Heads Up, Mexico: You May be Next

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

U.S.-trained Mexican Stormtroopers.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

(Courtesy of Sipsey Street Irregulars.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Empire's Clone Army: Mexican narcotics troops.

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

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

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

A quick note ....

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

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

Dum spiro, pugno!

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

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

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

 

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


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



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

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

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

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

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

The Leader speaks, the Leader lies.

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

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


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

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

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

Leader Worship, circa 2003...

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



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

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

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

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

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

... Leader Worship, circa 2009.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roberts took refuge in dissimulation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obiter Dicta

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

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

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

Dum spiro, pugno!

Inside the FBI's Terrorism Factory

Thought Criminal-turned-trophy defendant James Cromitie.

 As an ex-convict, Newburgh, New York resident James Cromitie was thankful to find a steady job. As a Muslim convert, he was particularly grateful that he could wear his kufi -- a knit skullcap akin to a yarmulke -- at work without provoking his supervisor's disapproval. Some of the customers, however, took unintended offense.

"They know I'm a Muslim," Cromitie told Maqsood, a friend he had met at the local mosque, in an October 19, 2008 phone conversation. "My boss say, `Hey, Abdul, I want you to go help this lady.' And then she look at me [and says], `Oh. What is you, Muslim?' I'm like, `Yes.' `Oh, I'll get someone else to help me.... They really don't like Muslims."


When Maqsood asked why people "don't like Muslims," Cromitie, displaying a touch of frustration, replied: "Only Allah knows.... I think they think that we are better than them, but we don't think that." He went on to describe a few workplace conversations in which he described some teachings and practices of his faith; one of those chats was with an individual Cromitie described as "some guy I talked to, [a] nice Jewish guy." 
 

Federal Terrorism "facilitator" Shahed Hussain, aka "Maqsood."

This conversational thread proved irresistible to Maqsood, who eagerly seized it and gave it a stout yank. According to Maqsood, a wealthy man from Pakistan who claimed to be a Muslim religious scholar, the Prophet Mohammed "has forbidden us to have these, the Jews, Yahuds, because they are responsible for all of the evils in the world." 

For the rest of the conversation, Maqsood persistently wove anti-Jewish resentment into the conversation, seeking to stitch Cromitie's personal concerns into a larger canvas of hatred. He told Cromitie that "every second adviser in the White House, they Yahuds," and tried to convince him that the bloodshed carried out by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- "where your blood comes from" -- was a reflection of the all-encompassing evil of the Jews.

In fact, Maqsood had been plying Cromitie with messages of this kind for months, and the wealthy Pakistani was a little frustrated that his American acquaintance didn't appear to be a particularly apt pupil. Oh, sure, Cromitie would occasionally let slip a derogatory reference to Jewish people, particularly women who had insulted him at work. But for all of his flaws, mistakes, and frustrations, Cromitie displayed a persistent strain of embattled decency that led him to see Jews as individuals, rather than as a undifferentiated mass of malevolence. 


"Even some of our [Muslim] brothers is worser than the Yahudi," Cromitie commented during the October 19 phone chat, displaying an ability to assess individual merit in ways that transcend tribal loyalty. In a similar conversation a week earlier, Cromitie, referring to workplace insults he had experienced because of his Muslim religion, related that his religious convictions gave him the strength to endure them without retaliating: "I'm a Muslim; insha'Allah, Allah will take care of it."

This was entirely unacceptable, insisted Cromitie's self-appointed spiritual tutor. It was good to be angry at Jews and other infidels, but mere anger isn't enough; it has to be transmuted into the kind of "righteous" rage that ends in bloodshed. By way of an example, Maqsood referred to a terrorist bombing of a Marriott hotel in Pakistan. That act, Maqsood insisted, was carried out by  people he identified as "brothers" to "send a message" that supposedly brought glory to Allah. The people responsible for that crime were "doing good, wonderful jobs and I'm happy with that," Maqsood told Cromitie, who didn't share his self-designated mentor's enthusiasm. 




Madsood spared no effort to shepherd every conversation with Cromitie in the direction of "jihad." He would first identify a personal grievance. Then he would tie it thematically to legitimate acts of armed self-defense carried out by Muslims against Washington's military aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Then Maqsood, his pose as holy man notwithstanding, worked to seduce Cromitie into accepting the proposition that terrorism is a legitimate form of "holy war." 


Once again, Cromitie found Maqsood's teachings unconvincing.


"We are kicking their asses in ... Kabul," Maqsood boasted.


"I don't care," replied Cromitie.


Undeterred, Maqsood continued to peddle the notion of militancy to someone not inclined to buy in.


"When I, when I see these, these Mushkirks, these Yahud, killing the Palestines, of killing Muslims, of killing people in, in Iraq or in Afghanistan, one of our brothers, I, I always think about going for a cause, you know?" Maqsood hectored Cromitie. "For a cause of Islam. Have you ever thought about that, brother?"


Cromitie, who was earnest in his faith, was obviously not on the same page with the oddly insistent man from Pakistan.


"It's sad that our Muslim folk and our children folk in Islam has to wake up to a bombing from somebody else every night, cannot sleep, have to be on point 24/7, have to sit up and wait, don't know what's coming next," he replied to Maqsood. "I think we need peace. In some way we have to make it happen." While he allowed that it may be necessary "to go answer the enemy in a different way," Cromitie didn't want to leave the impression that he would countenance violence against the innocent: "Don't look at it like I, like I wanna be a terrorist or something."


Oddly enough, although Cromitie was a convert and his Pakistani friend from the local mosque was a life-long Muslim -- and self-described scholar -- it was the former who espoused the orthodox view of jihad as a war of defense, and the latter who was promoting what traditional Muslims would regard as a heresy, namely jihad as an indiscriminate campaign of lethal violence against non-Muslims.

Akyol (center) with Pope Benedict and Grand Mufti Mustafa Arc.

As Turkish free market advocate Mustafa Akyol points out, the Koran -- contrary to the assumptions embraced by modern Islamists and the compulsive mosque-baiters with whom they're joined in a kind of morbid co-depedency -- teaches armed jihad as a defensive enterprise, commands Muslims to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, and prescribes limits even in making war against aggressors. 

Those principles, writes Akyol, "led the medieval Islamic jurists to create a literature of jus in bello, or rules of a proper conduct of war. For example, many of those jurists limited or banned the use of mangonels and catapults, for these war machines inflicted indiscriminate casualties on the enemy. In other words, even what the Westerners call `collateral damage' these days was a matter of concern for Muslim scholars of the Middle Ages. It is therefore ironic, and sad, that some of today’s Muslims — a tiny minority, to be sure — are willing to inflict not just `collateral' but also intentional damage on the enemy noncombatants."

Distinctions of that kind are not recognized by the intellectual architects of Islamic terrorism because their movement is inspired more by the 19th Century nationalism than by the teachings of Mohammed, according to Akyol. Like their counterparts from other backgrounds, those who peddle Islamist nationalism practice a form of indoctrination Akyol calls the "sloganization of scripture" -- that is, orphaning passages from the appropriate context and deploying them for the purpose of mobilizing political useful hatred.


Contemporary Muslim terrorists, Akyol observes, "attack innocent lives not because their religion tells them to do that — it actually tells them not to do that. They rather attack out of loathing, which is rooted in their political misfortunes." A sincerely devout Muslim, Akyol insists that for those who genuinely share his convictions, "Nothing, simply nothing, can justify the killing of innocents."

"Sloganization of scripture" can take the form of weaponizing a handful of passages from one's own holy books and treating them as a license to commit political murder. It can also mean winnowing a handful of incendiary texts from the sacred books of a different religion and using them to create a suitably hateful caricature. Maqsood, interestingly, appeared to be performing both of those roles in his dialogues with James Cromitie. This isn't surprising when it's understood that this purported Muslim holy man was actually an FBI provocateur named Shahed Hussain.

Cromitie in better times.

As noted in this space before, Hussain was what federal prosecutors called a terrorism "facilitator." A wealthy and politically connected criminal from Pakistan, Hussain showed up at the mosque in Newburgh flaunting a large, taxpayer-supplied bankroll and a fleet of late-model luxury cars. 

Blessed with a career criminal's instinct for sizing up a vulnerable target -- and, most likely, a detailed FBI dossier on his future victim -- Hussain quickly keyed on Cromitie, eventually rounding up three others (David Williams and Onta Williams and LaGuerre Payen) to take part in a purported plot to bomb a nearby synagogue and a local air national guard base.

All of them attended the same mosque. None of them had displayed any inclination toward militancy before the Feds deposited a terrorism "facilitator" in their midst. Yet a federal jury found all four of them guilty on terrorism charges stemming from a "plot" that was entirely manufactured by the FBI and carried out by way of Hussain.

As U.S. District Judge Collee McMahon remarked during a March 24 post-conviction hearing,

"The FBI did not infiltrate a plot. There was no plot." That is, there was no plot on the part of the railroaded defendants. That there was a plot on the part of the FBI and its pet provocateur is indisputable. This would appear to be a perfect specimen of the process of "radicalizing" Muslims, which His Holiness Peter King, Inquisitor General of the Homeland Security State, considers to be the most acute existing threat to life, limb, and virtue.

In fact, the infiltration of mosques by Federal terrorism "facilitators" is the dominant form of "radicalization" taking place today. Similar efforts on the part of authentic Muslim militants may well be underway, but the FBI has refined the relevant techniques into a science.

Most American Muslims who refuse to cooperate with the Feds aren't trying to conceal subversives from the authorities; they're trying to avoid contact with the FBI's ever-growing pool of provocateurs and informants. The frame-up of the "Newburgh 4" splendidly illustrates the wisdom behind the decision not to cooperate with the Homeland Security apparatus, which will exploit any opportunity to manufacture a "terrorism plot."

Through Hussain, the FBI "created the criminal then manufactured the crime," insists a brief filed on behalf of Cromitie seeking for dismissal of the case on the grounds of "outrageous government conduct."

Posing as a wealthy and spiritually learned recruiter for the Pakistani terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hussain promised Cromitie and his impoverished friends at least $25,000 apiece (and $250,000 to Cromitie as "ringleader") for help in planting a bomb at a local synagogue and attacking military aircraft with surface-to-air missiles.

"The evidence at trial disclosed Shahed Hussain's cynical, but successful, effort to turn James Cromitie from an angry and disaffected man into a man motivated by money and spiritual reward to participate in a terrorist plot," Cromitie's brief continues. The Feds "designed, funded, supplied, engineered, and directed every detail of a highly dramatic and frightening -- but entirely fake -- terrorist plot, leading to the prosecution and conviction of Cromitie and his late-recruited compatriots."

Once Hussain had focused his attention on Cromitie, he was fiercely determined to suborn the hapless man into carrying out some role in a terrorist "conspiracy" -- even though his target was anything but eager to play along. About the only respite Cromitie experienced during the period between late 2008 and early 2009 was the space of several weeks in which "Moqsood" traveled to Pakistan, at FBI expense and under the Bureau's supervision, to attend a terrorist training camp.

In March 2009, after months of bribes, bullying, and brow-beating, Hussain provided Cromitie with an expensive camera to photographs of the air base and synagogue supposedly targeted in the plot. Rather than doing as he was told, Cromitie actually sold the camera to a neighbor for a fraction of its purchase price. He then told Hussain that he had mistakenly destroyed the camera by sitting on it.

Hussain might have been thinking of that episode during a wiretapped April 5, 2009 conversation in which he tweaked Cromitie for his reluctance to help in the supposed terror plot, despite the promise of a huge payday.

"I have to try to make some money, brother," Cromitie told Hussain, apparently in reference to his efforts to find honest work.

"I told you, I can make you 250,000 dollars, but you don't want it brother," Hussain replied.

The FBI's provocateur continued to pursue his "reward in two ways" strategy, playing on Cromitie's religious earnestness and exploiting his financial desperation by insisting that carrying out terrorist would be both pious and profitable. This meant, among other things, that whenever Cromitie would speak of forgiveness and forebearance in the face of hostility toward his Muslim faith, "Hussain -- posing as a religious wise man -- `corrected' him and proclaimed that the true, religiously mandated approach was to kill non-believers, not out of anger, but for the glory of Allah," summarizes the defense brief.

These religious appeals were coupled with blatant acts of bribery, shameless manipulation -- such as claiming that Cromitie's reluctance to cooperate was putting Hussain's life at risk -- and, finally, "veiled threats of physical harm against Cromitie." The provocateur followed a script written by FBI Special Agent Robert Fuller, who supervised every detail of the frame-up. Fuller provided cars, cameras, cell phones, and dummy explosives; he set up a storage warehouse for the bogus explosives and a "safe house" for those involved in the supposed plot.

Using Hussain as a ventriloquist's dummy in recorded meetings with Cromitie and his friends, Fuller did everything he could to get them to make a dramatic pronouncement of their determination to kill Jews and soldiers out of religious conviction. "Don't do it just for the money," Hussain urged Cromitie in one recorded conversation regarding violence against non-Muslims. "But do it, also say, in the name of Allah."

By early 2009, it must have seemed to Cromitie that he was trapped in some perverse game show. When he wasn't being whipsawed by Hussain's passive aggression, Cromitie was being teased with an ever-expanding list of prizes for cooperating: He was offered a BMW, his own barbershop, an expense-paid two-week vacation to Puerto Rico, and $250,000 in cash. All of this was being promised to an ex-con who was frantic to earn an honest living, a man who had a difficult time making enough to pay the rent.

Finally, after months of being pursued by this tenacious pest, Cromitie wearily relented: "Okay. F**k it. I don't care. Ah, man. Maqsood, you got me."

The problem here was that neither Cromitie nor any of his friends had any useful skills in carrying out a terrorist plot -- no training, no weapons, not even a driver's license. But they were four living, breathing, black American Muslims; all they had to do was show up at the right time and place to be arrested and photographed as living trophies symbolizing another triumph of the Homeland Security State.

In its reply to Cromitie's brief, the Regime stipulates to all of the facts while saying -- almost in so many words -- that it's perfectly acceptable to manufacture a crime in order to justify prosecuting someone who harbors unacceptable attitudes toward the State.

Hussain insists that prior to his recorded conversations with Cromitie, the target had expressed a desire to travel to Afghanistan to fight against U.S. personnel occupying that country. Those comments were never recorded; in fact, Cromitie was captured on tape saying exactly the opposite.

Nevertheless, according to the Feds, the frame-up was justified because Cromitie was an incipient terrorist on account of his "deeply held desire to avenge the injustices that in his eyes had befallen Islam and Islamic people around the world.... Cromitie hated Jews and the United States government and was not shy about expressing either sentiment.... The exploitation of a defendant's warped religious beliefs in violence sails far below the threshold of coercion that would be necessary for a viable claim of outrageous government conduct."

In fact, in every recorded instance in which the persecution of Muslims was addressed, Cromitie maintained that he was willing to leave vengeance in God's hands, trusting that justice would be done on Judgment Day; it was Hussain, the Feds' well-compensated veteran provocateur, who consistently peddled a "warped" religious belief in criminal violence against the innocent.

Cromitie had already spent a dozen years behind bars by the time the Feds targeted him for their provocation op. His most recent stint came after he was arrested for selling cocaine to an undercover narcotics operative behind a school. The narc most likely chose that location because of federal sentence enhancements: For someone who makes a living enticing people into committing drug offenses, getting a repeat offender to sell drugs near a school is the equivalent of a Scrabble maven playing "z" on the triple letter score square.

Like everything else of consequence done in the name of counter-terrorism, the Newburgh 4 case was staged for the institutional benefit of the Homeland Security State and the individual career advancement of a handful of FBI agents, federal prosecutors, and one exceptionally squalid informant.

One very telling indication of the perverse priorities at work here is found in the fact that the FBI actually intervened to prevent the arrest of David Williams, Cromitie's co-defendant, on larceny charges so that they could bust him as part of their contrived terrorist plot.

What political profit would result from allowing local authorities to prosecute Williams on a charge involving an actual property crime? On the other hand, arresting him as part of a black Muslim terrorist cell -- now, there's a bust with a high Q rating. Or, to recur to the Scrabble analogy, that's like playing the "z" tile on the triple word score square at the intersection of two fifteen-letter words.

In signaling her willingness to hear the Newburgh 4's appeal, Federal District Judge McMahon candidly described the supposed terrorist conspiracy as a pure Federal fabrication: "The plot was created before our very eyes in this courtroom," she stated.


"The law allows that to happen," lied Assistant U.S. Attorney David Raskin in reply. 

This is actually quite a stunning admission, coming as it does from someone of exalted rank within the "Justice" Department: He acknowledged that the Feds consider it to be legal and proper to manufacture terrorist plots in order to justify what can only be described as show trials. 

This isn't a news bulletin to people who had been paying attention, but there is some value in getting one of the producers of the long-running melodrama called Homeland Security Theater to make that key admission on the record. 

Obiter Dicta

Thanks to the generous assistance of my friend Kevin Craig, my Freedom Zealot podcasts now have a home on the Web. If my circumstances permit me to do so, I intend to produce them at least once a week.

In my next Pro Libertate installment, I am going to be examining the CPS/SWAT assault on the family of Detroit resident Maryanne Goldboldo, who had attempted to protect her teenage daughter from being forcibly drugged by agents of the local psihuska. I was immersed in the story above when news broke of the atrocity in Detroit.

If you can, please help keep Pro Libertate on-line. Thanks, and God bless!

Dum spiro, pugno!