Submit, Or We'll Kill You

It must never be forgotten that every directive issued by the State and enforced by its agents is coupled with the threat of lethal violence against those who fail to comply. This principle applies to trivial infractions of petty ordinances, such as those dealing with pedestrian conduct and smoking.

Consider the tag-team assault by two policemen on Suren Chukhadzhyan that took place in Pittsburgh a few days ago.

Chukhadzhyan, an Armenian national who resides in Glendale, California, is described as being roughly 6 foot 5 inches in height and weighing in excess of 250 pounds. During a break in a very long bus trip he lit up in what was designated a no-smoking area at a Greyhound bus terminal. This attracted the attention of an employee, who complained to police officer Walter Carlson.

In his report, as related by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Carlson described how he told Chukhadzhyan to move to a designated smoking area. The large man “ignored me and made a cocky smirk to me and was very arrogant,” whined Carlson in his report. “[He] turned away from me an continued to smoke.”

After Carlson ordered him to turn around, Chukhadzhyan did so, blowing smoke “in the direction of the officer” -- hardly a surprising result, since he was now facing that direction. At this point, per the newspaper account, the officer “grabbed the man's arm” -- that is, he caused the situation to escalate to one of physical coercion -- “and said he would be cited.” The Armenian's response – and this is significant – was to de-escalate by extinguishing his cigarette and walking away.

At this point, if Walter Carlson had been a peace officer rather than a juvenile poseur with secret insecurities about the size of his wedding tackle, he would have smiled, shook his head, and walked away. The problem, such as it is, was solved: Chukhadzhyan was no longer smoking in a forbidden zone. That would be the proper reaction of a practicing adult who had chosen to make a living as a peace officer.

Regrettably, nobody fitting that description was on hand at the time. Carlson, like many (quite possibly most) of those now employed by the Homeland Security State, had to assert his Authoritah. He acted on what I've identified as the tacit credo of checkpoint guards and others employed to enforce the State's decrees:

You must show them control.

You must make them submit.

Noticing that Chukhadzhyan had taken a seat inside the terminal and, visibly agitated, was muttering to himself “in what appeared to be Russian,” the officer pursued him inside and “attempted to issue the citation” -- which wasn't necessary to maintain order, and actually created a potential danger to others who hadn't been involved in the matter.

Let's click the pause button on the story at this point to recap and italicize a few things.

Chukhadzhyan's reactions to this point are entirely understandable. He is fifty years old. He was born and lived most of his life in a country ruled by the Soviet secret police. This might explain his contemptuous reaction to Carlson's imperious demand. I know what I would have been thinking: “I lived for decades in the shadow of the KGB, and could have been dragged off to Lubyanka for any of a thousand reasons, and this little gelding thinks he can intimidate me because I'm having a smoke here rather than over there? Well, I'll just take one last drag and then throw the cigarette away; no point in making a big deal out of this.”

I don't know if that's what Chukhadzhyan was thinking, but it would have been in line with his actions, as they were described in Carlson's report.

Chukhadzhyan, confronted by Carlson, walked away peacefully.

By pursuing the matter beyond this point, Carlson is the one who became the aggressor.

That fact is not nullified by the costume he wears or the shiny little shield he was given.

OK – let's hit the “play” button, and resume the Post-Gazette's account:

“Officer Carlson again attempted to issue the citation, but said Mr. Chukhadzhyan stood up suddenly and approached him aggressively. The officer said he pulled out his Taser and warned, `This doesn't have to go this way.'”

Oh, good grief. This guy may not be a “pig,” but he's a Shatner-caliber ham – an honors graduate of the T.J. Hooker Academy for Drama Queens in Blue.

Chukhadzhyan allegedly replied to Carlson's unnecessary threat to use deadly force by saying, “arrest me” and pushing the officer. The Taser was fired by Carlson, but failed to operate because of the Armenian's heavy coat. At this point, according to Carlson, “Chukhadzhyan charged.”

Chad Stevens, an off-duty police officer from out of town, pitched in to help Carlson. Eventually the two of them were able to bull-rush Chukhadzhyan, pinning him against a vending machine, forcing the cuffs on his wrists, and tripping him to the floor. This melee “knocked over seats and sent other travelers scrambling,” notes the paper, offering a rather bland description for a needless episode of violence that placed innocent people at risk. As I noted above, avoiding situations of this sort would be the chief priority of a genuine peace officer.

Chukhadzhyan was placed under arrest for “disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and aggravated assault on Officer Carlson.” How an unarmed man commit “aggravated assault” on a heavily armed individual – who summons his buddy to help him out – is a question that could be profitably pondered by people not hopelessly held hostage by statist assumptions.

He was also reported to the local Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Here's an interesting possibility: If this is treated as a “terrorist” incident, Chukhadzhyan could be held indefinitely, since as a foreign national the habeas corpus guarantee doesn't apply to him as of October 17, 2006 – the day the Bushling signed the Military Commissions Act and the Homeland Security Death Star became fully operational.

Here's something else to consider: Is there any rational reason to doubt that if Carlson the Blue Knight and his equally heroic side-kick hadn't been able to subdue Chukhadzhyan, they would have resorted to lethal force? In fact, given the growing body count racked up by officers using the “non-lethal” Taser, Carlson actually did use potentially lethal force against Chukhadzhyan.

For smoking a cigarette.

After he had put it out and walked away.

And the real outrage is that this episode is not an aberration. This is how law enforcement operates in the era of Homeland Security.

Another beautiful day in the Land of the Free! (Thanks to Infowars.com for the photo.)

Former congressional candidate David Brownlow experienced that reality last December 9 when he and his family (including his 12-year-old daughter) were accosted by Oregon State Trooper Ken Moore and threatened with arrest for the supposed offense of holding up an anti-war protest sign on a sidewalk near a Portland shopping mall.

Brownlow, whose son Jared is serving in Iraq, has described how Trooper Moore was among the motorists who saw the family's sign, which read “Support the Troops – Bring Them Home!” Moore, “visibly agitated,” stomped over to the family, accused them of “breaking the law,” and ordered them to “leave the area immediately.”

Constitution Party of Oregon activist (and suspected Thought Criminal) David Brownlow.

When Brownlow asked politely what law he and his family had broken, Moore bellowed: “When a trooper tells you that you are breaking the law, that's all you need to know,” and that if they didn't move immediately, they would be arrested. Brownlow's wife Suzanne pointed out that they weren't blocking the road or the sidewalk; this prompted the (storm)trooper to jab a finger at her and hiss: “If you do not stop talking, I will arrest both of you for disorderly conduct!”

This would have meant taking into custody the couple's 12-year-old daughter, who by this point was terrified and hiding behind her mother.

The trooper seized the banner – which is to say he stole the family's property at gunpoint – and ordered them to meet him in a nearby parking lot. Once the group had reassembled, the officer – still breathing out various threats to do unpleasant things to the Brownlows – demanded that David produce his driver's license and asked if he was carrying a weapon (he wasn't, despite the fact that he had a concealed carry permit). When Suzanne Brownlow asked where they could “legally” protest if they weren't permitted to do so on a public sidewalk, the officer snarled: “In your front yard.”

At this point, Brownlow recalls, Trooper Moore's rage subsided and he became civil, returning their banner and offering apologies for terrorizing their daughter. “I wondered if this trooper was bipolar or something,” he comments.

While that's a possibility – and an unsettling one at that – I suspect the reason for the officer's change in demeanor is this: He had succeeded in carrying out his mission by controlling the Brownlows and making them submit to his supposed authority.

The Brownlows have filed suit against Trooper Moore, who – like any other armed terrorist – deserves at least to be driven into financial ruin (although his family, if any, would be non-combatants not deserving the same fate).

Thousands or tens of thousands of officious armed bullies like Officer Carlson and Trooper Moore infest our communities. They are not the “local police” who are fondly remembered by many of us (myself emphatically included) with respect and gratitude. Back then, of course, it was possible to find corrupt and abusive police officers, a fact sometimes washed out by the sepia-toned sentimentality that colors our recollections. But we're not dealing with simple corruption, or occasional abuses of power; we confront the product of a social transformation that has taken place over several decades, and that has turned the police into a literal army of occupation.

Law enforcement consultant Tony Cooper, an instructor in terrorism negotiation skills at the University of Texas-Dallas, warned about that transformation more than a decade ago. "I see the formation of a curious crusading mentality among certain law enforcement agencies to stamp out what they see as a threat to government generally,” he told the Washington Post in 1995 “It's an exaggerated concern that they are facing a nationwide conspiracy and that somehow this will get out of control unless it is stamped out at a very early stage."

While Cooper was chiefly concerned with that mindset among federal agents, his students included many state and local officers attached to SWAT teams and other tactical units, who helped propagate that mindset more widely among police units. With the aid of federal subsidies and material aid from the Pentagon, many “local” police agencies are rapidly taking on the traits of occupying armies.

Bad as this situation already is, it can always be made worse by gun-toting adolescents on the State's payroll who are dressed up like Village People wanna-bes and eagerly looking for an opportunity to push people around. What's really alarming is the extent to which that personality type is increasingly over-represented in our Homeland Security Apparatus.

Toward Global Energy Fascism

In 2041 ... Switzerland joined the United Nations*, now a military alliance. What had once been merely a debating society during the twentieth century had turned by the rapprochement of the super powers into ... an active military and economic alliance. An alliance whose purpose ... was to ensure that the less powerful nations of the Southern Hemisphere and Middle East continued to supply them with raw materials.

As their abundant resources propelled [them] to importance, old grudges against the “exploiting” powers radicalized the nations of the Southern Hemisphere. Controlling an ever greater part of the world's dwindling resources, the nations of South America, Africa, and Arabia used the massive wealth they were accumulating to modernize their countries, and their armies. Together they formed the Confederation of States, whose expressed purpose was little less than the domination of their former “oppressors.”

As these nations grew in both economic and military strength, they began looking for ways to flex their newfound muscles. The older countries, fading in both importance and economic strength, sought to reassure themselves by asserting their own power whenever the opportunity to do so safely arose. Soon minor skirmishes, mostly at sea, constantly threatened to erupt into a greater conflict.... By 2032 the world consisted of two mega-nations and a number of backward neutrals who were completely unable to affect the situation.

From the Prologue to The Jupiter War (1991)

Extrapolating from trends visible more than a decade and a half ago, renowned science fiction author Gregory Benford devised the foregoing premise and invited a group of his peers to describe a resource war between those two planet-spanning mega-states. Eager to control the globe without destroying it, the antagonists keep moving the battle lines away from the planet, eventually fighting a full-scale interplanetary war over the Solar System's resources.

In that long and increasingly pointless war of attrition -- “Neither side will surrender, neither will admit it might be wrong” -- the energy- and mineral-rich Jovian system was the grand prize.

Professor Michael T. Klare of Hampshire College avoids sci-fi extravagances in presenting a vision of the coming global resource wars. Klare, author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum, writes that we confront an era of perpetual war, economic regimentation, and garrison state oppression – a system he calls “Energo-fascism.”

“The rise of Energo-fascism can be traced to two overarching phenomena: an imminent collision between energy demand and energy supplies, and the historic migration of the center of gravity of planetary energy output from the global north to the global south,” writes Klare.

As this trend accelerates, Klare foresees the following developments, some of which are already visible in a limited sense:

• “The transformation of the U.S. Military into a global oil protection service”;

• “The transformation of Russia into an energy superpower with control over Eurasia's largest supplies of oil and natural gas”;
  

• “A ruthless scramble among the great powers for the remaining oil, natural gas, and uranium reserves of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia,” with the accompanying wars, proxy wars, client regimes, corruption, and repression;

• “Increased state intrusion into, and surveillance of, public and private life as reliance on nuclear power grows, bringing with it an increased threat of sabotage, accident, and diversion of fissionable materials into the hands of illicit nuclear proliferators.”

“Disparate as [these developments] seem, they all share a common feature: increasing state involvement in the procurement, transportation, and allocation of energy supplies, accompanied by a greater inclination to employ force against those who resist the state's priorities in these areas,” Klare points out.

(Although Klare seems to appreciate the deadly consequences of giving the state a monopoly on the use of force, he unfortunately has yet to re-think the merits of disarming the civilian population through UN-centered efforts to outlaw non-state possession of "small arms.")

Klare's analysis tacitly acknowledges a largely ignored fact that was highlighted by The Economist (subscription required) last August: Most of the world's energy resources are already either state-owned or state-controlled. The world's thirteen largest oil and gas firms, for example, are either partially or wholly nationalized through “state-owned firms through which governments retain profits from oil production.” Exxon, the world's largest private oil company, comes in at number 14 on that list.

All told, 16 of the top 20 oil and gas firms are State-owned and control roughly 90% of the world's oil. These national oil companies (NOCs) are riddled with the corruption and inefficiency that are inescapable symptoms of state ownership or control. As the Economist points out: “Few of the princes, politicians and strongmen who wield ultimate authority over these firms can resist the urge to meddle. At best, that leads to the sort of inefficiencies found at most state-owned firms.... At worst, the business of pumping and selling oil [and natural gas] is entirely subsumed by politics,” as when the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin choked off the flow of natural gas to Ukraine a year ago, in the middle of winter – the time of peak demand.

Klare considers Putin's Russia – which has been using undisguised state violence to consolidate control over the immense energy wealth of Russia and the “near abroad” -- as the paradigmatic “Energo-fascist” regime. Putin himself, in his Ph.D. Dissertation, set forth what could be considered the founding premise of that system: “The state has the right to regulate the process of the acquisition and the use of natural resources, and particularly mineral resources, independent of on whose property they are located. In this regard, the state acts in the interests of society as a whole.”

“No better justification for Energo-fascism can be imagined,” comments Klare. Indeed, Putin is to be commended for his candor; his counterparts in Washington are acting on the same premise while trying to conceal their intentions.

For example, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 contains a provision usurping state and local control over decisions related to energy infrastructure: Specifically, the Act deprived them of the authority to approve placement of natural gas “regasification” facilities.

Some communities had resisted construction of the huge facilities in local ports for various reasons – such as concerns over safety or possible terrorist attacks. This is a splendid example of how federalism should work, since other communities would be eager to exploit the resulting economic opportunities. But the Bush regime now has the power to veto those decisions in the name of acting in “the interests of society as a whole” (as Putin would put it).

Klare makes a plausible case that this could prefigure the wholesale federalization of all decisions having to do with energy resource development and allocation.

It's not unreasonable to see the theft of Iraq's energy resources by Washington (with a limited buy-in from a handful of cohorts) as an application of the same conceit on the international stage, as well as the first of many resource wars.

“By militarizing the energy policies of the consuming nations and enhancing the repressive capacities of client regimes, the foundations are being laid for an Energo-fascist world,” Klare predicts.

If he is right – and I fear he may be – we'll never have to worry about wars erupting in the Asteroid Belt or on the moons of Jupiter. Caught between apocalyptic violence and dystopian tyranny, humanity would never escape earth's gravity well.

*Actually, Switzerland became the 190th member of the United Nations in 2002, alas.

How the War will "Follow Us Home"

Every other rationale for continuing the occupation of Iraq having failed, supporters of the war have taken refuge in what they believe to be an invincible thought-stopper: Iraq differs from Vietnam, because this time the enemy will “follow us home.”

“After the war in Vietnam, we came home and the Vietnamese did not want to follow us,” stated Arizona Senator and presidential aspirant John McCain last Sunday. “Bin Laden, Zarqawi, Mullah Omar, they want to follow us home. Their next target is Saudi Arabia, and the next target is the United States of America."

Didn't the Islamists already hit those targets?

Of course they did.

Haven't we been told by the administration that on 9-11 the Middle East “came home to us”?

Indeed we have.

Like most defenders of the Iraq War, McCain was simply spitting out words to watch them splatter. He's intelligent enough to know that he was making absolutely no sense.

The same is true of Republican congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, who regurgitated the same line during a visit to Naples, Florida last Sunday. As one press account reported, Diaz-Balart told his audience: “The war in Iraq cannot be compared to the long-fought Vietnam War, [because the] Vietnamese weren’t inclined to follow Americans home nor to attack on U.S. Homeland....”

The ranks of the Bu'ushist right, however, are filled with people just as dishonest as McCain and Diaz-Balart. Some of them – free-range chickenhawks like Rush Limbaugh – are smart enough to know that they're retailing a lie. Others are apparently too stupid to realize what they're doing. One useful example of the latter is neo-con slogan-slinger Frank Salvato, who offers this recitation of the Regime's official “follow us home” meme:

“In today's conflict we don't have the luxury of simply leaving and declaring victory. This time our enemy – radical Islamists who employ terrorism as their chief military tactic – want us all to convert to Islam, live under Sharia Law or die.... This time, the enemy won't be satisfied with our soldiers simply leaving the battlefield. This time the enemy is going to follow us home.”

The instrument has yet to be invented that can measure the infinitesimally small odds that the Islamists could impose Sharia Law on the United States. A much more plausible domestic outgrowth of the Iraq war – unless we end the occupation immediately and begin to repair the damage it has done to our institutions here at home – would be an epidemic of urban terrorism here at home carried out not by savagely bearded foreign Muslims, but by disaffected veterans of the war who put to use the tactics they learned from the enemy in Iraq.

Military analyst William S. Lind refers to this as the “Boomerang Effect”:

“One of the things U.S. troops are learning in Iraq is how people with little training and few resources can fight a state. Most American troops will see this within the framework of counterinsurgency. But a minority will apply their new-found knowledge in a very different way. After they return to the U.S. and leave the military, they will take what they learned in Iraq back to the inner cities, to the ethnic groups, gangs, and other alternate loyalties they left when they joined the service. There, they will put their new knowledge to work, in wars with each other and wars against the American state. It will not be long before we see police squad cars getting hit with IEDs and other techniques employed by Iraqi insurgents, right here in the streets of American cities.”

It's worth recalling that the deadliest pre-9-11 terror attack within the US was carried out by a disaffected veteran of the first Gulf War, an Army tank operator named Timothy McVeigh.

Yes, there is intriguing evidence that McVeigh found allies among Islamist elements within the United States, including transplanted members of the Iraqi Republican Guard.

And yes, video footage has emerged suggesting that McVeigh was receiving training from the Army in explosives and demolitions subsequent to his reported discharge date; this would lend credence to at least some of the theories in which McVeigh was a “patsy” or provocateur.

All of this, if true, actually fortifies the point I'm making, since present conditions are quite similar to – and in some ways, worse than – those that led to the 1995 OKC bombing.

The longer we remain mired in Mesopotamia, the larger will be the population of proto-McVeighs among those consigned to occupation duty there. And not all of them would be drawn from among the White Supremacist demimonde.

John Allen Muhammad, the so-called Beltway Sniper, was a fellow Gulf War veteran and convert to Islam who took part in Louis Farrakhan's 1995 “Million Man March.”

Muhammad, in turn, was wired in to a domestic gang underworld that has become organically attached to the military.

As Stars and Stripes reported last December, street gangs of various flavors – including Chicago's Gangster Disciple Nation (which has helped broker federal subsidies to urban gangs across the nation, and whose leadership encourages members to enlist) – “have gained a foothold in the U.S. Military and are using overseas deployments to spread tentacles around the globe....”

Gangster Disciple graffiti can be found on armored vehicles, concrete barricades, and various buildings in Iraq. There are indications that the paramilitary Salvadoran MS-13 gang is actively recruiting among children of military personnel in Europe, and it's reasonable to believe that MS-13 and other Latino gangs could find adherents among non-citizen recruits eager to use military service to acquire citizenship.

In some form or another, the war will follow us home. That's one of the unavoidable consequences of waging demented wars of aggression. When the IEDs start going off in our inner cities, chances are we won't have the Mohammedans to blame.

A quick request:

Immigration reform activist Terry Graham has asked me to pass along an urgent appeal for my readers to call their Republican elected representatives and demand that they vote against Mel Martinez's nomination to be General Chairman of the Republican National Committee. That spurious post was created in 1983 to accommodate the appointment of former Nevada Governor Paul Laxalt, a good friend of Ronald Reagan. Martinez is similarly chummy with Bush the Younger, and shares the Bushling's enthusiasm to extend amnesty to illegal immigrants.

Romney: Official Candidate of the War and Torture Party?

Mitt Romney (right) stands with George W. Bush and International Olympic Chairman Jacques Rogge at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

“Paris is well worth a mass,” insisted Henry of Navarre as he underwent a politically motivated conversion to Catholicism that secured his throne as the first of France's Bourbon kings.

Henry had previously “converted” before, as a self-preservation gambit following the 1572 St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Born and baptized as a Catholic, Henry was raised as a Protestant and even bore arms with the Huguenot forces during the mid-16^th Century Wars of Religion.

But it wasn't until it became clear that embracing Catholicism was the price of securing the throne he inherited in 1584 that Henry IV was prompted to settle on one flavor of religious “conviction.” (His large retinue of illegitimate children demonstrated that his piety did little to inhibit his appetites.)

Flexibility of conviction is a consistent trait among politicians, but few have developed that trait to the extent that Henry IV did. Where cynical flexibility is concerned, Mitt Romney – whose lust to be president borders on the pornographic – might give Henry some stiff competition.

In recent days, citizens of the Blogosphere have passed along this video excerpt from Romney's Senate campaign against Ted Kennedy more than twelve years ago. The debate footage from an October 1994 displays Romney offering an impassioned, finger-thrusting defense of “safe” and legal abortion. He even plumbs the depths of pathos by invoking the death of a “close ... relative” from an illegal abortion, an event which apparently caused not only Romney but his mother, a one-time Senate candidate, to become deeply committed to the pro-abortion position.

Needless to say, as Romney has courted the unflinchingly anti-abortion Christian Right, he has employed the same acting school tricks to convey an impassioned commitment to the pro-life position.

The Boston Globe, which is having altogether too much fun underscoring Romney's hypocrisies (this is not to suggest, of course, that they should stop doing so), has pointed out that where in 1994 Romney “backed two gun-control measures strongly opposed by the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups,” he now “touts his work to ease restrictions on gun owners.”

“That's not going to make me the hero of the NRA,” Romney commented during the 1994 Senate campaign, referring to his support for the Brady Bill and a ban on so-called assault weapons. “I don't line up with the NRA,” he observed on another occasion during that race. Today, however, he proudly claims membership in the NRA (pshaw – if he really supported the right to armed self-defense, he'd offer to join Gun Owners of America – not that they'd take him) and recently put in face time at one of the nation's largest gun shows.

Clearly, John Kerry is not the only conspicuous member of the Bay State Mandarinate to whom flip-flopping comes naturally.

As the experiences of the Donner Party and Uruguay's national rugby team demonstrate, if someone gets hungry enough, he'll set aside nearly every moral inhibition to sate his appetite. Politicians, an exceptionally well-fed lot, generally know nothing of the primal desperation that prolonged physical hunger can inflict on otherwise civilized people – but they are well acquainted with cognate psychological appetites for power and money.

Even in such loathsome company, Mitt Romney distinguishes himself by his indecent hunger for the White House. And this may explain why he has taken to his bosom Mel Sembler, a squalid little pile of degeneracy for whom mere indecency would represent a monumental achievement in personal reform.

Months ago I took note of the fact that Romney, seeking the blessing of Evangelical Republicans leery of him because he's a Mormon, had made a point of expressing support for indefinite detention and torture of alleged terrorists.

As I commented then, it strikes me as perverse that a Mormon would endorse such official lawlessness, given that Mormons in the 19^th Century were on the receiving end of some of the most notorious abuses of power in our nation's history. Likewise, I cannot see how anyone who worships Jesus of Nazareth as God Incarnate could countenance torture for any reason. And it is abhorrent to think that it is on this ground that professed Christians could find common cause with a Mormon presidential aspirant.

In the essay immediately following the one described above, I profiled Republican fundraiser Mel Sembler, a Florida shopping mall magnate who is considered an intimate friend of the Bush Crime Family.

"Narcissus, thy name is Sembler": Mel Sembler (center), seen here in 2005 as U.S. Ambassador to Italy, prevailed on his friend, Rep. CW Young (R-Florida, right) to introduce a bill renaming a U.S. diplomatic facility the "Mel Sembler Building."

I published those essays back-to-back because I was confident that eventually these two would hook up. As it happens, Romney recently announced that Sembler will serve as one of his ten national fund-raisers.

Despite his prodigious fund-raising efforts on behalf of the GOP, Sembler helped raise money for Joe Lieberman's “independent” Senate campaign last fall. He is also head of the Lewis I. “Scooter” Libby Legal Defense Fund.

The trial of Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, will begin on Tuesday. In addition to being a key architect of the Iraq war, Libby is accused of playing a pivotal role in the outing of CIA covert operative Valerie Plame, which was done to retaliate against her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, an outspoken critic of the war. Even more importantly, Libby helped craft the detention and interrogation policies that led to creation of a global archipelago of CIA torture facilities.

Sembler clearly places prosecution of the war against “Islamo-Fascism,” and preservation of unaccountable executive power, at the top of his list of priorities. His support for one of those who crafted the Bush Regime's torture policies could be considered a form of professional courtesy.

Along with his wife, Sembler created the “Straight” behavioral modification program for youngsters with drug or alcohol addictions or considered to be “at risk” of developing the same. The Sembler-created “rehabilitation” network was based on programs and principles developed in a federally funded early 1970s enterprise called “The Seed,” which (according to a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation) used methods similar to the “highly refined `brainwashing' techniques employed by the North Koreans” against US prisoners of war.

“The Seed” was shut down in the mid-1970s, but Sembler's network (nine clinics in seven states) received funding from the same federal agencies that had underwritten the earlier Communist-derived program. Many of the teenagers put into Sembler's program complained of physical, emotional, psychological, and sexual abuse.

The program was shut down in 1993, but not before calving off similar efforts throughout the country and even abroad in Latin America and the Carribbean. Many of those programs are run by veterans of Straight; the ones operating abroad have quite literally made use of the same torture methods that became notorious at Abu Ghraib.

Many of the teenagers consigned to those facilities have no problem with drugs or alcohol, or any other self-destructive behaviors; nonetheless, they often are literally kidnapped from their homes (with the consent of parents terrified by lurid "War On Drugs" agitprop) and taken to a BM facility – sometimes abroad – and kept there until their thinking gets “straightened out.”

(The definitive research on this topic has been done by investigative author Maia Szalavitz; see her invaluable book Help At Any Cost for more details.)

Please indulge me as I repeat the summary at the end of my profile of Sembler:

“These BM programs are an outgrowth of the murderous fraud called the War on Drugs, and they developed and employed many of the methods of physical and psychological abuse now being used in the even more murderous fraud called the War on Terror. Sembler – a perverted little lump of arrogant corruption – is a human bridge connecting those two enterprises. And he's one of the most powerful figures at the highest echelon of the Grand Old (Torture) Party.

This is what those people do. It is who those people are. It is why they are Just Plain Evil.”

I see no reason to modify that assessment, except perhaps to add the critical detail that in the photogenic and apparently pious figure of Mitt Romney the most unregenerate element of the GOP elite may have found their ideal front man.

In this, as in so much else, The Bard nailed the truth flush to the plank centuries ago:

“The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. An evil soul, producing holy witness, is like a villain with a smiling cheek; A goodly apple rotten at the heart; O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!”

The Christian Right and the "Fatal Embrace"

No, these aren't out-takes from a "Tommy Boy" sequel; they're snapshots of tomorrow's Christian conservative GOP leaders. (Tip of the sombrero to The Gaelic Starover.)

It's ironic that Vladimir Lenin, notorious for the length and tedium of his pronouncements, coined what may be the world's briefest and most potent political truism: kto kogo, “who/whom,” understood to mean “who does what to whom.”

This is the defining question of modern politics, according to Lenin and those who subscribe to his insights – a category that includes pretty much everybody who aspires to political power.

Lenin's who/whom dichotomy has come to define democratic politics, in which a roiling mass of collectivist constituencies contend to be the “whos,” as it were, rather than the “whoms.”

Among the most tragic and dangerous developments to occur during the reign of King George the Second was his success in luring much of the Evangelical Christian church into an active alliance with the State. In assessing the influence and priorities of the self-designated Christian Right, it's useful to ask whether its leadership displays more fidelity to the Golden Rule or to Lenin's maxim, which is its direct antithesis.

In addition to being “God's perfect law of liberty” (James 1:25), the Golden Rule is the only basis on which humans can construct a political order compatible with freedom and peace. It is to be expected that those who profess the name of Jesus Christ would understand this principle and act on it in the political realm, as in every other sphere of life.

In practical terms this would mean contracting the role of the State rather than expanding it. But once again, since the emergence of the Religious Right in the late 1970s, the defining ambition of most politically conservative Christians has been to seize control over the State and occupy its “commanding heights” -- an expression associated with one of Lenin's most astute disciples, Antonio Gramsci – rather than reducing its size, power, and influence.

In 1988, as Kevin Phillips has documented, George W. Bush, the indolent wastrel son of the family dynasty, was chosen to become its emissary to the Christian Right. After taking control of the presidency, Bush became its leader ex officio. In ways both subtle and gross – and few things are more vulgar than the outright bribery practiced through the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives – the Bush Regime has seduced most of the Christian Right's leadership caste into active collaboration.

And tens of millions of Christians who displayed a sensible loathing for the State during the reign of Emperor Clintigula have dispensed with such concerns under the reign of Bush the Blessed, on the assumption that at long last they have joined the “do unto others” crowd.

These developments have led many on the Left to conclude that the alliance between the Bush administration and the Christian Right has begotten an embryonic version of American Fascism. This is the view presented by Harvard Divinity School graduate and former New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges in his new, unimaginatively titled book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.

Thinly researched and oddly pedestrian, Hedges' new book is largely barren of the unexpected insights that adorned his most recent previous offering, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

An even more serious defect in American Fascists is the author's reflexive embrace of the same who/whom dichotomy he correctly discerns as the Christian Right's organizing principle (even though he doesn't use that specific expression).

This is quite lamentable, given that Hedges does manage to provide some timely and useful insights, although they are lost on some who prefer to “review” the book without actually reading it.

Surveying the often nauseating opulence found among top-tier televangelists and moolah-mooching mega-church mullahs, Hedges writes that where Christian Right activism intersects with the “prosperity gospel” movement, the result is a really nasty form of collectivist materialism.

“The movement offers ... the absurd but seductive promise that those who are right with God will rise to become spiritual and material oligarchs," he opines. "They will become the new class.”

Hedges defines the “new class” as a product of a “strange fusion between this new, flamboyant gospel of prosperity and America's celebrity-driven culture,” which is a subdivision of a transnational elite “creating a global marketplace where all workers, to compete, will have to become like workers in dictatorships such as China.... [T]his new class seeks to reduce the American working class to the levels of this global serfdom.”

Handicapped by Marxist assumptions about the economy, Hedges insists that the emerging global economic system is a form of untrammeled capitalism, when in fact it is a particularly brutal form of corporatism, in which politically favored corporate interests are allied with the State.

Despite his economic misunderstandings, Hedges does seem to understand that the system he describes has an immense capacity for lethal oppression, since he laments that the Christian Right's rank and file, seeing themselves “empowered by faith,” are oblivious to “the gross injustices and repression that could well boomerang back on most of them” once the present political alignment changes.

Unfortunately, Hedges, despite all of his anguish over the Christian Right's role in building the Leviathan State, seeks not to dismantle that monstrosity, but rather to turn it against conservative Christians.

“The radical Christian Right must be forced to include other points of view to counter their hate talk in their own broadcasts,” Hedges insists, obliquely referring to Orwellian measures such as “hate crimes” laws and the so-called “Fairness Doctrine.” “They must be denied the right to demonize whole segments of American society, saying they are manipulated by Satan and worthy only of conversion or eradication. They must be made to treat their opponents with respect and acknowledge the right of a fair hearing even as they exercise their own freedom to disagree with their opponents.”

“Passivity in the face of the rise of the Christian Right,” Hedges concludes, “threatens the democratic state.”

But the State -- in whatever form it takes -- is the problem and chief source of danger, not supposed abuses of individual rights by people who express "intolerant" viewpoints. As someone suckled on statist assumptions, Hedges simply cannot see and understand this.

Similar Marxist-derived myopia can be found throughout Hedges' book. For instance: Hedges consistently denigrates those who would replace State-imposed redistribution programs with private charity, apparently on the assumption that material aid not sanctified through the exercise of State coercion is somehow an abomination.

Just like those he volubly condemns, Hedges believes that the State should exploit religion in order to accomplish ideologically dictated designs – an arrangement described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lenin's intellectual ancestor, as the “civil religion.” Hedges' enthusiasm for this arrangement is bizarre, given that as a long-time war correspondent he was a witness to the hideous things wrought in the name of various contending versions of the civil religion.

One of the strengths of his current book can be found in the often shocking descriptions of the militarist bloodlust that has come to define most of the Christian Right. “War is the final aesthetic of the movement,” Hedges writes, and I find it difficult to disagree – even as I find myself puzzled by his eagerness to use the State to wage war against “intolerance.”

If there is one redeeming quality to Hedges' book, it can be found in the possibility that its prescription for regimenting the Christian Right may help at least some within the movement to repent of their potentially fatal embrace of the State.

The Earth is the State's, and the Fullness Thereof

Armed revenue farmers harvest a crop at a DUI checkpoint.

When George W. Bush signed the death warrant for the habeas corpus guarantee last October, he was consummating a process that has been underway for decades in our law enforcement and "justice" system.

Bush's destruction of habeas corpus, which took place when he signed the Military Commissions Act (better described as the Death of the Republic Act of 2006), is kindred to other developments in which the Regime – both the central government and its state and local franchises – acts on the assumption that the earth is the State's, and the fullness thereof, and that its domain includes ownership rights over all of us.

The most important function of the habeas corpus guarantee -- the “Great Writ” that serves as the foundation of the Anglo-Saxon concept of liberty under law – is to protect individuals from summary imprisonment at the ruler's whim: Within a specified time of arrest, the State must “present the body” of the suspect and justify the detention to a judge.

This is an indispensable guarantee of individual liberty. It is also, in a very real sense, the most important guarantee of property rights, since control over one's person is the fundamental property rights issue. Classic libertarians extol the concept of self-ownership; a Christian libertarian perspective would define the question as one of self-stewardship under God's sovereignty.

In either case, the State does not own the individual. That, in my view, is the whole point of habeas corpus.

Totalitarian regimes are built on the assumption that the State owns its subjects.

A corollary of that premise is that anything can be taken from the subjects as the State's supervisors see fit.

Here's a very suitable recent illustration of those assumptions in action.

The Santa Fe City Council has enacted “a tough, anti-drunken-driving ordinance that would empower city police to seize vehicles driven by repeat offenders and sell them at auction," reports the Free New Mexican. “The ordinance would allow police to sell the vehicles of those arrested on a third or subsequent drunken-driving charge if they already have two convictions. Likewise, those caught drinking and driving on a license suspended for driving while intoxicated might have their vehicle forfeited and sold immediately.”

That is to say, the property would be forfeited and sold upon arrest, not following conviction. This ordinance appears to be patterned after one imposed on New York City in 1999.

City Councilor Patti Bushee describes this confiscation-without-conviction measure as “the ultimate hammer. It's not like they had an innocent slip-up. These are people who're just not doing the right thing and have a real problem.”

That description comes from a political official, so it's safe to assume that it's a lie. It is certainly a misrepresentation, since as the Free New Mexican points out, the ordinance wouldn't require for authorities to wait “for offenders to accumulate multiple convictions to enact municipal sanctions. Upon a first arrest -- before conviction in a court of law -- suspected drunken drivers could have their vehicles immobilized for up to six months unless they agree to install an ignition-interlock device.

As with every measure enacted by the criminal syndicate called government, an engine of corrupt enrichment lurks behind the facade of humanitarian necessity:

“The Police Department is requesting $119,250 to start the program and believes it can realize revenues of up to $150,000 during the first six months of operations. Funds from the program, above its operating costs, would go into DWI education and drunken-driving prevention efforts, said City Councilor Karen Heldmeyer, chairwoman of the city Finance Committee.”

Given that the revenue estimates are already in, and parasite constituencies are already lining up at the trough, assurances from City Attorney Frank Katz that “suspects would be given the right to an administrative hearing promptly following their arrest to contest whether the police had a probable cause to arrest them and take their vehicle” are just so much verbal flatulence. Odds are pretty good that the “administrative hearing” would be conducted by a municipal functionary, rather than a judge.

Katz insists that conviction isn't necessary to justify seizure and sale of an automobile from a suspected recidivist drunk driver; mere “probable cause” is sufficient: "It's enough to throw them in jail; it's enough to take their car."

Here's where Katz's cute analogy breaks down:

A criminal suspect can indeed be thrown in jail based on probable cause – but habeas corpus requires that the State justify that incarceration, and before the sentence is carried out, the State has to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Under Santa Fe's seize-it-and-sell-it ordinance, an innocent driver's automobile can be stolen and pawned by the police, and the proceeds spent by the city on – oh, I don't know, something worthwhile like an office beer bust -- long before a trial.

One small victory: With the help of the Institute for Justice, Carol Thomas of Millville, New Jersey, was able to get back her 1990 Ford Thunderbird after it had been stolen by the local police under the pretext of "civil asset forfeiture."




While not meaning to minimize the seriousness of drunk driving – an often lethal act of irresponsibility that should be severely punished when it results in crimes against persons or property – the anti-DUI campaign is a malignant racket.

Financial writer Christopher Solomon points out: “In several states ... your license may be suspended for 90 days simply upon your arrest for DUI, regardless of whether you end up being convicted.” For many people, loss of a driver's license can mean immediate unemployment.

To understand just how the DUI enforcement system has been engineered to extort guilty pleas – and, of course, revenue – from the innocent, consider the case of Stan Willcutt, an unassuming construction worker from Lee's Summit, Kansas.

In his early 40s, Willcutt is a walking collection of chronic injuries received from a long career in construction. His back, for example, is so infirm that a good sneeze can throw it out. This is what happened to Willcutt on April 7 of last year, as he was driving home from a doctor's appointment. The sneeze, and the resulting back pain, caused Willcutt momentarily to lose control of his car. His vehicle clipped a highway median, puncturing the front-left tire.

As Willcutt changed his tire, the Lee's Summit Police materialized, telling him they'd received reports of a drunk driver. Willcutt, who had a 20-year-old DUI conviction on his record, had given up all alcohol consumption.

When the officers demanded that he take a field sobriety test, Willcutt warned them that his injuries – dentures that caused him to slur his speech, two ankles left weak and unsteady from multiple breaks, and bad back – would make it difficult for him to pass the test. He complied, nonetheless, with predictable results.

(It should be pointed out that there are sound and compelling reasons to regard standard field sobriety tests as little more than a bizarre variety of compelled performance art.)

After his performance was deemed unsatisfactory, Willcutt requested a breathalyzer test, which measured his blood-alcohol content at 0.00 percent.

He was arrested anyway. Once in jail, he was required to provide a urine sample, which likewise produced a 0.00 percent reading for alcohol, amphetamines, barbituates, benzodiazepine, cannabinoids (Marijuana), cocaine, methadone, opiates, phencylidine and proxyphene.

Nonetheless, Rachel Brown, the vindictive, careerist shrike who serves as city prosecutor, went ahead and filed charges against Willcutt anyway – on the assumption that the complete lack of evidence against Willcutt didn't validate his innocence.

“You have people driving under the influence [of substances] that don't show up on the initial panel,” Brown insisted, maintaining that the judgment of the arresting officers was more important than the scientific evidence.

If Brown's reaction strikes you as kindred to the bizarre rationales used by the Bush junta and its supporters to justify the Iraq war despite the absence of Saddam's fearsome WMD arsenal, you're very perceptive.

Within weeks, Willcutt – who had few financial resources to draw upon – had spent over $1,000 on legal counsel. After the case received local publicity, Brown grudgingly dropped the DUI charges, only to press careless and imprudent driving charges against the long-suffering construction worker.

“I'm frustrated and mad,” Willcutt told a local magazine. “I'm wondering why the town I grew up in is raking me over the coals.”

The answer to Willcutt's implied question – why is the government doing this to me? -- is quite simple: Because it can, since those running the State consider us to be its property.

"This Time For Sure!"

“Character is fate, the Greeks believed. A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which the seed of self-destruction lay embedded, waiting for its hour. The voice was Schlieffen's but the hand was the hand of Fichte who saw the German people chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe, of Hegel who saw them leading the world to a glorious destiny of compulsory Kultur, of Nietzsche who told them that Supermen were above ordinary controls, of Treitschke who set the increase of power as the highest moral duty of the state, of the whole German people, who called their temporal ruler the `All-Highest.' What made the Schlieffen plan was ... the body of accumulated egoism which suckled the German people and created a nation fed on `the desperate delusion of the will that deems itself absolute.'”

Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August



German youths marinated in the delusional ideology described above marched giddily to war in August 1914 wearing belt buckles adorned with the slogan Gott Mit Uns (“God is with us”). The Schlieffen Plan envisioned a rapid strike by the German right wing through Belgium, with the last man on the right “brush[ing] the Channel with his sleeve.” German troops anticipated that they would be on the Boulevard in Paris in a matter of weeks.

Yes, this would be an aggressive war in violation of every civilized notion of international relations. But von Moltke had long since dispensed with such trivial concerns. “We must put aside all commonplaces as to the responsibility of the aggressor,” he stated in 1913. “Success alone justifies war.”

Besides, Kaiser Wilhelm II – hailed by the Germans as the “All-Highest,” perceived by himself to be “The Finger of God” -- had given Belgium a chance to collaborate in the unfolding of Germany's providential destiny, and their monarch had turned him down.

In 1904, Germany's “All-Highest” paid a visit to Belgium's King Leopold II, seeking to inveigle him into an alliance with promises of snatching territory from France. Leopold was hardly a model of probity, emitting what Tuchman calls an “aura of wickedness composed of mistresses, money, Congo cruelties, and other scandals.”

Although Leopold was many reprehensible things, “fool” was not found on that list. He pointed out to Wilhelm, whose foolishness was a match for his ambition, that the Belgian monarch didn't dispose of the same powers exercised by his 15th Century forebears. The King told the Kaiser that his Ministers and Parliament wouldn't approve of the alliance.

“That was the wrong thing to say,” notes Tuchman, “for the Kaiser flew into one of his rages and scolded the King for putting respect for Parliament and Ministers above respect for the Finger of God....”

“I told him I could not be played with,” the Kaiser told Chancellor von Bulow. “Whoever in the case of European war was not with me was against me.”

It's difficult to read those lines without thinking of the curdled little man-child in the White House, his own delusions of divine destiny (surely, George W. Bush could only be the “Finger of God” if The Almighty were treating humanity to an obscene gesture), his lunatic “global democratic revolution” -- and his determination to emulate the worst elements of WWI-era statecraft by reinforcing the his failure in Iraq at the cost of additional thousands of lives.

The formal announcement of the planned “surge” in Iraq will be what I call a “Bullwinkle Moment.” Many recall how the beloved dim-wit cartoon moose, consistently thwarted in his efforts to pull a rabbit out of his hat, exclaimed, “This time for sure!” -- before failing again.

“This time for sure!” pretty much encapsulates what passes for the White House strategy behind Bush's intention to dispatch tens of thousands of additional US soldiers to Iraq. The same could have been said of the demented rulers who refused to reconsider their course in World War I once the Western Front had become the scene of a pointlessly bloody stalemate: As long as they had a steady supply of young men to throw into the abattoir, the rulers would insist, “This time for sure!”

US intervention broke the stalemate, but it also led to a vindictive post-war settlement that engendered totalitarian movements in Germany, Italy, and Russia, thereby ensuring a bloody conflict less than a generation later. One enduring legacy of that war – the murder-suicide of the Christian West – is the modern Middle East, including the spurious nation called Iraq.

In defending the Bush Regime's plan to reinforce failure in Iraq, my local newspaper offered, without any ironic intention I can detect, the following assessment:

“An infusion of reinforcements will create a decent interval of stability to help kick-start economic aid projects and provide the Iraqi government with time and space to be successful.”

I doubt the author of those words caught the historic resonance, or had any inkling of the way that phrase had been used to justify several pointless years of bloodshed in our last misbegotten foreign war.

So Washington is once again the in business of requiring young soldiers and Marines – and not-so-young Reservists and Guardsmen – to kill and die on behalf of a “decent interval.”

Because our ruling class is confined in the intellectual prison called the “bi-partisan foreign policy consensus,” our soldiers will remain mired in Mesopotamia – unless George W. Bush and the adults who surround him decide to expand the war into Syria, Iran, or both. But as the Wall Street Journal (subscription req.) points out, the elements are in place for a disastrous regional war, even if the Bush Regime doesn't deliberately expand the conflict, as it clearly lusts to do.

The region is likely to erupt even if we were to remove our troops from Iraq now. This would be a catastrophe, but one we could survive.

Under the Constitution's allotment of war powers, it is possible for Congress to order the Bushling to get our troops out of Iraq immediately; doing so is a moral and patriotic necessity.

But our rulers esteem the interventionist “consensus” -- and its related doctrine of imperial presidential war powers -- more than their perjured oaths to the Constitution, and are hopeless hostages to the crusading ideology that has defined Washington's foreign policy since World War I.

Count Sergei Witte, the Russian Premier during the abortive Revolution of 1905, described the Imperial Russian government on the eve of World War I as an “insane regime ... [a] tangle of cowardice, blindness, craftiness, and stupidity.”

A better description cannot be found of the regime ruling us today, as well. And it's impossible to read Barbara Tuchman's description of Russia under Czar Nicholas II (who, it must be said, did not deserve what the Bolsheviks did to him and his family) without thinking of the petulant little figure in the Oval Office, and the incurably corrupt political system over which he presides:

“The regime was ruled from the top by a sovereign who had but one idea of government – to preserve intact the absolute monarchy bequeathed to him by his father – and who, lacking the intellect, energy, or training for his job, fell back on personal favorites, whim, simple mulishness, and other devices of the empty-headed autocrat.”

Nicholas II was widely seen as stoic and serene, when in fact his capacity to maintain his composure in the face of disaster was a reflection of “the indifference of a mind so shallow as to be all surface.”

George W. Bush's priorities and intellectual tool-kit are remarkably similar to those of the vapid Russian autocrat. And he's willing to send thousands of people to death needlessly in order to preserve his legacy against an ignominious – but imperative – withdrawal from Iraq.

Video music bonus

Thanks to Stephen Carson on Lew Rockwell's blog for pointing out this new cover of "One More Parade" by They Might Be Giants.

For those whose taste in anti-war anthems runs toward harder rock, I recommend this version of "Out In The Fields" by Gary Moore and the late Phil Lynott. Even more timely now than when it was recorded in 1985, this video is worth catching if only to see Moore -- perhaps the most elegantly visceral fretboard Jedi in the business -- tearing to shreds an Ibanez Roadstar II just like the one I had at the time.