaiming the American Right. "Archibald MacLeish, the `poet laureate of the New Deal' and Librarian of Congress, gave the lunch party his blessings when he told the ANPA [American Newspaper Publishers Association] that certain of their members were guilty of treason."


Although neither McCormick nor Patterson was prosecuted, Biddle -- under relentless pressure from FDR -- assigned Justice Department attorney William Power Maloney to compose a roster of alleged seditionists. Eventually 28 writers and activists who had distinguished themselves by criticizing FDR and opposing the war were indicted for treasonous sedition.


The prosecution's theory closely tracked a luridly dishonest "expose" published by Avedis Derounian under the pseudonym John Roy Carlson. Prior to U.S. involvement in WWII, Derounian was hired by a Marxist group called "Friends of Democracy" -- a self-appointed "watchdog" organization that supported American intervention on behalf of Stalin's Soviet regime -- to infiltrate various right-wing groups as an informant and provocateur.


The two books Derounian/Carlson produced, Under Cover and The Plotters, provided the template used today by Morris Dees and other self-anointed watchdogs of that ilk: A handful of marginalized, inconsequential figures who openly espoused bigoted views or support for the Axis were quoted as expressing agreement with the America First Committee or critics of FDR's domestic policies. In this fashion, "all criticism of the New Deal and FDR [was equated] with treason and support for Hitler," Raimondo recalls.


Comrade Vishinsky, I presume? O. John Rogge, the FDR regime's prosecutor at the 1944 sedition show trial.


This familiar and tiresome rhetorical trope was adopted as a legal strategy by Biddle and his subordinates -- first Moloney and then, following that attorney's dismissal for incompetence, O. John Rogge.


As Thomas Fleming summarizes, the Justice Department insisted "that the defendants were guilty of sedition because passages in their writings and speeches were very close to Nazi statements on Roosevelt, the Jews, and similar topics."


While most of the American public supported the war effort, and countenanced indefensible policies such as the wholesale imprisonment of Japanese-Americans, many Americans heard echoes of the Stalinist show trials emanating from the federal courtroom that resonated with Rogge's denunciation of the "seditionists." This resonance led critics of the spectacle to refer to Rogge as "Vishinsky."


We will never know whether FDR's plan to imprison his critics for their words would have succeeded. A mistrial was declared following the presiding judge's fatal heart attack. In 1946, after FDR's death and the end of WWII, the case was dismissed by Federal District Judge Bolitha Laws, who described it as "a travesty on justice."


By that time, some of the 28 defendants had spent years behind bars for the supposed crime of expressing their views in public. Among those who had been rounded by by the Regime could be found a deaf sign painter, a maid, a factory worker from Detroit, and several people who ran one-man publishing operations -- the WWII-era equivalent of bloggers.


In some ways, the FDR-era dissidents prosecuted as enemies of the state FDR were more fortunate than the scores of Montana citizens who were imprisoned during World War I under that state's version of the federal Sedition Act. Like the federal measure, the Montana anti-sedition statute criminalized the utterance of publication of opinions critical of the federal government, particularly the military and the president.


Elsewhere in the war-crazed United States, the Wilson Regime collaborated with officially sanctioned vigilante groups such the American Protective League (APL), which collaborated with the embryonic FBI (called the Bureau of Investigation at the time) to identify, harass, and punish those suspected of "disloyalty." This public-private partnership in suppressing dissent created what historian Diane M.T. North called "an elaborate nationwide spy network" that "relied on reckless, undocumented accusations" of subversive activities.


The APL played a prominent role in the "Slacker Raids" of 1918, a purge conducted in New York and New Jersey during which tens of thousands of American citizens and legal resident aliens were arrested on suspicion of desertion or refusal to submit to military slavery (commonly called the "draft").




















Officially sanctioned bullying: Certificates of this kind were issued by the federal government to those who joined the American Protective League, a nation-wide vigilante group used to suppress and punish dissent during WWI.



"The roundup began at 7:00 a.m., Tuesday, September 3," recalls Don Whitehead in his book The FBI Story. "At the close of the three-day raid, some 50,000 men had been hustled from theaters, restaurants, street cars, railway stations, pool halls and street corners, sometimes to the jeer of street crowds. Soldiers, with bayonets fixed on their rifles, halted men on the streets and demanded proof of registration [for the draft]. APL operatives `arrested' suspects. Out-of-town visitors who had forgotten their cards were hauled off to roped arenas which became known as `bull pens.' Worried wives came searching for lost husbands. Workers were seized when they left their jobs. Men were forced to stand for hours, without food, unable to telephone for help in establishing their innocence."


When it wasn't participating in direct mob violence against suspected "slackers," the APL was diligently scrutinizing everything said or written in their communities in search of "seditious libel."


The Bureau of Investigation gratefully acknowledged the work of the Minnesota APL, which provided "a complete record of every person living in the Duluth district who uttered words against the Government from April 1, 1917, until the division was disbanded on February 1, 1919."


The "Council of Defense," an APL affiliate in Henry County, Missouri, devised a three-card "warning system" targeting people considered "to be `speaking or acting in a disloyal way,'" recalls Whitehead. At the first "violation," an individual would be given a white card announcing that he had been reported as someone whose "attitude and utterances [were] dangerous and disloyal. We recommend caution and a complete change of attitude."



Those who stubbornly persisted in their independence of mind would receive a blue card amplifying the warning. In exceptional cases a particularly stubborn person would be issued a final red card instructing him to "report at once your change of front to the Postmaster" if he wanted to "avoid Summary Action" -- which could mean anything from ostracism to imprisonment to lynching.


The totalitarian actions of Wilson and FDR and their supporters form the impeccably progressive pedigree of Obama-aligned statists who are agitating for another nation-wide purge of seditionists.


Now, as then, the administration can count on the efforts of self-appointed watchdogs and political vigilantes -- chief among them the squalid Morris Dees, whose Southern Poverty Law Center is in everything but name an adjunct to the FBI. The indictment of the Hutaree Militia, which treats inflammatory rhetoric not far removed from the sentiments of Paine, Jefferson, and Samuel Adams as evidence of criminal intent, will be studied carefully by aspiring Vishinkys seeking to hold their own show trials.


Most ominously, Obama himself -- acting on "counter-terrorism" precedents established by his predecessor -- now claims the supposed authority to order the summary execution of U.S. citizens accused of "seditious libel."


"Sedition," as noted here previously, is our country's oldest, noblest, and most indispensable political tradition. "Libel" of any variety entails deliberate falsehood. Yet according to Obama-centric collectivists, telling the unpleasant truth about government -- thereby denying it unearned legitimacy -- somehow equates to "seditious libel."


Writing in The Nation, Princeton associate professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell observes: "I often begin my political science courses with a brief introduction to the idea of `the state.' The state is the entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, force, and coercion. If an individual travels to another country and kills its citizens, we call it terrorism. If the state does it, we call it war. If a man kills his neighbor it is murder; if the state does it it is the death penalty. If an individual takes his neighbor's money, it is theft; if the state does it, it is taxation."



Exactly the same points have been made by Augustine ("absent justice, what are kingdoms but vast robberies?"), Thoreau, Spooner, Nietzche, Nock, Rothbard, and others who understand the ineradicably criminal nature of the State. What they condemned, Harris-Lacewell and her comrades celebrate.


Like most of her professional colleagues, Harris-Lacewell subscribes to a Leninist view of politics in which the State exercises "power without limit, resting directly on force." She also embraces a view closely akin to Mussolini's definition of totalitarianism: "Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State."


"The Tea Party is a challenge to the legitimacy of the U.S. state," decrees commissarina Harris-Lacewell. "When Tea Party participants charge the current administration with various forms of totalitarianism, they are arguing that the government has no right to levy taxes or make policy. Many GOP elected officials offered nearly secessionist rhetoric from the floor of the Congress [during the debate over nationalizing health care]. They joined as co-conspirators with the Tea Party protesters by arguing that this government has no monopoly on legitimacy."



In order to be considered a criminal conspiracy, the accused must be charged with an overt act. For Harris-Lacewell, the actus reus occurred when protesters assailed Rep. John Lewis, who as "an elected official" is not merely a human being, but a quasi-divine "embodiment of the state."



"When protesters spit on and scream at duly elected representatives of the United States government it is more than an act of racism," insists Harris-Lacewell in a gratuitous reference to Lewis's ethnic background. "It is an act of sedition."


The tacit but obvious corollary to Harris-Lacewell's charge against "seditionists" is the same demand made by FDR's partisans in 1942: Hang them, shoot them, lock them up in concentration camps.


For Sara Robinson of the Soros-funded K-Street outfit called Campaign for America's Future, the seditious conspiracy includes not only Tea Party activists but practically anybody who has taken Obama's name in vain.


"Advocating, encouraging, and sanctioning sedition is the new norm on the conservative side," wrote Robinson in a recent essay. For decades, "the entire right wing" has been committing "sedition in slow motion," she continues; writers, ranters, and pundits of that persuasion offer constant "incitement to revolt against [Obama's] administration"; they are motivated by "seditious intent" and issue "nearly constant invitations to criminal sedition."


"What these folks are telling us," Robinson writes by way of stating her own Leninist bottom line, "is that they no longer recognize the government's sole franchise on the use of force"; this is what makes such people "seditionists in intention or fact -- and thus enemies of the state, plain and simple."


Only someone intimately in touch with his or her inner Vishinsky could use the expression "enemy of the state" as an accusation, rather than a plaudit. Only someone deeply ignorant of the American tradition of liberty protected by law, and incurably contemptuous of the U.S. Constitution (particularly the Second Amendment), could insist that Americans have a duty to treat the government as an entity with a "monopoly" or "sole franchise" on the use of force.


Nothing is more consummately anti-American than treating government as a monopoly of any kind.


In 1802, Thomas Paine warned that within a few years of the War for Independence and the ratification of the Constitution, a faction that had "lost sight of first principles" was "beginning to contemplate government as a profitable monopoly, and the people as hereditary property." It was this implacable appetite for power, Paine concluded, that inspired the effort to criminalize as sedition any attempt to "oppose any measure of the government of the United States" or to express any opinion meant to "bring into contempt or disrepute" the President or any other "embodiment of the State."



Admittedly, Obama-era militant collectivists don't quite fit that description, since they prefer ideological despotism to the hereditary variety.



In dealing with those who practice sedition, the Stalinist in the Oval Office is not limited to hanging them, shooting them, or consigning them to the gulag, nor does he have to wait until a show trial validates a pre-ordained guilty verdict.


Chris Floyd and David Swanson, two progressive commentators who are immune to Obama's personality cult, point out that the Blessed One now claims the power to order the summary execution -- via a missile attack carried out through an unmanned drone, if necessary -- of any U.S. citizen designed a "terrorist" by presidential decree.


"Barack Obama has ordered the murder of an American citizen" -- New Mexico-born Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric now living in Yemen -- "without trial, without due process, without the production of any evidence," Floyd laments. "All it takes to kill any American citizen in this way is Barack Obama's signature on a piece of paper, his arbitrary designation of the target as a `suspected terrorist.' In precisely the same way -- precisely the same way -- Josef Stalin would place a mark by a name in a list of `suspected terrorists' or `counterrevolutionaries,' and the bearer of that name would die. This is the system we have now, the same as the Soviets had then: a leader with the unchallengable power to kill citizens without due process."



"Obama has made it crystal clear for even the most avidly self-duping progressive," concludes Floyd:



"He will murder his fellow citizens without trial or evidence if he sees fit. The state can murder whom it pleases. This is the system we have. This is what you support when you support Barack Obama.... If you support Obama now, in this, then there is no crime he can commit that you will not support. And thus you become one of those people that we all used to puzzle over, the accomodationists to brutal tyranny: `How did all those people go along with the Nazis? Why wasn't there more opposition to Stalin? How could they countenance all those obvious abominations? What kind of people were they?' Now you know. They were you. You are them."


Current trends indicate that seditious talk of this kind -- denying the state's monopoly on force, calling into disrepute its sanctified embodiment, the Holy One, Barack the Blessed -- could eventually earn Floyd a place on the dock next to the Hutaree militia and anyone else who speaks ill of the Anointed One.


For your daily dose of unfiltered sedition, be sure to tune in for Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network.

Dum spiro, pugno!

We're From the Government; We're Here to "Help" You to Death

They kill not because they want to
Because they think it's right to In some cases
Have mercy on them and someday they may
Have mercy on you
The Mercy Killers
Have mercy on you
The Mercy Killers....


-- Theme to the imaginary TV show "The Mercy Killers," as presented in a 1978 Saturday Night Live sketch.



Susan L. Stuckey was suicidal when the police arrived at her apartment in Prairie Village, Kansas on March 31. When the police arrived to conduct what they dishonestly called a "welfare check," Stuckey refused their offer to "help."


Police had paid several previous visits to Stuckey, who reportedly suffered from severe emotional problems. On this particular occasion, when they materialized shortly after daybreak, they were acting on ulterior motives. "Our intent was to take her to K.U. Med for a mental evaluation," admitted Police Captain Tim Schwartzkopf following the confrontation.


Any day that begins with the arrival of armed strangers on one's doorstep is going to end badly. Despite her afflictions, Stuckey was lucid enough to understand that principle, and she did the entirely rational thing: She bluntly invited the police to direct their unwanted attention elsewhere. Since she wasn't suspected of a crime, that should have ended the matter.


But the police weren't investigating a crime. They were carrying out a much more dangerous function: They were there to "help" Stuckey, whether or not this would be appropriate, and her desires were irrelevant to the matter.


So when Stuckey rebuffed their offer, the police decided to "help" her a little bit harder by calling in a posse of uniformed knuckle-draggers called the Tactical Squad. Oddly enough, the arrival of yet another contingent of armed strangers -- this one decked out in military garb and carrying high-caliber firearms -- did nothing to ease Stuckey's troubled mind. She had already refused to grant police access to her apartment, and the arrival of the local goon squad prompted her to throw up additional barricades.


For more than two hours, the police tried to browbeat Stuckey into surrendering to them. According to neighbors who witnessed the event, the troubled 47-year-old woman -- whose mental distress was genuine -- was made frantic by this persistent, unwelcome attention.


Sometime around 9:45 a.m., Stuckey was heard to exclaim to the police, "Somebody please kill me."


So they did.


After the fact, the police insisted that the woman -- who was surrounded, recall, by more than a dozen armed males, most of them wearing body armor and packing military-issue weaponry -- "threatened" them with a weapon of some kind.


Neighbor Gary Carson recalls seeing Stuckey armed with a broomstick and a baseball bat. After killing Stuckey, the police insisted that the fearsome implement of death wielded by Stuckey was something other than a Louisville Slugger. Thus it is quite possible that when Stuckey was shot three times by a heroic 15-year veteran police officer, she was armed with nothing more lethal than a thin wooden dowel.


Yet it was for this reason, insisted a local "reporter" embedded with the paramilitary team that attacked Stuckey's home, that the police "were forced to shoot her."


The same repulsive sentiment was uttered by Stuckey's neighbor Marianne McGuff, whose canine eagerness to display the "correct" attitude suggests that she was a star pupil in one of the Regime's obedience training schools.


"It did break my heart that they had to shoot her," pronounced McGuff. "They must have had a real good reason to shoot her because that's not normal."


***


***

There was no "good reason" for the police to gun down Stuckey, because there was no good reason for them to be there in the first place.


The night before Stuckey was mercy-killed by the police, some neighbors called in the constabulary when the disturbed woman "verbally assaulted them," reports a Kansas City CBS affiliate. Within hours, she was dead -- without being so much as charged with a crime.


Police and their media stenographers insist that the "standoff" with Stuckey "escalated" as the morning wore on. To the extent that this is true, the escalation was unilateral, with the police fatally ramping up their efforts to overcome Stuckey's refusal to submit to their offer to "help" the troubled woman by handcuffing her and taking her to a mental hospital. Eventually some similarly helpful person provided the police with a key to the apartment, thereby acting as an accomplice to an eminently avoidable act of death by government.


In describing the actions of the police officers who carried out the lethal "humanitarian" invasion of Stuckey's home, Capt. Schwartzkopf offers no indication that the frantic woman posed a significant threat to the intruders: "They tried what I would describe as less lethal options; that was not working, and basically officers had to use deadly force."


When used in this way, "basically" is a high-viscosity weasel-word. The only time anyone is morally or legally permitted to use lethal force is to deflect potentially lethal aggressive violence. Note carefully that Schwartzkopf didn't claim that this was the case.


"[The officer's] hand was forced," Schwartzkopf maintained in a separate statement. "He tried to use different options there and unfortunately he had to discharge his firearm."


The most urgent questions in this matter are left begging like Dickensian orphans: Why did the police officer "have" to kill Stuckey? What "weapon" was Stuckey carrying? What "less-lethal" weapon(s) did the officer employ before firing his gun?


If Stuckey had been wielding a gun or a knife, this detail would most likely have been shared with the public. Schwartzkopf made no mention of a gun or knife. In fact, he didn't use the word "lethal" to characterize the purported weapon. Taking Schwartzkopf's account at face value, it appears the officer who killed Stuckey had time to try more than one "non-lethal" option before gunning her down.


The official story is that Stuckey "made a threatening move toward the officer." It should be kept in mind that police are permitted to describe any form of resistance as a "threat" to "officer safety."


Stuckey would have been within her legal rights to employ defensive force to repel potentially lethal aggression by the police. But nothing Schwartzkopf has said for public consumption indicates that Stuckey was killed for any reason other than her insurmountable refusal to submit to the police.


As things presently stand, it appears that Susan L. Stuckey -- may God grant rest to her troubled soul -- was a victim of what I'm going to call the Troy Meade Doctrine of Police Violence.


That doctrine takes its name from the Everett, Washington police officer who carried out the execution-style killing of Niles Meservey, a drunken man whose car was completely hemmed in and who posed no danger to anybody. Meade, his patience over-taxed after spending a few minutes trying to talk Meservey out of his Corvette, bellowed, "Enough is enough! Time to end this!" Meade them emptied his firearm into the driver's side of the car, killing Meservey.


Whenever the State's armed enforcers are deployed to "help" somebody, and the target of official benevolence doesn't play along, eventually the matter will reach the "enough is enough" stage. At this point, the government's emissaries of coercive kindness will have no choice but to kill the object of their humanitarian concern.


Two recent cases suggest that Stuckey could have suffered a violent death even if she had surrendered and been taken to a hospital.


Last December, Preston Bussey III, a 41-year-old resident of Rockledge, Florida who suffered from mental illness, was forcibly hospitalized for self-inflicted wounds. His injuries suggested a failed suicide attempt. Two police summoned to the hospital acted on the adage, "If at first you don't succeed...."


"Several police officers unsuccessfully attempted to persuade Bussey to follow a doctor's directions," according to a local news summary. "Bussey refused, and after repeated warnings to comply `two officers deployed their electronic control devices'" -- that is, their government-issued portable electronic torture devices, more commonly called "Tasers."


A brief digression is appropriate here. We were once assured that Tasers would be used as a substitute for lethal force in situations involving a potentially dangerous criminal suspect, and that the officers carrying them would exercise monastic self-discipline in employing electro-shock. Now we're casually informed that Tasers are "electronic control devices" appropriately used to manipulate non-violent criminals -- and even reluctant patients -- through pain compliance. This was what happened to Mr. Bussey.


After being repeatedly hit with high-voltage shocks, Bussey stopped breathing and died after unsuccessful attempts were made to revive him.


Incredibly, this was the second time a member of Bussey's family had been killed by police while in the hospital. Ten years earlier, almost to the day, Preston's older brother Vincent, who had gone to the hospital for treatment following a fight, was killed in what was described as a "struggle" with police officers.



A couple of weeks before Preston Bussey expired beneath the tender ministrations of Rockledge's "Finest," 62-year-old Toledo, Ohio resident Linda Hicks was gunned down by police in a group home. Hicks, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and hypertension, had gotten hold of a pair of sewing scissors. Some well-meaning soul, not appreciating the potentially fatal consequences of doing so, called the police.


When the officers arrived -- two distaff tax-feeders named Rebecca Kenney and Diane Chandler -- Hicks still had the scissors but she was prone on her bed. When Hicks refused to remove her arms from beneath a pillow, Chandler attempted to shoot her with a Taser, but the cartridge malfunctioned. She then pressed the Taser directly against Hicks's body to operate it in "drive-stun" mode.

This escalation had the predictable effect of making matters worse.


When the officers arrived, Hicks had been depressed and listless. The Taser assault enraged her: She rose from the bed and reportedly declared: "I'm going to kill you or you're going to have to kill me." Chandler replied by shooting the sick woman four times at point-blank range.


As was the case with the police officer who killed Susan Stuckey, Officer Diane Chandler was "certified with crisis intervention training," observed her boss, Toledo Police Chief Michael Navarre.


Apparently, CIT doesn't include instruction in de-escalating conflicts with people not accused of violent crimes.


If Chandler was able to get close enough to use the device in "drive-stun" mode, she was close enough to immobilize Hicks without killing her. Chandler had another officer on hand to assist, and there were objects in the room -- blankets, pillows, furniture -- that could have been used as a shield against a pair of sewing scissors. Presumably, police officers are given at least a modicum of unarmed combatives training, and are paid to run a few risks.


Despite all of this, Chandler's first option in dealing with a physically sick, mentally ill 62-year-old woman was "pain compliance" using a reliably lethal weapon. When that proved futile, her second option was homicide.

Pursuing justice: Civil rights activist Gerald Rose (right) confers with Evelyn Patterson, Linda Hicks's aunt (center) and her daughter, Carmen Boyd (left).





"It's a difficult job out there," Chief Navarre commented after the killing, emphasizing that Chandler, like other members of his department, were stressed-out because of recent layoffs. "Officers are being stretched to the limit."


This remark seemed to invite the public to sympathize with the killer, rather than the victim -- and to contain an oblique warning that about the potential that other stressed-out Toledo police officers may be just a touch too eager to pull the trigger.


Similar concerns were expressed by Thomas F. Pounds, the kennel-fed "watchdog" who publishes the Toledo "Free" Press. While "Hicks’ death is the greater tragedy in the situation," Pounds pontificated, "Chandler’s life has been irrevocably changed and she will need a great deal of support from the community she has sworn to protect." When government employees kill someone needlessly, they can always rely on the solicitude of state-centric opinion molders.

***



***

Roughly a month later, the Toledo PD's Firearms Review Board ruled -- isn't the suspense simply unbearable? -- that Chandler was "justified" in killing Hicks.


It will be recalled that Marie McGuff, Susan Stuckey's neighbor of Susan insisted that it isn't "normal" for the police to gun down someone they're trying to help.


Ladies and gentlemen: Welcome to the new "normal."

Video Extra: "Helping" Iraqis to Death

"Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids to a battle," rationalizes one of the Regime's hired killers after two Iraqi children were found among those slaughtered in the American war crime documented below.


No, you murderous, self-justifying twit: You're to blame for invading and occupying their country, and I wouldn't miss the likes of you if you never came back. Then again, if you did come back you're probably in a policeman's uniform by now.

Be sure to tune in for Pro Libertate Radio each weeknight from 6:00-7:00 Mountain Time on the Liberty News Radio Network.

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Manufactured Menace from Michigan -- Take Two

"That's it, baby -- strut! The camera loves you!" In a familiar bit of Homeland Security Theater, a law enforcement officer, his arms decorated with gangbanger-style tattoos, swaggers through a search of alleged Hutaree militia member Thomas Piatek's home in Hammond, Indiana.


When the stranger materialized a few years ago, nobody really knew much about him. He seemed like a suitably sympathetic figure and quickly ingratiated himself by offering whatever help he could. No task was too menial for him, and he had a way of finding just what the group needed right when it was required.


Most importantly, he seemed to share the group's antipathy toward the government. If anything, he was just a bit more emphatic than the rest in denouncing official corruption and endorsing violent "direct action" against the state. He seemed eager to shepherd the group in a more militant direction, eagerly out-bidding every expression of outrage and hostility. One of his favorite recurring themes was the idea that a criminal state could only be fought through the use of criminal means.


When the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) staged an armed raid to arrest several members of the group, the helpful stranger was nowhere to be found. He did leave a parting gift, however, in the form of detailed allegations recorded in a federal indictment alleging that the group he had infiltrated on behalf of the JTTF was involved in extensive criminal activity -- most of which was either suggested or directly facilitated by him -- and an ambitious plot to wage war against the United States Government.


In broad outline, this is what most likely happened within Michigan's Hutaree militia during the past couple of years, a period during which -- as federal authorities now admit -- the group was infiltrated by both an undercover FBI agent and a "cooperating witness."


One of the FBI's plants, significantly, "posed as someone who could provide the group with custom-made explosives," observes the Detroit News.


That revelation is critical, since it means that the alleged plot to manufacture of improvised explosive devices -- referred to, with hysterical hyperbole typical of the Regime's pronouncements, as "weapons of mass destruction" -- was quite possibly instigated by the FBI's informant/provocateur.


The "Hutaree Conspiracy" was the second installment in the FBI's ongoing Homeland Security Theater in Michigan. The Bureau's campaign against the Masjid Al-Haqq mosque in Dearborn followed almost exactly the same script. The final act of that earlier melodrama was an October 28, 2009 FBI raid against several of the mosque's adherents that ended with the death of its imam, Luqman Ameen Abdullah.


Initial reports claimed that Abdullah was killed in a "shootout" or "exchange of gunfire" with the Feds in a warehouse allegedly containing stolen goods. The word "execution" might be a more appropriate description in light of the fact that Abdullah was shot at least twenty times, including an entry wound in his back and an oddly specific grouping in and around the genital region.


The imam allegedly provoked the federal fusillade by shooting one of the FBI's "K9 agents." Significantly, the official autopsy report -- a document actively suppressed by the Dearborn Police Department for more than three months -- describes a series of "lacerations" (also described by Wayne County Chief Medical Examiner Carl Schmitt as "puncture wounds") that are consistent with being mauled by a dog.


It's possible Abdullah shot the dog to protect himself. It's also possible that he never fired a shot, and the dog stepped in front of one or more round intended for Abdullah. The official FBI narrative is that "Freddy," the Belgian Malinois killed during the raid, "gave his life in the line of duty" on behalf of "his team." The dog was buried in a solemn ritual and his name was added to the FBI's "memorial wall."


We'll never know the exact circumstances of "Freddy" death. This much has been clearly established, however: Abdullah bled to death with his hands cuffed behind his back while the FBI took the time to arrange an emergency medical airlift for their attack dog.


The most favorable construction one can put on this set of facts is that the feds handcuffed a helpless man who had been perforated by at least twenty gunshots. A grimmer possibility is that he was handcuffed before he was shot. In either case, this juxtaposition -- a handcuffed man bleeds to death while his assailants arrange emergency medical treatment for their dog -- reeks of some malodorous combination of depraved indifference and concentrated malice.


Despite the fact that both the investigation of the mosque and the raid were conducted by the local Joint Terrorism Task Force, no terrorism-related charges were filed against any of the ten men listed in the criminal complaint. The charges include "conspiracy" counts arising from an alleged plot to receive and sell "goods that defendants believed were stolen from interstate shipments"; one count of mail fraud; three counts related to possession of firearms or body armor by a felon; and tampering with automobile VIN numbers.


Attendees of Abdullah's mosque included many men who had served time behind bars. As a younger man, Abdullah was convicted of assault. Like many of this followers and countless thousands of others scattered across the country, Abdullah was converted to radical Islam within the world's largest and most lavishly funded madrassa -- the federal prison system. His friends and supporters insist that Abdullah, despite his criminal history, was a caring, pious, and generous man. The mosque ran a soup kitchen and was involved in other forms of charitable outreach to the economically blighted neighborhood.


A son mourns his father: Omar Regan at the funeral of Luqman Abdullah.


Abdullah was expansively hostile toward the government and deeply suspicious of the police -- what rational person isn't?-- but those who knew him well insist he consistently rejected aggressive violence of any kind.


"My father was a sharp-tongued individual," recalls Omar Reagan, a Los Angeles-based comedian and motivational speaker. "He would talk about his dislike of government -- about how law enforcement wasn't protecting and serving the people. But speaking his emotions and acting on his emotions are two different things."


The "evidence" presented in the criminal complaint unsealed after Abdullah was killed shows that he encouraged his followers to acquire the skills to employ defensive violence to protect themselves from both private and government-employed criminals. He also explicitly and repeatedly refused to condone aggressive action against anyone.


FBI Counter-Terrorism Agent Gary Leone, the author of the affidavit, hurls speculative allegations with the exuberant glee of a caged monkey flinging feces at spectators.


In substantive terms, his criminal complaint deals with a small fencing operation. However, where "anti-government" groups are concerned, the FBI appears to suffer from an institution-wide case of Munchausen by proxy syndrome; this may be why the bureaucratic incentives under which Leone operates dictate that every molehill be described as if it were of Himalayan proportions. Accordingly, Abdullah and his followers are portrayed as nothing less than hardened, battle-ready shock troops of the global jihad:


"The investigation has shown that Luqman Ameen Adbullah, Imam of the Masjid Al-Haqq ... is a highly placed leader of a nationwide fundamentalist Sunni group consisting primarily of African-Americans.... Their primary mission is to establish a separate, sovereign Islamic state (`The Ummah') within the borders of the United States, governed by Shariah law..... [Abdullah] regularly preaches anti-government and anti-law enforcement rhetoric. Abdullah and his followers have trained regularly in the use of firearms, and continue to train in martial arts and sword fighting.... Abdullah preaches that every Muslim should have a weapon, and should not be scared to use their weapon when needed."


Aftermath: An FBI agent near the warehouse in which Abdullah was gunned down in an armed raid by the local Joint Terrorism Task Force.


Even if every word of that summation were accurate, none of what is described above constitutes a crime -- a fact Leone tacitly acknowledged by declining to file terrorism or sedition charges.


Furthermore, the inflammatory dicta in Leone's complaint (which consumes 29 of the document's 45 pages) artfully misrepresents Abdullah's views regarding the legitimate use of violence, as those views were summarized by Leone's snitches within the mosque. The most striking example of Leone's dishonesty deals with an attempt by one of his assets to entrap Abdullah into endorsing terrorist violence.


"Confidential Source S-2," a JTTF plant who allegedly recorded conversations with Abdullah, admits that he offered $5,000 to instigate some kind of criminal violence during the 2006 Super Bowl in Detroit. According to Leone's own summary of the incident, "Abdullah said he would not be involved in injuring innocent people for no reason."


"Confidential Source S-3" alleges that Abdullah described how Abdul Samoor, one of his followers, "printed out several things from the internet including Al-Qaeda training camp materials. Abdullah said he told Saboor to throw them away and cautioned him not to look at things on the internet." This -- like most of the "evidence" assembled by Leone -- was hearsay, but it actually works against the FBI's interest by underscoring Abdullah's refusal to endorse Islamic terrorism.


"S-3" also describes a conversation during a trip to Alabama in which Abdullah commented that he "didn't agree with bombing civilian targets such as buses, which occur in Israel and the West Bank, but said it is fine to bomb police stations."


The awkward diction here suggests that Abdullah was referring specifically to actions taken by Palestinians and drawing a distinction -- for whatever it might be worth -- between terrorist attacks on helpless civilians and what he perceived as defensive insurgent warfare against armed personnel carrying out a military occupation.


One of the most critical disclosures offered by "S-3" deals with a reported conversation on June 19, 2009, in which the imam told an associate that he knew someone in his mosque was "working for the FBI.... Abdullah said that he is hopeful that anyone who is working for the Feds will come to the mosque often to pray, will see the error of his ways, and admit he has been working with the Feds."


Abdullah's conciliatory remarks came on the same day he supposedly said that he would kill anybody "trying to gather information on him." Leone accounts for this contradiction by claiming that the wily imam knew he was being "listened to and targeted by law enforcement so he intentionally [made] conflicting statements in order to protect himself."


How can we tell which reported statements are sincere? Ah, this is easy, Leone would insist: We should dismiss anything that appears moderate and responsible as posturing, and assume that anything incendiary and self-incriminating represented Abdullah's genuine intentions.


The problem here is that all of the "consensually recorded" comments that are directly quoted in the criminal complaint are entirely innocuous. It is only when one of the confidential informants is paraphrasing Abdullah that we are barraged with shockingly detailed references to alleged criminal acts and criminal plots.


Furthermore, the "direct" quotes are not complete: Nearly all of them contain strategically placed ellipses indicating the removal of potentially critical details. Presenting them as direct evidence would be tantamount to perjury through selective editing. And as we've seen, even the accounts provided by Leone's pet provocateurs contain compelling evidence that Abdullah -- whatever he may have planned or done -- was not an aspiring terrorist.


Abdullah was infuriated by the wars of aggression being waged by the Regime in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was also convinced that the FBI was an enemy of American Muslims. Notwithstanding his passionate outrage, and despite Leone's efforts to depict him as an exponent of aggressive jihad, Abdullah -- as described in the complaint -- endorsed violence only for defensive purposes.


"They [are] smashing the Muslims all over the world and then we sit here like everything is all right," stated Abdullah in an October 10, 2008 conversation surreptitiously recorded by "S-3." "`Just leave us alone.' I mean, no. Everything isn't all right. Matter of fact, you better get up from over there and leave them people alone, man. You [are] wrong. It's no threat from the Muslims here. The Muslims here are saying, you know, `Hey, just let us live here and [unintelligible], that's the only thing they [are] worried about.... That's no good, man."


For Leone, the take-away here is that Abdullah maintained "it is not all right to simply get along with kuffars," or non-Muslims -- the insinuation being that Abdullah endorsed militancy and revenge. But Abdullah's discursive remarks actually read like a plea for Washington to desist from its aggression against Muslims abroad, and respect the wishes of American Muslims to be left alone. Those are the sentiments of someone weary of armed violence, rather than someone eagerly courting confrontation.


Abdullah's desire to be left in peace was captured in recorded comments recorded by "S-3" on November 30, 2008. The conversation dealt with the activities of federal agents, who -- according to Abdullah -- were "just terrorizing the people."


"It's a whole organized effort," he asserted. "Organized effort to betray you. But not just you, other people too. It's not just, just Muslims"; it's also people like "McVeigh and them" -- meaning, apparently, non-Muslim "anti-government extremists" targeted for infiltration and manipulation by the FBI.


"It's no question about, he [McVeigh] was involved in getting that stuff done," Abdullah continued. "Even though they [McVeigh and "others unknown"] did what they did, they probably was irked on, and supported in everything, by the FBI." After all, he pointed out, the "first World Trade Center bombing was the FBI."


Bear in mind that Abdullah was describing the FBI's documented history of orchestrating terrorist plots to an FBI informant-provocateur. I'm sufficiently cynical to suspect that this could be what got him killed.


Sure, he's an FBI bureaucrat, but what he really wants to do is direct: Special Agent Andrew Arena, the choreographer of at least two ersatz "terrorism" plots in the Detroit area.


Within a few weeks of that conversation, FBI undercover operatives began a series of ten clandestine operations intended to entice members of Abdullah's congregation into a plot to steal and fence stolen property.


All of those staged pseudo-crimes were instigated by the FBI's assets, who also arranged for the "stolen" goods to be stored at a Dearborn warehouse that was rented by the FBI.


It was in that warehouse that Luqman Ameen Abdullah, a man once known as Christopher Thomas, an ex-con who understood how the FBI's infiltration and provocation racket worked, was shot at least twenty times before bleeding to death with his hands cuffed behind his back.


Although nobody was killed when the FBI rolled up the Hutaree militia, the Bureau's campaign against that "Christian militia" was struck from the same template used against Abdullah's followers. Several of the Hutaree militiamen were seized at an FBI-controlled warehouse
where they had gathered -- unarmed -- to attend what they had been told was a "memorial service."


The FBI's investigative accomplishments are criminally overrated, but in arranging
ersatz terrorist plots it displays choreography skills that put the late Bob Fosse to shame. Recent events in Michigan suggest that the Bureau is staging a revival of its Hoover-era production, COINTELPRO. Don't feel left out; the chances are pretty good that the Bureau's touring troupe of provocateurs will visit your hometown sometime soon.



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Dum spiro, pugno!